A dull thud in the distance
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A funny thing happened on the way to the Slavtak

April 27th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in Politics | Travel - (0 Comments)

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.

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The Big Thaw

April 5th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in Travel - (0 Comments)

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.

What happens when you don’t pay attention

March 10th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in Travel - (0 Comments)

My first weekend in Russia was fun.

Because many of our students are working adults, a lot of our work is conducted outside of office hours – i.e. evenings and Saturdays, although the school is thankfully closed on Sundays. This weekend was a public holiday, however: International Women’s Day, which, despite the moniker, is largely only celebrated in the ex-Soviet Union. Originally instituted by the UN in New York, it was envisaged as a holiday celebrating women in the workforce; the Soviets picked it up as part of its adoption of organised labour, and it gradually fell out of fashion in America and the West for much the same reason. Its celebration in Russia has mostly lost this context, and now serves as an all-purpose celebration of women, although this is largely theoretical in Russia’s hyper-masculinised society.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we shut up shop early on Saturday and resolve to head for the local banya. A banya is the Russian equivalent of a sauna – a log cabin in the woods, about a mile outside of the city, on the edge of a (very frozen) lake. You get about five hours in the hut – the ten of us arrived at around 8 and left just after midnight – a functioning barbeque, to which we bought our own meat and expertise, and a handy hole in the ice of the lake, to which we will be returning. Oh yes.

We started out by cooking the food we’d bought – chicken, beef and pork chunks were skewered with vegetables, and Rob, Dan, Amanda and myself took it in turns to watch the meat and occasionally prod at it to see if it was done. In the meanwhile, those who weren’t involved in the cooking watched the greatest hits of the Eurovision Song Contest in the hut and drank very expensive vodka. We cannot be accused of not having conformed to local culture.

Food dispensed with, we explored our facilities. The banya had three rooms. The first was a normal room, in which we played cards, ate food, and messed around with the provided satanic backgammon board (don’t ask). The second is a kind of hot lobby; although there was no fire in there, the heat and steam from the banya itself kept it at sauna temperature. It was a good place to cool down after the banya itself and a good place to acclimatise when going in the other direction. Finally, the banya itself was a small-ish room with tiered levels of slat seating. One wall was taken up by a furnace which belched heat and humidity. The temperature in the room was, at a guess, around 45C, but the humidity was intense. I don’t cope well with saunas so it was an effort of will for me to stay in there, but I enjoyed it once I’d found my feet.

In addition to the above, we also had the services of a banshick, a man who comes into the sauna, pours various liquids onto you (beer, cold water, honey, you name it) then slaps you with a laurel branch while you lie face down on the slats. This is actually an extremely pleasant experience and a quite unique way to have a massage, although you’ll still find bits of laurel between your toes weeks later.

After around twenty minutes of this, you have generally had enough. The tradition is to then run down to the lake, which has had a 2m x 1m hole cut into it with an axe (the ice, for context, was about a foot thick), and plunge yourself in. The hole itself was a good hundred yards from the banya, a mad dash over slippery ice down an unlit path through the trees, at the end of which: some ice, and a hole. The water was sub-zero; if you left it alone for more than ten minutes or so it would start to re-freeze. After plunging yourself into the frozen water, you then scramble madly back up the hill, back into the hot then bolt for the safe heat and humidity of the banya, all the while shivering uncontrollably and scraping ice out of your hair. I took one look and thought: Nah. Fuck that.

Of course, that resolve didn’t last long.

And the bizarre thing is: it was brilliant. The heat from the banya stayed with me for the entire plunge, and by the time I got back into the sauna I was still wondering when the pain was going to start. Not only was there no real pain; the rush of endorphins was immense. I ended up going twice; Jon went three times and ended up staggering around with a spinning head. Totally worth doing, though, and great fun as a group outing.

Sunday was quiet – I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Tyumen, which was somewhat underwhelming. Monday started with brunch at Amanda’s, along with Rob, from the school, and two friends of Amanda’s from around town – which rapidly turned into lunch, then afternoon tea, before I made my excuses and ducked out at around 5. All in all a good weekend. In the next few days, I’ll teach my first class and get ready to relocate to Nizh, so I guess you have some or all of that to look forward to in the next gripping installment.

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