Many of the journalists we've talked with here say with some sadness that free speech has become associated with Yeltsin-era chaos. We have to keep reminding ourselves, as we report on the increasingly controlled media, restrictive rules for opposition candidates and the lack of justice for murdered journalists, that the majority of Russians see the lamentations of the "democrats" as just so much special pleading. What seems incontrovertible at home is an open question here.
Jun 8, 2007
A Note from Brooke
I used to live here but I hardly recognize it, and not just because of the color and the traffic and the Manolo Blahnik store around the corner. Last time I was here, it was a time of sky-rocketing inflation, soaring corruption, national humiliation - and freedom. And most of us American reporters placed an arguably disproportionate emphasis on the freedom. Now, when many Russians are enjoying relative financial stability and resurgent national pride, we are focused on the LACK of freedom. Vladimir Mamontov, the editor of the durable pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, essentially told us (in a polite way) to back off. He said that Russians see a different relationship between power and strength. That Russians believe freedom does not make you strong, that in fact strength makes freedom possible. He said most people here understand Russia needs time to get stronger before it can support an American-style press. Recent polls suggest he's right.
Many of the journalists we've talked with here say with some sadness that free speech has become associated with Yeltsin-era chaos. We have to keep reminding ourselves, as we report on the increasingly controlled media, restrictive rules for opposition candidates and the lack of justice for murdered journalists, that the majority of Russians see the lamentations of the "democrats" as just so much special pleading. What seems incontrovertible at home is an open question here.
Many of the journalists we've talked with here say with some sadness that free speech has become associated with Yeltsin-era chaos. We have to keep reminding ourselves, as we report on the increasingly controlled media, restrictive rules for opposition candidates and the lack of justice for murdered journalists, that the majority of Russians see the lamentations of the "democrats" as just so much special pleading. What seems incontrovertible at home is an open question here.
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I spent last summer with my Russian family in Novosibirsk. What I saw, and what western journalists don't get about Russians is that they are simply sick of politics. It's not 'Freedom' that is associated with Yeltsin-era chaos, but politics as such. What most people remember is that around 1992 there were lots of people making lots of speeches and promising a lot of great reform. That turned out to be hooplah, as the economy crumbled and people were now not only broke but also humiliated. By the time Putin came on the scene, all they wanted was for him to pay their salaries. They wanted to focus on getting their lives back together-- when you're trying to that you don't really care about much else. One of the most common words in Russia these days is "Prilichyi" or 'decent'. Everyone just wants to have decent food, a decent job, a decent house, and a decent president-- just like normal people. Comfortable westerners expect great things their governments. Russians aren't looking for 'great', they're still trying to go for 'normal'. All the anti-Putin activists are comfortable Moscow intelligentsia. Russians in the 20th century constitute the most politicized population in history. Little good has it done them. Maybe when there's a measure of decency in their lives they can start playing politics. Your trip to Russia should have branched out from Moscow. All the images of your blog are signs of affluence. You claim that the Russian economy is 'stable' as if everything is great-- and in Moscow, it is. Go to a small town and you'll see why the Russians continue to elect Putin in landslide elections. They see him as decent, competent, normal. They've gotten their small measure of decency and all they are interested is securing it.
I'm just back from a week in Moscow and Petersburg for the very first time since I lived and worked in Moscow for a year as an undergraduate from Britain. The disconnect for me was somewhat different from Brooke's since my time in Russia was 1974–1975, the absolute heart of the Brezhnev era. I tend to agree with Gleb—it seems clear that what Russians are mostly focused on is a reasonable life—decent food and housing and for some, perhaps jobs they can actually enjoy and feel fulfilled by, all possibilities that seemed pretty much nonexistent during the time I lived there.
I also agree with Gleb about going outside the biggest cities. In the 70s I traveled all over the Soviet Union, including visiting small towns and the countryside, and even then the differences were fairly sharp—I always saw it in terms of food: it was completely typical to go into the only grocery store in town and found absolutely literally nothing on the shelves except jars of pickles and some ancient carrots. And though Moscow then always had the best of everything, it was all relative—last week my oldest son, whom I was traveling with, found it very amusing to see my shock not only at the number of restaurants and supermarkets and the abundance and variety of what was for sale but at the (mostly) cheerfulness and politeness of the people working in them.
However, as soon as he and I went out to visit an old friend of the family in a Moscow suburb, the past seemed far more vividly present. We took a tatty (though fast) marshrutka from Kievskii station which rattled rather hair-raisingly through the (unbelievable) traffic, made various confusing U-turns away from and over the highway and just as back then found ourselves on a dusty street with no proper sidewalks, some rather crappy looking shops and a lot of dumpsters for garbage arranged unattractively next to the road. The only visual difference from thirty years ago was that some pretty hideous condo-type high-rises were being built along the route. But why wouldn't you want a hideous condo when all the other apartments are terrible jerry-built old complexes with crumbling concrete, peeling paint, horribly badly lit hallways and elevators about one-foot square? These are middle-class, educated people's homes, not projects for homeless people. Not that the apartment we went to wasn't supertidy and looked after.
I was in fact also rather shocked when one of my and my son's companions in our overnight train back from P'burg to Moscow, two friendly middle-aged guys (probably about my age) who worked for the army (in the olden days I would have automatically assumed they were KGB), actually waxed somewhat nostalgic about Brezhnev times when I mentioned that was when I'd lived in Russia, said things were fine, simpler, easy, good. My own memories of the struggles one had to undergo sometimes merely to put together enough food for dinner, find somewhere that had beer to sell, buy a train ticket or find a place that could repair your shoes and wasn't closed except on Tuesday afternoons--let alone do anything more obviously bureaucratic or complicated--might have led me to argue with him, but I didn't want to be rude when he was pressing Hennessey cognac on us in traditional Russian style.
All this is a long-winded way of saying, yes, I agree: Russians just want to be able to live a normal life, and most of them aren't worrying AT ALL at the moment whether Putin is repressing the media. We talked about some of this to the old family friend we'd gone to see in the suburbs; she's well aware of it all, but feels, I think, that especially with the existence of the Internet, etc., that even Putin will never quite be able to stuff the Russian cat completely back in the bag again. Meanwhile, the people are getting some bread and circuses, of which they were deprived for so long. And there's a freedom to not having to fight your way to the front of endless lines for almost anything you want to supply your home and person with, too—as any American housewife in the 1950s longing for a washing machine and a decent supermarket and a car to drive to it in could have told you.
Your commentary is very interesting. It is useful for an American audience to be aware of different political cultures and how they regard "freedom." Malaysia is another example of a country taking the view that strength leads to freedom, not freedom to strength. Thanks for your great work. Looking forward to hearing it on WNYC.
Vincent in Harlem
Ah, if only it WERE incontrovertible at home!
It's all really fascinating ... but I think something's wrong with me. All I can focus on are the four ancient looking phones in the background of the photo. Those would be more than 20 years old in America. What are they for, I wonder? Otherwise, the photo's kind of surreal -- that could be any office in America.
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