Putin Country

As a missionary, I spent a good chunk of time, about five months, if I remember correctly, in a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia, called Kolpino.  When originally transferred there, I wasn’t sure what to think.  I came to enjoy my time there, especially as I got to know some of the people who lived there.  Kolpino was and remains a factory town, though.  The vast majority of the people we ran into on the streets were so-called “real Russians,” just like lower middle-class Americans who have to work hard to provide for their families are often referred to as the “real America.”  It was often a struggle to understand the slang-filled language of the common man, but I enjoyed the challenge and I enjoyed running into such a wide variety of people, from pensioners to basketball-mad teenagers and from Muslims of Central Asian descent to Orthodox priests.  St. Petersburg and Moscow are highly westernized and with their slick, polished images, are often far removed from the Russia that surrounds them, often less than an hour’s drive away.

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels (ISBN: 978-1-250-11811-0) provides a glimpse into Russia outside Moscow’s Ring Road and away from St. Petersburg’s glittering canals.  Garrels, who was a journalist in the Soviet Union, returned to Russia and decided to spend time in Chelyabinsk, also an industrial city, but one famous for being part of the Soviet military-industrial complex.  Like a lot of Russia, life here was extremely turbulent during the 1990s, right after the fall of Communism, and many people were happy to see some stability come to their lives and their country when Vladimir Putin came to power.  Since then, life has gone on, and, as tends to happen, different people’s lives have taken them different places.  The author delivers a number of short sketches of these different lives.  There are taxi drivers, working moms, doctors, activists, journalists, people fighting for the rights of disabled people, environmentalists, farmers, and entrepreneurs.  Not many sections of society are left untouched.  With all of her friends and contacts, Garrels eventually gets to the political questions Westerners wonder about.  In many cases, the Russians she talks to are either on board with Putin or at least accepting of the way things are going.  In the rarer cases when the people she talks to don’t like the way things are trending in Russia, the option isn’t to fight the good fight at home and change things through activism and electing the right people; the alternative to satisfaction with the status quo is to emigrate.  Garrels chronicles the hopelessness that many people feel, regardless of their political opinions, because they feel that Putin’s reign is a machine that cannot be altered.

I thought the literary portraits presented were great reading and reminded me a lot of Kolpino.  While anecdotal in nature, and not strictly scientific (in as much as social science can be called scientific), they seemed accurate and presented a faithful outline of the present general mentality in Russia.  I was not at all surprised to read about patriotic Russians who want the best for their country.  How to get there is what’s up for debate.  As long as the current system is in place, independent of personalities, things will probably only progress at an incredibly slow rate.  Corruption and cronyism, problems that are increasingly present in the West, make it hard for democracy, freedom, and economic prosperity to thrive.  Still, there was a lesson that is applicable to everyone and something worth taking into consideration when one weighs the policies one wants to support.  The lesson, I thought, was that, a lot of times, life is simply what we make of it.  The chapter that dealt with people fighting for a better life for their children with disabilities was poignant, but was also heavily marked by a fighting spirit of individualism.  One couple had worked hard, putting in the blood, sweat, and tears necessary to build a center for disabled kids and that provided various resources for parents dealing with the same things they dealt with.  They had built a successful operation, often in the face of formal and informal opposition.  Other parents involved in getting the project off the ground had similarly sacrificed.  The second and third generation of parents coming to the center had to be educated as to the commitments necessary both to improve their own situations and to continue the communal benefits.  It was slow work, but progress was evident.  Even in the face of great trials and an oppressive government, individuals find the best way to solve their problems.

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