[But let's not forget, they still have the joy of sledding! This bit of count-your-blessings wisdom is from yesterday's NY Times:]
Russia's Leaders Are Different. It's the People Who Are the Same.
By Alison Smale
MOSCOW -- For someone who has known Russia for 20 years, but who lived in the West in the 1990's, perhaps the most striking thing about Vladimir V. Putin's Moscow is how familiar it feels.
When I lived here in the 1980's, it was scarcely surprising that everybody danced to the tune played from the Kremlin. It was the time of deepest Communist stagnation, and falling in line was the surest way to survive. ... Those days are gone and they will not return. Yet after the heady wonder of glasnost, or openness, that Mikhail S. Gorbachev brought in the late 80's, and the chaotic, corrupt, yet exhilarating turn to capitalism and free expression that followed under Boris N. Yeltsin, the aura that surrounds Mr. Putin seems strangely lifeless. ...
What is needed ... is for the West and the Russian populace to both take on the role of the old bride-to-be of Russian folk custom, who was handed a tangled ball of thread on the eve of her wedding. If she untangled it, she would be an excellent wife for her complicated, problematic partner. It seemed an apt metaphor for the problematic marriage that both the West and Russia have made with Mr. Putin. The problem is that after a period of curiosity under Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin, many Russians, and many in the West, appear to have decided at least for now that the tangle is too vexing to unsnarl, and so they have cast the ball of thread aside, and are devoting themselves to simpler pleasures.
Indeed, as I walked down the snow-laden street where I lived in the 1980's, I found it tempting to agree. The TV may be vulgar, the corruption widespread, the people alternatively servile or cruel. But there is almost nothing to compare with the sheer joy of sledding down a hill next to the restored onion domes of the Novospassky Monastery, watching the men who sit for hours fishing a hole in the ice, and listening to the gleeful shrieks of women exulting in the rosy cheeks of their coddled and muffled children, soon to be borne home, fed and put to that most blissful of Russian conditions, sleep.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/weekinreview/06WORD.html]
Carl
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