Russian Blog

On my way to the conference in Tomsk, I stopped for a day in the biggest city of Siberia – Novosibirsk. It had been almost three years since my last visit there, and I was happily surprised to find it still as much of a Soviet monument today as it was in 2005. During the 20th century it was the fastest growing city on the planet, going from a couple of thousand inhabitants by 1917 till 1,5 million in the 80’s. While walking around the city on Orthodox Eastern Sunday I caught some shots of different signs found in the center, and I’d thought I’d share them with you so here they are – enjoy!

I’m very ashamed of it, but I must confess my mistake and make up for it immediately – I forgot one of the most important signs found in Novosibirsk in my last post! It is, of course, the following sign «на почётном месте» [in an honorable place] on the brick wall of the train station with the following message for generations to come: «На этом месте находилась станция Обь, где в 1897 году, следуя в село Шушенское, останавлисался В. И. Ленин» [In this place the station of Ob' was located, where in 1897 on the way to the village of Shyshenskoe V. I. Lenin stopped].

Томск [Tomsk] has a population of half a million and is located in Siberia, but since Siberia is a big place one is quite in the right to ask – where exactly? North-east of Novosibirsk by five hours by commute train, to be precise, the city is seated two hours north of the Trans-Siberian railroad route along the river Томь [Tom’]. Founded already in 1604, it is one of the oldest towns of Siberia, and it has the oldest university of the region – Томский государственный университет – which has protected a strong tradition of scientific studies for over 130 years now. In the city there are six more universities, and this has earned it the nickname of “Siberian Athens”, and it is estimated that every fourth inhabitant in one way or another is enrolled in academic courses. In many ways Tomsk resembles another, though more Western, Siberian town – Tobolsk. Both of them were ‘centers’ of exile, Tobolsk in the 19th century and Tomsk in the 20th, and because of this influx of intellectuals and other well educated people from European parts of Russia, they have both – after the terror died out, that is – enjoyed a rise in both scholarly and as well as artistic spheres to set them apart from other remote cities. This is something that can be felt straight away upon arrival to a Siberian town – whether or not it was a place for shuffling exiles to their points of destination – or, if not scientifically proved yet, it is at least my opinion. Yekaterinburg or Novosibirsk both have more of a ‘worker’ feel to them, because they were created to be industrial centers, where as Tobolsk and Tomsk both have a certain ‘sensitive’ air about them due to the intellectual activities that went on there despite of all the hardships. Needless to say, I fell in love with Tomsk as soon as I arrive last Sunday and stayed one day longer than necessary only because I liked it so much. Though now is neither the time nor the place to tell you why – maybe some other time [or read my private blog!] – but I’d like to talk about something else that has to do with Tomsk today, about Томский мемориальный музей истории политических репрессий «Следственная тюрьма НКВД» (филиал Томского областного краеведческого музея) [Tomsk Memorial Museum of History of Political Repressions “Investigatory Prison of the NKVD” (branch of Tomsk Regional Museum)] located in the very heart of the city.

Though the city of Tomsk itself is much more than it might seem to be from the pictures I have chosen, I think that it would be a shame to not share these photographs with you. As Russia on this very day [May 7th 2008] is getting ready for the coronation – oops! – I mean, of course, inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev, as hundreds of tanks at night time are running the streets of several big Russian cities in preparation for the born-Soviet-again military parades of Victory Day May 9th, it seems all the more appropriate to turn an eye to the past as we step into a future not quite so clear as we’d hoped it would be. Perhaps I should focus on safer subjects – as was my plan today to write a little funny piece about the six cases «падежи» of Russian language – but not only. I don’t want to only be such a writer, just a humorous commentator on Russia, not because I think that I am a very serious individual with highly unique views or know something you don’t, but solely for the reason that I’ve been here long enough to get over that initial phase of misunderstanding this country while laughing at ‘them weird Russians’ and their ‘strange ways’. Not too long ago I was asked to write a weekly column for the website of new state TV Chanel Russia Today, and I agreed, but after the first three pieces I wrote for them their words about how I should “keep it light and funny and nothing serious” made me feel deeply underappreciated. Anyway, since it’s a Russian company, which seems rather chaotic and fluctuating from the view of such a minor contributor as myself, I might not even be an employee with them anymore and therefore I am free to say whatever I want (though I should try keep my tongue in the right mouth anyway – blogs are by Russian law considered to be means of mass communication and the first blogger has already been sentenced [to prison?] for talking bad about cops… no comment).

Or, more correctly speaking, not we, and least of all I [being a legal alien with a mere «прописка» allowing for my stay in the country], but the Russian Federation has a new president. The bombastic inauguration ceremony was broadcasted live on TV from the heart of the Motherland, from the inner center of the Holy Capitol of Moscow, at noon (Moscow Time, of course), and contained very few surprises. It was disappointing to see both Владимир Владимирович Путин and Дмитрий Анатольевич Медведев driving through (empty!) streets up to the Kremlin in a black Mercedez each – is neither the new nor the old president patriotic enough to forgo comfort and safety in order to turn to the native car of Volga? Putin gave a stern farewell speech, being a master of stern speeches, and Medvedev happened to smile a tiny little bit while inspecting the armed forces at the end of the ceremony. Despite the presence of the patriarch at the ceremony, the new president was not blessed by him after saying his «присяга» [oath] and giving a confident speech full of expectancy, though I suppose there was no need for a second blessing (a second baptism is, after all, a sin also in the Orthodox Church) as he was already blessed by the patriarch last fall after Putin announced he was to be his heir, oh, sorry – successor.

Since it is not yet the 9th of May, but still only the 8th, I'll be the first one to say "Поздравляю Вас с днём победы!" [I congratule you with Victory Day!]. The day will be celebrated tomorrow in all of Russia with everyone getting the day off so as to be able to enjoy the spring sun with a beer in a park and watching the occasional military parade on Red Square. If you want to take a sneak peak already now of what it's going to look like tomorrow in Moscow, I advice to check out EnglishRussia and these pictures The Parade Reharsal. It's the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Victory Day will be celebrated with military tanks inside the Kremlin. Is this good or bad? I don't know, all I know that it seems to be lacking of logic to celebrated the end of one war by showing off what kind of stuff you could pull out in case of another.

The day after Victory Day I went to a local grocery store in my neighborhood where I saw this magazine with a cover picture from which I could simply not tear my eyes. It must have been the combination of buff arms with a hat on a gorgeous horse and that carefree facial expression that did me in – I never buy tabloids in any country, let alone in Russia (did they defeat the dictatorship of the proletariat so as to read brainless gossip and look at paparazzi pictures of the rich and famous half-naked on the beach?), but this time I forked up the 20 rubles because I couldn’t wait to gorge myself in useless information about the elite in Moscow, including everyone’s favorite Vovochka. I don’t know how it was back at the beginning of his ‘reign’, but it must have seemed very unlikely in 2000 to imagine the then new president Vladimir Vladimirovich in eight years time turning into – like it or not, but that’s what it looks like – a sex symbol. Back in November last year I did a review of magazines to read while in Russia, but for some reason I left out all of the tabloids, each and every one of them, though in Russia, like in any other country embracing Western cultural standards, tabloids outsell almost all other printed materials. This article was found in a magazine that proudly calls itself StarHit in English and translates that into Cyrillic on the main page as «СтарХит». Since it lacks an official website of any sort, I am forced to share the article with you here in pictures [one day I swear I’ll get a scanner and go crazy, but until then…], and with the first paragraph translated into English, so as to give you a general idea of the journalistic value to be found within it’s plenty flattering pictures of the ex-leader.

Today I woke up to find hundreds of posters just like this one taped up on the walls inside of the dormitory building where I live. Though the service adverticed by Tomas Life Coaching is clearly not directed at me (it is actually rather unclear as to whom it is directed, but I guess we shouldn’t get further into that) it caught my attention nevertheless. How? And why? The answer is simple – it’s attention-grabbing employing of three dative compositions in one tiny sentence. This awoke an old dream of mine to write a post about the six loveble cases of Russian language, and try to sort things out as much as possible (because there’s always some serious sorting out needed when it comes to the Russian cases, no matter if you’ve studied it for ten years or ten weeks). Let’s take the sentence above and work on it for a while like an example of ‘sorting out’: first up we’ve got the verb «учить» which when paired with a noun in dative form means “to teach” [«я учу тебя русскому языку» = I teach you Russian], but when paired with one in accusative form “to study, to learn” [«я учу русский язык» = I study Russian]. Next up is an impersonal construction using an adverb predicatively, in this case «полезно» (useful, healthy, good), which next to a noun in dative forms tells something about this noun, rather than the other way around [«ему полезно есть кашу по утрам» = it is healthy for him to eat porridge in the mornings]. The last so called (in my vocabulary) ‘dative composition’, includes the brand new word of «тренинг» (taken straight from the English word “training” and plainly Russified to fit the Russian language), and pairs it with the «предлог» [preposition] «по», which can be paired both with dative and accusative. What we’re focusing on in this case is, of course, what it means when with a noun in dative. «Тренинг по соблазнению» (do note that no stress falls on the preposition in this expression), is grammatically speaking the same as «тренинг по боксу» [training in boxing, box training] or «тренинг по плаванию» [training in swimming, swim training]. In this context the preposition in need of dative can be translated as “on (in the field of)”.

I suppose everyone already knows which country is the biggest in the world – Россия. But that’s the kind of second-hand knowledge one acquires from studying a map of the world. If you’re actually in Russia, and not on a train or on a plane traveling through it, but walking around in a big Russian city, you won’t believe that this country has the amount of space it (allegedly) has, because everywhere you go here it’s cramped or crowded. The Russian equivivalent of the English expression “It’s a small world” is «Мир тесен» [The world is very crowded/cramped], and uses the adjective «тесный» which translates into ‘crowded, cramped; tight, compact, close; fig. close, intimate; tight’. Surely, for the people of the world’s biggest country, the rest of the world might seem “cramped”, but then again – where else in the world were families forced to live in one room for the better part of the 20th century? Flipping through «Русский репортёр» this Saturday morning, as always thoroughly enjoying a new issue of the weekly magazine with the slogan «вдумчивое чтение для интеллигентного среднего класса» [thoughtful reading for the intellectual middle class] I came across the following article: «Мечта о миллионах домов: Первый указ Медведева хорош, но трудновыполним» [A dream about a million houses: The first decree of Medvedev is good, but hard to fulfill]. Though while walking through any city of Russia you’ll get the idea that they’re building as much as possible here, wherever and whenever feasible, the truth remains a bleak one: they’re building far from enough. And what they’re building is not what is needed the most, but what generates the most money – luxury apartments that the avarege Ivan can’t afford even with risking everything on a loan or high-end fashion malls where the average Tatiana can only dream of shopping. The larger part of the population can’t afford even a half-decent place to live. Today I was very happy to see the new president concerned with this very same problem, that has bothered me for quite some time now, too bad the cautious journalist who wrote the article is realistic enough not to get as optimistic as me and Димочка.

Walking through my Russian hometown of the moment, I came across this ‘graffiti’ on a truck. Yeah, it’s kind of funny and that’s the reason why I decided to take a picture of it. It reminded me of those Soviet propaganda posters from WWII with the happy soldier tying his boots with the words «Дойдём до Берлина!» [We will reach Berlin!]. This made me curious to know if there was any propaganda made back then with the same words as on this truck in 2008? I googled the sentences above and guess what the first picture that came up was? A pic almost identical to mine above, only that it was taken in Moscow about two months ago, from a Russian blog. Is this a trend among Russian truck drivers? Is this a way of showing patriotic feelings to other drivers on the road? Or is it another symptom of the sentimentality felt by large parts of the Russian public towards everything Soviet lately?

At first I named this entry ‘Back To The Future’ [after the famous movie, that’s rather obvious – by the way, the same movie is in Russian called «Назад в будущее»] but then I realized that it would fit very badly in the context, and so I changed it to «Вперёд в прошлое». From here on I shall stick to these words when choosing titles for my entries: “Call things by their right names,” as Boris Pasternak wrote in «Доктор Живаго» (did anyone else watch the movie “Into The Wild” directed by Sean Penn? It doesn’t really have anything to do with Russia, yet it is still a great movie, but in the end of it *spoiler warning* the main hero reads Tolstoy’s “Family Happiness” and has an appifany about life, and then he dies holding Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize winning novel in his hand…)

One of the first things I noticed when I arrived in Russia back in 2004 was how much the young teenage generation differed from their parents and even from people in their twenties and thirties, despite a difference of a little more than ten years between them. It didn’t take long for me to clearly realize that those born during perestroika or straight after the collapse of Soviet Union are completely different people, living in another world. They’re opinionated and optimistic and goal oriented and brave, altogether with a fearless outlook on the world (perhaps because they’ve never been behind an iron curtain?). Immediately I felt that all of Russia’s hopes for the future is in this very new generation, and I wasn’t afraid to speak out about my views, yet many people, both Russians and foreigners, didn’t understand me for over four years time. Now it turns out that at least Russian Newsweek is on the same page as me, in any case according to their front page story in №21 (194) 19-25th of May «Поколение Путина выбирает стабильность и карьеру» [‘Generation Putin’ chooses stability and a career]. First it was the picture that caught my attention – I meet all of these ‘young types of Russians’ on a daily basis, I know then, and I know them well. Secondly, the interesting use of the word «колено» [knee] in a phraseology-like construction also intrigued me. Though I was not successful in solving the riddle and failed to uncover its whole meaning, I can’t help but to suspect it being a spin-off from the colloquial expression «(мне, тебе, ему, ей, им, вам, нам) море по колено» [(I, you, he, she, they, you, we) couldn’t care less].

Today the famous Nokia-beeping of an sms woke me up in the middle of the night with the following words from my mother in Sweden: "Congratulations Russia won! How does it feel? Hugs, mom". Relieved as I am from owning a TV, it was only on an intuitive level that I understood that I had slept myself through yet another 'Sacred' Eurovision Song Contest. For non-europeans it might be difficult to fathom this phenomena, and even more so after watching the show itself, I imagine. The status of the competition differs in all of the European countries, iin some people couldn't care less, in others it's almost religion [my seculative native land falls into the former category]. In Russia this Contest is only beginning it's journey to becoming a true folk fest, whereas in Sweden it's more about the National rounds leading up to the final contest in May than actually watching heart-wrenching ballads from Malta or listening to the discobeats of Israel. It was Dima Bilan's second try to conquer the hearts and charts of Europe [he won me over already in 2004 with his hit "На берегу неба"] and he did it, with the song "Believe". And the cherry on top of it all must be that the Russian president, everyone's favorite 'teddybear' Dima Medvedev, rang him up at 2 a.m. and congratulated him.

Комсомольская Правда writes: "Евровидение-2009" пройдет в Москве!" [Eurovision-2009 will go down in Moscow!]

Известия writes "Рудковская: "Евровидение" в России должно стать лучшим в истории шоу." [Rudkovskaya (Dima's producer): "Eurovision" in Russia must become the best show in history]

My 'homies' at E1 write: "Дима Билан стал победителем Евровидения-2008." [Dima Bilan became the winner of Eurovision-2008] and also feature a list of the 25 contestants and their places in the rating - revealing my poor Sweden at a sad number 18. It's a long way from Abba and "Waterloo" in the 70's...

If you want to know more about modern Russian music, while the Russian iTunes store is still non-existing and all you can buy at your local music store is Alla Pugachyova, visit Far From Moscow. This morning I recieved an e-mail from a certain David MacFadyen with the following: "In the light of yesterday’s Eurovision result, I’m writing from the University of California, Los Angeles. We’ve just created the only English-language site dedicated to new music from Russia. Every day we add video, audio, and quick sketches of the artists." Now doesn't that sound like a dream come true?

The most confusing part of Russian language – putting aside, of course, those six cases for the moment – is the verb. The Russian verb is both confusing and difficult to master for foreigners, especially for foreigners with a non-Slavic native language. The reason why this is so is because of a little thing called ‘aspect’, of which each and every Russian verb has two, and that’s the subject for today’s linguistic discussion – how to know if you’ve actually done something to the end, reaching some kind of result, «сделал что-то», or if you’ve only done something, «делал что-то», not to the end, without reaching any results, but still spending quite the amount of time on this certain process. Aspect is in Russian called «вид», and the two different kinds of aspect are «несовершенный вид» [imperfect aspect] and «совершенный вид» [perfect aspect]. In the example above, «сделать» is perfect, generally showing a process already over and with a achieved result, while «делать» is imperfect, stressing the process, which doesn’t necessarily has to lead to any result. But using this very verb-couple (that’s what the two aspects together are usually called, seen not as two verbs but one, as they share a one and the same meaning) is really making it easy for oneself – even a Russian would be able to tell the difference there between imperfect and perfect. The fact is that the whole ‘aspect’ thing is so difficult and confusing that many native speakers seem to find it hard to explain, though they don’t make any of the mistakes that foreigners do, especially when you start thinking: “Did I achieve something with this, or did I not? Was it really perhaps all about the process?” For example, a university professor once told me that the perfect «написать» to the verb «писать» [to write] doesn’t apply to large works of fiction, such as for example novels, because it takes too long to write. Then another university professor said that’s that it’s okay to say «я написала роман» [I have written a novel] if you only just finished writing it, thus making it more of 'I finished writing a novel (only just recently)'.

After his death in 1924, the face of Владимир Ильич Ленин was used for mainly religious purposes, as he became known as a sort of ‘icon’ for the Soviet Union. After the death of the Soviet Union, the face of Lenin, and even more so his profile, has been used for a wide array of purposes, many of them purely commercial, some even rudely capitalistic. If Lenin must have been spinning in his grave – uhm, I mean mausoleum, back in the days of building communism and being on the constant watch-out for a classless society, then I suppose he’s getting sweaty with movement in modern Russia of today. Here and now you’ll run into Lenin in places where you least of all expect him to, like in advertisement for juice or on children’s t-shirts, while at the same time statues of him are being torn down quietly all over the country. But then again, the Russian mind has a history of being complex and even more so the Russian soul – and which one of these two body parts was it that he had more influence on? If there’s a Bolshevik Hell, I’m sure to burn in it: I call the minor statues of Lenin [those are often forgotten and will probably be the last to go, if they ever will that is] «Ленинчик» [“little Lenin”] which has the suffix «чик» in the end, which used in this waysand in this context is what in Russian is called a «уменьшительно-ласкательный суффикс» [diminutive-endearment suffix]. Such a suffix is often used when wanting to express certain feelings (perhaps of endearment) toward certain things, or if the things talked about are small. In my case, though it is risky to be your own therapist, I’d say my distortion of the Russian leader’s name is an expression of my familiarity both with him and the statues of him. Come to think of it, I’ll probably not go straight to Bolshevik Hell for this – in usual manner The Party will probably invite me up for tea in Communism Heaven first, where they’ll treat me cookies and smile at me, right before denouncing me in their paper “Heavenly Pravda” and purging me… Anyway, that’s not important – and may be offensive to some – what I wanted to discuss was this ad that I came across today: