On Contracts, Pronunciations and Flu

Today I stayed at home to cure my lethal flu and to work on my paper about Danube navigation law, but as the flu seems to be incurable and, consequently, I don’t have the brains to make up witty phrases on navigable channels and pilotage, I decided to post here.
I was asked to write something about the university where I study law. We have both international and Russian subjects and although I’m not sure I’ll ever really use my knowledge of Russian criminal procedure, it’s quite interesting. What I’ve decided to write about is not directly connected with my studies – more with the Scyllas and Charybdises of making deals in Russia.

The word договор is translated as contract, but the idea behind a договор and a contract are not at all the same. Of course, the textbook definition of a договор is very similar to the one of a contract – a binding agreement between two or more parties for performing, or refraining from performing, some specified acts in exchange for lawful consideration, blah-blah. But as soon as you quit the lecture hall, you get the feeling that the post-Soviet understanding of a contract goes like this – a piece of paper required by some stupid law, signed by both parties then forgotten for good.

Let me explain it through some examples. When I was looking for a room to rent here, I found a nice one, close to the university, even the price was reasonable, so I asked the agent to send me a draft of the contract and I’m ready to sign it, if I find everything in order. Both the agent (a law school graduate, by the way) and the landlords (no information on their education background, but really nice, friendly, intelligent-looking people) thought that I was trying to duck out, so the next day, instead of a draft, I received a message that the room was already taken by someone else.

No regrets anymore, because two days later I found my current place, cheaper, and, more importantly, with lovely flatmates. And now the next example: one of these lovely flatmates, who has turned into something like a friend for me, works for a small company as chief accountant. It seems to me that this company prefers to spend on nourishing corporate lunches and corporate „let’s buy a few bottles of vodka, it’s already Wednesday”-s then on attorney’s fees, so it is my flatmate who represents the company at court. Once she came home from a hearing, yelling „I’ve won the case”, then told me that the strongest legal argument that the defendant (represented by a lawyer) had to offer sounded like this: „Oy, the contract… Yeah, you know, Your Honour, a contract is nothing more than mere formality”. Apparently, His Honour was not impressed by this original approach and decided in the favour of my flatmate’s company.

So, as we can see, the situation is not so tragic – at least the judge stuck to the textbook definition of the contract, and of course, my hundred-percent Russian friend was also in a shock when she heard the opponent’s statement. Maybe all this is not a Russian peculiarity at all – take Hungary, we are also not the champions of carefully reading and then honestly executing contracts, but still, I have the feeling that the easter you go and the more post-Soviet the country is, the „contracting culture” gets further and further from the, let’s say, Western ideal. Okay, we can say that it is because of the Soviet regime, where private law was simply declared non-existent and which made people lose their last remainder of faith in the rule of law (if they ever had any). Or we can also say that the eastern, or the Asian way of doing business is traditionally built on confidence and not on documents. (Any of us has already heard things like „You want to see it in writing? You don’t trust me? Don’t offend me, please , no Russian/Greek/Hungarian/Taijik has ever lied to his business partners, if I say so then it’ll be so!”) Or… or we can find many more reasons, and still we’ll be annoyed next time when we are signing something important and the secretary is forcing a pen in our hands with a „You don’t say you really want to read it all, you’re just wasting my time, you moron”-face. So, and I think that’s a rule that applies to everything that’s strange or different or annoying in Russia, we can understand the reasons, we can complain about it, than accept it and hope that it’ll change when the Soviet era will be more of a memory than reality. There are good signs – everything I signed in these two and a half years was at least printed on proper A4 sheets instead of being scribbled on the back of a chocolate wrapping paper…

And there’s one more thing. Let’s get back to the word договор. The Ministry for Education and Science has recently published an act on the correct pronunciation of words with shifting accent. (Where to put the stress correctly in Russian words – sometimes it’s difficult for native speakers as well…) One of these words was договор. Sometimes it is pronounced like dOgovor, sometimes we hear dogovOr. For long the second version was deemed correct. Now the Ministry decided that both are correct. (By the way, the Russian press found this decision utterly ridiculous, saying that the Ministry should keep itself busy with more important matters.) What I have to add – and it’s not a result of some linguistic research, just a remark of a language-geek – is that in most cases, when speaking about a contract as it is in the textbook, you’ll hear dogovOr, but in the phrase „I don’t care what’s written in the bloody contract!” it is more possible to meet the dOgovor variant. Don’t draw any conclusions, it’s just interesting.

P.S. By the time I finished this post, the fever and the sore throat disappeared. Maybe I was wrong and it was not a case of lethal flu.