Young Women in Chechnya

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature, one of my favorite things on the Internet, has a post up today about young women in Chechnya. It’s mostly a photojournal of teenage girls’ lives: high school classrooms, snowy walks through the village, lunch with friends, cell phone conversations held while smoking a cigarette or pulling on a stocking. The photos, by Diana Markosian, are beautiful and evocative. But as Westerners tend to, Markosian focuses her lens on the headscarf as the symbol of repression, and the small space allotted for text means the nuances of Chechen religion, state and society are glossed over.

One theme that remains largely unexamined is the disparate forces pushing girls toward covering. There’s no doubt that many women feel enormous pressure from the authorities – and let us remember, here, that Chechens are living under the rule of a petty dictator of questionable sanity who is loyal to (and was installed by) their oppressors - to cover up, as Human Rights Watch detailed in a report issued a year ago. But several of the photo captions reference the growing popularity of Islam among youth, and show girls who cover up against their parents’ wishes. This is really interesting: the government is moving toward Islam, and the youth are embracing it at the same time.

The reasons for the push from above and the groundswell from below are vastly different. For the youth, this is in line with a larger turn toward religion in Russia, by Muslim youths in the Volga region to the famously disaffected Russian Jews to the country’s Orthodox Christian majority. It is also a lasting effect of Chechnya’s brutal war for independence, which flowed seamlessly between patriotic freedom fight and jihad; a reflection of money and mullahs sent to the region in the last 20 years by rich Islamists in the Gulf; a result of the conflation of Islam and ethnonational identity; and an effect of Chechens’ outsider status in mainstream Russian society. (Even the liberal political opposition in Russia has been known to rally around the cry, “Enough with feeding the Caucasus!”) The government’s promotion of Islam probably also plays a role. And, perhaps, too, it reflects the simple desire of each generation to be unlike their parents.

Another nuanced issue that gets glossed over is bride kidnapping. This is a problem, yes. In some regions, like rural Kyrgyzstan, it is more popular now than it ever was in that shiny idealized ethnically pure pre-Russian past. In almost any form, it is dangerous, sometimes traumatic, and unfair to girls and women. However, it is worth noting that many “kidnappings” are prearranged, either by the girl and her lover or with the involvement of both sets of parents. There is a negotiation phase, in which the girl’s parents have the right to refuse her hand and take her back if the groom is unsuitable (or, one hopes, if the bride is unwilling). Official statistics are hard to come by, as the practice is illegal, which means that it is actually a bit meaningless to say that girls are “often” kidnapped off the street by men they don’t know. In any case, tragic stories like the one Markosian profiles in photo 32 are by no means the majority of weddings.

Unfortunately, the complexities of life in Chechnya can’t be adequately conveyed by girls in headscarves alone. But Diana Markosian’s photos do serve, in conjunction with good reporting, as sensitive, humanizing illuminations of Chechen realities.

Linguistic innovation, the internet, and politics

Educated Russians are the only people I know among whom vigorous grammar Nazism is as voguish as it is among educated native English speakers. (Disclaimer: I don’t know French.) It helps that standard literary Russian is buttressed not only by venerable scolds à la Strunk & White, but by ideologically motivated Soviet campaigns to prove and reinforce the greatness of the “great and powerful” Russian language,[1] a nationalized education system that ensures the standardization of grammar education, and a relatively short literary history that greatly limits the body of evidence for the validity of this or that construction. (Unlike English descriptivists, with claims about Shakespeare’s use of split infinitives always in our back pocket, Russians can only reach as far back as Pushkin, writing in the early to mid-1800′s; before that, Russian was only rarely used as a literary language.) Plus, Russian culture values intelligence and erudition in a way that American culture, frankly, doesn’t. Grammar-induced scolding and nose-wrinkling is a national pastime, at least among the educated elite (Muscovite and provincial alike – to say nothing of Petersburgers, likely the worst of the bunch!).

All of this is a long way of saying that you can find a lot of people complaining about the current state of Russian; the abominable slang that’s worked its way into daily use, from criminal argot to Soviet officialese; the ever-encroaching Anglicisms; the failing education system that does not effectively squelch the pedestrian habit of saying звОнит in place of the correct звонИт[2]. Fortunately, we foreigners get off easy – usually when I use an incorrect or slangy form, the tsk-tsking is directed at the questionable acquaintances from whom I presumably picked it up.

This is misguided, though – while I did learn a lot of slang from my younger acquaintances in Russia and from spending a lot of time on Russian livejournal, I know my way around it better than I let on, and probably deserve to be tsk-tsked in my own right. An incurable descriptivist defender of my native tongue, I can’t resist playing the same part in Russian. Thus, I was delighted when I stumbled upon a speech example that combines, a grammarian might say, Anglicisms and internet stupidity:

Слоупочный слоупок слоупочен.

sloupochnyj sloupok sloupochen

This is a variation on an English internet meme that takes the tautological form “[adjective] [noun] is [same adjective],” e.g. “awkward penguin is awkward.“ What it says is, literally, “Slowpokey slowpoke is slowpokey.” Слоупок is just a Cyrillic transliteration of the English slowpoke. In the adjectives we see consonant alternation between k and ch before a suffix, a feature of Russian phonology. That in itself never fails to delight me – the application of native phonological rules to borrowed words.

Its real brilliance, though, lies in the grammatical subleties of Russian. Russian requires slightly different adjectival forms for adjectives directly modifying nouns (e.g. “tall woman”) and predicate adjectives (in forms like “The woman is tall”). Russian is also fantastically liberal in its use of derivational suffixes, allowing for flexible nouning of adjectives and adjectiving of nouns. Add in the fact that Russian is null-copula – the present tense verb “to be” is omitted entirely – and you have an easily-derived phrase consisting simply of three forms of the same root. Its repetitiveness is both more elegant and less redundant than the  equivalent English form. Beautiful, right? I mean, for a meme.

While I would love it if Russian grammar Nazis gave a little more credit to language innovators and the unique characteristics of Russian that they’re showcasing, I can respect that it’s probably not going to happen any time soon. The anxieties expressed by Russian prescriptivists reflect deeper insecurities – Russian’s loss of status as a language of empire and its weakness vis-a-vis global English; the frailties of the Russian educational system compared with the Soviet one; the replacement of the remembered culture of intellect and erudition with a crass consumerist mentality. Acceptance of language change is a sign of liberalization, but it’s also a sign of comfort and confidence in your language’s place in the world. This raises the question: will the playfulness of the younger, internet-loving Russian innovators fade as they age? If Putin’s third term turns out to be a crucible that decides the fate of the post-Soviet experiment with democratization, what role will it play in the development of the Russian language?

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[1] great and powerful Russian language/великий и могучий русский язык – the Russians are great lovers of compact, easily meme-ified quotations (known as “winged phrases/крылатые фразы”) like this one, which entered the linguistic heritage via a Turgenev poem.

[2] English equivalent: using “bring” for “take.”

Update 2: Gay Rights in St. Petersburg

Back in November, I posted (twice) about Allout.org’s petition to stop legislation in St. Petersburg aimed at making the promotion of homosexuality a crime. The December 4 parliamentary election and ensuing protests put the bill on the back burner, but on February 29, it passed.

The law has gotten more press this time around, and there’s another Allout.org petition to get St. Petersburg regional governor Georgii Poltavchenko to veto the bill. If you’re willing to say that you won’t visit St. Petersburg if this bill is passed (probably a pretty low-stakes claim for most of us), please consider signing. There’s also a youtube video, and Allout.org is currently asking people to leave positive comments there to drown out the flood of negative reactions from Russians and others.

There’s just one thing I want to add to the conversation. A lot of the protest rhetoric I’ve seen so far has talked about not letting a small minority of bigots silence LGBT people and their allies. I think it’s important to understand that a “small minority” is not actually what we’re up against. The bill passed 29 to 5. Fear and disgust around LGBT and queer issues is the cultural norm in Russia, and most Russians – especially those who live outside major cities and outside the relatively young, well-educated internet-using class – aren’t presented with any alternative ways of understanding gender and sexuality. In that cultural context, it makes sense to pass a law to protect innocent children from exposure to the perversion of homosexuality. Many Russians see this as a no-brainer, like laws imposing steeper penalties for dealing drugs near a school. That’s why it’s already been signed into law in Ryazan and Arkhangelsk.

Considering that, I don’t know if this law can be stopped. But I do think the international outcry is important, in that it may help to change public opinion within Russia. Let them see that there are millions of us who aren’t disgusted by gays, who don’t think everything outside a narrow conception of heterosexuality is a ‘perversion’ and don’t fear letting our children know that not everyone is straight, and who consider silencing LGBT people and their allies a violation of basic human rights. It may be true that real cultural change has to come from within, but it can certainly be helped along by pressure from without.

Pugacheva causes Zhirinovskiy to self-destruct

Russian speakers should definitely check out this video from Tuesday’s televised debate between presidential candidates Vladimir Zhirinovskiy and Mikhail Prokhorov. Aging but ever-relevant Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva (think Madonna in terms of star power) asks Zhirinovskiy a long-winded question about, essentially, how Russians can expect him to be a good public face for the country when he’s such a blustering jerk. Things quickly devolve into Zhirinovskiy screaming about how he says and does what he considers necessary, Pugacheva shouting “VY POZOR!” (“You are a disgrace!”) back at him, and Zhirinovskiy responding with increasingly unhinged insults (spoiler alert: he calls her a prostitute) and rants. There’s even Khrushchev-style banging on the table before the moderator, Vladimir Solovyov, finally cuts Zhirinovskiy off.

Someone needs to make a subtitled version of this.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming of waiting for whatever is going to happen in Sunday’s presidential election. Stay tuned!

So, Mikhail Prokhorov.

So, Mikhail Prokhorov announced yesterday that he’s going to run for president of Russia.

I’m not the biggest Prokhorov fan – after all, he got fabulously wealthy off others’ toil in a mine and smeltery in what’s pretty unequivocally one of the dirtiest, most depressing, least livable places in the world.*

But I did like this piece by Anton Orekh of Ekho Moskvy, quoted in the New York Times, where he argues that Prokhorov actually isn’t a bad choice:

Prokhorov definitely isn’t a Chekist. Prokhorov isn’t going to try to build a parody of the Soviet Union. Prokhorov isn’t going to tell us old ghost stories about NATO and America and waste half the budget building obsolete tanks. Prokhorov is scarcely going to suppress the media, beat people with police batons on the street, or leave Churov [chairman of the Central Election Commission] to keep working his magic. Prokhorov is rich, so he’s not running for president for the chance to steal. He’s a capitalist, and it’s high time we started building capitalism instead of this mix of socialism and idiocy.

I don’t agree that people who already have a lot of money can automatically be trusted not to steal more money from the state, or that people who own magazines necessarily won’t suppress the media. But I do like, and wholeheartedly agree with, the bit about ghost stories about NATO and the United States. Compare to what Dmitri Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to NATO, said from the stage at Monday’s allegedly poorly-attended United Russia rally:

There are forces today that consider Russia easy prey. They bombed Iraq. They destroyed Libya. They are approaching Syria. They stepped all over the people of Yugoslavia. And they are now thinking about Russia and are waiting for a moment when it is weak.

This is a pretty common attitude in Russia, shamefully perpetuated and played up by its leaders. Any whisper of interest, any news coverage, any American opinion proffered on Russian current events, is spun as an act of imperialism by evil Western forces that are bent on the worldwide dissemination of lies about Russia and the ultimate destruction of everything Russia stands for. Not that there aren’t legitimate criticisms of American imperialism to be made, but this blatant fear-mongering, this refusal to see the U.S. and its allies as having any interests other than blind aggression toward poor beleaguered Russia, this invocation of Cold War dualities… it’s really tiresome. It’s a way for the elites to make the people feel that they stand together on the us side of us versus them; Russians versus the rest of the world, instead of oligarchs and plutocrats versus the Russian people. And it’s a way to justify Russia’s flouting of international standards of, say, electoral procedures and human rights.

I’m still skeptical that we’ll see someone other than Vladimir V. Putin as Russia’s next president, but one of the most hope-inspiring things about this December is that it seems that Russia’s people are no longer interested in being told, or pretending to believe, that the elites are on their side.

*Just realized that “You’ll Never Leave Norilsk Alive” needs to happen. For one thing, the sun really does come up at ten in the morning and go down at three in the day.

Update: Gay Rights in Petersburg

(Original post here.)

Human rights advocates now have until November 30 to add signatures to the All Out petition to get St. Petersburg lawmakers to strike down a bill that would create a structure of fines for “homosexual propaganda” in any medium that could be seen by children. The petition has almost 230,000 signatures. If you feel so inclined, keep signing!

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress continues to be a great English-language source for news on the issue. Today’s post illustrates the maxim that as a given instance of fearmongering becomes more hysterical, the odds that it will invoke the demographic crisis grow exponentially. Here, we examine not the cancer-causing nature of abortions or the Muslims and Chinese who are poised to overrun Moscow at any moment, but the sinister nature of childcare centers named for rainbows:

​​Elena Babich, a local lawmaker who voted in favor of the legislation on its first reading, explains in a column for Izvestia that the measure is designed to save Russia from the same fate now plaguing neighboring Germany:

In Germany, they have awakened to their ongoing extinction as a nation. But here [in Russia], during the day of the city, we have hanging all over St. Petersburg the face of Peter the First and a bright rainbow. Why the rainbow, when it’s the global symbol of the gays? But here, all around the city – from the kindergarten “Rainbow” to the pharmacy “Rainbow.” All rejoice. Soon we will be rejoicing to the point of extinction.

One correction: Elena Babich was only mentioned in the Izvestiya column – she wasn’t the author of it. (Volsky’s wording makes that unclear, I think.) She’s a lawmaker for the racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (pretty savvy branding, eh?), and hopefully not a good barometer of public opinion. I mean, I would imagine most people would think twice before making the claim that Germany has it all figured out re: the “death of the race” (translated here as “extinction as a nation”).

Also, one linguistic note: Babich sounds just as silly, but a lot wittier in Russian – where rainbow (raduga) and rejoice (radovat’sya) have the same root. We’re rainbowing ourselves to death, here!

Image Monday

Two images from social networks. First, winging its way to me via Facebook (originally featured on the blog of the Russian independent news radio channel Echo of Moscow), a photo of the ballot used at the United Russia Party Congress yesterday to select Putin as the party’s choice for president.

Translation:

Twelfth Congress of the National Political Party “United Russia”

Moscow                                                              27 November 2011

BALLOT

for secret vote on the nomination by United Russia of a candidate for the post of President of the Russian Federation.

________________________________________________

PUTIN Vladimir Vladimirovich

Shockingly, the vote was unanimous. As the first commenter at Echo of Moscow glumly observes, Stalin at least had fake opponents.

The second image is from journalist Julia Ioffe’s Twitter feed.

A poll by the Levada Center, a renowned polling organization in Russia. Question: Which politicians’ recent public appearances and statements have been the most memorable to you?

The interesting thing isn’t the answers so much as the list. It’s topped by Putin and Medvedev, followed by a list of lesser United Russia figures and opposition politicians. But third from the bottom is Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. What? You mean this nice old man?

Kirill is widely seen as having brought the Church and the government closer together. The West also seems to like to bring up his alleged ties to the KGB – a lot of the church leadership in the Soviet period had KGB ties, including special KGB agents assigned to each of the church higher-ups, since making nice with the government was the best way to maintain legitimacy and not get arrested. Kirill, besides being an archbishop, was the Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations beginning in the late 1980′s – basically, chief government liaison.

But classing him as a “politician” is still pretty amusing. Slash truth-telling.

Stop Anti-Gay Legislation in St. Petersburg – Please Sign!

Some of you may have seen this AllOut.org petition against anti-gay legislation in Russia. It’s a great petition to sign, but the text on All Out’s page is a little lacking in details. The English-language internet doesn’t have much good information on the legislation – it’s being reported in LGBT outlets more than Russia-focused outlets, and a lot of the available information seems to be poorly reported or conflicting. So I was pleased to see this morning that Igor Volsky has a pretty good summary of the situation on the ThinkProgress LGBT channel.

The proposed legislation, introduced by a faction of the United Russia party, is at the municipal level, affecting only St. Petersburg. But Moscow is allegedly considering a similar measure. Stirrings about federal legislation (mentioned by Volsky) reflect, I think, a justified nervousness on the part of the LGBT activist community, but not a serious threat (yet). The issue is that the head of the State Duma’s Legislative Committee, Pavel Krasheninnikov, says he supports the legislation and would like to see a federal version. But a similar federal bill has been introduced in the Duma four times, in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2009, and has failed each time.

But this is obviously still a really big deal. The legislation is attempting to introduce fines for the dissemination of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and pedophilic “propaganda” aimed at minors (the inclusion of pedophilia is not a coincidence – in the mainstream Russian cultural consciousness, it’s all the same); the concern, besides the inherent human-rights-violating nature of the bill, is that the law could be applied to basically anything mentioning these topics that kids could see, effectively placing a taboo on talking about any sort of queerness. Ever.

Homophobia is totally acceptable in Russia – to legislators and to the majority of ordinary people – and I think it would be great to send a powerful message that millions of people both in Russia and abroad think this attitude is backward and cruel. About 117,000 have signed the All Out petition as of press time – if you feel inclined to add your signature before tomorrow, when the bill goes to its third reading, I, and all the queer activists and allies in Russia, would be grateful!

"Moral deviance" - well, he is smoking.

Before we go, let’s lighten things up a bit: the one bright side of a culture where most people’s conception of homosexuality is purely theoretical and “gaydar” isn’t even a thing is that it gives you pop stars like the glamorous middle-aged Boris Moiseyev, who reads as flamboyantly gay to Americans, but whose not-traditionally-masculine gender performance is mostly ignored by the mainstream Russian media. (Although when he came to Taganrog for a concert – which, yes, I attended – the local Cossacks protested his “moral deviance.” Really.) Also, you can have flyers for a “drag party” posted all over the campus of Far Eastern State University, which are very exciting to the young Americans studying there who think Russian drag queens sound like the most fun time ever – but turn out to be advertising a drag racing party. Wah-waaah.

So much plastic surgery. Also, pretty sure that's a wig. He's usually a brunette.

Then again, you also get the perennially duck-faced hair-stylist-turned-superstar, Sergey Zverev, who also reads as flamboyantly gay, but has been “caught” by “paparazzi” “having sex” with starlets. (I don’t recommend Googling that, or even him, at work.) Oh, Russia.

Who’s Looking Out for the Junkies? Who Should Be?

This New Yorker blog post by Julia Ioffe (pro tip: if you see Russia journalism by Julia Ioffe, you should read it) led me to this horrifying article about a home-cooked heroin replacement that’s ravaging the large Russian drug-using population. If you’re sensitive, proceed with caution. All you really need to know is that the stuff is made with codeine and iodine, is significantly cheaper than heroin, and will kill you within a year in a disgusting flesh-eating way once you start using it regularly. And in Russia, codeine is very easy to get in large enough quantities to make it. And, Russia has a heroin problem – both in terms of demand, and how difficult it is for the average addict to access. The Russian government appears to be doing next to nothing about this.

Depressing all around, but I found this particularly interesting and sad:

“Addicts are being sold [codeine] by normal Russian women working in pharmacies, who know exactly what they’ll be used for,” said Yevgeny Roizman, an anti-drugs activist who was one of the first to talk publicly about the krokodil issue earlier this year. “Selling them to boys the same age as their own sons. Russians are killing Russians.”

Russians are killing Russians. This invokes the duality, familiar to Russians and anyone who studies Russian culture, of svoi and chuzhoi, one’s own and that which is foreign. The idea – not to put too fine a point on it – is that if you’re a Russian, you trust and take care of those who are close to you, and mistrust and/or say to hell with everyone else. Genevra Gerhart, in her wonderful reference The Russian’s World: Life and Language, explains:

“[The] closeness of family and friends creates two personas for each Russian: the public one with a hard exterior shell that knows you must shove or you won’t get any, and the rich, warm, private one that goes to extraordinary lengths for one of her own.”

I’m agnostic on the common claim that this is an ancient, essential characteristic of the Russian people, but I have experienced its traces in contemporary Russian society, and it’s not too hard to see how Soviet society would encourage this attitude. Following the rules may have kept you safe, but it didn’t get you ahead; and while the fear of the Gulag abated after Stalinism, being a maverick was never encouraged, as is evident in this sad, dreamy cartoon short (“Little Idiot Girl”) about a kindergartner who’s a bit of an odd duck. The best way to function in a repressive but broken system is to band together with people who are “your” people, keeping your heads down and pooling your resources against the hard outside world. “Your” people are whoever you let in – your family, close friends, neighbors, coworkers, schoolmates.

In Roizman’s quotation, the definition of svoi is expanded, as it has often been in the past twenty years, to include all Russians. In the post-Soviet vacuum of official ideology, the ethnically-defined nation has been put forward (often for political gain) as one possible replacement for the Soviet brotherhood of all workers. The problem is that, just like the brotherhood of all workers, the nation – except in emigration, or communities with a high level of interethnic conflict – is never going to be a meaningful enough marker of svoi to incite ordinary folks to extraordinary behavior, to calling in favors or staging drastic interventions. I mean, there’s a reason Benedict Anderson’s communities were “imagined.”

Roizman’s complaint is symptomatic of contemporary Russian reality; it reflects a total lack of interest in systemic, government-implemented fixes, and a reliance on – and ultimate disappointment with-  the mythos of the common people’s togetherness, strength, and love for one another. It’s the lament of a man who lives in a society where the government does nothing about terrible social problems like drug addiction and HIV infection, and so instead he imagines that the regulatory role in fixing these ills should be played by ordinary people – that folks should draw the svoi/chuzhoi line such that all suffering Russian people are svoi, so that they see their sons and brothers in the addicts they sell pills to. Instead, they look and see only chuzhie lyudi, strangers.

Insulting Political Leaders’ Facial Hair: What Could Go Wrong?

In honor of Movember, a couple of lessons we can learn from people who have poked fun at the ‘stache.

1. If you make light of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, prepare to face the consequences. 90% of the comments on this Foreign Policy list of Dictators with Mustaches (thanks, Denise!) are from Turks, insulted at Ataturk’s inclusion. Somewhat disappointingly, the Turks are more upset about the implication that Ataturk was a dictator than the implication that his mustache was silly.

Sure, if you’re writing for an American magazine, “the consequences” might just be an angry internet mob; but Mr. Homans should know before his next vacation to Istanbul that insulting Ataturk is actually illegal in Turkey. The cult of Ataturk as Turkey’s founder, leader, guardian and savior is not only legally encoded – it’s very, very powerful. Calling Ataturk a dictator – in any context – will be taken by many Turks as a personal attack. In Mr. Homans’ defense, the text under Mustafa Kemal’s photo – “as he guided Turkey toward economic and political liberalization in the years that followed, he shaved [the mustache] off entirely” – does not paint the Father of the Turks as much of a dictator at all. Besides, the extent to which Ataturk’s rule was autocratic is certainly a valid question to discuss. Regardless, blithely putting him on a lighthearted list of dictators was definitely a PR misstep.

2. Speaking of PR missteps, Osip Mandelstam probably should have learned from his: a dictator who will exile you to the Urals for insulting his mustache is probably about to go off the deep end. Leave the country. As Foreign Policy mentions, the poem that got the venerable and tragic Russian poet arrested (the first time, in 1934) included an insult to Stalin’s mustache.  Тараканьи смеются усища – literally, “his cockroach-whiskers laugh,” or, in one particularly dreadful translation, “Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming.” It insulted other parts of Stalin’s person, too, like his fat, “worm-like” fingers, and finished off with a racist stereotype of bloodthirsty Ossetians. (Stalin wasn’t even definitively Ossetian! Geez, Mandelstam.) Mandelstam survived that arrest and exile, only to be re-arrested during the great Purge of 1936-1938 and sent to the Soviet Far East. He died in a transit camp in Vladivostok at the end of 1938.

[Incidentally, to continue the short story recommendations from my last post (anyone read Babel yet? No? You are a constant disappointment.), try Varlam Shalamov's "Cherry Brandy," a meditation on Mandelstam's death in the transit camps.]

In any case, I hope my gentleman readers are enjoying Movember, and will consider modeling their mustache off that of a Eurasian political leader. Just make sure you make it clear that you’re not trying to be insulting.