Notes On Moscow

Tis commonly observed by visitors to Russia that Russians are amazingly apathetic about the state of their country’s politics. This was evidenced today by my teacher in class. Every day during breaks in class I peruse the Moscow Times to try and keep vaguely up to date with what’s happening in this part of the world, and the leader today was about the death of the Patriarch Alexei II, and his alleged role in the KGB and FSB during his life. My teacher is unusually religious for a Russian, and when I mentioned what I was reading, she launched into an excited discussion of everything he did to reinvigorate the church following the collapse of communism. When someone ventured that he may have had a less than squeaky clean past, however, she clammed up, saying only that she had never seen any evidence of that and she couldn’t speak about what she didn’t know. This seems to be a general excuse that I’ve heard from many people here; Russians don’t associate their lives with politics, and would prefer to imagine their heroes as completely removed from the less appealing elements of Russian society and politics. One of my friends here once made the mistake of venturing that Yuri Gagarin was an alcoholic in later life and that prompted massive outrage from her teacher.

The financial crisis here is entirely blamed on America and excesses of the West by the media, where the press is allowed to speak only of a global financial crisis to which Russia has fallen victim, not that Russia has in any way contributed to its economic issues. Meanwhile, people seem to be complaining that the rouble is falling, withdrawing all their savings from the banks, and complaining about price rises, while at the same time refusing to entertain the possibility that the government could have done something to prevent this, and that, where corruption in the economy exists, it is with low level players and thus below the radar of Putin and the other big wigs. It’s gotten rather depressing observing time and time again that normal people see politics as something which has no effect on them and that they have no effect on it.

I haven’t quite reached the level of pessimism that another guy in my class has though, who declared to me today that old adage that ‘Russia cannot exist without a strong leader, the country would fall apart if they really tried to have a democracy’