Ramblings, as promised

Now, to the topics I promised I would revisit. On Wednesday night, after playing a few games of pool, we sat down and talked to Andrei, Pavel, and their friend, whose name escapes me. For a while I talked with Andrei about the stock market and investments, which turned out to be difficult, seeing as how I don't know the Russian words for any of those sorts of things. After that, we talked about politics for a while, which was definitely the most interesting part of the evening. So far the only things I have heard from Russians about Russian politics have been from Olga Ivanovna, our Politics professor. Predictably, she seems to follow the official line about the Russian political system, which holds that it's an open, democratic system in which everyone has an equal chance and say. Andrei and Pasha, though, told us that the elections this December really don't matter, as Yedinaya Rossiya (which I think is usually translated as “United Russia”) is certain to command a huge majority in the State Duma, which is their more important house of parliament. United Russia is the “Party of Putin,” and thus gets all the benefits of Putin's new laws suppressing legitimate opposition parties. The only other parties that are expected to gain seats in the Duma are the Communist Party, LDPR, and another party, which I think is called Spravedlivaya Rossiya, though I'm not certain. The Communist Party isn't particularly strong, and is mostly supported by pensioners who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. LDPR is the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who is a ultra-nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic nut. Do yourself a favour and look him up on Wikipedia to see just how ridiculous / scary this man is. Spravedlivaya Rossiya, or whatever it's called, is the union of three earlier political parties. It's supposed to be a fairly moderate party, and a challenger to United Russia. But Pavel told me he thought Spravedlivaya Rossiya was just created by the powers-that-be to take votes away from KPRF (the acronym for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation). It was really interesting for me to hear these guys give a completely different view on national politics than I had been hearing in my classes. They don't seem to think that Russia is a democracy at all, and they had the same opinion about the American system as well. I won't get into what I think about that point, as this is neither the time, nor the correct forum. As I said, on Thursday I went to IMKA, where we did some “cross-cultural communication,” which I find to be a very Macalester term. This consisted mostly of introductions (which were interesting in their own right) followed by discussing stereotypes that Americans hold about Russians, and that Russians hold about Americans. As there were two Americans there, and more than 10 Russians, this ended up being a fascinating discussion. We divided up into groups of three, with Rhiannon and I in the same group, along with a crazy Russian student-type named Aleksei, who had studied in England. Each group had to come up with a list of the stereotypes they thought Americans hold, and those that Russians hold. Most interesting to me was what Russians thought Americans think about Russians. They seemed to think that Americans know a lot more about Russians then they actually do – for instance, birch trees and good food were both given as things that Americans associate with Russia. I would estimate that very few people in the US who haven't tried Russian food would assume that it's good (it generally is, for the record), and wouldn't have known that Russia has birch trees. As for the stereotypes that that they held about us (or thought Russians in general hold about Americans), they thought we smile at strangers too much, that we get married late, and that we have high living standards. They also associated cowboys, fast food, and Hollywood. Aleksei had some really interesting views about Americans, but I won't go into them now, for I have already written way too much. Oh, and perhaps the best part about the IMKA experience was that Vitya (nickname for Viktor), who is one of the heads of IMKA has as his ringtone the song “YMCA.” As in, the Village People. That made me really, really happy.