In Soviet Russia, Bed Sleep on YOU

At my uni, a safe conversation starter is to hate on the debating union. I’d like to take this opportunity to express how much I respect people who put time into running the Union, and how awesome some of its events are. That said, the membership fee was a total waste of my money. It’s not the Union’s fault, I just haven’t had any time to go and listen to the speakers they host, and I’m starting to think that it would have been wiser to just invest in 31.25kg of Cadbury Dairy Milk instead (and that’s at retail price – imagine the  things I could do with a wholesale licence!) But I did go to one debate at the Union which very nearly made my chocolate sacrifice worth it. It was in my first month at university, and the motion was: This House Regrets Giving Russia the Cold Shoulder. A few of the speakers were very convincing – Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician, was particularly charismatic. But the most memorable speaker by far was not one of the four big names, it was the closing speaker from the proposition, a representative of a foundation which promotes democracy and openness in Russia. Unlike the other speakers, she didn’t get into an argument about the effectiveness of sanctions, or even try to defend Russia’s actions. She just pleaded that we stop equating the Russian leadership with the Russian people. In the context of such a politicised and jargon-crammed debate, the simple idea that we should start thinking of the country as its people, and not just the events we see on the news, was incredibly striking. Her voice cracked when she delivered her closing line: ‘please don’t make the Russian people into a threat.’ And looking back on it, that makes me a little bit emotional too.

I’d been doing everything I could to put off shopping, but it had to be done. Eating out is cheap in Krasnoyarsk – you can get a meal and a drink for about £6 – but eventually I’ll need to get into some kind of regular routine, and that starts with cooking meals. The trouble is that supermarkets stock different things in different parts of the world, and I had no idea what I could or couldn’t get over here. So I asked Aygul for recommendations for good Russian food which was easy to cook. She suggested chicken pilaf, pelmeni (dumplings which you can get in packs from the shops), and golubtsi (stuffed cabbage rolls). I decided to do one at a time, and started with the pilaf. I needed rice, vermicelli, some vegetables, oil, salt, pepper, and paprika. I went to the shop that Olga had pointed out on my first day and found everything surprisingly quickly. I also got some rye bread and some grechka (toasted buckwheat, the Russian version of porridge, which would probably be marketed as a superfood in the UK). You might be wondering how I knew what to get. Well, I mentioned a couple of days ago that I went to a Russian language school in Kiev last year. The cuisine over there had a lot in common with the popular food over here in Krasnoyarsk. I quickly discovered that I love grechka and rye bread, but that I’m not such a fan of tvorog. Is it just me, or does tvorog even sound disgusting? It’s an acid-set cottage cheese which tastes like lard has had babies with curdled milk. It seemed more or less ubiquitous in Kiev: you ate it cold, you ate it warm, you ate it microwaved in pancakes with a dash of sugar. No, really. Needless to say, I steered clear of the tvorog. At the till, the woman asked me if I wanted a loyalty card. I’m not sure if I wanted a loyalty card, but it really mattered to me that everyone in the queue behind me knew that I’d understood the question, so I said ‘oh go on then.’ Except in Russian you don’t say ‘oh go on then’, because Russians don’t faff around. In Russian, you say ‘give.’

I didn’t have time to make chicken pilaff before work, so I made porridge out of the grechka instead. Grechka is hard to do wrong – you boil it in a pan and then chuck in a knob of butter. And I’m very proud to say that I didn’t do it wrong. Not entirely sure I did it right, but it wasn’t wrong.

Then I went into work. I started off by doing some admin stuff. When you arrive in Russia, you need to register where you’re staying within three nights or else you’re in big trouble. So I went upstairs in OKNA, the cool library run by INTERRA, and photocopied my entire passport (every last page), as well as my migration card. I had difficulty with this at first, but a kind woman who I’d never even met stopped working and came over to help me operate the photocopier. When I’d finished, Nastia and I walked to the post office with all my scanned documents to register me. The lady at the post office and Nastia started speaking very rapidly, and I realised something was wrong. It was getting pretty heated actually, and Nastia kept on saying ‘well try at least. Please try.’ The way registering an arrival worked had changed within the last two weeks. I think that now you needed the host you were staying with to come along personally and sign for you or something, like a really big Amazon delivery from Britain. I’m not sure whether she was getting officious or trying to be helpful, but the woman behind the desk printed off a document full of very confusing legalese and handed it to Nastia. Nastia leafed through the document, which was about twenty pages long, and found a paragraph buried two thirds of the way in, which she traced with her finger, and then looked up angrily. Whatever the problem was, we decided to send off my registration now anyway, and presumably we’ll now need to do something else inconvenient in the next couple of days. Nastia was a dab hand at filling out forms, and she signed about five of them, put them in an envelope which the woman behind the desk proceeded to cover with stickers and signatures, and then paid for it to be sent to some local government office somewhere. As we were walking back, Nastia seethed. ‘Every time I register an intern, they’ve put some new clause in which requires me to drive out of town and see an official, or pay more, or bring your host along to register you or something. And every time they slip it in the middle of a huge document so that you don’t know it’s coming.’ I wasn’t angry though – I’ve talked to the people over here about getting British and American visas, and I’m perfectly aware that we’re even worse than Russia. Did you know that British visas are the most expensive in Europe? Or that to apply for an American visa, all Russians have to go to an application center in… drumroll please… Vladivostok? If you live in St Petersburg, that means a 9500km flight, or a modest seven days on the train… each way. This is just how international relations seem to work at the moment – visas are treated as a form of sanction, a retaliatory measure against a government’s actions, but one which the government doesn’t suffer from as much as the people do. I think that this is pants, and as you’ve probably guessed, this particular blog post is going to end in an impassioned gush about how much I love Russians and what a pity it is that we Brits seem to have nothing to do with them and know nothing about them. Read on if you think you can bear that.

When I got back to work, Ira sent me permission to edit the much-prized INTERRA interns’ blog, and showed me what format to use and how to post. Then I met Lena, the Director of INTERRA, who was very jovial. She sent me some translations to do that afternoon, which I think had something to do with her joviality, although I’m sure she’s lovely too. The translations were for a modern art exhibition which was set to open the next day in the museum which INTERRA shares a building with. It’s an exhibition of work by students from the confusingly named Laboratory of Young Siberian Artists. I was translating the descriptions of some of the installations, presumably so that all three of the English speakers in Krasnoyarsk could judge me on my translating skills. I think the fact that I was doing these translations about fourteen hours before the exhibition opened suggests that the installations I was writing about were more or less the dregs of the group. Some of the ideas were cool. Most of them were baffling. Highlights included getting participants to answer yes/no questions while someone standing next to them threw painted crockery on the floor. Apparently, the fragments of the crockery would form a ‘psychological map’ of the participant. To quote perhaps my favourite line from perhaps my favourite film – Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom – ‘I don’t understand how THAT works!?’

Another highlight was trying to translate a passage that goes roughly like this ‘It is the shooting down of the consciousness. It is the alienation of the brain and common sense in the context of the meta/megahuman. The synonymous pairing of the intemporal and the temporal. The next humaker. Iteration/operation.’ …

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Fortunately, Olga turned up at INTERRA just as I was despairing of ever understanding the Russian language, and she sat with me for the next hour and helped me finish off the translations. The end product was thirteen pages of absolute crap, but we figured that if anyone was bored enough to be reading our shoddy translations then the exhibition hadn’t done its job properly, and that was hardly our fault. So we locked up the INTERRA office and went out to explore town a bit more. The previous day, Olga had asked me what I wanted to do while I was in Russia. I’d rattled off a list of things that were unlikely to happen: ‘I want to go to a dacha, I want to go to a banya, I want to make real Russian friends who I keep for life, and I want to become fully conversational in Russian. Ooh, and I want to have borscht!’ Olga decided that one of my goals was immediately achievable – borscht. That evening, we went to a very classy institution called Bar Bulgakov, with a cloakroom, waiters dressed in smocks (for some reason which I don’t get, probably a reference to a Bulgakov novel), and enormous bookcases dividing the main room in two. I’ve only read one thing by Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita, which has a well-deserved cult following among young people in Russia. The bar’s opulence recalled the restaurant in the writers’ union at Griboedov, but I’m not going to elaborate on that because some people who know a whole lot more than me about Bulgakov are probably reading this blog. We ordered borscht, and I had cherry juice too. Ok firstly, cherry juice. That stuff is the absolute bee’s knees. I think Russians appreciate cherries more than we do in the UK, and I respect them for that. Cherry juice needs to be more of a thing. But the borscht… wow. Nothing should ever be as good in reality as it is in your imagination. Call me a cynic, but I just think that’s a rule. The ideal is unrealisable, or something like that. But this borscht was incredible. INCREDIBLE. Incredible. (*Nods while smirking, à la Donald*). It’s beetroot soup with a dollop of sour cream. This one was kind of smoky, and it wasn’t just delicious, it was sort of fairy tale-y. I know it sounds ridiculous. I don’t care. This soup tasted like fairy tales. It plunged me into a smoky pine forest with a mysterious cottage, and possibly a well with something dodgy lurking at the bottom. I didn’t quite cry, but we’re talking that level of amazing. It also had rye bread with it (yeeeeeeeeeah boi). The rye bread had very appetising looking slices of something whitish on it, which was coated in an even more appetising looking brownish sauce. I asked Olga what it was, she said ‘sala’, and I started devouring it. Sala isn’t very nice. I asked her what it was in a more precise sense than just ‘sala’, and she pointed to her tummy. I think it comes from the insides of some unfortunate animal. 0/10. Would not recommend. I looked up ‘sala’ on an online dictionary, and it came up with the following translations: grease, lard, sebum, sludge, tallow, blubber. Mmmmm. Yummy.

That says Bar Bulgakov

So much love for the juice, and for the soup. Let's not talk about the sala though

On the way home, as the lurching of the bus volleyed me around like a human pinball machine, I reflected on how lucky I was to be in Krasnoyarsk, and how entirely indebted I am to the people here who have made that happen. Imagine what a disaster my shopping trip would have been without Aygul’s advice on what to get – I’d probably have come home with 31.25kg of Kedbooree Deree Meelk. And I don’t imagine for one second that my Bambi eyes would have somehow got me out of the mess I seemed to be in at the post office when Nastia registered my arrival. Those art translations were laughably bad, but without Olga at my side to explain the Russian ‘meaning’ to me, they’d have ended up as an approximate guess of what I thought they meant, and that might have made sense, which would have been all wrong. And my numinous borscht. I owe that entirely to Olga. Besides, even if I were here with my chocolate and my Bambi eyes, there would simply be no point if I didn’t have anyone to talk to. A few days ago, Olga gave me a ten rouble note, which had a picture of the chapel on the hill in Krasnoyarsk on it. She also gave me a pin of the same chapel, as I mentioned. In return, I gave her a British fiver, which is definitely a less exciting note, but is worth a fair bit more. In fact, monetarily, I probably lost about £4.50. But socially, I’m pretty sure that swap left me with the credit.

Russia is not the Big Bad Wolf. It’s bonkers that when seventeen-year-old me heard the word ‘Russia’, the first thing he would have thought about was probably the Russian reversal jokes that he heard in Year Eight: ‘in Soviet Russia, bed sleeps on YOU’, or my personal favourite ‘in Soviet Russia, above ignores YOU’. And then he’d probably have thought about James Bond, with all its connotations of murder and corruption. That’s not Russia. Russia is 145 million people. And if my experience is anything to go by, most of them are really, really awesome.

The river and the national park just after sunset