Gas explosion in St Petersburg pipeline

The lights flickered on and off, ther was the roar of thunder like a distant thunderstorm. It was repeated a few times. It was no thunderstorm. From the 9th floor I could see the sky in the horizon glow red, flickering and then there was a billowing cloud of smoke rising towards the sky.

The smoke was rising slowly, almost like a cloud which meant it was at least three-four miles away. It was around midnight so the sky was still light and the redness was spreadin across it, reflected within the thick column of smoke.

It was incredible. The smoke widened and spread and filled the sky and then it started to rain! For a video of the event check out this link from YouTube posted just moments ago!

Living in Russia

Living in Russia it is sometimes easy to become hypercritical. There are a lot of things which get to you after a while. The dirt and grime which no one seems to mind. The fact that customer service consists of goods being flung across a counter. The fact that no one smiles and everyone seems to be obsessed with money because there are few jobs and no safety net here and everything that was, is no more.

It is easy to focus on ideological differences and the fact that this was a land which did nothing but accept communism for 70 years and did nothing about it.

Within this framework it is easy perhaps to forget a much larger, unique picture. This was a land of a people who passionately believed in the rule of the Tsar and shook it off, almost by accident. It is the land of a people who then fought the Germans to a standstill, dehumanizing themselves in the process and proceeded then to roam across Eastern Europe and Germany.

Meanwhile, back home, they laboured through consecutive generations believing, truly, that one day, some day they would end up with a workers’ Paradise where all goods would be free and everyone would just walk into a shop and take anything they needed, according to their needs.

It takes a special kind of mindset to believe that and it goes beyond naivety.

It takes an even stronger mindset to suddenly have this revealed as false and then go through the upheaval the shattering of a dream and the loss of every vestige of national pride entails and still function sufficiently to pull themselves together.

The result right now is a patchwork reality where some struggle while others live in unimaginable luxury. A place where opportunity and equality still favour those with either might or connections. A place where life continues to be precarious, where alcoholism is a problem, where men are dead by 65 and women are graded only on looks. A place where the old networks no longer work, where the individual which was once thought to be bad is now considered to be acceptable, a place where the young are still not given much of a saying and the old are still considered ‘wise’ by the fact that they have grown old.

There is illiteracy, ignorance and superstition. Illogical beliefs that Communism might again triumph against a morally bankrupt capitalist system. There is also some hope. Hidden, nurtured, hardly spoken of.

The hope that tomorrow will be better than today. The hope that the future is coming. The hope that there will be a better world than this one and it will all start here.

Perhaps this is a steadfast, unique characteristic of a society that maybe has not changed much or has changed a lot. Either way it is this stoicism and ability to find hope even when they do not speak of it that marks Russia and Russian people apart from the rest of the world.

We drive on the pavement here

Russia, or rather St Petersburg is a city made by a city planner who knew how to use a ruler. "We make a road here," he must have drawn a line on a pristine sheet of paper, "and another one here," drawing perhaps a parallel line, "and one here, and here and here," more lines, reach perfectly parallel to the others and then those lines intersected by perpendiculars until he ended up with something that looked like an extended version of the framework you use to play 'noughts and crosses'.

"And here we make the pavements," I can imagine him saying shading in with his pencil on either side of the straight line creating in his head a city with streets built to take gun carriages without even trying and pavements where crowds could gather to watch without feeling too jostled with each other.

The Communists, when they came into power, did their best to translate their ideal of architecture which was so functional as to crush the human spirit, so bleak as to relieve life of anything resembling happiness and so universally similar as to stamp out individualism practically forever.

Flats became boxes. Furniture became items. Everyone had the same flats, furnished by the same furniture and wearing the same clothes and if you think IKEA is bad (which is doing great down here by the way) wait until you see what can be produced by factories governed by the notion that the one aspiring goal of every individual is to arrive at a worker's paradise where everything is free (yes, including furniture) and everyone takes only what they need (yeah! you heard that one right, they actually believed that).

In that version streets, incredibly straight and incredibly wide were bordered by incredibly wide pavements, space, as a matter of fact was all around (ok, there were precious few cars) and cramped quarters were reserved only for where people lived.

In the 21st century St Petersburg has more cars than it used and no parking spaces. Ok, that is not a new problem. Every city on the planet suffers that ill. But where others create underground car parks here they simply park on the pavement.

Worse still, they drive on the pavement. Now there are many reasons for this, not least because pavements are meant to be driven on, or at least they have sloping curbs which allow cars to drive on and off in order to take a shortcut, access a shop entrance or simply get off the road.

And drivers, being drivers, which means they are like water, simply use them all!

So you are walking along marvelling at the fact that here is a pavement which could easily take two cars abreast when you hear a roar and there behind you there are two cars abreast driving on the pavement with you in the way and that's when you also realise that in all that flat expense you are on there is no place to hide and nowhere to jump to other than a busy road!

You would expect cars on pavements to go a little slower but then that would credit Russian car drivers with an amoebal awareness of something lying beyond the end of their bonnets and this they simply have not got!

People of course here are used to it and they squeeze against buildings or step into flower patches or the curb in order to avoid them, but for a Westerner used to pavements meant only for people it's still something that takes a little getting used to.

Three and a half hours of darkness

St Petersburg this time of the year is a wonder in its own right. It gets totally dark about 11.40pm and dawn breaks around 4.00am. We are heading towards the white nights and there is a palpable sene of energy in the air that is hard to exaplain.

Why we do what we do

There is always a deeper underlying reason in patterns of behaviour. In why we do what we do. In behaving in a certain manner and developing a certain outlook and making certain decisions.

The 'Hawk' or 'Dove' argument, the risk or the safe choice are not always the defining charactersitic here. The argument though has perfect validity with the way we see the world.

Some build and some destroy. The motivation, in each case, is the same. Each chases a world view, one in which they believe in staunchly.

Sometimes I want to scream!

There is a nightmare I once had while awake in which I thought that hell on Earth must be a place where no one cares and no one listens - humans are trapped in a somnabulistic trance from which there is no escape, doomed to forever amble about in a zombie-like existence where life has little real meaning and where every action is governed by the same animal instincts that drove man before he came out of the cave and looked up and saw the sky.

To say that Russia is like that is too hard. There are people here (and let's not forget Google's Founder is Russian - though, yeah, he got out) who must be good. Who are good. Yet as a society governed on primal instincts, where, women are used up and cast aside, where everyone steals and everyone lies, where the group is prized above the individual, this kind of society makes me want to scream: wake up!

There is no censorship of the internet in Russia (though news and television are now State controlled and there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of expression), but so few people access anything other than porn on it that it may as well not exist.

You can never make a horse drink water no matter how hard you try!

The letter that wasn't posted

I don’t normally start entries here like I am writing a novel. Sometimes in the details you capture the essence of a transformation that has such huge ramifications for society that it truly leaves you stunned. I sometimes joke about the last war being all about ketchup and our ability to enjoy our tomatoes in liquid form through a plastic bottle and this is not far from the truth.

Ketchup, to make and market properly, requires such an extensive network of supply-chain economics, free-market-economy principles and a truly consumer-orientated society (you couldn’t get it in Communist China before it opened up its economy) that in a “seeing the world in a grain of sand” approach, this is exactly what the last war was about.

We take the sending of a letter for granted. The number of times the Royal Mail has been fined for failing to meet its targets of 98% next day delivery for First Class post have been something we get used to. We expect post to work. We send a letter and it gets there. In the postal service we have created a low-cost, incredibly effective, efficient network that seems to span the globe. A letter addressed to the US gets there in seven days. A package to South Africa just reaches its intended recipient. Because it works so well we don’t really see the mechanics of it. We do not see the manpower, the organization, the thinking and planning, the supervisory machinery, all the things that go into setting up and then controlling a quality service.

We do not see the invisible stuff either. We do not see, for example the pride that goes into doing a job well or the responsibility that even the loweliest of us feel, or even the system of accountability that makes it difficult to not do your job.

All I wanted to do was post a letter. It was in an envelope and written on paper using ink. This is low-tech stuff, we’ve perfected it since the days of the Pony Express. The Post Office was just 15 minutes away from my flat on foot and I walked down to where I thought it would take a few minutes to buy the right stamp and send a letter from St Petersburg to London.

Ok, there are a few surprises in store now. The first one was the building (bearing in mind that Post is a government service). It was low, of the pro-cat variety that vanished with the asbestos scares in the 70s, with some pebble-dash exterior, low ceilings, bad lighting, dirty walls, cracked melamine floors and the sort of place you’d call a dive had there been food or drink or music on offer.

A couple of huge notice boards choker-filled with notices announced proudly that this was ‘Information’.

There was a counter with a low divider and the places for two Post Office Assistants, though one was shut with a typed notice giving opening times. It was just after 12.00 and the second, apparently would not be open until 12:15.

I joined the queue in the one which was manned and seeing how I was about eighth in line I thought it would not be too long. A couple of enterprising souls came in, looked at my queue and gamely joined one other person waiting patiently in front of the shut place which should open in 15 minutes.

I suppose I should have worried here and then because they had decided to join a queue without an assistant which would open in 15 minutes rather than join mine, but hey, I was sinking in a state of depression brought about by the setting which I was now busy inventorying, so I did not think much about them.

I took stock of the setting behind the counter. The person serving was at a low table dominated by a massive telephone and she was busy checking something on a parcel that was being sent by the first person in the queue. She was in her late 50s dressed in a uniform which would have marked as janitorial staff anywhere else and yelling something which sounded like numbers into the handset.

There was a door, left open, behind her which presumably linked the service end of the Post Office to the admin staff. I say presumably because it was opened to a low-ceilinged corridor with walls that had not been painted or cleaned for at least 50 years. There were low-wattage incandescent light-bulbs adding to the horror-set image and a half-open door along the corridor wall leading, presumably to an office.

At the end of the corridor there was faint, natural daylight. There was no sign of life in the corridor behind her so I set about studying the layout behind the counter. She was still reading some laborious code on the telephone and the queue had not moved. It was now 12:08 so it’s not like I had no time.

Obviously ergonomics and basic furniture are not big in the Russian Postal Service. The area behind the counter was split in two by two large, sturdy wooden tables (complete with faded wooden surface and splinters). The larger of the two was covered with papers, the parcel that was being prepared plus a massive phone. The second one, of a lower hate by a good three inches, had a PC (switched off) and some more scattered papers.

Behind that, about seven feet away were two grey, battered, six foot high metal filing cabinets with a row of sorry looking potted plants on top which looked like they had not seen the light of day (which is about right as the nearest daylight window was at the far end and covered with notices) for years. The plants were dirty, the plant pots were dirty and the filing cabinets were dirty. What’s more they were open and inside was a filing nightmare with folders left willy-nilly everywhere.

By the time I had finished examining all this I was beginning to feel like an extra in a gulag prisoner movie and the queue had still not moved. The other queue, the one forming in expectation of the coming Post Assistant was now four strong.

It was, by the wall clock 12:13 and the parcel was almost finished upon which point the sole Post Assistant serving announced she would be taking a break in two minutes for 15 minutes but as a post track had arrived with letters and parcels to be sorted and she was on her own she was going to be busy. We all had to come back ‘later’.

I know it sounds incredible. Particularly as I walked back home feeling depressed, rang up DHL and had the letter on its way within an hour after paying about £40 for the service. The thing is it never used to be like that (apparently). In the old Soviet system a Post Man was a coveted position to be served with pride.

Post was regular, the Postman was greeted as the harbinger of happy news and the carrier of people’s thoughts and being one elevated you socially. Now it takes seven days for a letter to be delivered across St Petersburg. Russian companies uses couriers and the Post Assistant that ‘served’ us gets paid about £3 a day doing a job no one wants from a position of power because if she leaves it she’s hard to replace!

I suppose I should finish with a moral which should be along the lines of ‘don’t use paper if you can go digital’ but I will eschew my normal cynicism and think about how change, while good, when it happens without control or too fast also destroys things which are good and neglects to replace them.

Post services are part of a country’ national identity and its sense of pride. Here, they are a source of dismay, irritation and an affirmation that Russia is still second-best in the world.

The Supermarket Experience

Shopping in a supermarket is such an indelible part of Western life that we forget just how much it says about us, what complex developments it reflects (like supply and demand chains which are up to the minute) or how much training in terms of consumer behaviour it actually entails.

Step outside our own social confines and it becomes a different ball game altogether.

My struggles with the now forsaken Paterson chain have been chronicled here before. Things can get a lot worse before they get better and there is room and scope for an inalienable 'worse' which seems to be a hangover from Soviet times, though why it's still around is quite beyond me to understand.

I thought long and carefully about how to cover the Sunday supermarket experience in a way that captured its flavour but left my own judgement out of the picture and the closest I can come to it is to describe Vanity Fair style, like Thackeray. So here goes:

The doors slide open as you approach and you walk in. It's Sunday, just after midday and everyone is out shopping. There's a security guard in a uniform with a walkie talkie on your right, a long row of checkouts in front, all busy and a security guard at the turnstile as you enter.

Shopping baskets right now are at a premium but assistants are busy reclaiming them from the checkout and piling them up by the entrance as you get through the turnstile so all you have to do is wait. There is a melange of types of people right now, couples and individuals, young and old and even children.

The press of people is all around you, ebbing and flowing, incredibly enough in a country where personal space does not matter, they are careful not to come too near, but this is Sunday supermarket shopping and alongside the housewives and the professionals you also get the old babushkas, wrapped up in what looks like rags pushing trolleys the way Viking pillagers must have once used battering rams.

There is a real intensity in their eyes and a grim expression in their face and for them this is heaven and hell rolled into one. Too many people for their liking, too small isles to really push a trolley comfortably through and while the choice is fine their means of buying things is not.

They are caught between two worlds, the old one that's forsaken them and the new one that has not yet embraced them. They navigate past everybody, ramming the trolley against baskets, shins and expensive handbags.

Russian housewives always get made up to go shopping but this is Sunday so it's even more special. The clothes are tight, the make up immaculate, the hair incredible. The guys by comparison are less smartly turned out, more sleepy looking, being dragged along or reclining against a trolley, waiting for their partner to come back with some item she's looking for.

The Supermarket assistants are giving out samples, juice, cheese or fruit. But such is the pace on a Sunday that even in this nation of people looking for freebies few pause to try them. The crash around the fruit and veg is because of a bottleneck. You see people who wouldn't look out of place in a Soviet film, somehow playing to stereotype. The impoverished student, thin and hungry with clothes that hang off him, the corpulent businessman with a young wife dressed in thigh-high black boots and stiletto heels. The housewife out shopping on her own for a young family, focused on getting essentials, the young couple uncertain how much to spend and even, a gay couple, clearly professionals, picking over the pre-packaged tomatoes on the vine.

Queues form at the weighing machines and if you want to go for loose stuff, put it in bags, weigh it, get the ticket and put it in your trolley you will have a long wait. The easy option is to go for stuff that's already been weighed.

There's not very much noise in all this crowd. But there are smells. The smell of food and vegetables and supermarket produce mixes with the faint perfume of the woman behind you and the smell coming off an unwashed male as he shuffles ahead.

It's easier to avoid the crash, head past the meat counter where everyone is trying to put in an order at the same time and head for the pre-packaged stuff again. Here there are fewer people but kids are now running around, clutching bags of sweets, looking for their parents. Supermarket staff are filling shelves, moving things about, unmindful of the press of people, the busy day.

Away from the foodstuffs the crowd is thin. You can get what you want quickly. You forget that this experience, the shape of it, the entire scene and the ability to buy things so easily is new here. That people are neither really used to it nor really new to it anymore. That they have yet to learn how to become sophisticated consumers and that supermarkets here have yet to learn how to make them spend money. This is still very much a satisfying your needs kind of place rather than being reminded of your wants.

If you want to find something you really have to look for it. The organisation of everything is very slack, the displays poor and though the end-of-isle hotspot is recognised it is used poorly with items remaining there for weeks rather than days.

Some food is expensive. Some is chap and there is imported food costing well over Western prices. Alcohol is extremely cheap and there is always a large section. Sweets too are also cheap as are cakes and here, despite having its own bakery, the supermarket buys its cakes from Cever, the cake factory.

The checkouts are cramped and the conveyor belts small with a massive space instead allocated to the end where the packing happens. You need to buy your bags here and shopping assistants have been trained to neither smile nor give you the bags first so you can pack, so unless you ask for it you will have to wait while goods pile up willie-nilly at the far end until the bags come.

Where there's two a division of labour is going on with one unpacking and paying while the other is doing the packing.

Russians do not seem to value rouble coins or kopecks very much and there are many of them either lying on the floor where they have been dropped or left there, by the checkout, as change that was not picked up.

An old man happens along. He has a walking stick and old clothes that mark him as a tramp. He has a beard in need of trimming and the intensity in his eyes of the hunter. When he goes past the smell from him is less than that of the unwashed, but better dressed guy before.

He pauses at the end of each checkout and looks at the floor carefully. Wherever he spots a kopeck lying there he reaches out with his walking stick and taps it. The tip of his walking stick is magnetic and the kopeck sticks to it. He does then at each checkout in turn, unmindful of the people packing, those shopping and they are unmindful of him. To them he is a ghost they do not see and he is too focused on what he is doing to pay them much attention.

He does that at each checkout in turn until he gets to the end and then painfully makes his way up the short flight of steps leading to the exit at that end of the supermarket.

All around the ebb and flow of shopping continues, the ringing of tills and the press of bodies and more people come in and more people leave. It's Sunday shopping and the supermarket, in a stroke of irony perhaps is part of a chain called 'OK'.

Cakes come from a factory!!!

Some things are really weird. We need to understand why. Let's look at cakes for example. We all like sweets. It's in the genes somewhere and we crave sugar no matter how bad it may be for us. Maybe nature's revenge on us for taking over the planet, maybe part of the Cosmic joke. Who knows, the thing is that cakes are liked by everyone and in the West we have elevated cake making into an art form.

Go into any part of Europe and you will find a little bakery somewhere, or a cake shop, a place where someone has put their heart and soul into making a cake and they are probably part of a long tradition of home-baking.

You know that if you go to the next one down the road the same cakes will taste differently. I know we don't think of it very much, it's so ingrained in our culture we have developed selective blindness but we understand it to such a huge degree that we resist buying pre-packaged cakes even though we know that there's nothing wrong with the quality.

Deconstructed this approach also underpins a certain way of doing things: we know that if have the skill and a certain amoutn of passion we can make our way in the world, imparting in it a certain degree of our individuality and creating a tradition and a future for ourselves.

It's the way things are.

Not in Russia.

Blindly wedded to the idea that group activity and centralisation are a much more preferable (and probably safer for the ruling elite) alternative to individual effort they centralised every aspect of society.

What's that got to do with cakes?

Everything! The most basic of activities: cake making was centralised and re-introduced as an industrial concept. Comfortable with having our cars, planes and tractors mass-produced in vast machine-controlled warehouses, we might, in the West, balk, at having our cakes created the same way.

Yet in Russia this is the way it is. A factory called Cever with a long tradition of cake making going back to 1903 mass-produces some 30,000 cakes a day and delivers them all over St Petersburg. So the cake you buy in the little dive just round the corner from the underground is exactly the same in packaging, quality and price as the one which you will get in the massive, gleaming supermarket.

There are a lot of issus here. Let's look at the practical ones first: I suppose you get the same quality cakes everywhere. The price is the same. The packaging is the same. The factor has been in business for over 100 years so I guess hygiene must be good enough for them not to have killed anyone yet (otherwise they would have been closed down or lost their customer base).

Now here comes the part that's hard to swallow. You want a cake: you go to the dive down the road. You expect somethign quirky. The kind of traditional recipe the little woman that runs it has had handed down to her from her great-grandmother whose husband was a hero of the Red Revolution. Ok, this is not going to happen. You're going to get the same degree of standardisation and she has put as much effort in the cake she sells as in a packet of cigarettes.

Then you think this is enterprise. Bakers in the UK vie with each other to produce recipes that smash your senses, give you a taste of something special.

Not here.

Everything that seems natural and instinctive like personal competition and an enterprising spirit has almost been bred out of this country. Russians love cakes and they all buy the same. It's a weird thought. No matter where you are in St Petersburg you can buy the same cake at the same price, made in the same factory using machines!

There is a State-sanctioned soulessness here at times which is hard to describe unless you experience it. A wave of collectivisation that's hard to fathom. It persists to this day. I went into a small shop. The experience was weird enough to warrant a post of its own and today I am running out of time.

I never thought I'd miss baking from home, not just for the taste but also for what it represents.

Personal space is not big in Russia

I was walking down the street the other day when I felt the hairs at the back of my neck twitch. You may think I am kidding but coming from a place like Manchester in the UK where violence, potentially, can break out in a nunnery during daily prayers, you learn an entire panoply of survival tactics which you take for granted.

Step outside that environment and things become complicated. It was broad daylight, I was in a busy street. I was walking on my own, both hands free and wearing the loose type of clothing which back in Manchester marks you as willing, able and capable of loosing mayhem at the drop of a hat. Normally, though I would never let my guard down, I would not be expecting a fight either.

This however is St Petersburg. There are dozens of probably unemployed, or shadily employed, or Black Market employed guys hanging around or walking around carrying bottle of beer (yes, it’s common practice here and it gives me the jitters) and drug taking is on the increase. Add to it the fact that the normal signals do not apply and I am obviously not Russian and you begin to see why I was getting twitchy.

I listened as the steps directly behind me quickened. I was walking on a pavement broad enough for cars to drive on (which hey do here, but that’s another story) and there was no reason for anyone to walk directly behind me.

I slowed down a little, looked sideways appraising both those around me and the shape I could peripherally pick up coming up fast behind me. Now, if it was dark and an empty street I would be turning around and getting ready to deck whoever was coming up behind me, out.

It wasn’t and those around me were not registering any alarm (and no intent of assault takes place without ripples), so I slowed down a little more, feeling my body relax and though my heart rate was now up I knew that I had to let this take its course. The worst thing that would happen would be a violent shove I could absorb and roll with and I would then rain down some nukes on anyone sufficiently idiotic to think Westerners are easy targets.

Whoever he was he did come up in a straight line and fast and he was not slowing down as I was. He came right up behind me, veered sharply left and continued on his way towards the nearby underground station.

I looked at him as he receded. He was about 24, thin, dressed in the drab, dark colours that seem to mark everyone here. Wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shabby backpack, his head down immersed in whatever music was piping into his ears through the MP3 player he had on.

In all likelihood he could have been a student, maybe he wasn’t, the point is that here personal space, for some reason is not very big at all. In a country where space is no object, Russians like grinding against each other.

Go to the supermarket queue and the guy (or woman) behind you is standing close enough for you to feel their body. Walk down the street and people around you get well past what back in Manchester would have been the personal assault range past which you would be laying into them with both fists.

Get on the train and you are running the risk of having sexual intercourse with half the commuters there.

I don’t know why this is. It could be because the weather sucks here and everyone is into the multi-layered look of wearing almost all their winter wardrobe at once, which kind of makes men and women in Winter look very much like each other from a distance (many men here have long hair!), until you start noticing the beards (Russian women do not have beards!). It could be because three quarters of a century under communism succeeded in destroying their sense of personhood and the sense of the individual and have fostered the collective mentality that they have yet to escape from.

Whatever it is, it is really unnerving. You meet them in the street and they stand so close you begin to wonder what to do. You take a step back and smile they take a step forward and touch your shoulders.

There are other things they do wrong. Like hold your gaze when you do not know them and just cast that appraising ‘don’t mess with me or I will take you down’ look in the street. Things here are simply wrong.
Westerners can get in trouble real easily (or go quietly mad).

World War II, national pride and bent cops

The second World War made a lot of things difficult, caused a lot of misery and ultimately changed the political and social landscape of the 20th Century. For one, it seems to have provided countless grandparents with a common pool of reminiscences (but that’s trivializing it a little so I won’t go into it too much), for another it polarized the world into East and West, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Communism’ and spoilt the 20th Century for the rest of us.

War is pretty meaningless and once it gets started it embodies everything that’s worst and best about us as a species. Nevertheless, what happened, happened, and because so many people died defending what is an honourable ideal of justice and freedom it is only right they should be remembered.

It happens across Europe which has decreed 9th May a holiday and it happens, as you’d expect, in Russia, which seizes the day to foster some much needed national pride. National pride is important. It helps to remember why we each belong to different nations (I know it’s outmoded but hey!) and it also helps bind a nation together in a moment of crisis.

In Russia there is a strange thing about national pride. They all feel proud about what Russia achieved, they all want to move on and feel proud of what it achieves again and they also harbour a suspicion and a jaded sense of celebration fatigue regarding any official holiday and celebration.

They have had to many crammed down their throats by the previous regime and many of them at the time actually believed them. They went on thinking that Russia in the 20th century was doing great and leaving the rest of the world behind and if there was any perceived problem it was only going to be transient and it was really just a question of time before all the sacrifice paid off.

So you can’t really blame them for being jaded and going through the motions.

The thing is 9th May is a holiday and holidays in Russia mean expense as you will have to go out with friends, drink, probably eat somewhere out and so on. For a cop on a month’s salary of £80 a month it is going to be really expensive. The cost of living here is comparable to the West give or take a few pounds (or dollars) the salaries aren’t!

Now there are quite a few issues here like what sort of system trains policemen, gives them guns and authority and then pays them so little that the cadets in the training academy get more while they are being trained to do the job, but we’ll bypass all of these because this is how grown men lose their hair and wise ones their sense of reason.

Let’s just accept that yes, that’s the reality of it. If you’re a cop with a gun and a car, expected to uphold law and order, live a life beyond reproach and support society, you are given the princely sum of £80 per month and left to get on with it.

You know of course where this is heading. Cops will stop cars for speeding (ok, they use no equipment and have no evidence beyond their word), faulty fire extinguishers (you’re required to carry one here!), out of date insurance, you name it and they will issue an on-the-spot fine. Or at least that’s what they call it. Money changes hands, any alleged offence is forgotten and everyone involved goes on their way.

There is a system to this organized fleecing. A cop car stops by a busy road. The two cops (there is always two) get out. They use their batons to stop passing motorists, they ask to look at their papers. At this stage the motorist is taken into the cop car (you can’t have money changing hands go on in full view) and the transaction takes place. Prices are reasonable, about £4 a graft, but I suppose over the course of the day they will all add up.

At least come 9th May the instruments of the law will not have to worry that their drinking and carousing will eat up into the meager paypacket and family finances.

I live off a busy road and I could watch all this take place. I took some pictures I have posted here and some video. The cop car stayed there for about four hours and they must have stopped over 30 cars in that time. Then they moved on to find another spot.

In Hot Water

The devil is always in the details and the details are always the devil. You take some simple things and deconstruct them and you end up with capturing an entire universe in a grain of sand and probably even eternity in an hour.

It is Sunday and I’m out of bed late. Lazy day and no plans of doing anything beyond having coffee and reading a book. So the day has to start with a hot shower. Sounds idyllic, right?

It would be. Except there is no water. Ok. Backtrack junior and take things from the beginning. How can there be no water? Where? Have you checked the tap? It’s this kind of monologue that goes through your head when you find yourself in a 21st century flat in the middle of a modern city and with the nearest river, well, here it’s not that far away really, the Neva is everywhere but how do I get water from there to here in a meaningful enough quantity to have a shower and shave?

This is the kind of thought that raced through my head and you see with not a drop of water coming through the cold or hot tap I was suddenly without any water for the shower, shaving, the toilet or the washing machine.

You can’t drink tap water in St Petersburg, not unless you’ve decided you have had enough of life. Residents here buy water in 5 litre bottles so drinking and making coffee was not going to be much of an issue but the toilet…. Uh-uh, this was getting a little worrying.

You begin, of course to wonder why? How? And it inevitably boils down to ideology. Anyone who says ideas cannot save you or damn you knows nothing about the world. Democracy is an idea. So is Communism. And the Protestant Work Ethic.

Ideas have the power to change the way we see everything from the glass being half full as opposed to half empty to day being night and black being white. It is really the case here. In a Communist paradise it was felt that no one should ever want of hot water, or be subject to the vagaries of earning capacity and social status when it came to taking a hot bath.

You have to admire this. Used to stories in the news of UK pensioners cutting back on taking baths and running the heating only during the evening the notion that plentiful, hot water could be easily available to anyone does have a certain appeal.

This is exactly what has happened here. Hot water comes in plentiful supply from the city’s water authority at an incredibly hot temperature. This is where my knowledge of 20th century plumbing kicks in. Think what normally happens: water gets from a pumping station to your house. You want to use it, turn the tap on. You want it hot, get it into a heater and heat up as much as you need.

Not here. Here water comes in two separate pipes: hot and cold. You want cold water, no problem, it would make any Polar Bear feel at home. You want hot, it’s like the gates of Hell have opened up. I’m no water engineer but the logistics do pose a few questions even for me: how do you heat up enough water for everybody in all the city and then make sure everyone, no matter how far away they live from the pumping station gets it at a hot enough temperature to be hot?

Suppose you manage to solve this problem, how do you then, manage the network of pipes which, running at such super-heated temperature must be subject to more wear and tear than usual?

See how a well-intentioned notion, put into practice, leads directly to the road to hell?

I can’t say what temperature the water gets heated to or how much it costs to do this or how they judge the use or what it dos to the environment, but the days when it cost a few kopeks to use are long gone. I have two water meters, one for cold and one for hot and they both measure exactly how much I use.

Then there are the little technical details: The moment the water authority carries out repairs somewhere in the grid I have no hot water, even though the icy-cold tap may be running no problem.

It’s expensive to heat up all that water so they fire up the boiler (or whatever it is they use to heat it up) sometime in the morning. But because they don’t get up early enough, by 7.00am when everyone wants to take showers to get to work the water is not hot enough for that (it’s lukewarm at best).

I am quite lucky. I work from home and don’t hit the shower until about 9.00 or 10.00 am by then the hot water is hot enough to give you third degree burns if you are not careful and because everyone who could have used it is by now on their way to work, and hasn’t, the tube at this hour is a mélange of odours which would make a closed-air bazaar in Kathmandu seem tame by comparison.

Then there is the thing about plumbing. Used to Western plumbing which mixes high-pressure cold water with gravity driven hot water from the boiler, I am used to cold water gaining the upper hand at some point in the mixer tap and making my shower an adventure.

Not here. Up the pressure and the hot water, having a much higher pressure, thanks to its super-heated status, gains the upper hand and blisters your skin before you get the chance to turn the mixer tap handle the other way. This kind of thing acquires greater interest when the increase in pressure (and temperature) happens as you have your eyes full of suds and are trying to blindly find the mixer tap handle and desperately remember which way to turn it to get the cold water flowing again.

And then there are mornings like today. When the water stops.
Oh, and there are of course the industrial accidents when the pipe repair crews working on the hot water pipes get scalded to death quite frequently as super-heated steam or water escapes from a burst pipe.

All this because they tried, at some point, to be different, socially equal. Create a better world. By the time I have written all this the water is back on, running a dirty brown from some repairs and it looks like I will get my Sunday morning shower and lay about reading my book.

In case you’re wondering no one can drink the water because the water pipes here are so old that there are things there which had they been in Saddam’s possession during the Iraq war he would have been able to unleash them and overwhelm the American army in its tracks.

As I said, ideology, it can really damn you. Ideas are powerful things, particularly if you apply them and then forget about them and just start doing things because that’s the way you think they should be done.

Celebrating Work

Now this is a shorter post and it's more apt. The work ethic, as you can imagine, is equally fucked up here. Faced by the sudden need to survive everyone works, incredibly long hours and at crap jobs.

Unemployment is quite high because there are many unemployables.

May the 1st is when all of Russia celebrates Labour Day - work (!) by taking a four day holiday!!!

Sex in the USSR

I have to open this post with a certain degree of erudition: it was Ekaterina Furtseva, known in Russia at the time as Catherine the Great who became the first woman to hold political office in the phallocentric, patriarchal USSR. As Minister of Culture, she believed unquestioningly in the slogan: "There is no sex in the U.S.S.R.!" and fought mercilessly for morality in art. Yet the entire ruling elite was well aware of her torrid affairs: scarred veins on her wrists bore witness to her ill-starred passion.

This sort of sets a tone.

In Russia's past where collectivism was exalted to the place usually reserved for Religion, and where the individual was banished as a dangerous entity, sex, the ultimate of individual activities (even in groups), was seen as a dangerous release to be feared and controlled.

In a land where every woman looked the same in terms of hairstyles available and clothes to wear (unless you happened to be the wife or mistress of one of the ruling elite) sexual competition became an art in coquetry and studied eroticism.

Women learnt what turns men on. They took femininity to a height which perhaps is encountered only in prostitutes exactly because they operate under similar conditions: competing with others for a scarce resource. In the case of prostitutes this is customers. In the case of Russian women it is eligible men.

The number of women to men in today's Russia is about 2:1. This causes problems.

Living here I have seen men who would make Ron Jeremy look good shrug their shoulders and walk away from imploring girls who would not have looked out of place in a Playboy gala. Things here are upside down.

Every Russian woman from the age of 50 downwards seems to have her sexuality wattage on full blast. Married women want to look good because their husbands will look elsewhere. Unmarried ones compete for husbands (and by the age of 26 they are considered over the hill for marriage) and every girl from the age of 13 upwards seems intent on swinging her hips and casting her eyes about.

Incredibly short shirts, pencil thin eyebrows and stiletto heels which never drop below the three inch mark are considered daily wear.

I have yet to spot a woman who is not wearing a thong. It looks like the country went from its drab, flat-heeled, 'woman the labourer hero' standardised look to the incredibly sexy, perennial sex-kitten look, high-heeled, short-skirted, thong-wearing 'porn starlet on the make' look.

Even when the country was in the grip of Soviet ideology sex was something easy to have. You can't repress something like that without it suddenly appearing, briefly, explosively and uncontrollably, everywhere.

It has created a strange culture. Women here, more than men, tend to be educated, level-headed, cool thinking. They also look like prostitutes.

I was shown round a gym yesterday by the manager. She came out wearing short lycra leggings, in black, black three inch stilletos and a black knitted poncho which allowed full view of a black lace scalloped balconette bra and what was in it.

The look was completed with shoulder length honey blonde hair and pencil-lined pink lip-glossed lips. Pencil thin eyebrows, full make-up.

It was a gym!! She was the manager!! And it was all far from unusual.

There are many aspects of life here which make no sense at all. It's like Alice in Wonderland world, except here they have sovietised even this and it is called Annie in Wonderland. Sex is everywhere, easy to have and pointless to pursue.

Western men are like prey. Watched by women's eyes wherever they go because they do not drink, take showers, dress in clothes that are not black.

This is the kind of post the deserves a deeper analysis and deeper meaning here - ideology has really fucked the country up. I will have to revisit this subject. There are too many strands to chase up in my head to really do it justice.

Why this has to be different

I have been thinking carefully about the direction this Blog is taking and have decided to keep it away from politics. Not because it does not matter. On the contrary. If we take the view that politics and political theory shape and are shaped by ideology which is the reflected by and reflects specific aspects of culture and lifestyle then politics really matters.

There are a billion political Blogs out there some of which will be about Russia and some of which are bound to have greater insight than mine because they are better placed, have greater access to that kind of information or simply a clearer grasp of some issues.

They can also be done while the writer is sipping cocktails in Honolulu.

This is different, I am in situ and I can see, hear, sense, feel the minutiae which make up every day life heree. This is the intrinsic value of these posts. I will have to be your eyes and ears, your senses, more than your mind. Reporting rather than analysing.

There is value in the accumulation of observation which expands way beyond what is simply observed and becomes a snapshot of a cross section of society.

This is where I am of real value. So, I will have to take things from the beginning and try to describe what I see and hear and feel. I am, here, truly a stranger in a strange land and these posts come from another place.

This is why I kept silent while Yeltsin was being mourned and buried. While the outside world reported heavily on Russia about this Russian television kept is as just another event.

In the West we tend to think of Yeltsin as instrumental, hugely important because he brought democracy and much needed market reform to a country which had neither. He was important and he did all that and in the process gave Russia and its people a short, sharp, shock from which they are still reeling.

There is a very real sense that they do not know exactly who they are. They lost the pride they had felt in themselves as a nation and they lost the pride they had had as being unique, outsiders in the great world schema, daring a brave social experiment which would in time succeed no matter what sacrifice they had to make.

Yeltsin transformed them into a failed nation grasping desperately for the dollar and realising, for the first time, that the outside world thought Russia was a sad basket case, a joke. A place of thieves and prostitutes and lawlessness where corruption and connections ruled above anything legal or democratic.

We will ge to that reality now in due course but let's for a moment examine how Russians feel.

Yeltsin may be responsible for taking away the lies they had been told they should believe in and holding up a mirror where the Russian soul looked none too good, but for that the West will remember him with far more kindness than Russians themselves.

They, as a people, had been taught to instinctively reach for each other, foster solidarity and a sense of togetherness because these were ideals. They had been taught to fear individualism, suspect loners and live in a communal way which reflected in everything, from the way they organised their social life to the way they worked at work and lived at home.

In a Communist Paradise where there was no such thing as unemployment there was no reason for anyone not to feel fulfilled. No reason for anyone to feel unhappy or to voice that unhappiness, unless of course, they were sick and needed to be hospitalised.

As a society they had all been conditioned to look out for deviant behaviour, signs of unhappiness and anti-social actions and report them. Were they all happy? Were they all unhappy?

No. I don't think they could have been. But whatever sacrifice was being demanded of them to make was in the cause of a higher ideal. They all truly, really believed that they were building a better world and doing so in bitter isolation from the jaded, imperialistic and decadent West. They truly believed that and that, hard as it may be to understand, also gives us the first clue as to why things are the way they are, why they were the way they were.

If you believe that you will feel both bitter and proud. Bitter perhaps that thinsg are not better, that the outside world does not understand, but proud because as a nation you suffer and this becomes the common, underlying thread that draws everybody together and creates a weird, specific, sense of pride that is hard to explain to outsiders.

Think of a high-pressure kitchen where poorly paid stuff labour under appaling conditions to cater to well-fed, spoiled and demanding clients and yet, even as the deadlines grow shorter and the demands increase the kitchen hands feel a certain sense of pride in managing to deliver, in managing to pull through the pressure together, to work in poorly lit, unventilated conditions and produce a fantastic meal for the demanding patrons of their restaurant, and in their pride, they feel that it will only be a matter of time before other restaurant goers realise just how great this restaurant is and forego going to all the other restaurants where the staff are better treated and better paid because what is delivered here is put together with passion, which makes its deficits overlookable, while what is delivered out there is soulless. The product of bought labour that is performed because the staff in other restaurants need the money, and nothing more.

It was like that here.

And then one fine day a new owner rolled in and told them they did not have to work in the badly ventilated, poorly lit environment of their kitchen. He was knocking down the walls and making it open plan like it was in most of the other restaurants he had seen and they would have to work in the same conditions and produce the same exquisite meals as everyone else. Shortcomings in food quality were inexcusable. Passion counted for nought when patrons wanted clean food and hygiene.

Except he forgot to teach them how. And they had forgotten how to learn.

And with the passion gone they were all suddenly left alone. To perform their job and find new status in a kitchen environment that had suddenly become unfamiliar. One which when examined under the better-lit conditions of the new set up and under the gaze of the patrons, now looked unappealing and incapable of producing anything beyond basic fare because it did not have the equipment and the staff did not have the skills.

Some, the better ones, left to work for other restaurants. And those who stayed, well, they could go nowehere else. But the sense of passion had gone. The solidarity had gone. And the pressure they felt being under, now incapable of being shared, went deep inside. And there it began to fester.

This is how it is.

The crappiest supermarket in Russia?

If there was a website for the crappiest supermarket awards then Patersons just have to be serious contenders. Living in a country it’s always the small things that get to you. You are prepared for ideological differences and the accepting Russian psyche that made it possible for Communism to flourish and then go on flourishing long after anyone with a half a brain and one eye could see that the system was really good only for the ruling elite and those with high-up Party connections. You are prepared for a language that sounds strange even to the locals who look askance at those from neighbouring republics who try to speak it. And you are prepared for the usual level of difficulty that the easiest of tasks require here.

What you are not prepared for is a level of incompetence so gross that it stretches even the imagination of the most imaginative.

So I went to the supermarket. It’s near so I went to Patersons. Boy was that a mistake! I mean it takes little common sense from a supermarket customer service point of view to realize that you can dispense with useful displays and a logical way of arranging items in the aisles. You can dispense with a way of service which makes it easy for your customers to shop (like, for example why, after you buy a jar of caviar at the caviar counter it is taken to the checkout of your choice [you need to decide there and then] to wait for you when you finish the rest of our shopping, go there, queue and claim it so you can pay for it!!!). You can dispense with proper labeling, price tickets that actually match the products displayed and proper lighting. You can even dispense with cosmetic cleanliness provided everything is not covered in dust. YOUCANNOT DISPENSE WITH PLASTIC CARRIER BAGS!

Especially when you have given no prior notification to your customers busy buying all the difficult to carry things one picks up at a supermarket on a Sunday evening.

Then, when you get to the checkout you do not, as a cashier, shake your head, rub your hands together and explain that the administration is rethinking the free bag policy. I mean…HELLO?

If you are rethinking a policy you do not stop doing business. Well, it’s all pretty academic. They have my vote as the crappiest supermarket in St Petersburg and I am never going there again. Adios baby!

That’s how western customers react to bad service!

Everything is different and nothing has changed

In the Russia of the 21st century everything is different. Fundamentally so. It is difficult to exactly explain the transition, particularly to a generation born in the 80s who are trying to make their way in the world here.

Yet the transition was marked. From a sense that the State was there to somehow take care of you, to help you and there was a State-sanctioned, propaganda-led, State-perpetuated sense of solidarity where people were expected to take care of each other, to look out for each other and to help each other (because let's face it, the State could do little beyond oppress) they have gone to one of total isolation where they are on their own and look out for themselves.

Their view of the State has undergone a cosmetic transition in that they now know it is not there to help and unless they behave they can get into trouble.

At a time when Peter Mandelson highlights EU-Russian tensions it is interesting to note that Russians, as a nation, still know little about the world, are propaganda-led, State-controlled and live, despite the shift from collectivization to individualism, in a world where the old habit of checking on people to see what they are up to, still persists.

In the old Soviet Union this was fostered, subtly and pervasively, under the guise of openess and comradeship as a means of social spying. You never could do anything against the State because the State was everywhere, its eyes and ears in every place, cultivated through a subtle, intricate network of spies that were both real and imagined.

This has led to a society where even in large cities the habit of asking direct questions, stating open opinions on issues of judgement and 'nosing' (for lack of a better word) into each other's business, still persists.

What has this go to do with East-West relations and the EU-Russia thing? A lot.

It comes down to perception and expectation. From the outside we se this rumbling, massive, naturally wealthy nation and expect it in the 21st century to be like us. Maybe a few hang ups and maybe a few issues but catching up rapidly and getting to be like the West.

It isn't. With unemployment and illiteracy running high. With most Russians focussed on how to pay the rent and get a flat and find some stability and some security. The democratically elected government of Russia is bent on solidifying its hold on power and in a paternalistic, top-down manner tell its citizenry how happy they are, how proud and what a great country they live in.

This is a government that is insecure in teh way it is perceived by the outside world, exactly because it knows that its democratic label is only a label.

As a result it is full of mistrust. It fears being criticised. It fears being judged. It fears being cast in a poor light because it is unsure that it can control a citizenry that has grown richer and more active.

In terms of where we stand in the East-West perception nothing has changed.

Russia fails to understand that the West is interested in trade more than war, that nationalism is subject to profit and that national pride is subject to business success.

The land of the free

I am trying really hard not to turn this into a political Blog or one that lives up to the old stereotypes of the west is better than the east, democracy is better than communism kind of single-minded, blinkered crap.

I am in Russia by default, not entirely out of choice and I have a huge respect for the country, its people, its culture and their achievements which are always so easily overshadowed by the fact that they have, as a people, allowed themselves always to be dictated to and presided over men who had never really had their best interests at heart.

The Tsars are a case in point and what followed afterwards only proves what I said and the government they have today is little better.

I'm a writer self-exiled in Russia trying to keep my thoughts together and this Blog was started for my sake primarily.

Then, on a day when I read on the BBC site about a teenager who abducted and repeatedly raped a 15-year old girl I get to talk to girls here, in the city of St Peterburg, who in broad daylight they are afraid of being abducted and gang-raped by Mafia types or locally connected youths.

In either case the Police will do nothing as they will have been warned that should a complaint be followed "it never happened" and the world goes on its way, supeficially calm, collected and civilised.

At least in Britain the boy got caught, he ended up in court and his life will be wrecked. But here...

There is a Russian trait not to think too deeply about events but to roll with the blows. The Mafia is so strong here that every business pays protection. And the Police are so ill-trained, poorly supervised and chronically underpaid that they are on the extortion business themselves in order to make ends meet and in the pay of every local Mafia gang, politician and underworld boss who likes to buy them.

What is tragic is that there must be many of them who want to do something about it and can't. How do you change a culture as endemically corrupt as that?

How do you learn to work in a different way when the different way can get you hurt or worse?

How can you learn to respect the law when every symbol of the law has stood and still stands for oppression?

Service with a smile

The title here is of course enough to bring a smile to my lips because, in Russia, service most definitely never takes place with a smile. This is a leftover from the Soviet regime when just living was difficult enough and though everybody worked, no one smiled.

Now it is even worse. There is real pressure to survive on your wits, no social safety net and no concept of connecting one's job with the customer.

I was at a supermarket called Patterson's (yes, I know, their website makes them look like they rival Waitrose but believe me Neto looks great by comparison). In Russia plastic bags cost. You pay for them. Fair enough, Lidl uses the same system. At Patterson's plastic bags are free. They are hair thin and awful and prone to bursting at the wrong moment so much that if you have anything heavy the assistants give you two bags at a time to try and strengthen them, but at least you do not have to pay for them.

Except on this day they did not have any. At this point you have to suspend your disbelief and accept that it is perfectly normal for a busy supermarket, part of a large chain, situated in a prime position near a very busy underground in Russia's second largest cityt to run out of plastic bags at 11.00am.

It happens. Plastic bags have this tendency to run out without warning. So any jokes about piss-ups, breweries and planning you may have in your head right now, just forget about them. It happened.

Bear in mind people are buying cans, fruit, vegetables, all the little things you buy in a supermarket. Kinda hard to carry home if you haven't got a bag.

I was in the queue at the checkout when I realised what was happening. I was next in line to pay. The guy in front of me had just paid and was looking for something to put the dozen cans and tins he had, the bread, the tomatoes and some odds and ends.

There was an unsmiling checkout girl who sat there looking at him floundering.

'Have you no plastic bags?' he asked.

'No,'

'Why not? How can you have no plastic bags?'

Bearing in mind that our custom there was making this assistant's job possible the reply stunned even me and I have become used to the madness here.

'Just go out and buy one. Why are you complaining?'

The supermarket is in a shopping centre complex and I guess it is true that you could go and buy a plastic bag elsewhere. But seeing how there had been no warning that they had ran out, the guy had already paid for what he had bought and he had no real way of carrying it, it was all fast becoming just another impossibility people here have to learn to cope with.

Eventually the checkout girl whipped up some non-descript transparent, ultra-thin, plastic bags and gave the guy two and because by now I was so overwhelmed by this that the expletives about this ******ing country were coming thick and fast, in English, she gave me two too so I could get my shopping home.

And though on the way back I could not help but laugh at all this because it really beggars belief and stretches credulity to breaking point, I also realised that throughout all this she had never even smiled.

News from Russia

It’s a weird feeling waking up to get my news from the net. I have been used to a world where dissent is open and governments’ job is to make sure that things go along smoothly enough to satisfy the majority of people.

In the west are used to complaining. If we feel strongly enough about something we can voice it and if we are right or if it taps into an underling seam of dissent it raises questions which a government tries to address.

It is a clunky, messy process that completely satisfies no one except as an intellectual exercise in political and personal freedom. The view is that if we are proud of our country, and if we live in it, we really want it to be the best it can possibly be and self-serving as most of our motives might be, when we take to the streets or speak out publicly it is the direct result of a deep sense of indignation coming to a head.

Although not everyone of our actions is governed by a strong sense of public spirit, the very fact that what we do will be available to all and will be scrutinized by the world serves as a Darwinian principle of self-selection (or at least self-governance) – there is little point taking to the streets unless we feel we can rationally defend what we are doing and point out how what we are protesting against is either illogical or unfair or both.

Not so in Russia.

Despite if being labeled a ‘democracy’ the normal rules and laws do not apply. Before you smirk and nod your head think why this should be so first. It came from a world where for over 50 years repression was a way of life, where survival meant blending in and where the spirit of togetherness was fostered on an ideal that was underpinned by the collective efforts of the KGB.

When the Berlin wall came crashing down and we all welcomed the new spirit of openness and ever so naively though that’s all it took to foster democracy Russia sunk into a mire of debt, lawlessness and a collective loss of identity. As a people they no longer feel they know exactly who they are or what they are striving for.

There is no sense of the Great Russian Dream, no white picket fences or a house with a garden like you’d get in the UK. The great, non-descript projects-like block of flats still dominate the city’s skyline. People wear drab colours, no one smiles, everyone drinks as a way of letting off steam and there is a sense of directionless energy that has nowhere to go.

In this Russia the rich are very rich and the poor are unemployed or trapped in low-paying jobs they need to hold two at a time in order to pay the rent.

With average life expectancy for men being 60 and women 65 there is the constant sense that time is running out, though running out for what no one really seems to know. In this environment there are those who seek to escape. Men drink (and smoke). A bottle of vodka is just four dollars, a bottle Russian champagne is just four dollars too. Shops stopped selling high-alcohol drinks after 11.00pm at night just this January. Men go about the streets at 10.00am carrying bottle of Russian champagne or beer and drinking them.

Women use their looks.

Those who can’t find someone rich locally look abroad.

And then there are those few who want to protest. Living in the city I knew nothing about the protest, the TV channels did not cover it and the newspapers wrote nothing about it. This is not an open society and its democracy is only so as long as you do as you are told and do not question anybody.

In a country where there is a constitution and supposedly a law, protesters marching in St Petersburg against the incumbent president (Vladimir Putin) were attacked by police in full riot gear, arrested before they go to their demonstration and labeled as the modern day equivalent of dissidents the police here are thugs.

They are chronically underpaid and badly trained and those not in the direct pay of the Mafia use their position of authority to supplement a meager income with grafts. They stop motorists and impose on the spot ‘fines’ they check your papers to see if you are an illegal immigrant (and extort money if you are).

What is amazing is that no one does anything about it. Everyone quietly accepts it.

That Russia is not yet a democracy could hardly be surprising. I think, in the 21st century, running a very real danger of turning American and UK societies into police states under the kneejerk anti-terrorist laws we ran, it’s only the mentally feeble who still hope that democracy spouts like a shoot and grows into a mighty tree. And those who believe that it can be imposed from the top down have spent the last two hundred years living in a barrel at the bottom of the sea.

The rest know it’s a constant dynamic struggle between State and populace – beliefs and practicality. In the end logic and pragmatism have to win. Which, sadly, might be what’s happening in Russia where these two principles make it easier to keep your head down, forget to smile and hope no one notices you than to actually try and change a system so archaic, inert and entrenched that nothing short of a miracle can make it change any time soon.

So I get my news on the net and count down the days when I will no longer have to live here. The thing is I strongly suspect I am not alone.

For me leaving is an option. For many others it is not.

In April the weather warms up

It’s April and the weather is getting warmer. The days are already long enough for daylight hours to stretch to 9.30pm as St Petersburg heads for the famed White Nights when the sun really never sets.

Russia is driven by the weather. The weather is so grim here that Spring energises them. Skirts hike up to five inches above knee level, stockings come out and boots with 3-inch heels seem to be de rigueur. I am talking, of course, about the girls, because the guys seem to just be the same.

In a country filled wall to wall with achingly beautiful women guys seem to go throw life swatched in layers of drab grey and black, sporting bellies and Prince Valiant haircuts that are a direct throwback to the Soviet era when state barbers gave everyone the exact same haircut for an incredibly cheap price.

That practice has not entirely vanished. Hidden away in non-descript buildings there are steel-shattered doors which open once a month. There is no sign outside and there is no description of the place. There is no shop window and I have never ventured closer than ten feet.

To me they look like some sort of dodgy-dealing place you see pushing hard drugs, contraband or being a node in the white flesh trade in Asian films about the underworld. Here this is the State barber, a staple to those who feel nostalgic about the vanished past and unemployed youths who still feel patriotic about their country.

A haircut here takes about 15 minutes and costs less than a dollar.

You get what you pay for.

The girls in the meantime are under pressure. If they do not shine in the spring sun they will not get anyone, and even the ones who have got someone, whether they are married or not are under pressure to look good, stand out, make their men feel that straying (a notoriously common and widely acceptable if hidden facet of Russian society) is less than ideal.

For them the unrelenting pressure to look good, act sexy and be impeccably turned out begins to get relentless.

Russian television and Russian sex

As you'd expect television in Russia has opened up opportunities. In case you think that it's created a brave free world, it hasn't. Television is still, very much, state controlled, except the Russian State knows it's people and takes a Roman Emperor-view of what they need by creating the illusory total freedom of them to experience fun-and-games but no substance or investigative TV.

Sex sells in Russia. It is a country sex-obsessed. Image and and style are used to sell everything and celebrities are not celebrities (nor can they hope to be) unless their clothes come off (at least partly).

Take a leading pop singer for example: Zhanna Friske (top left). This is the image of her that's propagated everywhere (if I didn't know any better I'd think she was a Playboy model rather than a singer). Another is 'popular' TV star Kseniya Borodina (top right). Popular because of her acting talent, obviously.

Ok, ok, It's easy to make fun and easier still to get cynical. Russia is a funny place. There are at least two women for every guy, there is a city somewhere outside Moscow called 'The city of brides' because the ratio of men to women is like four to one.

If you're a guy who look slike Ron Jeremy you have absolutely no problem getting laid here. But girls are not 'easy' in the conventional sense, unless they are drunk in which case they are not different to girls anywhere else.

For the average Russian woman her looks are her career and she is going to trade them for income, security and financial stability.

Given the fact that at 26 you are considered too old in Russia, Russian women, in general are under greater pressure than major-league football players. They are under intense pressure, competing with each other at a younger and younger age for, wait for it, older guys, because they are the ones who have made it and can have these girls.

Reality can be a very stark affair in Russia. In the west we have ad the time to dress up our cohabital arrangements with romanticism and fun. In Russia everything happens in a pressure-cooker environment. Girls are sexually active at 14. By 17 they look like pornstars and use their bodies and looks like commodities and by 20 they have either succeeded in finding a guy who wil answer their needs for stability, money and security or they are making a beeline for the west.

Russian meeting sites are a huge business.

Watching Russian TV in English

Television stations in Russia are perenially cash-strapped. When they buy films from English speaking networks they buy them in English and go for hot, current items like... Top Gun! (I kid you not).

Illiteracy is a problem in Russia and there are no real figures on what the extent of it is. This is still a society which doe snot encourage lifelong learning, where the education system encourages learning by rote rather than analytical thinking, where teachers scrape by with a salary of 7 roubles per teaching hour (with a 45 minute lesson) and where school is seen as a necessary evil to be gotten over with as fast as possible.

There are instances of teachers selling home-made vodka to students as a sideline to supplement their income and instances of teachers who have little experience or qualifications, being press-ganged to a class because there was no one else availabel to teach it.

The end result is that TV is dubbed. The quality of the dubbing depends on a number of factors, not least the quality of the equipment you have at your disposal. In the 21st century all films are created with a soundtrack and speech track that are added separately precisely so they can be separated and dubbed if necessary.

It doesn't work quite that way here. Now I am not sure how dubbing works here from a technical point of view because I am not a dubbing expert but I'd hazard a guess and say it is the TV equivalent of trying to dubb over the precise speech of actors and actresses as they speak without erasing the speech track.

Sometimes this amounts to little more than a vocal translation after they have spoken in English (yep! I can watch a Russian film on TV no prob). At other times it is overran with some interesting results because in order for the Russian translator to make themselves heard they have to shout loudly enough to drown out the English conversation which, however is still audible in the background and in the gaps in between the different speech patterns.

Ok, I know, you are reeling. So was I. Wait though, it gets better. Dubbing has a surreal effect. The cheapest ones get one guy (it is always a guy) who does all the parts (good guy, bad guy, girl, woman, and even translation of the written parts which appear on the screen like dates, places and so on) in the same monotonic, deadpan Russian voice. The better ones at least get at least two translators of different sexes to match the parts.

This means that tough-guy acts such as Arnold Schwarzenegger have thick, manly voices befitting their image. Tom Cruise, for example, sounds like some kind of giant-slaying, Siberian goliath.

Russia and Berkova

This is the first post of what's going to be a busy year. I am in Russia. I am not Russian. I suppose I originally was Australian, I have been away from home for the best part of thirty years so now...hmmm. It's a tough call. The thing is I am westerner through and through and I see Russia through Western eyes but I am close enough to the sensibilities of its people to be able to fathom the unfathomable.

I mean, think about it: for the best part of 50 years - that's a big 5-0, an entire nation believes in collectivism, self-sacrifice and -worst of all - that their point of view is winning and they are better off than the rest of the world!

Then it all goes away. Wham! Just like that.

If it doesn't blow your mind I don't know what does.

On the surface of it it all seems fine but it isn't, it really isn't. 21st century Russia is a place where things are not what they seem because they are exactly as they were - just remade, or should I say remodelled?

I know, I know you are mystified and so was I. I came to St Petersburg to spend six months, at the beginning of January 2007 and it now looks like I will be here until January 2008.

I have began to burrow into a looking glass world where Alice's rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

I will take things from the beginning, or as much as I can and add to this blog on a daily basis but I must explain this one, at least.

Russia is well known (hah, laugh now) Berkova isn't, or at least wasn't. In Russia there's a Big Brother show that's been going for three and a half years running based on a core group of people who do not know each other and have to live in there trying to build it (it's an on-going project). It's called House 2 or Dom 2 and it has fanatical following and Berkova was one of the House Guests.

They all have to partner up otherwise they get voted out and she paired up with this guy and they had sex (it was filmed) and then it came out that she was a pornstar. There was the initial denial as she tried to explain the first videotape that came to light as a party one night with her ex-husband and a friend but after the number of videotapes surfacing multiplied it became apparent that either she has had a great many husbands and they have been incredibly active on the social networking scene or she really was a pornstar and she had to go.

She went.

What's this got to do with Russia?

Everything and -seemingly- nothing. The fact that it would only be acceptable in this country and that she is famous and has made a huge career out of something that should have blighted it is just one paradox.

The Russia of the 21st century is a highly moral, Russian Orthodox place where even in a city like Moscow, or St Petersburg, everybody makes it their business to find out everybody else's. A massive country with a serf, village mentality.

On the surface one thing, underneath totally another.

Berkova is totally accepted and acceptable, sex seem to be as easy to get as Vodka (which you can get in kiosks, the underground and even newstands for as little as 50p a bottle) and Russian porn is both ubiquitous, matter of fact and incredibly a difficult to analyse mix of pragmatism and familiarity.

If you are confused by all this you ain't seen nothing yet. I have yet to cover relationships, dating, domestic abuse (which is something of a national sport here), social mores, software piracy, snow, public drunkeness and prostitution. Oh, and before I forget I will also be tackling democracy, bureaucracy and the way the Russian government treats its own citizens.

Stay tuned? I dare you to try and turn away. This is a fascinating country, it has a lot of pathos, a lot of suffering and the capacity to do great things. At the same time it has a huge inferiority complex and a sense of trying to make up for most of the last century it lost.

I will cover all this - leave me notes, suggestions and remarks.