Stepmother Russia

On Contracts, Pronunciations and Flu

2010-03-24T05:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Perestroika Lost

2010-03-15T01:31:00.000-07:00

A truly moving piece in the New York Times by Mikhail Gorbachev, written for the anniversary of the Perestroika. Gorbachev is a widely hated personality in Russia and he seems to be fully aware of this, the article is overloaded with remarks of self-defense. At the same time, he boldly comments on how badly Russia needs a functional civil society in order to modernize its economy and reach a higher level of development. Pity he's a lone voice, and also pity that most probably this act will turn out counter productive as well, for not only did he, "the failed modernizer" dare criticize the course of politics in his country, but he also did so in the New York Times. (Which one of my teachers referred to as a "tabloid" recently.)

There's only one point I didn't quite agree with: he says the biggest mistake they made during Perestroika is that they failed to modernize the communist party in time. In my opinion the biggest mistake was that they didn't follow the Word Bank's recommendations but liberalized prices rather than introducing and executing privatization first. This way they created a situation of complete deficit in products and skyrocketing inflation. They should have created a clear and workable structure for the economy, and only then introduce new measures.
This is partly why the legacy of the transition has turned out as it has, because people remember only the chaos and the empty shelves, not much more. I've heard it a thousand times - during the communist era they had seen shortage in most products, but nothing quite similar to what they experienced under Gorbachev. The Russian public lost faith in Gorbachev the very first moment, which provides a powerful argument for defendants of the present regime until this day.

The Dorm at Tyepli Stan

2010-03-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve moved to a third dorm here, it made me think about the previous ones. It's funny how universities here are so international, but not Valencia or Amsterdam-like international. It looks like Moscow is a different hub. During the two and a half years I've spent in Russia, I've lived together with people from at least ten different places in Africa, Australia and mostly Asia.

I moved in the dorm I've just left when I got transferred from the Peoples' Friendship University to MGIMO in September 2008.

At first I hated it, and I was scared to death by my roommate. She was a very traditional girl from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a prude and a bore. The other room was shared by two Kirgiz girls, and a Mongolian spending her senior year at MGIMO. She hated everyone except me for some reason. She desperately wanted to leave Moscow for Tokyo where she was planning to get a masters degree at the United Nations University.

Slowly I got used to it. The building was in quite bad condition, but the neighborhood was as green as it can be in Moscow and there was a park nearby where I could go jogging. Also, another Hungarian girl lived there already, and we fast became very close friends during the first couple of months of my stay. We were both suffering badly from trying to keep up with the rest in our groups (she studies law, I study political science), we would stay up until 2, 3, 4 a.m. in the morning or not sleep at all, waking up each other from time to time when one of us fell asleep on the kitchen table. We didn’t have any energy left to think about the low life standards we’d got used to without even noticing.

The girls from Bishkek amazed me with their stories from Kirgizia; it was an entirely different world they were telling me about. They told me, for example, that in most families custom is that grandmothers and other elderly women gather in front of the door of freshly married couples’ new home and they listen all night long to get proof that everything happens that night that should. Yet these girls were so full of life that whatever they told me they did so with a mischievous smile, which made me feel they were not so different from me after all.

When they understood that I must have already had sex in my life, they couldn’t hide their curiosity. They had dozens of questions, clearly they couldn’t wait to try it but they feared it more than anything.
One of them seemed particularly interested, telling me how wonderful it must be and how brave I was, and she blushed. In a couple of days she came up to me saying she had to tell me something in private and I learnt that she had lost her virginity a couple of months before. She told me in tears that this was the greatest shame she could think of and to anything I said her answer was that I couldn’t understand the way people thought in her country. Next time I saw her, she was standing on the corridor flirtatiously talking to a group of Kazakh guys, which made my discomfort ease a little.

I got used to the Tajik girl too. She turned out to be so simple it entertained me. Also, she had skills that none of my friends or acquaintances even. She would bake bread at home, she could clean things no one would even want to even look at, and when there was a Muslim holiday she invited her friends over and she put a feast together that made me forget I was in a dorm. When she noticed that her hair began to fall, she started to wash her hair two days a week with a mixture of onions and raw eggs.
She told me there was a guy she liked but since she didn't like his mother, she didn't want to go out with him. After all, in Tajikistan, once you get married, you have to live with your husband's family.

Also, sharing a room means sharing your privacy with someone, and once you shared it, you feel attached to the other, too. And once she confessed to me that I was her closest friend in Moscow - vanity is capable of incredible things.

This is where I made my very first Russian friend too. We agreed we would to move to the other, better dorm together, so that we could share a room. I got the permission at the university immediately, so I moved in right away. Two weeks later her application was rejected, so here I am with a stranger again. She's Korean, she seems fine, but I haven't quite decided yet if I have the energy to get to like her.

Russian (TV)Reality

2010-03-12T00:17:00.000-08:00

When you start a battle against stereotypes on Russia, you feel like Saint George fighting a several-headed dragon, a righter of wrongs in shining armure ready to slash, cut, dismember all the evil and icky heads of the beast. However, sometimes your pleasant daydream of a world free of prejudice gets shattered by a rude call from reality: victims of stereotypes aren't always victims, and all stereotypes aren't always that far from the truth, unfortunately.

Comrades, we might have lost this battle, but the war isn't over. Remember that there are still out there clichés, platitudes and received ideas on Russians and the rest of the world to be slain. Just to set things straight, French people DO wash!

Back to basics: Booze and Buterbrods

2010-03-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

Moscow is the land of thriving fast food and coffee chains. Choose a random place, walk 5 minutes in any direction and you’re sure to hit one of these infinitely duplicated restaurants. They hide whatever makes Moscow specific, and soon enough you’re walking home, looking at your feet, voluntarily oblivious of the city around you that seems to be only a tiring collage of similar scenes.
I was at this low point when I stumbled on a рюмочная. Oddly, I had never heard of this kind of place before. Inherited from the Soviet era, these small usually run-down joints were meant to serve vodka shots (рюмки) to whoever felt like a little liquid joy. As selling only vodka was forbidden, these were always served with a side dish, traditionally bread with either cheese, marinated fish or salami. There were no chairs, only tables or a high counter: these places weren't for lengthy, cozy stops, but just for a quick, blood-warming gulp.
Today, the concept has evolved. Some рюмочки have stuck close to the original Soviet heritage, while other have adapted to modern taste while keeping the details that put them apart from usual coffee places. They are in general much more present outside of Moscow.
To start with, the food selection has widened even though it has stayed basic and limited. Think stolovaya. No sushis or pizzas (very good sign). Chairs have also appeared sometimes. Decoration stayed pretty Soviet, in a plastic flowery kind of way. However, what really got me was the fact that this might be the only place were coming in alone to drink and grab a bite is considered normal and actually has a homey feeling to it. Most clients (95 % older men) get in, hang their coat, order a soup and a vodka shot and sit down to read a newspaper. Don't get me wrong, no one comes here just to drink. Alcoholics stay outside and buy a full bottle of vodka which is much cheaper, even if the prices in a рюмочная are low (50 roubles a vodka shot).
Sitting with my tea and my liver stuffed belyash served on a white plate with a collar of green fruity designs (a rare luxury as рюмочные rather resort to discardable tableware), I felt I was touching again what made the Russians Russian, a feeling I hadn't had in a long time.
This may not sound like a breakthrough experience at all, but after you've been in Moscow a while, or if you're just sick of trudging around in the snow/mud, the nice, no BS glow of this kind of place makes you understand again why the hell you chose to live Russia and not some sunny place in Latin America. Try drinking tequila with borsch…

Photo credits: article from Bolchoï Gorod on рюмочных (http://www.bg.ru/article/7344/)

Mr Rogozin's Twitter Wonderland

2010-02-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

Really, Dmitry Anatolevich couldn't have chosen a less suitable person for the post of the Russian ambassador to NATO. A New York Times article on Mr. Rogozin's rhetorical bombs.

Missile Defense, Military Doctrine and the Connection Between the Two (if Any)

2010-02-24T09:40:00.000-08:00

The fact that you should be careful when reading Russian papers is a common place and I find it boring when foreigners complain about it much. Especially because most foreigners who live in Moscow do not even speak Russian well enough to afford such comments. However this time I found it quite exciting how the lecturer at my “Introduction to the Applied Analysis of Foreign Policy Measures” class, Professor B. managed to convince the audience that they should never trust the author an article entirely, be it published in Kommersant, the Economist or the New York Times. It had nothing to do with finding excuses for the pathetic standards of the Russian press, the lecture was supposed to make it clear that information could be the trickiest thing, that while we were trying to produce reliable information ourselves, we had to stay alarmed that what we were reading was not important or reliable enough. I wouldn’t have found it so interesting if it hadn’t been for the way he illustrated it.

Professor B. is known for being the best teacher at the faculty, but he is also an impossible person, he hates women, looks down on political science students (although he wrote most of our textbooks) and tries to show off at any occasion.

When the class started he immediately noticed that I hadn’t been there the first time and made it clear that he was not about to forgive me for that. A friend of mine, in an effort to save me, told him that I had still been in Budapest. This didn’t really help. “Oh. So in Hungary people don’t go to university, I presume.”

There were two texts we were supposed to analyze: one was about the US administration confirming the news about its plans to station ground-based interceptor missiles in Romania, the other was about Medvedev informing Russian Security Council members that he had affirmed the new military doctrine of the Russian Federation and the “Outlines of State Policies in the sphere of Nuclear Non-proliferation up to 2020”, in which the following threats are listed as most alarming:

1. NATO extension and its aspiration to acquire global military functions

2. Deployment of ballistic missile defense elements in neighboring states

3. The Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism

Quite provocatively, Professor B. asked which one of the statements might have been issued first, to which the audience unanimously answered that the news of the BMD came first and Medvedev commenting on the new military doctrine second. B. made an irritated face when someone implied that this was quite obvious then asked whether one might have actually caused the other. I thought he just paraphrased the same question but I guess he didn’t since this time a loud debate broke out as people were eagerly trying to voice their opinion.

Some of my classmates said this must have all happened by chance because military doctrines had to be prepared for months if not years. (Now he looked at me. “ I bet you are scared now” I guess he implied that I couldn’t follow because not only was I a foreigner with a thick accent, but I also dared miss his lecture. I wasn’t, though.) Another one was convinced that Medvedev was so cross at the Americans that he fast included the NATO extension among the most fearful threats. Others were animatedly trying to prove that the Russians just waited until the right moment for the statement to be issued.

This is when Professor B. struck. “Now will you please look at the Medvedev statement again. Does it say the military doctrine was signed? No it doesn’t. It was “confirmed” by Medvedev. He might have nodded. Has it come into force? No it hasn’t. Let’s say it is not going to be signed at all. Then what are these articles about? Bullshit. That’s what they are about. What are they published for? For the show. Information is never where you expect it to be. Not where it is anticipated by drum rolls. You have to be able to exclude all the noise, and the noise is always very aggressive.” (At this point, his cell started ringing. It was incredibly annoying, but he wouldn’t answer. Then it went off again, he looked at it, and said in a matter of fact tone: “excuse me, it’s from The Ministry, it must be very important, I’m going to answer it”. He does show off at any occasion.)

“However, there are signs to be found it these texts. What can be a sign?” The timing, I said. “Yes.” I could tell he was impressed. “A sign for whom?” (For the U.S. Administration, we all answered.) “Oh, so in your opinion there is only us and the U.S? Is there anyone else at all? Isn’t it rather a signal for states who are in for forming an anti-American coalition?

But if you insist, it can be a signal for the Americans too, especially the timing. It tells that the door is closing for them to come to terms with us on the issue of Iran.”

I have to say that although I agree with his message that we have to beware of insignificant information, I find the conclusion rather manipulative. To start with, what door? It implies that the Russians have been patiently waiting for the Americans to take action for some time, but now they’ve had enough of their dithering. Secondly, the door was never really open. There was a brief moment there in the summer when they said they might cooperate but when it came to actually signing an arms reduction agreement, Medvedev backed out. Saying that a state’s sovereignty comes first he refused to impose sanctions on Iran, too.

(Not so long ago I did think they were open to negotiations, though. I was so enthusiastic after the summer that in September when I was taking an exam in global politics and the elderly professor asked me what should be expected in U.S.-Russia relations, I actually tried to convince him that now things were really going to change. He was very nice to me, and yet he couldn’t help but laugh in my face. “But Medvedev said he might sign a bilateral treaty…” “Promises, promises…wait until he signs anything. I didn’t want to disappoint you, I’m sorry. I started teaching here in the Khrushchev era – I’ve seen a lot, believe me” he said, when he saw the startled expression on my face.)