Russia Today – 06/09
I made my first visit to Russia five years ago, and lived and studied for four months in St. Petersburg. Now I have returned, not only to a different city, but to a different Russia. Moscow pulses with the energy of a major metropolis, a center of government, commerce and culture. The pace of life here has historically proceeded with a greater sense of urgency than in St. Petersburg, but the growing collection of skyscrapers on the horizon hints at more recent changes. However, even if a foreigner is able to engage individual Russians on their own terms and in their own language, their outsider’s perceptions are inevitably skewed toward pre-drawn conclusions or a creeping condescension. Many of my own beliefs, I’m sure, suffer from the same, which is why it is important to continue pushing my own boundaries, and perhaps be willing to consider possibilities I was not initially inclined to accept. These are the tenets of good research and good historical practice, and it also pays to keep them in mind when considering the relationship between two nations. As a student of history, I am keenly aware of the struggles Russia has faced in the past, both distant and recent. My research is largely a study of material culture and the structures that create and surround it, and perhaps what has changed most in Russia is its material reality. One of the chief advantages of the language study program I am currently enrolled in is the opportunity to engage with younger Russians, who can reveal more than any amount of archival legwork in this respect. Having attended the same language program in St. Petersburg in 2004, I was pleased to discover that I’d learned and retained enough to converse with my peers with at least some confidence from the moment I arrived. My purpose in studying Russian this summer is to support research for a thesis on technology exchanges between east and west at the height of the Cold War. The technology gap was exacerbated from within by currency shortages and from without by export controls, part of a cycle that continued until (and in many ways caused) the economic and political collapse of Communist Eastern Europe. I belong to a generation of Americans who grew up in the tremendously optimistic period that followed, but the ways in which the aftermath of that collapse affected ordinary people in Russia are often ignored in the US. My travel and study abroad in this country remind me that the history I am investigating is really the story of a country and its people. This awareness, while not detracting from the historiographic tone of my research, gives me fuller and more human perspective on the work I am doing. Most of the attempts by the USSR and its allies to obtain and adapt technology from the West in the 1960s and 70s were in an effort to improve their domestic standards of living and provide their citizens with better goods and services. However, economic practice and political ideology (both ours and theirs) ultimately delayed this process for decades. Regardless of the political and ideological differences that remain between Russia and the west today, within the past few years Russia has for the first time experienced not only the influences but the benefits of participation in the global economy. Twenty-first century Russia is eager to assert its place in the world, and even in the current global marketplace there is strong sense of motivation and even optimism, especially among younger people. Throughout the period I am researching, it was the tendency in the West to portray the two opposing powers as equally matched. The image of two giants locked in struggle relied on the assumption of a level playing field. While perhaps not as significant as the number of nuclear weapons maintained on alert, or the speed with which our submarines could have raced toward one another, I find the fact that most Russians did not own a refrigerator by the mid-1970s to be too important to overlook. In my view, it is possible that political, economic and ideological inflexibility may do no more to hasten the collapse of a system than does the loss of confidence among its citizens. When a postman in the USSR pondered that a postman in France or West Germany most likely had a refrigerator, a car, and was not required to spend hours hunting for unreliable goods and services, he might naturally wonder why his own life was so different. The same went for millions of people in Russia whose lives became progressively more difficult and cities shabbier as the Soviet period wore on. Many of them lost nearly everything in the USSR’s death throes, and suffered through the long period of recovery during the 1990s. The psychological impact of our current crisis, with its rising unemployment and the apparent instability of our financial infrastructure, pales in comparison to what every Russian experienced within the past twenty years. Today there are still many who mourn the USSR, not so much, it seems, for its political ideology, but for what it did manage to successfully provide, and the principles it upheld in doing so; free health care, free tuition to state schools, steady employment, a place to live, and enough food to eat for all. Under capitalism, there may be better healthcare and housing available to those who can afford it, and along with it has come a reality familiar to all Americans: social division along economic lines, and the impetus to create personal and national wealth. All economic and political systems are essentially experiments, and are only a success so long as they allow a majority of people to live well enough by their own standards and enjoy the fruits of their own efforts. While we are becoming one another’s economic competitors yet again, the situation may be bringing us closer than we have ever been before. A growing Russian middle class is evident in every Moscow street; whatever their stake may be in the contemporary Russian economy, it is allowing them to afford experiences more similar to their equals in Western countries than those of their own parents. There is a natural difference between people whose lives are dominated by privation as opposed to plenty. Russia is far from providing abundance to all her citizens, but I have every hope that in the future her people will be spared the near-universal hardships that characterized much of the past century. A new breed of Russian will likely result if that is the case; one who is perhaps more individualistic and less fatalistic, who will expect more and be unwilling to cope with less, who will insist on more services and greater accountability from the authorities. When Catherine II declared that “Russia is a European country”, she clearly felt the point required such clarification that it was necessary to make that assertion in an official decree. In the next century, it may be a real possibility that the dividing line between Western and Eastern Europe will grow hazier as goods and services become more universally available. It may never disappear entirely, but its meaning will be transmuted, ceasing to serve as a demarcation between order and disorder, greater and lesser, as it has often been interpreted in the past. Russians and Americans share many similarities that have often been overshadowed by our historical opposition. We see ourselves as closely tied to, but inherently separate and different from, Europe and the rest of the developed world. We both wish to exert our influence in world affairs, and be respected as global powers. We are grand countries whose identity is strongly tied to the concept of a frontier, and who have been considered at times the gendarmes of our respective hemispheres. The United States and Russia are both rapidly changing countries, regardless of our respective conservatisms. However, in the future, we may not be dealing with the stolid “homo Sovieticus” of old, or the opportunists of late 20th century “New Russia”, but with an increasingly sophisticated and globally-conscious citizenry. Despite the widely publicized restrictions that have recently tightened their grip on Russian media, the current generation will be better informed and more eager to engage with the West than perhaps any before it.
Russia will, in my view, retain its uniqueness and a strong sense of nationalism, but I believe it would serve us to remember that Russians born today stand a good chance of sleeping in softer beds, eating an improved choice of food, and will likely carry an awareness of world affairs more informed and honest than that of any previous generation in this country. The United States has already lost the luxury of considering Russia a second-class power, and will need to learn anew how to cope with a Russia whose internal struggles will be increasingly similar to its own, and whose populace will be exerting the pressure of heightened expectations as time goes on. We have the opportunity at this moment to consider a future where mutual understanding and cooperation will help us weather a coming storm of potential economic and energy crises. This, like all understanding and cooperation, has to begin with a conversation.
University of Maryland, College Park, Moscow, 2009