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.