11/27/2007

So classes are starting to come to a close. We’ve complained!? throughout the semester about the lack of any sort of serious homework here, but now we have term papers and exams and I think its starting to dawn on me that plenty of information and readings have been thrown at me throughout the semester…I just didn’t have the language skills to allow all those Russian sounds and letters to form words and retainable thoughts in my mind when the were spouted at lightning speed by the professors of my Baikal Studies and History of Russia courses, the two hardest classes and the only ones that require significant finals work. My paper for the History of Russia mainstream class is about the geopolitical consequences for Russia of World Ward I. I told my Baikal studies professor I was planning to write about relations between Cossacks, Buryats, and Old Believers living east of Baikal in the nineteenth century, but I think it might be even too complicated to sort through Russian card catalogues in search of information relating to only one of those three groups. With such broad topics, so many varying points of view to explore, and my reading rate of about 3 pages an hour…it’s difficult to know where to begin.

In any case, we decided registration at the main university library was probably a good beginning (though the beginning of the semester might have been a better time for the completion of this process). University buildings in Russia don’t usually gather together on a campus. They are spread throughout the city. Each building contains a department an each department contains a library, but you can only check books out of your department’s library or from the main central library which requires a separate registration process, and so that was what we set out to do. It’s a nice place…marble staircases, comfortable chairs, chandeliers everywhere…but its difficult to check a book out to read under the chandeliers.

The process begins with a requirement to leave your coat in the coatroom. Basically any official building in Russia contains a large coatroom with several workers in front of a window ready hang your coat up as quickly as possible and then return with a numbered ticket that you must have (but that I frequently lose) to retrieve the coat at the end of the day. In many buildings, including our international department at the university, a guard reprimands anyone who plans to irresponsibly keep themselves too warm by continuing to wear the coat after leaving the front hall. Unlike the other public buildings, the library has another set of guards after this first one to make sure you don’t bring any books from home that may accidentally mix with and tarnish the collection already inside. Natalie’s grammar textbooks barred her entrance one day. You then register yourself in the library, and to obtain one book, you hurdle yourself through a series different rooms with various card catalogues, filling out of various request forms and then giving the request forms to a lady sitting at a desk at the front of the reading room (the only place where students are allowed to use the books…they can’t be taken home). Here students can’t wander among the library stacks contemplating their vast university’s stores of knowledge like we do in the US. Instead, the front desk lady gives the form to another worker whose job is to efficiently retrieve the requested book from the shelves …but she often does quite a bit of aimless wandering herself and returns only to yell at you for asking for a book that doesn’t actually exist in that set of shelves. It turns out only a handful (maybe around 100) library books are actually located in the main library building….the university stores the rest in another building a few minutes down the road. So you then make your way to the official university book request dispatch desk where they send out a dispatch for the book, which won’t be arrive at the main library until tomorrow or the next day, when you usually don’t have time to return

Sometimes Russia is fastidious in its organization. I’m sure few books have been illegally extracted from that web of bureaucracy that exists I guess to prevent book theft…or maybe its also there to maintain book quality and keep people like me, who have a talent for accidentally breaking textbook bindings within the first three weeks of receiving them, from spending too much time with them. One book I used had a copyright of 1946, but I saw absolutely no folded page corners or scratches on the covers.

Inside the home, observed is a similar many-stepped meticulousness aimed towards cleanliness, healthiness, and safety. You open five locks before entering the apartment, everyone’s require put on slippers within minutes of taking off their shoes, you’re supposed to change into sweatpants before sitting on the bed so as to not soil the bedspread with your jeans that have been outside all day, every three days the floor must be scrubbed….I’m actually not sure if everyone universally observes the rules or if they apply only to my apartment, but every Russian home I’ve seen (though that number may only amount to 4) has been immaculately spotless. Of course, many of the rules seem cumbersome and unnecessary, but they contribute to an observable good result. Immediately outside of the home, any sense of organization disappears. The exteriors of most of the apartment buildings are dirty and in need of repair. Rusting twenty-year-old playgrounds stand at the centers of their unmaintained courtyards. Around six construction projects that no one seems to be working on anymore dominate my neighborhood’s skyline. And, as discussed in our orientation materials, Russia as a country and government, despite its bureaucracy, is pretty disorganized.

In one of our classes we read this article about how much Russians like fences. Any visit to a Russian village confirms this purported stereotype. But, as I think Susanna pointed out, its difficult to know why the fences exist or what they divide. Cows goats and flower gardens often co-mingle. Putting up fence is an easy way to create a sense of order, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to purposeful beneficiality…like the all the fences preventing university students’ easy access to the knowledge in the libraries…its more about an impression of order than a necessary result. Maybe Russians like a sense of rigid organization and tradition inside the home because for so long there rarely existed a trustworthy safety net outside to provide day-to-day protection and predictability. If you’re living in a remote village in the mid-1600s in subzero temperatures, its impossible to work to maintain order beyond your immediate confines….but I think that’s enough broad generalization for today.