September in Krasnodar

It's raining in Russia. The streets have given up the tired humid heat that tortured us all through August, sweating in the trams and suffocating until sunset. The dust has washed away and the stray dogs aren't barking. Autumn has come and we are starting to chill: if only for a few days. It will be warm again soon, they say: we're in the sub-med and you'll probably be able to walk around the city without a coat until January. Even in January there might not be snow. "There's practically no winter here," the taxi driver told me. This won't be the typical Russian experience, I guess. I won't be digging my feet out of 10 metres of snow, whilst it's minus 30, but I will be speaking Russian every day, meeting new people and reading as many Russian books as I can manage.

Sunset in Krasnodar: a living complex where I stayed for a few days

This will be my first post in my special 'year abroad' blog. It will be probably turn out fairly serious, because I'm trying to define some concrete goals for my writing. Moreover, it's raining and I've decided to indulge in some pathetic fallacy. No doubt
when the heat comes back and the rabid dogs start chasing me down the street again, I'll be more than willing to entertain all my readers with hysterically-humorous rants about how I love/hate Russia (This will depend on the day, and on my mood.)

I will continue to post pretty much the same articles in my personal blog (plus a few extras), but I am beginning a new page in order to make a clear start to a new project. Namely, I will be blogging regularly about the experience of a 20-something (partially) Cambridge-educated Northern Irish queer writer/artist/student who has for some odd reason decided to move to a city that almost no Westerner has ever heard of to do things that most people probably wouldn't like to do.

I have come to Krasnodar with a few vague goals:

1) I want to learn the language and learn the people.

I want to become fluent in this strange slavic speech, which regularly requires me to stretch my tongue around consonant clusters, complex grammatical structures and generally foreign sounds. I had always thought of Russian as some sort of unimaginably difficult, serious language spoken by a cult of beautiful and mysterious stoics. I wanted to have their chique and their mystery and say sentences like ‘Vladimir perished in the Great Patriotic War fighting the facist peril and will never return. Send Svetlana his love.’

In the process of learning Russian over the last two years at university, I've come to realise that my preconceived ideas weren't completely true: the culture shock between Russians and Westerners is large, but as you communicate with the people here it becomes more and more obvious that they aren't mysterious: they're just different. Moreover, they are often very stubborn in justifying or defending their differences. (Fair dues.)

Nonetheless, when you penetrate deeper, it becomes clear that the visible culture and the behaviour on the street are shells. Like in any place, you find people who will listen to you, who will trust you and who will help you. Provided you manage to break through the shell, of course, and get to the person. This can mean anything from learning to accept that the woman in the tram is going to shout at you if you don’t get your money out quick enough (even though she's a lovely person and takes great care of her grand children. She even brings them to the zoo once a month!) to accepting that a young lady probably shouldn’t smile too heavily at an old man on the bus (unless she wants him to think she’s a prostitute).

2) I want to write a dissertation that is topical.

I don't know exactly what words I will use, or how many pages I will write, or whether I will choose literature or politics or some other cultural aspect, but I do know the general topic of my research: everything queer. After all, what better time to analyse Russian attitudes to alternative sexualities than now, given that the LGBT rights movement inside of Russia seems to have hit a dead end. Propaganda of ‘non-traditional’ sexual orientations to minors has been banned, the adoption of Russian children to countries with legal LGBT famiy policies has been outlawed, and most activists I have spoken to are not very optimistic about the future.

I feel drawn to Russia for reasons I don't quite understand. I am not, per se, completely content here, but I'm not discontent either. I'm not religious, but something in my psychology is calling me to Russia: I feel like I have to live through this place, where, for various reasons, I either feel amazing or terrible, with very little in between. On the one side, I feel accepted immediately by a community of people who are marginalized i.e. gays, queers, young people with different views on the world, and outsiders. On the other side, I regularly experience the flip side of living in a culture that does not accept people who love outside of the heteronormative tradition: the awkward conversations with passengers on the train ('Where is your girlfriend?', ‘How would you rate Russian women?’ or, if they're drunk, 'Have you fucked a Russian girl yet?'); the casual homophobic comments from otherwise polite and well-educated people; the terrible news stories of abuse and arrests of gays; the stoic accounts from friends of what they have had to live through; and, most painful of all, those instances where you see hate and fear arising within the LGBT community itself: the gay men who refuse to talk to other gay men who they consider too 'effeminate' and therefore a threat to their heteroseuxal disguise (“they’re just...too much”); the gays and lesbians who criticize biseuxals; and the general reluctance to acknowledge the existence of transgendered people. Moreover, there is an unpleasant conflict between activists and non-politically active queers (I use the word ‘queer’ as a quick shortcut for LGBT+, i.e. anyone whose sexuality doesn’t fit a societally acceptable standard of heteronormativity. No offense is intended by this word.). Often activists feel frustrated and abandoned by the large majority of queers who are either too afraid to take action or just consider that it is 'too early' for Russia to change. I have met people who have told me that the activists' robust manner is simply 'not Russian' and is making the situation in Russia worse for LGBT people. It is sometimes painful to see individuals who I know to be queer spouting homophobic comments or telling lies to other acquiantances in order to leave no suspiscion that they themselves might be LGBT.

I don't know where this ‘research’ or collection of experiences will take me. I don't know whether it will lead to me meeting the queer Ghandi, falling happily in love and creating a family of 2.3 children or whether I will simply become exhausted by general pessism and lack of progress in the movement. Maybe, like most people I've met, I will end up just accepting that things aren't going to change in the next twenty years. In the words of my friend, Rumpel.: 'You say it was 16  years between when Margaret Thatcher introduced anti-gay legislation (i.e. Section 28:  that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship") and the legalisation of gay civil union and adoption in the UK. You're right, 16 years is quick and, it was probably a very unexpected rate of progress. But for Russia you might as well take that number and multiply it by 10. Russia isn't a post-industrial country, Russia is barely even an industrial society. We live on gas.'

What she forgot to mention (in my view) is the fact that change might come even slower to Russia not just because of the level of economic development, but also because of the fact, that for whatever reason (culture, climate, tradition), Russians are often naturally pessimistic when it comes to politics and very stubborn about changing their opinion. This is a generalization, of course, and I do not mean to offend anyone. But I have already experienced enough instances of discussions with Russians which never managed to develop into useful exchanges of opinion: a stereotypical English man will probably listen to your opinion and give you time to finish whatever point of discussion you are talking about, even if later he rejects your view and expresses his own opinion (however bigoted it may be). Many Russians, on the other hand, simply don't listen in the first place.

Here's an example of a discussion I had yesterday with a group of students at my university:

Random Russian man: In your country, who do they think won the second World War?

Me: Well, most people would just list of the names of the Allied countries: so, UK, America, Russia, France....

Russian man (already indignant!): What a crock of shite! In our country 20 million people died. You would have been fucked by the Germans without us!

Me: Let me explain why people in my country think that way...

Russian: What propaganda! In your country they always forget about Russia!
Me: That’s true to an extent, but let me explain....
Russian: You people don't respect Russia! You would have died without us...
Me: Let me explain...
Russian: You just bombed Japan to show off your weapons. Nobody even really died there compared to Russia!
Me: (trying to be humorous) I didn't bomb Japan, but...
Russian (continues a rant about the second world war, even though he clearly isn't very clued up on the facts. He seems to think it started in 1941, not 1939 -- probably because this was the year the Soviet Union was invaded.)
Me: (exasperated) Alright then.

There are lots of conversations like this. My friends here tell me that when a person has an opinion in Russia, there is no point trying to convince them that they are wrong, even if you use facts and evidence, they won't listen. After all, it’s not always clear where you’ve taken the facts from. They might just be ‘propaganda’ invented by our governments/states/whoever. The old suspicion between our countries lives on: as much in the UK and the US as in Russia itself (but that is a topic for another blog post.)

In the future, I will try to avoid talking to drunk men who only want to shout about Russia's sacrifices in the Great Patriotic War, but nonetheless, it goes against my upbringing not to express my opinion. Moreover, it can be endlessly frustrating when even people you like refuse to listen to your opinion e.g.

'No, that's wrong'

'But why?'

'It's just wrong.'

'But why?'

'It's just wrong?'

'But why?'

'It's propaganda.'

'Why do you think it's propaganda?'

'You're runing my lunch. Let's talk about something else'

'But why am I ruining your lunch? Why can't you just listen to my opinion?'

(At this point, I will feel tempted to cry and move to a yurt in Mongolia where I will give up all interaction with civilization until the year 2046 when we will all be programmed by computer chip to be tolerant, loving people with impecable physical and emotional attributes.)

To be fair, I am a little overemotional at times, and also quite stubborn and annoying when it comes to these things. I probably come across as some sort of patronizing Westerner who thinks he always knows better and is trying to convince all Russians that they are wrong, when in reality, I just want to talk openly about various topics so that people can understand why we think the way we do. I often end up frustrated at the fact that people won't let me express my opnion, because they think I'm trying to convert them like some Jehovah's witness.

In any case, I have disgressed drastically from the topic of gay rights in Russia. I intend to help in some sort of capacity, if I can. Maybe I will translate a few articles into English, maybe I will help out a few friends in personal matters. I won't, however, be protesting on the street: I don't want to be prematurely arrested and deported. I want to respect the people here and try to understand them and in order to understand them I have to respect the laws to the right extent. It might look very nice on my CV to write 'deported from Russia for human rights activism', but it will probably simply have an adverse effect on the situation on Russia: Don't you see! It's another Westerner trying to import homosexuality to Russia! It's always the Westerners who protest! i.e. Homosexuality is a Western import.

3) I am here because I love Russia and I want to enjoy my time here, even if it is only a year of my life.

I don't love the state, but I love Russia. I like to dream about the vast expanses (like any cliched Westerner, I suppose). I love the feeling of finally being able to communicate to a decent level having struggled through endless grammar and lots of new words. I love the literature. I love being able to understand a whole new world of inside jokes and puns. I love the script. I love many things, in short. And I especially love the matter-of-fact attitude of a lot of people -- it can be very funny e.g.

Tram conductor scolding a man blocking her way: 'Young man, who do you think I am? A snake? I have bones, you know, I can't just wriggle my way through your junk!' 

I love many things and I won't spend the rest of the post listing my loves: that is probably a gradual task for my future blogs.

4) I want to write beautiful things.

I am a writer. I like poems. I like stories and I need to write. Russia can be hard, but living through experiences that are strange or difficult make you a better writer and a more experienced human. By the end of this year, I thoroughly expect that my poems will be as widely read as the collected works of Fedor Dostoevskii. (Well, I can hope, anyway).

To summarize: I am in Russia and I will be posting blogs. Please become a reader. I will shower you in imaginary Matroshkas.

Take care, dear readers,

yours,

D.