Angry Compassion with Russia

I’m a little ashamed to admit, as someone who has written a lot about Russia, that I had never actually been to the country. I’ve rationalized it by saying that I have been to lots of other former Soviet republics, where (to varying degrees) Russian influence is still strong. I’ve picked up some basic Russian language skills, eaten lots of pelmeni and listened to lots of Russian pop music. But I had not seen the real thing until this weekend, when I got to Ulan-Ude.

Ulan-Ude is probably not the most representative place to get my first impressions of real Russia. It’s the capital of the Automonous Republic of Buryatia and the population is about 60 percent Buryat, who are closely related to Mongols. (As far as I can tell, Ulan-Ude is the second largest city in Russia in which ethnic Russians are a minority, the largest being Kazan, capital of Tatarstan.)

That does mean, though, that it’s an interesting place to see how Russians, much maligned for their racism, interact with ethnic minorities. And in that regard it’s pretty striking how integrated Russians and Buryats are. On the streets, in restaurants and so on I see mixed-race groups of people together all the time. (And people who have spent more than 48 hours here back me up.) I did see some drunk Russians trying to pick a fight with, of all people, a Buddhist monk (I couldn’t tell what the Russians were saying, I could only pick up one of them saying “by Russian law…”) but my translator – a Russian – blamed it on them being “Muscovites,” and he said while Russians in Buryatia get along with Buryats well, Buryats who go elsewhere in Russia are subject to racism. I talked to the monk after the Muscovites left, and he joked that he was practicing “angry compassion” toward them.

I noticed this in Central Asia, too, where I had expected to the pockets ot Russians who remained there after the disintegration of the Soviet Union to have a kind of haughty, colonial attitude (like a lot of Europeans who stayed in Africa), but it wasn’t that way at all. Russians I talked to seemed to identify as much with their adopted country (Uzbekistan, for example) as with Russia and seemed to be well integrated. Part of this, I suspect, is the great success Russians had in Russifying the people they colonized; why they did this so effectively is for someone more expert than me to explain, but it’s really true. It’s most noticeable here in Buryatia in ways that are negative, from a cultural diversity point of view: compared to Mongolia there are almost no nomads, relatively few people speak the Buryat language, and traditional religions are weak here. (The positive side of Russification is less visible, but of course both here and in Mongolia the Russians also provided people with great educations and a much higher material standard of living than they’d had before.)

Anyway, another immediate impression is that there is a LOT of bureaucracy here. I got a taste of this before I came; just to get a visa you have to get an “invitation,” which is a strange formality that serves no purpose I can come up with. Then you are supposed to register with the police in every town in which you spend more than three days. To get a prepaid SIM card for my cell phone I had to show my passport, and the guy at the cell phone store had to copy down all the information from my visa. (In most countries this is something you can buy at a kiosk on the street with the same amount of paperwork it takes to buy a pack of gum.) When I checked into the hotel they gave me a little slip of paper that I have to show to the woman who monitors my floor at the hotel every time I go to my room. I’m not sure what the purpose of all this is, but it definitely makes me feel well monitored. And I’m not sure if this is connected, but I’ve noticed several people I’ve interviewed have asked my translator a lot of questions about who he is, where he works, etc.

But that contrasts with the other big impression I’ve had so far, that there is a sort of amoral, post-apocalyptic vibe to the place. There are tons of mulleted, black-clad boys and men walking the streets, drinking beer at all hours and smoking constantly. The most obvious new buildings are cheaply built shopping centers with electronic signs. And every restaurant and cafe has Russian music videos playing, 80 percent of which prominently feature women in lingerie. (And I’m not the kind of guy to harp on this, but it’s hard not to notice that the commercials that intersperse these videos are for stupid mail-order insecurity devices like the Ab Rocket or a widget that makes your breasts bigger.)

Finally, one photo of Ulan-Ude’s most famous landmark: the biggest Lenin head in the world:

My translator, told me that Lenin’s grandmother was a Kalmyk, which is another Mongol-related group that now lives near Chechnya. And he told me that the sculpture also was known locally as “the world’s biggest Jewish head.” OK, here we go, I thought. But the reason is funny: apparently the contours of the head are shaped such that when snow falls on it, it sticks in a pattern that looks just like a yarmulke.