2022 Wrap-Up Siberia
2022, my mind goes immediately to Albert Brooks in his film “Lost in America”. The scene where he finds out his wife gambled away their nest egg, “We are in hell, we have entered hell, when?”. Not at all the image I expected to be reflecting on in Siberia as COVID barriers began to lift around the world. It has been a dizzying year of adjustment. The “when” question almost doesn’t matter anymore, whether it was 2014, February 24 2022, December 25, 1991, NATO expanding, NATO bombing of Syria or Libya, Russiagate etc. We are where we are and it is as bad as it can get. 30 years after we were promised a peace dividend, how did we get here from there?
To start looking for answers, I decided to read my journals from 1992 when I first moved here. I was part of the first wave Americans who got caught up in the excitement of possibilities for Russia, for America, for ourselves. The journal is heartbreaking. Initially because there is so much misery and confusion, but in the context of today, that heartbreak comes mostly from being reminded of the opportunity America missed.
Whenever American friends ask me to explain Putin and his on-going support from the Russian people (going from 31% as Yeltsin’s Prime Minister in August 1999 to 81% this December), I tell them about the 90’s. There is a passage in my journal on a train to Krasnoyarsk, “11PM, still light as villages roll by. All across Russia tonight I know they speak of only one thing; how hard life is”.
There are details defining hard on every page:
· A University Professor apologizes for not inviting me to dinner because she hasn’t been paid for 6 weeks;
· Being stuck in Tomsk because the price of a bus ticket was going up and the ticket machine can’t print anything higher than 99 r.;
· A school English teacher kills herself because she is afraid if she asks for psychological support she will lose her job;
· A student arrives for a visit saying he was going to buy me a candy bar but the woman at the kiosk would not sell him one because (he waves his rubles in the air) “this is old money, a candy bar costs new money”;
· A group of retired gold miners in a village outside Chita ask a dozen different ways my impression of their quality of life compared to American pensioners. After each question they held their breath waiting for the answer. Like a second visit to the doctor after some tests have been done or stumbling across incontrovertible evidence that your 30 year marriage was a sham.;
· When Ruslan Khasbulatov was President of the Russian Parliament he came to Novosibirsk. I was told that preparation by local government officials consisted mostly of deciding whether they should stuff goods in the stores and do repairs like they used to do when leaders came, or if this was no longer appropriate? Should things look good or bad?;
· An elderly couple, retired engineers who built the BAM, in one of the largest apartments on the best street in Tomsk apologize for having us eat dinner out of the frying pan because there is so rarely water they try to cut down on dishes;
· Eva, one of my students wrote, “This summer the salary of a leading scientist from the Institute of Thermophysics was 900 rubles a month. What could he buy? 4 kilograms of butter for 800 rubles or maybe 3 kilograms of sour cream for 850 rubles. I must mention that this situation really killed a lot of talented scientists who couldn’t stand the humiliating conditions. One Department at the Inst. buried three gifted scientists in three months.
While all the misery described above was happening, the US was having a love affair with Russia. It was the worst of times for Russians but the best of times for Americans. Russia was THE place to be for ambitious and adventurous Americans. The world of opportunity, the place where frogs came to become princes/princesses. In Moscow it was a legendary non-stop party. In Siberia it was quieter but still Americans could live above their paygrade and date out of their league and do pretty much anything they were or were not qualified to do.
One friend left a dead-end job at a video store in Minneapolis and opened the first chain of pizza parlors in Siberia, another came fresh from College and saved the Novosibirsk chocolate factory. When I arrived, I only had a BA and no idea how to teach English and yet I was teaching at one of the top universities in Russia.
Within a couple of months, I realized that as long as I called it a “Master Class in English”, I could talk about anything. My curriculum expanded to include a mock democracy, a gender lecture series with the only feminist in the region, and a seminar with a male American colleague, “Capitalism, Business, Women, and Sex in America”. Every time I pitched a new idea a look of dread came over Anatoli, the Vice Dean, but he never said “no”. With what became known as the ”sex lecture”, he asked that I have dinner with Galina the Department Head to discuss. Two toasts in, I made my real case to Galina that included raising awareness about AIDS and she signed off saying, “This must be done”. I was surrounded by heroes who trusted me. All that opportunity squandered.
In 92 Abram Illich, a mathematician who lost his position at the University for publishing a samizdat, told me promoting a red scare or the potential for fascism is beneficial to everyone in power because it provides the classic heist diversion while all the countries prized assets were stolen. He said I didn’t need to be afraid of a rise in fascism because “fascism requires you to believe in something deeply and no one here believes strongly in anything”. All that opportunity lost.
There is a quote from a Novosibirsk Mathematician’s wife, “Now it’s all treacherous, we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.” And that summarizes 2022 in Siberia. And while there are some similarities to 92, most people still don’t believe in anything deeply, the challenges people faced this year are a different kind of hard. They were forced to come to terms with their relationship to their country, what it means to be Russian or to live in Russia. That meant sometimes making hard choices, do I go or stay, do I serve or not? That process is finally bringing some clarity and that is no small accomplishment on the 30th anniversary of this “transition”.
For those who decided to stay, the vast majority of people in Siberia, it was a year of finding ways to adapt to a new reality every day. For many that included navigating, or not, relationships with friends and relatives in Ukraine and in the West. For some it means suffering the loss of a child, husband, brother or friend. These loses are well documented in local newspapers and by the fresh flag covered graves, Special Forces, Intelligence Services…
Everyone I met in 1992 was shell shocked by the changes and were totally unequipped to respond. That is not what is happening today. Once it was clear that this wasn’t going to end in a month or two, an impressive number of people focused on moving forward. Some wavered at first but decided to stay and make Russia a country worth fighting for. They have the skills and energy to take advantage of opportunities that have appeared because of sanctions. People are networking and building community in ways large and small. My neighbor, who moved to the Village from Moscow two years ago, is expanding her small hotel and her on-line platform while her husband commutes back and forth to an IT job. They spent yesterday with their 12 year old son dressed as Santa Claus, Snow Girl, and Helper visiting every store and municipal institution delivering gifts to all the workers. The ugly barrier that sometimes exists between “old” and “new” people in the Village is crumbling, we are all in this together.
And so, a new year begins. I have never greeted a new year with such trepidation and sadness for the opportunities lost. I know what was possible, I lived the dream that was born when the Cold War first ended. My journal includes a description of the 1992 US Embassy 4th of July party, seeing Gorbachev, meeting Strauss. I was invited by a young foreign service officer. We met when the Vice Rector called me out of class to meet someone from the US Embassy. The Vice Rector wanted to prove to him that an American could live in Siberia so that more American teachers would come. That Embassy guy is now one of Biden’s top NSC advisors on Russia. Maybe he knows how we got here from there?
