Brontides

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I was walking down the street yesterday, about to meet some colleagues for an evening of card games and roast chicken. At the time I was on the phone to Jon, when without warning a massive guy came up behind me and but both his hands heavily on my shoulders. This was rather surprising, but then he called out to a car, that swooped out of the nearest turning and pulled up in front of us. Before I could really react, he had pushed down on me, hard, forcing me into the car, and had closed the door behind me.

Jon tells me that I sounded surprisingly calm while this was going on, but the guy driving the car started shouting almost immediately. “POLITZIA, POLITZIA,” he shouted, while I looked back in wide-eyed terror. They drove me to a nearby alley and continued shouting. “PASSPORT. PASSPORT!” Stupidly, I had left all of my documentation at home, but had no really effective way of communicating this other than shrugging and looking bewildered. They carried on shouting for a while and I carried on looking confused, but I quickly realised that we were at an impasse.

They were apparently unwilling to do anything to me other than shout, thankfully, so I called the manager of the school and asked him to translate for me, in order to help move things along. He had a word with the cops and explained to them that I didn’t have my passport with me, but almost as soon as he’d hung up they started shouting again – “POLITZIA! PASSPORT!” This didn’t seem like a promising sign.

After a while, the record changed. The larger of the two turned, looked me in the eye, grinned, and – pointing to himself – started repeating, “Mafia. Dollars! Mafia!” At this point I actually relaxed a little. Up until this point I hadn’t been sure what was going on, but a shakedown is much more of a known quantity – it was surreally hilarious, but in general, you know what to do when a massive crooked cop is asking you for money. He clearly wasn’t actually Mafia; I’d been walking around with a laptop, a camera, an iPod and my credit cards, and if this guy had really been mafia he wouldn’t have bothered with a shakedown for twenty bucks. So I continued to act dumb (I’m a natural) until he got bored, which happened surprisingly quickly. After about 5 minutes, he visibly deflated, said “Bye bye”, and stared morosely out of the window. “Spasiba!” I said before climbing out of the car and hauling ass.

My boss was livid about the incident. Apparently, despite being a bit of a Russian cliché, crooked police shakedowns are rare in Nizhnevartovsk, and he promised to give the local PD hell (I’m sure that he pays enough in protection money to be able to expect that his teachers are unmolested). Me, I was… one-fifth terrified, two fifths confused and two fifths entertained. As soon as I realised that I wasn’t in any real danger, the whole thing became a bit of a pantomime. There is an extent to which I brought it on myself – by walking around without a coat I stuck out as a foreigner like a sore thumb (I also attracted a fair bit of gopnik attention – ‘gopnik’ being the local variety of chav, redneck, bogun, whatever). But it makes for a good anecdote and we had a few laughs about it over the roasted chicken, so it could have gone down much worse.

Spring has arrived in Nizh. For the last week, temperatures have been above zero and my thermal underwear has stayed in its drawer. Outside, the sun is shining and a few birds are tweeting away in the distance.

Spring is a treacherous time in Siberia. The snow on the ground can take weeks to melt, and will, more often than not, re-freeze overnight, leaving the dreaded, perilous black ice to bewitch the ankles. More hazardous is the prospect of falling ice, which – its grip loosened by the heat which escapes from inefficiently-designed concrete roofs – plunges at near-terminal velocity, in chunks the size of a paving stone, from eight to ten storey buildings. This is easily enough to kill a person; so, for the first weeks of Spring, the residents of Nizhnevartovsk tend to stay away from buildings as much as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting my teeth into teaching. Do I enjoy it? I haven’t decided yet, but it’s certainly an experience. I teach six separate groups – four of children (mostly between 13 and 17, although one group is 8-11) and two groups of adults. Teaching the adults is okay, but teaching the kids requires a discipline I just don’t have, and behind it all is the nagging suspicion that I’m just not very good at it. Still, two weeks is a bit of a quick judgement, so we’ll have to see how I feel after three months.

Society is different here. I haven’t quite gotten my head around the way that it works, but it’s very different. Russian women outnumber Russian men by a significant margin, but yet are as unequal as in parts of the Middle East; but that inequality seems to be consensual. I met a girl from Zim who worked fairly high-up in one of the oil companies, and she said that – as a foreign woman in a position of authority – he got a fair amount of hassle, but no more than she would have gotten anywhere else outside of western Europe and the US. Russian women in positions of power are rare, but they don’t seem to attract the same social opprobrium that enfranchised women elsewhere do. I can discern no social pressure that prevents women from working and succeeding, should they wish to, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist – in inarguably does. The social levers of oppression here are either extremely subtle, or the female population is being co-opted in some other way – either through residual conditioning or something even more obtuse. I’m not sure what yet. That this is a grossly unequal society is not in question; the manner of the inequality is of a certain academic interest, though, and will certainly bear further thought.

Meanwhile, getting used to the surrounds continues apace. One of the sad things about the school in Nizhnevartovsk is that it doesn’t seem to have the same tradition of adventurous group activities as the school in Tyumen exhibited. There is some talk of another banya trip, which could be jolly, but I’d like to get out of Nizhnevartovsk and see what there is to be seen in the remote Siberian taiga; hopefully I’ll get an opportunity before long.