P.S.

New pictures of Ivan Ivanych, our hedgehog mascot, are up! No Russian captions yet, because I was in a hurry, but I don't think any of this blog's readers will mind much.

Tatar Food!

Although the Tatars left their nomadic past behind long ago, their traditional foods are reminiscent of that lifestyle, in that they consist largely of meat, milk, and dough. Delicious.

The most famous Tatar food is chak-chak, which is sort of like Rice Krispies Treats, except the Rice Krispies are wheat-based, denser, and deep-fried, and they're held together by honey instead of melted marshmallow. It's a common food for holidays and parties, and I will bet money that in half an hour when one of the ducklings has a little classroom birthday celebration, he's going to get some chak-chak as a gift.

Tatar foods that are more everyday include треугольники/эч почмак/öç poçmak, which means "triangles" (in Russian, Tatar Cyrillic and my own made-up Tatar Latin). They are triangle-shaped pastries filled with cubes of meat and potato, served warm. You can buy them in any grocery store or cafe for about 20 rubles (66 cents). I just had one for lunch.

Another food is губадия/gubadia, a big pie filled with layers of dried cheese curd (hard to describe, but it's dry, crumbly and caramel-colored), rice, raisins, and other sweet things. There's a meat version, too, but I haven't tried that. Check out this website for more info in awkward English. The other day I bought about a quarter of a gubadia from Bahetle, the Tatar grocery store (site in Russian, but it'll give you a nice picture of the triangle pastries or chak-chak on the home page) and have been slowly been working my way through it. It's quite rich.

And the pan-Turkic connection means I have gotten to try Central Asian lagman, a soup made with delicious, thick homemade noodles and beef or lamb, twice already. (Once it was billed as Uzbek, and once it was Uyghur.) Again, very rich. That's really a theme with the food around here. Nomads need their energy and fat deposits.

This has made me a little worried about where my waistline might be headed, but I do a lot of walking, jogging, and shepherding, so I hope I'm in the clear. And I'm trying to make an effort to be more proactive about eating veggies. Just now I bought a head of lettuce (LETTUCE! Unless you've been to Russia before, it's probably hard to understand how exciting that is) and some mystery herb from a dedushka (grandpa) selling his dacha harvest on the street, in an exchange that went like this:

me: How much is your lettuce?
him: Ten rubles. Please, take some!
me: Uh-huh. And your parsley?
him: Also ten rubles. But it's not parsley. It's kinza.
me: Kinza? It's not parsley?
him: No. It's kinza. They use it there... in the South... you know, the Caucasus. I had never tasted it, but I harvested it yesterday, and it is so tasty. Extremely tasty.
me: [piecing together the clues] Can I try a leaf?
him: Yes, please, please. It is extremely tasty.
me: (in my head) CILANTRO!

A Successful Morning!

I went out shopping this morning for a little birthday present for one of my students, who turns 21 today. She doesn't drink, and even if she did, I wouldn't want to give her alcohol, so that eliminated the obvious gift. I thought about a book, but they make your suitcases heavier. Amara suggested something Tatar, but all the souvenirs I've seen are either cheap-looking, made of plastic and synthetic fabrics, or else intolerably "Eastern," like belly-dancing sashes or knick-knacks with faux Arabic script all over them. (That is, Cyrillic script made to look like Arabic. So horribly cringe-inducing.)

So I set out with no clear idea in mind. By chance, I wandered by a little square where some old men were sitting out on benches selling things. I walked a few steps past them before I realized what it was they were selling:



Znachki! Znachki are little pins that seem to have been incredibly common from the 1960's through the 1980's, as you can now buy them from old men at flea markets in pretty much any city in Russia. There are all kinds of znachki: sports-related, commemorative (of city anniversaries, international conferences, sports contests, etc.), military, Soviet (hammers and sickles, Lenin heads, etc.), and znachki from specific places (cities, regions, Soviet republics). I sort of collect them, but to avoid buying every znachok that strikes my fancy (they are incredibly cheap), I stick to the ones bearing the names of places I've been.

I broke that rule today; the upper right znachok is from Uzbekistan, where I have never been. (Yet!) But I couldn't resist the little white puff of cotton, so innocent-looking, and yet symbolic of such terrible things: imperialism, an incredibly destructive monoculture, child labor. (The Soviets really messed Uzbekistan up with cotton.) The other four are Kazan (for the birthday girl!), Yelabuga, Murmansk, and Tallinn. Tallinn appears to be from some sort of sailing competition in 1980, and Yelabuga commemorates the city's 200th anniversary.

I hope my student finds her new znachok as charming as I do!

Жара

We've had Ankara weather in Kazan for the past four or five days - above ninety degrees, no cloud cover and low humidity.

Fine. I don't have air conditioning, but I deal with heat pretty well, and my apartment is on the first floor of a Stalinka, a Stalin-era apartment building characterized by good construction, thick walls, high ceilings, and neo-Classical style. Say what you will about Stalin - the man knew how to build stuff. (See also: Moscow Metro, Moscow State University.) Stalinki are well-insulated, and being on the first floor and surrounded by trees means that it's very shady and cool. Day five of the heat wave and I'm still going to bed with a blanket on.

BUT. I came home from an outdoor rock festival last night (I saw Сплин! They were great!), dirty, hot, tired, and hungry, and found that they had turned off the water in our building. Not just the hot water - ALL the water.

This. This is Russian hardball.

So far I'm doing fine - I had things for dinner that didn't require water (translation: cookies), watched the U.S. fail at soccer (confession: Amara had to threaten to revoke my citizenship to get me to change from a made-for-TV drama on the Kultura channel called "Hyphenated Surname"), had a cup of green tea, and used the last of my 5-liter jug of bottled drinking water to brush my teeth and wash my dirty feet before bed. Only the necessities!

But I woke up this morning and Russia is still playing hardball. Must decide whether to go to the store and buy two 5-liter jugs of drinking water – one for drinking/cooking and one to rinse myself off – or to check out the local banya. I'm thinking banya. The banya makes you feel clean for days, and who knows how long this water thing will last.

Another photo album!

I like taking pictures and, like every other hack with a digital camera, I think I'm sometimes good at it. My mom (who actually is good at photography) likes looking at my artsy pictures. And maybe some other people want to know what Kazan looks like. In any case, here is an album of pictures of Kazan.

Another thing: linden trees smell amazing. Kazan is full of them (a Russian friend told me what they were - I could not recognize a linden tree on my own before three days ago) and every evening the air smells like linden blossoms.

Everyday

My landlady comes into town from her dacha every so often to check up on things and wash my linens (I could do that myself, but whatever). This weekend I came back from our excursion to Yelabuga to find that my bedsheets printed with big red roses and curlicues of "Seni Seviyorum" ("I love you" in, oddly enough, Turkish) had been replaced by bedsheets printed with big hot pink hearts and "I love you" (in English). I know it's unlikely, but I'm really hoping this trend continues. Cupids and "Je t'aime," perhaps?

Ivan Ivanych!

Today we had an excursion to the town of Yelabuga, the birthplace of 19th-century landscape painter Ivan Shishkin and the deathplace of Silver Age poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide there while in evacuation from WWII (many Russian scientists and artists, as well as institutions from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to orchestras and ballet companies, were moved from Leningrad and Moscow to cities closer to/in the Urals).

On the way there, we stopped at a rest stop, because even when Russian tour buses have bathrooms on board, the driver never lets anyone use them. When I got out of the bus to stretch my legs, I found a little tent, under which there was an assortment of lawn ornaments for sale. (Just the sort of thing one is usually looking to buy at a rest stop!) I picked up a small plaster hedgehog for 150 rubles (about five bucks), and he is now our mascot.

After much deliberation, we named him Ivan. The suggestion came from Seth, who suggested the awful pun Ivan Yozhny (this means "Ivan the Hedgehoggy," and sounds like Ivan Grozny, the Russian name for Tsar Ivan the Terrible). I can't think of a punny equivalent in English, except perhaps Ivan the Incorrigible. He does look like an incorrigible little fellow... Anyway, Ivan is also a good name because he can be called Uncle Vanya. His patronymic, we agreed, is Ivanovich, shortened to Ivanych in casual speech. You can follow the adventures of Ivan Ivanych here.

But I'll probably update to the blog when I add pictures. Not all the Yelabuga pictures are up yet, because I want to get on wi-fi before I upload more.

Leslie

Tatar Update!

Today I met up with a Tatar acquaintance from my Fulbright days and went to a Turkish restaurant. The food was real Turkish food! (That might sound like a given to Americans, but finding authentic ethnic food from places outside the former Soviet Union is quite rare in Russia. Except sushi, which is hugely popular.) She explained that several Turkish firms were doing business here in the 1990's, so the Turks built themselves some restaurants so they could have food from home. There are somewhat fewer firms now, apparently, but the restaurants live on, and if you go at night, you'll see Turks dining there. (We went for lunch.) There are also three Turkish schools in Tatarstan – two for boys and one for girls – that teach in Tatar, Turkish and English. I asked if they were Gülen schools, but she said she doesn't think they're religious.

She also answered my weird but burning question about "ak çiçekler." It's the title of a very famous novel by Abdurakhman Absaliamov, a Tatar writer of the mid to late 20th century. The novel is about doctors, and for any Tatar (or any Russian living in Tatarstan), the phrase "ak çiçekler" is associated with doctors. So they named the prize that.

Missed Opportunity for Bizarre Punnage

This is a silly language post. You've been warned.

The Russian word удар/udar means "a hit, a blow." But it can also mean "stroke," as in the phrase солнечный удар/solnechny udar, "heat stroke." So when a restaurant here in Kazan chose the name Мясной Удар, were they going for the literal "meaty hit" (like being bludgeoned with a ham hock?) or is it a play on "heat stroke" to "meat stroke"?

I prefer the latter. I like to imagine a restaurant that promises to feed me so much meat that I'll faint. Alas, the restaurant's owners provide their own translation of the restaurant's name, and they passed over "Meat Stroke" in favor of "Meat Kick." Not as good!

In this post, babushka = old lady, not head scarf

Hell hath no fury like an offended babushka.

This evening, on the way to calm down an offended babushka with chocolates and flowers, the host institute director (who had already scolded me for doing certain things that led to this babushka getting offended - if you want more details than that, you'll have to ask me one-on-one) and I got stuck in a Russian elevator together.

Sweet Jesus. Really, universe? I hate elevators. Especially Russian elevators, which are only half as big as American ones, and often smell funny (ok, actually this one didn't). And I couldn't even sit down in the stuck elevator, because this is Russia and the floor was dirty/cold and sitting on it would have convinced the host institute director that I am ACTUALLY 100% INSANE (and, after sitting on the floor, also infertile). Fortunately, we were only stuck for about 15 minutes. But still. I felt a little like an offended babushka myself.

But the universe soon made it up to me. The babushka (who did not become un-offended, unfortunately... but we're working on that) gave each of us a shot glass of cognac, mistook me for a Russian for half of our conversation, and exhibited okan'e, which is a super-awesome linguistic phenomenon that you hardly ever find anymore among contemporary Russians and which I, personally, had never actually encountered in real life. (Basically, she pronounced O in unstressed syllables as O, not as A.)

YAY. Kazan continues to be mostly awesome.

Better

To counter my Debbie Downer cat post: my apartment is just a few blocks from the Kazan Kremlin, and right now I can hear a riot of church bells coming either from there, the monastery down the street, or the church up the hill. I hope today isn't a special Sunday (it might be Trinity Sunday/Pentecost by the Orthodox calendar, not sure), because I'd love to hear them every week. Orthodox church bells make one of my favorite soundscapes. They don't play melodies or toll a slow, solemn rhythm – they ring out as a cloud of complicated patterns and pitches. Really beautiful. I recommend looking for recordings online.

I'm sad that I haven't yet heard the Muslim call to prayer, which I also find very beautiful. Maybe they don't do it from the mosque in the Kremlin, or maybe I haven't been listening at the right times.

Ok, time to meet the ducklings for a tour of the city!

Gross.

My first long-term stay in Russia, a month's trip to Petersburg, we often ate lunch in a little café in one of the academic buildings of St. Petersburg State University. The café was fine, but the building's entryway was absolutely awful. I would take a deep breath right before entering, which I would try to hold all the way down the hall to the café, against a horrible stench which I did not recognize at first as cat urine. It didn't take long to work out; right inside the building's entrance there was an assortment of dishes filled with dry cat food and raw meat trimmings. Soon enough, we started actually seeing the stray cats and their litters of kittens that inhabited the stairwell.

Anyway, yesterday I walked into the entryway of my apartment building, which appears clean and freshly painted (the most you can ask from a Russian apartment building entryway, as they are public spaces for which nobody has been responsible since the Soviet era) and was met with an oddly familiar stench. I couldn't put my finger on what it was until I came back from my run this morning and saw in a shaft of light streaming in from the courtyard two neat little dishes of cat food.

OH, F*** NO, PEOPLE. If I weren't a guest here, I'd throw it outside myself. But as it is, I think I'm going to call up the woman who actually lives in my apartment (who has repaired to her dacha on the Volga for the summer) and ask her if there's anything I can do about it. I will absolutely play the "I'm horribly allergic to cats [really, I am] and the apartment is right on the first floor near their pee-soaked lair" card. But first I have to figure out how to say "pee-soaked lair" in Russian.

Context

Or, "I get it, but I don't really get it."

Because Turkish and Tatar are both Turkic languages, I understand a lot of the things I see written in Tatar. (I haven't heard much spoken Tatar yet, but I did understand that a guy in the grocery store last night was asking someone on the phone a yes or no question!) Or, I sort of understand. Here's an illustration:


This sign (sorry for the tree – there was no better angle) is all in Russian, except for the big blue words in the middle – Ак чечеклер. In Latin script this would be "ak çeçekler," which is almost the same as Turkish "ak çiçekler," which would mean "white flowers." The sign gives clues that this is what the Tatar means, too – the flowers the woman is holding, and the stylized flowers in the background.

What I have no context for is why the sign says "White Flowers." The rest of the sign says "Health Ministry of Tatarstan" and "Doctor of the Year – 2010." Is that doctor's (you can't see it, but he's wearing a lab coat and stethoscope) name White Flowers? Is that a possible Tatar name? "Flowers" sounds ridiculous as a Turkish surname – I've never seen one with a plural ending on it before. But I suppose it's possible. If that is his name, why is there a woman holding white flowers on the sign as well? Or is the prize for Doctor of the Year called the White Flowers prize? If that's the case, why? And why isn't the Doctor of the Year's name given? Has he/she not been chosen yet, and the guy on the sign is just a generic doctor?

SO MANY QUESTIONS. Health Ministry of Tatarstan gets a D- for signage.

Meanwhile, Agriculture Ministry of Tatarstan gets an A+ for enormous, monstrously gaudy buildings with 50-foot tall trees-of-life in the middle of them situated right on the riverfront, but I'll show you that some other time.

Couple of things

1. Photos of street signs soon to be added to last post. Do I have too much time on my hands? Maybe! But not for long – the ducklings get here in less than 36 hours!

2. Here are some silly pictures of me.


While Lutsia was registering me with the police, she told me to go hang out in the Kazan Fur Factory's outlet store (no, really) across the street. I tried on a sweet lime green leather jacket with tons of zippers on it that was, alas, too expensive for me, and then played with the hats. The photo is bad, so you sadly can't see just how magnificently purple this hat is. I think the Sexy Arctic Explorer Barbie doll I had as a kid had a hat like this.


And while waiting to meet Natasha for dinner, I took a discreet candid shot of myself with Uncle Vladimir on Freedom Square. I tried to make my best Lenin Face.

3. I found out who Yapeyev is. (See previous post.) He was head of the Tatarstan MVD. (The MVD is the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I'm not entirely sure where the lines are between them and the KGB/FSB, but they do similar stuff.) Creepy! Unsurprising, though, since I live within two blocks of both the Tatarstan MVD and FSB headquarters.

And... now my blog is probably being watched.

Kazan: Street names

I love Russian street names. And here are some street names that provide a nice illustration of language politics! (Which I also love!)

So in Kazan I live on Yapeyev Street (goal: find out who Yapeyev is), near its intersection with Bolshaya Krasnaya Street (Big Red Street). I've already seen four types of signs for Bolshaya Krasnaya:

1. ул. Б. Красная


2. Большая Красная ур. / ул. Большая Красная


3. Зур Кызыл ур. / ул. Большая Красная


4. Bol'şaya Krasnaya ur. / ул. Большая Красная


Sign number one is straight-up Russian – ul. (for ulitsa – "street") Bolshaya Krasnaya.

Sign number two has both Tatar and Russian, but the words "Big Red" haven't been translated into Tatar – you can only tell it's Tatar because "street" is abbreviated as "ur." and comes after the street name.

Sign number three has both Tatar and Russian again, but the Tatar has translated "Bolshaya Krasnaya" to "Zur Kızıl."

Sign four is the weirdest one – they went to the trouble of putting Tatar in Latin script (a no-no in the Soviet era and therefore a big symbol of revived Tatar identity in the 1990's), but didn't bother to translate the Russian words, which are so easily translatable! What's with that? For the rest of my time here, I will be looking for the holy grail of street signs, of the form:

Tatar-in-Latin ur.
ул. Russian-in-Cyrillic

Pictures will follow if I find it.

Moscow PS

Sorry if that last post was kind of boring. I didn't get to go to the Gorky house-museum because it is closed on Tuesdays. I also stopped by the Gogol Memorial Rooms, the house Gogol died in, and it looked exactly the same as it did two summers ago when I tried to go: closed for repairs, with a whole gaggle of carpenter- and painter-looking guys hanging out in the courtyard not really repairing anything. Except now they have a folding card table with a bunch of food piled on it, from which they were snacking. I think this will further slow repairs.

Now I am on my way to the train station, to the airport, to Kazan! With 28 identical cell phones for the ducklings (+ one for me) in tow, still in their boxes, stuffed into every formerly empty nook and cranny of my luggage and carry-on. (My Moscow boss gave them to me packing-taped together as a big cube o' cell-phones-in-boxes, which was an interesting and aesthetically pleasing idea, but that wasn't going to make it onto the plane with me.) If the security people at the airport notice, I bet they are going to be very curious. Good thing I know how to say, "I swear to God it's not contraband."

Moscow!

Hello, friends!

I'm in Moscow!

I actually got here yesterday, but found out upon arrival at my hotel that my computer charge cord no longer charged my computer, so I hardly managed to do more than email my mom to say I was alive before compy croaked. But today I trekked out to a ritzy shopping center in the north of the city with an Apple certified reseller (no real Apple stores in Russia), where I was helped out by two young guys who seemed somewhat bewildered by my friendliness (oops... not in America anymore) and lack of knowledge of the normal words for electronic devices ("I opened my computer and I found... how do I say this?... that the wire does not feed it. So the battery quickly ended."). Fortunately, the problem was in the "wire," not the computer itself, so we're back in business with a new charge cord.

Moscow! Russia! I have many thoughts. First is that I have found it extremely pleasant to be interacting with people in Russian. I make a lot of mistakes and am often slow to respond to questions (while my brain changes gears, or something), but it is nice to be able to communicate, and have people respond, and not feel the pressure I used to feel to sound like a native speaker.

My main thought about Moscow is that it feels totally natural to be back here. Two years isn't that long to have been away, I guess. Unfortunately the computer adventure took up much of my wandering-around time, so I don't think I'll be able to do much more than stroll down the Arbat, maybe stop in at the Maxim Gorky house-museum (designed by Schechtel, interesting to me more for the architecture than the life of the writer, who I have never read), stop by the American Center to return Amara her Moscow guidebook, and skip town. Next post from KAZAN! Woo!

Tatars or Tartars?

Break from packing (Do I need to pack a jacket? A Russian dictionary? Why did the guy who painted our bathroom yesterday make off with my razor? Is 500 pills' worth of ibuprofen too much? aaaaaah) to write a bit:

Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, one of the 21 ethnic republics within the Russian Federation. Tatarstan is the homeland of the Volga Tatars, a predominantly Muslim Turkic people about whom I will write more later, when I learn more about them. The Tatar lands aren't far from Moscow, so they were incorporated into the Russian Empire very early (before it was even an empire, actually).

But the question has come up in conversation a few times now: is it Tatarstan or Tartarstan? Tatars? Tartars? Did they invent the sauce? (No.) Steak tartare? (Yes.)

Well! Good thing I always have the answers. The Tatars call themselves the Tatars, and Russian-speakers also call them the Tatars, but in English, they're commonly referred to as the Tartars. This sounds slightly old-fashioned and/or imperialist to me, as it sort of hearkens back to the days when the term was used (in both Russian and English) to refer to any number of Eurasian peoples both nomadic (Kazakhs) and not-so (various groups in the North Caucasus) and Muslim (Volga Tatars) and not (Mongols). Sort of a catch-all term for a threatening "other" in Russia's history.

But anyway, it's not my very favorite term, but I don't think anyone except a cranky anthropologist would really fault you for using "Tartar." (I've met a couple cranky anthropologists. They're impossible not to offend.) I think the idea that we always have to call groups and places by what they call themselves is kind of silly, in that it is usually only applied haphazardly, mostly to non-Western groups. We don't call the Germans the Deutsch, or refer to Armenia as Hayistan. Then again, we also don't name sports teams after them. Hmm.

Woo, on to more packing, then: Moscow-ward!

Good news!

1. My visa, which was supposed to expire promptly on the end of the program I'm working for, is in fact good for almost a whole month after that. I already have a flight home via Tbilisi on August 16th, so my plans probably won't change too much, but this does mean I can swing by home sweet Taganrog and say hi to my friends there. I was thinking Kazan -> Rostov by plane, quick trip to Taganrog from there (it's only ~45 min from Rostov), then Rostov -> Yerevan by train, but my geography skills failed me:

Russia and Armenia don't share a border. Oops. (Going straight to Georgia from Russia won't work; the border is closed.)

2. I get to spend more time in Moscow before heading to Kazan than I thought I would! This means I get to hang out with my good friend Amara, and I have all of Tuesday to explore Moscow and bask in all that liminality. I'm trying to think of things in Moscow I haven't already seen. (The obvious answer: Vladimir Putin. Kremlin trip?)

3. I got a stack of headshots of the Kazan ducklings, leftover passport photos from their Russian visa applications. Ideas so far: glue them to popsicle sticks and roleplay tough Resident Director situations ("Leslie, Svetlana and I are eloping! Will you sign the marriage license?" "Leslie, I think I have gangrene!"); play matchmaker with them and the Ufa ducklings, whose headshots I also have (to pass on to the Ufa RD). The latter is difficult, because almost everyone looks incredibly grim in these pictures. Lighten up, kids! We're going to RUSSIA!

At Matushka Volga, we strive to deliver balance

To make up for the wordiness of that last post, here's a funny picture of Putin. You're welcome.

Thinking Out Loud: Liminal Moscow

There is supposed to be a great duality between Moscow and St. Petersburg, which dates back at least as far as Tolstoy. Unfamiliar as the great man seems to have been with the naturalistic fallacy, he used Moscow, with its deeply Slavic roots and organic layout of concentric rings, to represent purity and Russianness; Petersburg, a logically planned city built by Peter I, the great Westernizing tsar, represented the unnatural and foreign.

Nowadays, this duality translates into a rivalry; there is a sense that one must be a "Moscow person" or a "Petersburg person." Seems unfair: despite its lack of organic street cred, Petersburg's advantages over Moscow are such (art, theater and music; a more relaxed or even bohemian attitude; history that has not been nearly as obscured by Soviet and post-Soviet modification either architectural or spiritual; the very fact that the government isn't there) that anyone with a soul would choose the former.

Nonetheless, I've been unable to definitively choose a side, though I've spent plenty of time in both cities. The problem is that they play fundamentally different roles in my personal narrative of Russia. Petersburg – the crown jewel of the Yale concert band tour that first took me to Russia and the site of my first summer study abroad experience – has always been a destination; Moscow has always been a gateway. I've been to Moscow upwards of a dozen, possibly twenty, times – twice for a long stay of about a month – but I can only think of one time that I wasn't passing through on my way to somewhere else. And often, it's been on my way in and out of the country.

It didn't take long for me to notice that Moscow's character is fickle. Coming from the U.S., the city feels very Russian. I notice the smells (diesel and dill!) and the Russian voices around me, the Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, the onion domes and public parks that used to be princes' estates, the old women in head scarves, the disregard for traffic laws. But coming from the provinces, it seems garishly western, with its billboards in English, European clothing stores and restaurant chains, and money and privilege on obnoxious display in every imaginable way. Either way, it's jarring. So instead of feeling like the capital and the essence of Russia, it feels liminal, a city between two states of being.

I should note that although my experience falls in line with the popular idea that Moscow isn't "real" Russia and the provinces somehow are – the provinces are where I've spent most of my time in Russia, so they define it for me – I don't really buy into the implicit value judgment. First of all, it's essentializing: what fits with our idea of the Soviet is real, and what has changed since 1991 is not? Really?

Second, it misses the point of the difference between Moscow and the provinces – it's not that Moscow chose a different path, but that it has enough money to choose anything at all. The provinces have their little bits of Moscow's modernization and conspicuous consumption, where they can afford them, but mostly they have a lot of obsolete collective farms and factories, an aging population, and government buildings full of former Party apparatchiks who stay in power and in favor with the Kremlin by maintaining the status quo and not doing anything too exciting. (But the provinces are also beautiful and fascinating and full of wonderful people! Visit them!)

In any case, I'm venturing back into that weird liminal space of Moscow on Monday, at least for a few brief hours. I'm glad; I'm not sure what it would be like to get to Kazan without getting a dose of the most – and least – Russian of cities.

First post!

Hello, friends!

I wasn't going to keep a blog, but my mom asked me to. This is where I will be recording whatever Russia-thoughts I would like to share with the world at large on this ten-week jaunt into the heart of the Volga region. (Personalized Russia-thoughts will be delivered to relevant parties by email, so if I promised you I'd correspond with you this summer - we're still on.)

The blog's name is "Matushka Volga" - "Mother Volga." I shamelessly stole this name for the Volga River from a song by Lubeh, Putin's favorite pop-rock group, but I'm pretty sure it's also called that by people other than sentimental/militaristic nostalgia-mongers. (I love Lubeh, actually. But sort of ironically.)

The original name was going to be "Moya Prekrasnaya Nyanya" - "My Beautiful Nanny," the title of the Russian remake of the Fran Drescher sitcom "The Nanny" (yes, really, there's a Russian remake). Alas, I decided that since I'm going to try to avoid writing about the nannying aspects of my job and my charges (henceforth the Kazan ducklings) too much, it wasn't a particularly apt name.

I leave in less than a week, so look for more posts soon!