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.