Hakki wrote:
|| USSR fell apart. English was not a commonly studied subject in
|| the Soviet
|| Union -- hell, Bulgarian or Moldovan was more useful than
|| English. Moreover,
A lot of Soviet technicians came to Turkey in the 70's and it seemed to me that many of them were German speakers. I also see a lot of German-speaking Russians on Deutsche Welle. Also, thinking back to when the wall came down, my impression was most FSU people interviewed by the EU media spoke German. Am I right?
CD: East Germany was a part of the Warsaw Pact, and an important one. Gorbachev speaks German (badly) as does Putin (fluently). (PS. Putin's nickname when he was Sobchak's assistant in St. Petersburg was "Stasi.") You were much more likely to study German than any other Western European language.
Also, there was a huge German diaspora in Russia during the 1700s and 1800s as part of the Westernization plans of various tsars. They would import engineers, architects, scientists and so forth. Until the 1950s, there were whole towns in Russia in which German was the daily language. There are enough Russians in Moscow who self-identify as German to support the newspaper Moskaue Deutsche-Zeiting (a friend of mine is the arts & entertainment editor).
It is for this reason that Lutheranism is identified by the government as one of the native Russian religions that have official state sanction, the others being the Russian Orthodoc Church, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism (14% of Russian citizens are Muslim, and the Buryats in Siberia are traditionally Buddhist).
|| though Soviet education in general was superb (and Russian
|| education still
|| is; I have never seen a more highly educated group of people in
|| my life --
And one gift of capitalism was to give FSU women with PhD's the chance to earn a better living abroad, though their degrees had nothing to do with it, sad to say. In Turkey they're called "Natashas". I used to work in the digital dept of a photo studio here; many of our fashion models were from the FSU (cheaper), and many of them had postgrad degrees.
CD: A recent development that is very good for Russia is the large numbers of people who emigrated in the 90s are coming back now that the economic and political situation has improved so much. There is the impression that it is now possible to lead a decent life in Russia, especially if you have experience in the West, and of course it's their native culture. A friend (coincidentally named Natasha) spent a decade in San Francisco and moved back last year, inspired in large part by the "loneliness if American culture." (I was once commenting to her on the lack of obviously crazy talking to themselves people on the Moscow streets, and her answer was "I think it's a lot easier to go insane in the United States.) I'm also currently trying to help a Ukrainian friend of my mother's, who moved to the US in the 90s but desperately wants to get back because he's miserable "in the lonliest country on Earth," find a job in Moscow.
Humorously, yet another friend was supposed to spend a month's vacation in the US (admittedly, San Antonio) but returned after just 2 weeks because "The people are unfriendly and nobody reads." Plus she got sick on the food.
I assume that a number of the people you are referring to are working as, ahem, you know what. Just to give you an idea of income/class stratification within the FSU itself, I would estimate that 70% of petty criminals or prostitutes in Moscow are not Russian (from Ukraine, Georgia, etc.), and very few of the remaining ones are from Moscow. I have problems imagining a non-drug-addicted Muscovite going in for prostitution or petty crime. Moscow is like the Emerald City of Oz to most people in the FSU -- wages are something like 6 times as high here as in the rest of Russia, which itself has the highest living standards in the FSU. Unfortunately, and in violation of the Constition, it is still illegal to live and work in Moscow without a residency permit, which is hard to get. As a result, many people who come to Moscow in an attempt to better their circumstances are automatically criminals. Moscow has several hundred thousand illegal immigrants.
|| (Speaking of classes, one thing I like about Russia is that,
|| outside of some
|| ritsy apartment complexes, cities aren't divided into working
|| class/middle
|| class/poor neighborhoods. Factory workers/teachers/lawyers/managers/the
|| unemployed all share the same buildings. Russia doesn't
|| ghettoize its poor,
|| at least not yet.)
Same here: With my modest income I share the same street with a number of big shots in mansions with flash cars and security cameras. Some of their other neighbors are even poorer, living in rotting wooden houses. But it's really not so remarkable; there are a lot of unsegregated cities, or parts of cities, in Europe. Walk around Amsterdam's tourist circuit and you'll surely come across a red-lit worker in fishnets sitting in her window next door to a bourgie, also on full public display (they don't draw their curtains over there), reading his krantje or sipping his kopje.
CD: Here, they don't even live in remarkably different buildings. Most but not all of the Soviet housing has been privatized and belongs to the previous tenants. You own the apartment you had in 1991 regardless of how much money you earn now (most Russians don't pay rent, though you can rent someone else's apartment if he or she has abandoned it). A middle-class family can easily live just a wall away from a beggar.
This has an effect on crime. In at least most American cities, the poor are ghettoized into special sections, while the affluent live in their own quarter. As poverty usually equates with (blue-collar) crime, this means you have some neighborhoods which are extremely safe and others where walking around means taking your life in your own hands. In Moscow, yiou have a uniform low level of danger everywhere
Chris Doss The Russia Journal.