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.