Ulan Ude (formerly Verkhneudinsk)

As the last Russian stop on the Moscow-Beijing train route before Mongolia—once it was a major hub on the tea route to China—this modest capital of the Buryatan region has long nurtured a mixture of Russian and Asiatic cultures far from the cosmopolitan fury of Moscow. Though it remains covered in the unmistakable, generic Soviet rust that persists in the apartment complexes and sober streets of most Russian cities, Ulan Ude still surprises with its time warped style, the occasional scenic decay of its still glorious wooden classical Russian and Mongolian architecture and the easygoing spirit of its people, half Buryat. Not far from a fantastically dilapidated opera house (decorated with hammers, sickles, and similar Buryatan cresents), a handful of dusty but formidable museums, an energetic market and main street of shops and street performers, and the Brehznev monstrosity of the Hotel Buryatia, sits the excessively large main square and the similarly enormous head that once made it all possible, and impossible. Lenin’s bust might be the world’s largest bust—a fact that means increasingly little and indeed may have never meant much. Especially to a city this far from Moscow, and so close, almost so close to the future. http://www.answers.com/ulan%20ude.

What We Are Doing

We are volunteers chosen for our a) experience with the program theme (in my case, historical and cultural preservation—my experience being, largely, that I’ve studied history and literature) and b) experience with Russian (I have some experience with Russian people). Obviously, considering my extensive expertise, it makes perfect sense that I be exiled to lovely Siberia by the sinisterly-named organization IREX (international research and exchanges board). This is the situation now. Of course the culture and language is not so inaccessible as it might at first seem, Buryatia is a warm place, as much in mood as in temperature, and cultural and historical preservation skills are not really what’s needed here. What’s needed are hands and tongues: booklets, websites, museum placards. What else: Providing valuable ideas and insight—essentially our impression of the way things work here, and what about it could be done differently. How can we get more people from around the world to volunteer and visit Lake Baikal? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal) What would happen if we were working on conservation near California’s Lake Tahoe, Baikal’s sister lake? (http://www.tahoebaikal.org/)

We give our opinions on how to get more visitors, more volunteers, more money, more members—we just came from a weekend conference for the Great Baikal Trail (http://www.baikal.eastsib.ru/gbt/index_en.html)—essentially the immediate goals of each of our organizations. The Laboratory for Active Tourism (http://lat.iatp.ru), the outdoor education and volunteer group run by our host family, wants (or papa Igor wants) us to create a tourist booklet for the Zabaikalsky National Park (http://ngo.burnet.ru/znp/index_e.html) heavy with our impressions. This seemed to be going too far—could our impressions of Baikal really draw tourists here?—and how would we even begin to translate its beauty to paper? Reading about the lake in the Russians’ literal translation, with its incredible hyperbolism and bizarre, almost unintelligible constructions and delightfully absurd rhetorical questions (“Who on Earth doesn’t know the amazing incredibleness of the pearl of Siberia”), is almost a more appropriate way to discover it—that is, with no pretense of expertise, no attempt at demystification. We are not the most qualified for this work, but we’re doing it anyway and I think we’ll do a fine job. But there’s so much more to do, especially in the area of the environment: more than we can fully grasp right now, more than the Russians seem ready for, but so much work that it demands some attention.

The Selenga and Uda rivers, which pass leisurely through the city, look sky blue from the bridges; up close, they are lined with a year’s worth of trash—forties, cans, cigarette boxes. The dogs scavenge here. It’s hard to walk in any public space in town without stepping on a bottle or kicking a bottle cap. A small group of college kids is trying to keep the river clean, and wants to encourage the city to dig into its modest pile of funds to provide better trash collection. More ambitiously, they’re trying to put a stop to littering. Yesterday we trolled the shores of the Uda taking photos of trash for a publicity campaign; it was pretty bad. It’s hard to know how best to make change, and though we’ve been encouraging the Russians to try tactics that work in democracies (don’t ask river-dwellers to pay for new garbage cans, sign a petition that can be delivered to the local governors), this is not a real democracy. Not yet. But perhaps these suggestions alone, no matter how silly they may seem in the context of “politics” here, or “activism,” (or, on the other hand, “tourism” or business), are the sparks of change. There’s so much to be done—legal and political reform, the stemming of corruption (Russians supposedly paid in bribes roughly half of what the government spent last year), more transparency and access, and more engagement between the politicians and the people, not necessarily in that order. Besides not knowing where to begin our work as “historical and cultural preservation” volunteers, the hard part is not knowing whether anything you do is going to matter. That was the question that the young head of the local, budding Green Party asked us the other day: “Tell us honestly, will any of our work make any difference?” They have a long way to go, like those few hoping for change here, but we told them that their hope and their work alone would matter of course. We hope so too.

Buryat

Stalin, like the Cossacks and other Russians before him, didn’t much favor these people, with their Mongolian dialect (still alive, floating in between Russian in the conversations of babushki) and their Buddhist and shamanist leanings, but he compromised and allowed them to have their temples and yurts and their own republic too. Today Buryats make up about half of Ulan Ude’s population, but the traditional trappings grow ghostly in the face of Russian and growing western influences. In a quiet way, there seems to be a very slight racial divide in Ulan Ude, favoring whites--though there is no apparent racism here, for which Russia is typically known. It's a wonder that any tension could arise: they are as deeply, demurely beautiful a people as you can find.

Skype (and the Internet)

A brilliant method of communication that allows people to use the internet to make phone calls to any phone in the world. But by internet, I hardly mean the thing that gives you web pages in Siberia—we might call that the outernet (you heard it here first) because it’s quite outside the lightning-fast kind of information superhighway (don’t steal that one either) to which us neophytes are addicted. In fact, I am convinced that not only does this internet not use light or even sound, but rather an arduous system of goats and nerpas who ferry the data to and fro in their mouths. This explains why every time I try to talk to someone on Skype, they don’t respond to the thing I said for minutes, and sometimes they never respond. At other times, they sound like robots, which is scary because maybe they actually are.

Language

Russian is a fascinating language. So fascinating that my years of off-and-on amateurish, spare-time study of it got me only to the alphabet and a few important words. One word was “mozhna,” which means “may I;” only when I arrived in Moscow did I learn how useful it was. The m word can get you almost anything and anywhere: if you say it while pointing at a dumpling, it means “may I have that dumpling,” and its repetition back to you means “yes, you may,” and you will then most likely receive the dumpling. If you say it while standing in the middle of a store for instance, you will then most likely receive a funny stare, which is always a fun thing. Your conversant may then say “mozhna shto?” meaning “may you what?” Your replay could be “mozhna skazat mozhna” meaning “may I say ‘mozhna’.” This is useful for precisely nothing more than confusing people, especially children.

But I’ve raised my voice in the real world, to some effect. Many times, it seems, even the laziest novice can get by just fine by muttering sounds or grunting at the right moments. As when one rides the marshrutka to work. The phrase that will get the van to stop at the next stop (assuming the brakes are functioning) is “na stanovky” a phrase whose grammatical structure we haven’t quite pieced together. But all one need do inside that pop-music filled, tired peopled van, is utter a simple “nast” or “key” or “pushkin,” or anything really. The hard part is getting out, which requires a particular body language that I always mangle.

Home, Family

We were told we would be living on our own in the center of town; instead we’re about half an hour away from Lenin’s head (the center of town) on the outskirts of the city. But it’s much better than I could have hoped. A cozy place with one bath, one room for me and John, one for Melissa, a bedroom for Svetlana and Igor (our parents), a kitchen (the bird Kasha lives here), and a living room for any guests who might happen to show up with a toothbrush, which is often. For a few weeks at the start, Valentin, one of their three children, was home from university; he stayed on the couch while John and I slept in his bunk bed, in a room that doesn’t seem to have changed in a few years, which means it looks like a room from the 70’s: football posters with their edges curling, a large yellowing periodic table, hundreds of books, some Buddhist artwork, pins and medals from outdoor organizations (“TIMBY: Tahoe Is My Back Yard”), an award with Vladimir Putin’s face on it (in high school, Valentin was the country’s orienteering champion for his age group), some antique guitars, a jigsaw dinosaur, a high bar with rings and a rope (which I use for getting off the top bunk and my gymnastics routine), a top bunk that is a foot length’s too short. The requisite thin walls, on top of an already modest square meterage and the typical Russian nosiness, make privacy as nonexistent an idea in Russia as it is a word. But there’s little need for it anyway; we’re starting to feel like a family. We dine with Igor and Sveta most nights and sit around for hours talking about our work and days, our experiences in Russia and the States, our families and friends, sharing photos. I’m confined to mostly trying to listen of course, and if I get bored I can at least practice my Russian with the bird. When we go out, we often pay for each others’ bus rides and sodas and blinies and beers without thinking of it, as much out of familiarity as out of a lavishness in our ruble power. The neighborhood, Vostochny, is mostly a homogenous collection of apartment buildings and the requisite supermarkets and stores, like any number of concrete neighborhoods in the Bronx or Queens but with mountains in the distance.

Activism, Volunteering, etc.

The curtain’s fall didn’t dispel the notion that everything is someone else’s problem—one of the greatest ironies of Soviet communism. Forget communitarian values, civic responsibility or the public good—there’s always someone being paid a state wage to take care of it. And despite “freedom of the press,” information’s still held hostage by some of the higher government wage takers. If people knew about the problem perhaps they could organize but then again someone else is probably taking care of it and there’s too much else to worry about anyway so why bother and plus, there’s nothing wrong, right? Even though he helped distribute a petition around Ulan Ude to try to convince Putin not to build his massive pipeline near the lake, Igor has nothing bad to say about the government; he also insists that the lake and Ulan Ude are not very polluted, despite all we’ve seen to the contrary.
Meanwhile, all communication is poor. Of course we never know what’s going to happen more than a day in advance. Even at the nature museum, the top-down structure lingers so that no one seems to know what our next task will be, not even the vice director’s assistant, especially not us. The big picture is always elusive; the only sphere of action is local, and not the streets—that’s too dangerous—and not political either—there’s no public information about voting patterns, or politicians’ voting records. I mean the home, one’s inner circle. Not even going door to door works, unless you’re visiting friends. At least in our kitchen, run by a couple of the most cosmopolitan, ecologically-minded folks in town, skeptical questions about Putin—who has declared that no environmental group is going to get in the way of an upcoming pipeline project—are met with, at most, a shrug.
Russian NGOs have never been very popular or successful in Russia; considering the impression the government has made among citizens over the years—the only structure that has ever got anything done, somehow—“non-governmental” is not an idea people tend to put a lot of faith in. Until the people (and, gulp, the government) begin to pay more attention to these groups, there’s only so much influence they can have on issues. Questions at the Great Baikal Trail (BBT) conference ran the gamut, from what sort of eco-tourism is desired, how much should volunteers pay, how should volunteers be organized, how can we get more foreigners to volunteer, etc. But there’s little discussion of the broader questions, and the ecological issues (why are we maintaining this land and lake for instance). Just keeping an organization alive is hard in Russia, and besides, what else can they do for now?
Maybe a lot. More happily, groups like the BBT, which assembles the domestic and foreign workers, young and old, who build and clean up the areas around Baikal, hint that the word “volunteer” is beginning to insert itself more forcefully into Russian lexicons. Even if politics is left out of conference discussions, there’s a sense that people working together—and, importantly, people from different countries—can have a real impact on the environment, starting at the level of tourism and the economy.
Meanwhile, our meetings with a wide-eyed bunch of college ecology and geography students show that the idea of activism is not foreign, even if it seems awkward, like a Russian testing out his broken English (quite rare). The Green Party is 450 members short of the 500 needed to officially register in Buryatia, and as they focus on assembling more, they’re not even sure they can do much beyond that. At a meeting of theirs yesterday (two of them and the three of us), they had the wisdom to ask if what they were doing was going to matter at all (Yes, yes it matters, but we need to talk more; we can give them examples of activism, but they need some legal expertise, they need basic voter information, they need a new political system; the best we can do is inspire them and fuel their patience.) At a lecture where we spoke to a group of over a hundred blank-faced, note-passing freshmen, it was actually refreshing to hear this smug looking kid get up to argue against the value of our program, the reason we had come, the validity of the whole idea. “I’ve taught kids too,” he explained loudly to his disapproving professor, “and this sort of information doesn’t get anywhere.” A decade ago, no one would have said a thing. At least he had the courage to voice what the majority of the room was thinking; and without that, there would have been no opportunity for the debate that followed. It’s the debate that circulates information and then challenges people to really think. And when people start to think on their own, after hearing the various arguments, the evidence, then they might begin to start those larger arguments.

Chocolate-crème tea wafer (vafeli)

Many of these sublime six-layer stick of goodness have rescued many needy sweet teeth since kindergarten, and more recently provided ample substitution for fingernails when trying to piece together ideas across the language-barrier kitchen table, my Russian kindergarten. Ochin fkoosna is the best response.

Russians

They know how to live. Not just survive, but thrive. They may not know how to keep a Party going, but they know how to throw one. Neglect of “social good” aside, they know how to dance and tell a story and a joke and make great food and make anyone feel at home, they know how to eat and drink and enjoy virtually any thing, afterwards they’ll wash it down with a lively sing-a-long. Once a Russian lets you into the circle, they’ll do everything for you, anything. You’d be hard pressed to find a better friend. If you’re in a bus, train, metro car, queue of any kind, you’ll also be hard pressed, but this time against the window—by the inscrutable stares and the crowd and their inevitably large and bulky bags full of a life’s worth of possessions, food and small children. Though sympathy for strangers in public is as uncommon and concern for the general public good, Russians take great care of their own possessions (just as with their own friends) and seem to take a lot with them when they travel on trains or buses; also, out of necessity and by turn culture, they don’t dispose of very much, except perhaps beer bottles: this includes soviet architecture, soviet cars, clothing and food. Between my own soft spot for 70s Soviet kitsch and my tendency to hold onto things way past their typical American lifetime (certainly passed down from the previous generation), I’ve no doubt in my Eastern European heritage. Russians have a propensity to exaggerate things, especially size. Certainly there is a premium placed on size in America (Wal Mart, penis enlargement, Big Mac, Big Car) but here it is a deeply-rooted point of pride (buildings, factories, dams, Lenin heads, prefixed and suffixed words, but also lakes, skies, mountains, landmasses, bears) and quite ironic. If open spaces are enormous (Red Square, Moscow, Russia), apartments are tiny as a rule. Getting close to Russians in their homes is so easy because there’s really no choice.

The Russian home is one of the most comfortable places you’ll find on earth, at least because it’s not the hallway or the street or the bus or the airplane you took to get there. Because no one’s ever been in control of what’s going on outside their own homes—except perhaps in the good old (pre-) revolutionary days—everything inside the heavily bolted door tends to be beautiful, clean, cherished. Plants especially are omnipresent, and better taken of than anywhere else. Everything outside is the opposite.

Openness is valued, and Russians, more than any people I’ve met, have a talent for recognizing the truth about others. But as Eugene pointed out, this frankness doesn’t also imply sincerity—Russians may be slow to acknowledge the truth about themselves. They’re also hesitant to yield much information, a relic of its scarcity and very absurdity under the USSR. Today, information and plans may be thorough and detailed, but often won’t be formulated until the last minute; and even if they are, no one knows them anyway. For instance, we had no idea we were hiking to Lake Baikal until some days before, only that we were “going” to the lake. And once on the trail, we never spoke in detail of what lay ahead—the rocky parts, the bridges, the absence of bears (!); we just went. As an enthusiast of open-endedness (lousy planner), I really appreciate this approach. As an incorrigible communicator—and a volunteer eager to help—I also can’t appreciate it. Still, for the tourist in me, this mystification means the many surprises of Russia are doubled and doubled.

Other useful generalities: Russians like to eat and drink; they like sex, they like to travel, they like cool ringtones, they like sports and cool clothes and heat and television and shopping and pop music and western movies. Also though: they respect their president for his strong-arming of the economy and Chechnya, and his work on the economy; what little they say about America is warm with a tinge of skepticism about the culture; the theater is far from dead, but they say the literature is dying; I hear the art scene is getting hotter along with the fashion world; the rich are getting richer, the poor are growing poorer, and the middle class is growing a little bigger. One thing that cuts across all classes is the coat check. Taking off your jacket is pretty much compulsory in Russia, as is removing your shoes in exchange for some slippers. And when, entering one’s home, it is also customary to bring a gift, such as chocolate, wine, vodka, chocolate with rum, chocolate flavored vodka, or wine.

Food

Quite literally, the grease of Russian home life. From the cafeterias in Moscow to the Mongolian bread and meat “surprises” of Ulan Ude restaurants (it was literally a box of bread with said meat surprise within) to the exquisite omul fish we ate near Baikal to the borsch and fried cottage cheese of home, the food has grown increasingly delicious, I fatter. Not so fat that I didn’t need to head downtown the other day to go belt-shopping in the rynok, but still fat. I think my face is fatter. Anyway, I don’t have much of a choice. In Russia there’s something of a tacit militaristic system when it comes to eating, especially in someone home—you’ll eat it and you’ll like it. Also useful is don’t ask, don’t tell.

Being a spy

My years of practice taking photos without looking through the viewfinder have made me a formidable schpion. Just the other day, our new friend Anya discovered me in the living room of her husband Sasha’s parents’ house, taking some photos. “You’re a spy!” she declaimed, before explaining that any westerner who comes to Russia in the wintertime is automatically considered a covert agent. Hitry schpion (cunning spy) is the expression for such a one. I promised her I wasn’t a spy, before she left the room and I got my target: a photo next to the TV of Sasha’s father’s former charge: a large missile truck parked somewhere in the forest outside of Irkutsk. It’s a frightening looking monstrosity, with tires the size of a person and a big nuclear missile that could reach new york in an hour. Coincidentally, this message will self-destruct in an hour.

Vegetables, or how I learned to stop eating meat and love cabbage

Contrary to popular belief, it’s very easy to be a vegetarian in Russia. Believe it or not, I’ve fallen head over heels for cabbage and beets and even pickles. You see, I didn’t really have a choice given the indefatigable Russian insistence on those ingredients. Meanwhile, any passing acquaintance with meat or fish (when passing it at a newsstand for instance, or the fish stands in the rynok) is an easy reminder that eggs offer more than enough protein, thank you bolshoi. And those kartoshky piroshky are quite good without any meat added. Of course, we have to imagine that this variety of vegetarianism is healthy, as everything is fried. And of course, all vegetables contain some trace of meat, if not a large slab of meat thrown right on top of them, or around them, or into the middle of them, so forget that thing about becoming a vegetarian, it was basically a lie. But with the right language barrier, you can very easily pretend.

Music

Essential to Russian culture. People love to sing and they love to listen to it everywhere: you can’t go into a store or ride a bus without getting a plentiful dose of (mostly English) pop music. It’s a given, a constant soundtrack; I can’t imagine that the irritable, hungover busdrivers actually want to hear this music. Typically, no cheesy piece of modern pop refuse gets piped into our morning busride unless it’s been exhaustively remixed by some flashy Moscow DJ. Though sometimes there's room for the oldies that you never knew disappeared. Within the space of two days, I heard on the radio White Town’s “Your Woman” and another song whose lyrics I could never understand except for “cherry cola” (you know the song), sending me back to my bedroom in the late 90s; otherwise it’s a lot of western songs that I’ve never heard and cell phone ringtones. There’s a wealth of great Russian singer-songwriters, but even if I knew the names I couldn’t remember them amidst the loud U2 and the Backstreet Boys and Killers videos at this café. Some of my favorite music so far (invariably rock is the only interesting modern stuff) is by Mummiy Troll, Tatiana Bulyonov, Masha y Medvedi, Pyotr Butisov….On the other side, the other night we squeezed ourselves (as is common when getting through the doors of events) into the opera house to see “Baikal,” a cultural extravaganza featuring two different Buryat artistic groups, one traditional and one from the future, full of pan-asian influences, not to mention Salsa and American pop. Amazing dancing, hammered dulcimers and chimes, cheesy lights and fog, sexy singers. The most colorful orchestra I’ve ever seen. Weird, great, and exciting.