spud says hi

Interesting.

So, my hosts in Riazan' were very interested in keeping me entertained; thus the concert, and the trip to the Kremlin (oh. and also the loan of a DVD for the evening when they realized my computer could play them, because I HAD to see a group called the "Turetskii choir."  I'd seen ads for them here, and asumed that was the "Turkish choir," since that's the translation.  No, actually, it's just led by a guy named Turetskii.  Anyway, it's basically a small show choir, all men, including several with the FREAKIEST falsetto voices I have ever heard.  Seriously.  A MAN singing that bird aria from Mozart's Magic Flute is very, very strange.)

They also offered me books to peruse, in one of which I found this.

It's a copy of the census form Nicholas II (the last tsar) filled out for the first Russian national census in 1897.  (There'd been regular things called "revisions" that were basic censuses before that, but this was supposed to be more modern and scientific, with more questions to get a fuller picture of what Russians were doing.

Anyway.  You learn that he and his daughter (at that point the family only has one) were both born in Tsarskoe selo, the "Royal village" outside Petesrburg.  You learn that he and his wife (born in Germany) were both educated at home.  You learn that his soslovie, or legal social estate, is "Emperor of all the Russias."  That his job position is "master of the Russian lands," and his job description is landowner (his wife is "mistress of the Russian lands," and her job description is "guardian of charitable homes.")

I just find that interesting, the idea that EVERYONE was supposed to be part of this census, and that the Emperor himself figured out a way to fit his role into the form that was meant, for the most part, for very, very different people.

(Oh, also, Nicholas had very nice handwriting.)

Why we went

E was born in September 1941.  Things were not good in Moscow, or near it, where her mother had fled, at that point.  Her father, a 40ish engineer, went off to join the volunteers, to defend Moscow.  To quote E, "he saw me once."  He died in early 1942, and his widow never knew where he was buried.

In recent years, though, there have been a lot of attempts to put names to some of the dead more specifically.  And so, E found out where her father was buried, in a little village on the way to Kaluga, a couple hours from Moscow.

So that's why we went.  I helped E and her friend, whose father also died in the war, but who doesn't have a site to visit, clean up the monument that's at the spot where those who died at that battle were buried.  It's something that's been there for years and years and years, but since E found out about her father, she's gone every year to take care of it.  We straightened flowers, raked (I got called a peasant, approvingly, for my ability to rake), and painted the little fence around monument (my painting ability was also commended... I have to thank Дядя Иван for a lesson in how to load a paintbrush well for that).  And we toasted the fallen with a little bit of wine E brought for our picnic.

All this got done this weekend because today's Victory Day, and it's a big deal, still.  There were concerts and parades and this and that all over today.  After I watched the big military parade on Red Square on TV this morning, this afternoon I went for a very, very long walk, and saw a lot of people just enjoying the day, but also heard lots of war-time songs on loudspeakers, and part of some ceremony (no clue what; I heard an echoing bit of it coming from some unknown loudspeaker, but not clearly enough to get what was going on), and part of a concert at Gorky Park.

I avoided the big site today, Victory Park, which seems to be more known by it's pre-park name, Poklonnaia Hill.  This was in part because I thought the crowds would be mad.  But it's also because I went there on May Day.  E suggested taking a walk by our little tributary river that day, which turned into exploring a side path off that that took us across a bunch of railroad tracks and then up to the park.  I knew it was close, but not quite that close.  I'm really realizing it today, though, because today all the trains that go through there are blowing their whistles when they go by the park.  This is not normal (thankfully), but kind of cool for the day.

Anyway, the park has a lot of sort of mediocre monumentalism, like the giant obelisk and then a huge WWII museum behind it.  I'm being a little annoying by calling it mediocre, but some of it really is; the obelisk would be fine if it were plain, but it's really too overdone.  And it especially clashes with the bright red Coca-Cola umbrellas and chairs surrounding the various food kiosks.

There's a sort of interesting, though again a little too overdone, statue in the back of the museum.  It's supposed to commemorate the civilian casualties of the war, basically (the "victims," to use its term).  I find it pretty effective, really.  And I very much appreciate that that's part of the memorial space, even if it's kind of in back and out of the way.

So, anyway.  Even though the whole militarization thing here can sometimes make me shiver a little, I have nothing but respect for the sacrifices of so many Russians during the War, and so, С днём победы!

Days, as they go

So, I’m not sure if this is actually interesting, but I thought some might want to know what it is I’m doing here, and what “work” entails.  This is what I’ve done the last couple of days.

Monday morning I headed out to archive #1 in time to get there pretty much right when it opens at 10:30.  This is a city-run archive, and one of its interesting features is that there are lots of just regular people around getting the kind of stuff people need to get from city archives; records of where they’ve lived, or of military (or Communist Party!) service or whatever.  But that also means it’s a little crazy at times… not the reading room where I work, so much, but the entrance.

Anyway, it’s a bit far away, and it has one big drawback:  you can only order 5 “dela” a day.  A “delo” is basically the smallest archival unit (in fact, that’s an older term for it).  Some of them are huge; at both the archives I’m working in I see people working with bound volumes of handwritten material that are literally a foot thick.  Mine are instead anywhere from just a couple of pages to usually no more than 20 (though occasionally more), which means that I end up not spending the day at one archive.

But Monday I read through the five dela I’d received, and then did some work copying out possible future dela to order (this is turning into a huge task; there are literally thousands of dela on my topic, so merely noting them all down is going to turn into part of the research here).  There’s a way in which this is very much data entry, though with some thought involved, I swear!

After a few hours at that archive (and I basically spend thouse hours sitting at a desk, poring over papers), I set off for archive #2.  It takes about an hour to get from one to the other.  The metro ride itself is almost exactly half an hour, though sometimes I take a bus and then the metro, in order to avoid having to make two changes on the ring line.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Metropolis, but there’s a bit with the shifts changing, and sadly, the Moscow metro, as much a miracle as it is, often feels like that.  Or, obvious as it seems, like cattle.  Not the metro.  The people, including me.  Reading helps.  I’m working my way through the first book by a quite popular Russian mystery novelist (I’ve actually read an English translation of it before, but I figure I’ll work my way through the series while I’m here, and I’d rather start at the beginning).  On Monday, I took the metro through the two changes, largely because at one of them there’s a newsstand that sells The Economist, and I’ve been buying it weekly and reading it slowly over breakfast each day.  And the issues are freshest on Monday (or on Sunday, I think, but I’m not making a special trip then).

Then there are the other things that bring the process up to an hour.  Putting on my coat, putting everything back in my bag, and then reversing that at the second place (you can’t bring much with you into the archival reading rooms, for the most part).  A trip to the toilet (still, something I think about scientifically… I’ll pee in archive #1, but still try to avoid the toilet in archive #2; then there’s the fact that library #1 pretty much always has toilet paper, though there’s only one dispenser outside all the stalls, so you still have to think ahead, while library #2 rarely has toilet paper available… ).  Finding something for lunch (if I’m heading to a library, I’ll eat there, but for the two archives, I hit a grocery store, usually, or stop somewhere for something quick).  A bit of walking.  Getting into and out of the metro.  It adds up.

Then I’m at archive #2.  On Monday, I was chastised as soon as I got there for having too many dela out and told I couldn’t order more until I turned some of them back in.  Granted, I did have a fair number out, largely because they allow 10 a day, and I didn’t go there on Friday, and they take me forever to go through.  You see, at this archive I work with documents from the eighteenth century.  It’s much the same work as at the other, a combination of poring over the lists of dela, and then going through the individual documents, looking for bits and pieces of relevant information.  But that last bit takes much longer at this archive (and sometimes the first bit does, too).  Russian, the language, changed a lot over the course of the eighteenth century, as did its orthography.  So the stuff I look at often has strange vocabulary (thankfully, knowing a fair bit of French and at least some German helps enormously with deciphering things) and REALLY strange handwriting.  There are letters left over from Old Church Slavonic and its various script forms.  There are… well, there’s a bunch of stuff, and it’s a challenge.  A puzzle, really.  I have to work from context sometimes until I get a given hand down (and of course the next page is written by someone different).  Sometimes that happens at the other archive, with nineteenth century documents—I actually let out a small “oh” the other day, and startled a passing reading room worker.  This could have been bad, as this one in particular is always walking around shushing people.  I think she kind of likes me, though, because I just got a look, and that’s it.

On Monday I worked there until about 7:45 (and then was chastised again for not following rules about not giving back documents you’re done with after 7 [this was totally my fault, but there you go]), and headed home.  I’ve got a new way home from this archive that involves a fairly interesting walk, through a bit of park, then through an interesting neighborhood (including by the Korean [I assume South… it’s got yin-yang symbols on the gates, and I’d assume North’d have hammers and sickles or something…] embassy) and over a cool pedestrian bridge, and then a bus ride.

And then Tuesday and today were just variations on that.  Yesterday I reversed the order of archives and was home by 7, since they both closed at 5:30 (and though I could have gone on to a library for an hour or two, three separate places in a day is just too much).  It doesn’t actually take that long to get home, I stopped at the grocery store.  Oh, man, and bought really yummy spinach that I just steamed lightly like Julia Child suggests:  with only the water used to wash it.

Today, I hit library #2 first, and then archive #2, since archive #1 was closed.  At the library I’ve been doing a bit of writing/revising on something, and then also going through some old journals to see if there are relevant bits.  Today I found very few relevant bits.  Which is actually kind of a story in and of itself.  I also took a slightly longer break between the two places and bought a cell phone.  This took doing.  Mental doing.  I still don’t have a cell phone in the US.  Oh, wait.  In North America.  Anyway, dealing with getting one, even though I totally bought the cheapest, least fancy one possible, was oddly intimidating to me (yes, I can fly off to Russia for six months more easily than I can buy a cell phone).  Anyway, now I have a cell phone.  Oh, and I also bought symphony tickets for tomorrow and Saturday night.  Yeehaw.

Oh, and the picture?  Has nothing to do with any of this.  But I haven’t been carrying my camera everywhere, and I’ve been meaning to post this.  This is what I see as I walk away from library #1 to the metro stop.  It’s an old monastery (I think) that’s been extensively rehabbed, if my memory serves me correctly.  And lurking behind it is one of the Stalin gothic towers.  This neighborhood is called “Kitai gorod,” which literally means China town, although it has nothing to do with China, sort of the way Red Square didn’t originally have anything to do with the color red.  “Kitai” refers to the kind of walls that were in the area, and “krasnyi” (red) originally just meant beautiful.  Which it is.

Knitting and civic responsibility

Someone posted this link over at the knitty board.  I just think it's cool.  Particularly the poster.

Julie Andrews rocks

For various reasons, but tonight for the fact that her performance in The Sound of Music is deeply appealing to five year olds like the one who's been staying with me this weekend.  The slightly sick five year old who's been staying with me this weekend.  The five year old who asked to go to the drive in for dinner tonight (and, really, who am I to say no to that, especially when I know her mom goes there now and again). The slightly sick five year old who has trouble falling asleep when her mom's not around.  And whose voice I heard saying "here Ziti, here Ziti," followed shortly by "bad kitty, bad kitty," at about 5:30 am yesterday.  I don't know what happened between those two points, as I was vainly trying to pretend that I wasn't really awake.  Alas, I was.

Aaaanyway.

I actually got some yard work done with IZG visiting, partially because she was interested in the worms I occasionally uprooted while pulling dandelions.  Of course, then we had a minor meltdown over the fact that I was pulling dandelions, because they're pretty.  I remember when I thought that.

And I read the play I wrote about a while ago.  There are various quoteworthy things, but this, in particular, I must bring up:

HEADMASTER: There is a vacancy in history.

IRWIN: (thoughtfully)  That's very true.

HEADMASTER:  In the school.

IRWIN:  Ah.

Part of me says hey!  And part of me says hee.  And all of me thinks that more thought on this play must wait until I'm more rested.

Twenty years

A large part of me can't quite believe that Chernobyl is now filable under history.

I mean, I remember it.  It was one of those crazy seeming, momentous events in late Cold War history that marked my high school years.  Gorbachev.  Chernobyl.  Perestroika. 

And now that I think about it, the even more amazing years of college:  Berlin Wall down, First Gulf War, Gorbachev in the Baltics, the coup...

I didn't take many political science classes in college, but I did take a basic Introduction to International Relations.  It was one of the only really big lecture classes I ever had, certainly the only one outside of the sciences.  And it was taught fall 1991.  That meant that there were articles available on the end of the Eastern Bloc, but no one quite knew what to make of the just-happened fall of the Soviet Union, too.

And yet, now, history.  My college students for the most part don't remember any of it, and soon most of them won't have been born then.

Crazy.

Chernobyl's something else, though.  It is astonishing to me that 20 years later, there's still debate over its effects.  And yet, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising.  For all of Gorbachev's eventual transparency, that hadn't much taken effect by early 1986.  And the results of the hiding linger.

In this case, there are obvious, physical, "real" repercussions to that.  People's lives (or deaths) have been influenced by the interpretation of the event, and the reactions of the state.

In Lenin's Tomb, about the last years of the Soviet state, David Remnick discusses the odd state of ahistoricality existing in those years.  And, more to the point, the problems faced when new truths (not truth) emerge and contradict the current understanding of history.  Or, perhaps, better, when certain memories are allowed to be remembered.  He has a lovely line (which I unfortunately can't find right now because I think I've packed the book) on this, suggesting that in the Soviet case, the control of memory warped people.  That the image created by the state was too unreal to be truly believed.  That in the face of rediscovered truths, the society propped up by this set of memories could not but crack open.

I've been thinking a bit of this because I'm interested in the reviews of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, a play that just opened on Broadway.  The New Yorker's review emphasizes the sexual politics of the piece, but the NY Times' review was much more thoughtful about the historical content of the play.  Or, rather, the ideas of history and its place in society, as presented in the play.  It's made me order the script to read, which is something I've never done.  I suppose as someone who teaches history, a play about the act of teaching history should interest me.  Anyway.  More thoughts, perhaps, after reading it.

But.  The news recently has had memorial articles on Chernobyl that have made me think more about these things.  And so:

Tales of workers and emergency workers on the scene.  More voices from the area.  And a photo essay.

Thinking like the president?!

Wandering the web over coffee this morning, I happened upon this note about a point GWB's apparently going to make in his state of the union address tonight.  Basically, that America needs to worry because we may start lagging (or are lagging) in science and technology.

Now, aside from the oddities of this president making that claim, which Chris Mooney, the blogger (who's admittedly and totally partisan, I should perhaps note), makes, this struck me because of a historical parallel I've been pondering for the past day.

Basically, I've been thinking about how to go about dividing all of Russian history into two sections (semesters/terms).  Bear with me,  here.

Different people do that dividing in different ways.  When I first got my job, the course catalog had two regular classes on Russian history:  Imperial Russia, which ran from the beginning of time until 1917, and the Soviet Union.  That was fairly normal.  I divided the first class into two, divided by Peter the Great.  Also fairly normal.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which is frickin' almost 15 years ago), there've been movements to integrate its history more fully into the broader history of Russia.  That has often meant using earlier dividing points for a two semester sequence (that is, not privileging the Soviet Union by giving it a whole semester to itself).

Most often, the new dividing point between semesters is 1855 (or 1861).  The former brought a new tsar to Russia, Alexander II (that's him in Helsinki on the left).  The latter brought the first of his "Great Reforms," the emancipation of the serfs.

The Great Reforms brought a whole series of other, uh, reforms to Russia; to the army, to the judicial system, to provincial organization and self government, to censorship, to towns...  and the new tendency to use them as a dividing point emphasizes their significance.

I've been wondering whether I'd want to use them as a dividing point, however.  There's been a lot of work showing the ways that efforts in the decades before the Great Reforms really paved the way for them.  In other words, they're much more integrated with the time that precedes them than this division suggests.

But what other date to use?  Another possibility would be 1812 (or probably 1815).  Using the Great Reforms really emphasizes Russia's internal politics.  Using this time, the end of the Napoleonic wars, would emphasize Russia's place in the world.  The Napoleonic period sees the peak of Russia's international power, in many ways.  For all the claims that Napoleon was beaten by the cold, not by the Russians (and certainly there's truth to the idea that poor provisioning beat Napoleon), Russia's military did extraordinarily well during the eighteenth century (hence a lot of the anti-Catherine propaganda [it's not how she died]) and into the beginning of the nineteenth.  Although Russia rides on the success of 1812 (and on) for another few decades, proclaiming itself the gendarme of Europe and all that, in many ways from this point on there's perpetual decline of Russia's international position as defined militarily (a few successes notwithstanding).

The first major sign of that is the Crimean War... and that brings us to the Great Reforms.  One theory for why Alexander pushed through the Great Reforms is that the debacle of the Crimean War forced it upon him.  And why the debacle?  Too many enemies, not enough allies.  Serfdom.  But also, and very significantly, technological backwardness.  More difficulty supplying troops over much shorter distances than enemies.  Guns that don't shoot as far.  Less advanced navy.

Now.  It's all these links that have me thinking like the president.  (Well, as the president supposedly thinks.) 

I've often thought that there are interesting parallels between Russia's two wars with Napoleon and the US wars with Saddam.  Two wars separated by periods of more or less liberal reform.  The first a kind of half victory.  The latter a rout.  Images of the enemy as the antichrist (or otherwise eeeeevvviiillll).  There are big problems with the analogy, of course; it's only really quite loose.  But, still, there are certainly ways in which links can be made.

But just recently, I started thinking about future parallels, based on the idea that just struck me about this period being in many ways the peak of Russia's international power (until 1945, really).  After this Russian leaders squander many opportunities for internal reform, make bad judgments as far as foreign policy goes, and allow millions of their citizens to die from natural disasters or wars.  And that's not even getting into the whole revolution and Soviet disasters and Stalin stuff.

And one of the things that was an immediate problem was Russia's inability to keep up with the West technologically, which most manifested itself during the Crimean War.  Although between the Napoleonic Wars Alexander I, then tsar, established new educational institutions throughout Russia, after the second war he allowed his minister of education to force them onto a much more religious path.  Now, internal freedoms, or the lack thereof, certainly played just as much a role in Russia's difficulty with modernization, but educational priorities matter, too.

And that brings me to the US today.  And science.  And its difficult position within American society, largely because it's not in American society.

And that makes me sad and anxious.

By grace of clarinet?!

I'm going through materials for the new semester, and came upon this anecdote, reported in Achilles Rose, Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 (I found this on Project Gutenberg, but lack the original publication information).  He's telling the tale of "a very young German, Karl Schehl," who was part of the Grand Armée:

After a battle on the retreat from Moscow he, with many others, was taken prisoner by Cossacks, who at once plundered the captives. Schehl was deprived of his uniform, his breeches, his boots. He had a gold ring on his ring finger, and one of the Cossacks, thinking it too much trouble to remove the ring in the natural way, had already drawn his sabre to cut off the prisoner's left hand, when an officer saw this and gave the brutal Cossack a terrible blow in the face; he then removed the ring without hurting the boy and kept it for himself. Another officer took Schehl's gold watch. Schehl stood then with no other garment but a shirt, and barefoot, in the bitter cold, not daring to approach the bivouac fire.

The Cossacks (on examining the garments of Schehl), found in one of the pockets a B clarinette. This discovery gave them great pleasure; they induced their captive to play for them, and he played, chilled to the bone in his scanty costume. But now the Cossacks came to offer him garments, a regular outfit for the Russian winter. They gave him food to eat and did all they could to show their appreciation of the music. What a rapid change of fortune within two hours, writes Schehl. ...

Schehl himself was protected from all molestations by the peasants by the two Cossacks of the escort. He was even taken into the provision wagon where he could ride between bundles of hay and straw. On the evening of the first day's march the troops camped in a birch forest. Russian people are fond of melancholy music; Schehl played for them adagios on his clarinette, and the Cossacks gave him the best they had to eat. His comrades, now reduced to 400 in number, received no food and were so terror-stricken or so feeble that only from time to time they emitted sounds of clamor. Some would crawl into the snow and perish, while those who kept on moving were able to prolong their miserable lives. The second night took away 100 more, so that the number of prisoners was reduced to less than 300 on the morning of October 31st. During the night from October 31st. to November 1st. more than one-half of the prisoners who had come into the camp had perished, and there were only about 100 men left to begin the march. This mortality was frightful. Schehl thinks that the peasants killed many during the night in order to be relieved of their guard duty.

Schehl (and Rose) present Russian peasants as unbelievable primitives, but for this odd love for sad music.  That's not the only place I've seen that kind of description, but somehow it's particularly noticeable to me here.

History and the Orenburg shawl

Last week I read (for class) Frederick Burnaby's A Ride to Khiva, which is the story of an English officer's travels into Central Asia in 1875-6.  Burnaby was an adventurer who decided he wanted to travel to Khiva, which had just been annexed by the Russian Empire, mostly because he read a newspaper article that said foreigners weren't allowed to go there.  But go there he does, though at the worst time of year and with assorted (though in some ways surprisingly few) difficulties on the way.

He's an engaging writer, with comments like "I once rode a love-sick camel" thrown in for good measure.  He's got some of the tendencies of people from his time period when it comes to describing non-white, non-christian populations.  And he also, as part of his desire to describe everything (I suppose), has a lovely description of the Orenburg shawl trade.  For fun, here it is:

A considerable trade is carried on in the district between Orenburg and Orsk in shawls and neck-wrappers.  These are made of gossamer-like webs of goats'-hair woven into the articles above-mentioned.  They are marvellously light, a very large shawl, which can be put into an ordinary-size official envelope, not weighing more than a few ounces.  What most surprises the traveller is the excessive warmness of these Oriental wraps, as well as the softness of their texture.  Many of them are so delicately made that they can be passed through a finger-ring.  Any one who has material can understand what the author of an Eastern tale had in his mind's eye when he invented the story of the fairy tent which could shelter an army, and was yet so light as to be hardly perceptible to the touch.

Amongst other kinds of shawls offered for sale at the various station-houses on the road, and where the good woman and her daughters entreat the traveller to purchase in so plausible and winning a manner that it is difficult to say nay, are wraps made of hares'-down.  This is woven by the wives of the farmers and peasants in the neighborhood into very warm shawls, and which are softer, if possible, than those made of goats'-hair, although they are not nearly so light.

The price of these articles of female attire is not by any means exorbitant.  A good shawl can be obtained for from thirty to forty roubles.  I feel convinced that if some of our London tradespeople were to send their travelling-agents to those parts, a very profitable return would be made on the capital investment; for the shawls in question would demand a ready sale in this country.

Anyway.  My shawl, not being made of the true gossamer goats'-hair (hee), won't fit through a ring.  But hopefully it'll be pretty, no matter what.