A guide to the Общежитие - part 1

The общежитие is basically a Halls of Residence, and mine is called ДАС (Дом Аспиранта и Стажёра). There are several in МГУ, but none as bad as this one. I'm not just saying that - before I got here my Russian teacher in London told me the worst thing that could happen would be that I ended up in ДАС. So of course I emailed the school before I got here to ask where I would be living, and whether there was any possibility of choosing, but, as in everything, they were singularly uninformative, instead repeating the mantra, "just come to Moscow. Everything will be sorted out when you get here". I'm not quite sure why I fell for this. I must have temporarily taken leave of my senses.

ДАС on a good day. This is actually entirely the wrong kind of light for ДАС, which should only be photographed in drizzle under a steel grey sky in order to accurately capture the atmosphere of the place

More ДАС I'm afraid. But look - the snow is melting!

And so it was, that at 6am one dark, decidedly autumnal morning in late September I pulled up outside the building, right in front of a collection of those massive bins that populate New York alleys and exist solely for vampires, murderers and cats to jump out at you from behind. At this point, it did occur to me that this might be one of the bigger mistakes I have made in my life. What I could see of the building looked like it should be condemned. The driver took me into the totally deserted entry hall, where after some discussion, the guards let me through. I was then taken along a corridor, complete with paint peeling off the walls, and after banging on one particular door for some time, the driver abandoned me to the mercies of the old woman who opened it. She told me that the room I had been assigned was already full, but that this wouldn't be a problem, they would fit me in anyway, and packed me off with a slip of paper to find another old woman at the other end of the building six floors up. This woman, who should be given a part in the next film about the Bastille, or some medieval prison, had a cough which sounded like she had the plague, was mostly covered in an enormous shawl, and had the biggest collection of keys I have ever seen, all strung on a massive metal circle. I kept expecting her to cackle as she looked for, and then tried to prize off the requisite keys from the keyring.

We set off to find the room. Naturally when we got there the keys didn't work, so the old woman bashed on the door until it was opened by a half-asleep and totally bewildered girl who is now my room mate. Although there were two beds in the room, one was on its side against the wall with a desk in front of it, and the mattress had been moved to the other bed. The undaunted old lady broke the desk into pieces and dumped it in the hallway before departing, and I exchanged a few words with my new room mate before she went back to sleep and I lay awake on my bed, trying to calm myself by reciting poetry. Unfortunately, I soon ran through all the don't-let-the-bastards-grind-you-down, madness?-This-is-Sparta poems I know, and went onto Julius Caesar and the inevitability of death, which isn't the best for cheering yourself up.

Actually, I was very lucky to end up in the room I got, because as it later turned out, some people sleep six to a room, and have to do their homework on their knees sitting on their beds. I can imagine this for a few weeks, but for four years of a university course?

How does a Russian stove work?

This has been bugging me since I first got here, because I don't like not knowing how things work. I first saw a Russian stove in the Volkonsky's home in Irkutsk - it is a massive thing that goes right through the centre of the house, so that its corners stick out into multiple rooms.

So... I'm not the world's best photographer, but the big white thing is part of the stove.

The stove is designed to solve Russia's biggest problem, i.e. that it gets a bit nippy in winter. So how do you heat a building using the minimum amount of fuel and fuss? As you know, the problems with open fires are two fold; firstly, most of the heat goes out the chimney and is wasted; and secondly, feeding the fire is a full time job. A Russian stove gets around this by channeling the hot air through a labyrinth of brick passages in the stove. The heat is transferred to the bricks, effectively creating a heated wall in one part of the room. The bricks stay hot for a long time and radiate heat at a lower temperature than say, metal would, so you don't need to constantly feed the stove. In fact, you only need to fuel it twice a day. There is little smoke generated because the fire in the stove is so hot - hot enough the turn iron red. According to russianstove.com (yes, there is such a place, and it claims to be the most interesting page on the web), the stove has an effective range of 20 feet. The only downside is that you might kill yourself with carbon monoxide, so you first have to open all the dampers (little doors on the stove separate from the main door for fuel) to let enough air in to burn the wood down to coals with no blue flame showing, and only then shut them all and go about your normal business.

Of course, bricks take hours to heat up, so this type of heating is only suitable for climates where you are going to need to continually heat a space for a very long time. Like say, from November to April. 

Traditionally, there might be a bed above the stove called a лежанка (as in "приятно думать у лежанки"), and in peasant houses people used to take baths inside them, because they made their stoves big enough to fit a grown man inside. This is a bit too much like Hansel and Gretel for my taste, but maybe I am just paranoid.

A Hollywood producer in Moscow

On Friday I went to a talk by a Hollywood producer who has lived in Moscow for the past ten years. He was what people used to call "a singular gentleman", but (or perhaps because of this?) he had some interesting stories to tell about his experiences working with and for the super-rich in Russia.

A brief outline of his life: He grew up poor in Beverly Hills, jealous of the lifestyle of his more privileged friends, and started work straight out of high school. Over the next twenty years he started various businesses, always with the aim of finding something that would make him rich. Unfortunately, nothing he turned his hand to was successful for more than a couple of years, and he ended up coming to Moscow in the late 90s with the idea of being a link between Hollywood and the Russian film industry. The financial crisis in '98 put a bit of dampener on things, but eventually he got himself hired to bring an American movie star to the Moscow Film Festival. Since then he has made a living arranging for film stars and singers to attend the birthday parties/film festivals/business openings (delete as appropriate) of wealthy Russians, with the occasional sideline into helping out rich people from other countries. Basically, if you have a lot of money, live within the borders of the old Soviet Union, and want to meet a movie star, this is the guy you call.

He has brought more eighty "stars" to Russia and related countries over the last ten years. Most of them wanted to visit Moscow strip clubs and also Red Square, to experience the illicit thrill of standing at the heart of [former] enemy country and reminisce about how they watched tanks rolls across it when they were children. He has arranged parties for members of the Gaddafi family, the wife of the President on Azerbaijan, various Russian bankers and oligarchs (who appear to have really long birthday parties - all the parties described were multi-day events - does everyone really go for the entire time?), and, perhaps strangest of all, he arranged for Ramzan Kadyrov to meet Jean Claude Van Damme and Hilary Swank. He joked that this last one didn't make him very popular with the human rights people. Ho ho ho. Those pesky human rights people.

Anyway, these are a few snippets of advice from his talk:

1. If you life is threatened, ring up your Chechen mates
Whilst arranging one event, some Russian gangsters tried to shake him down. They told him that if he didn't give them half the money he was being paid he would never leave Russia alive. So he phoned up one of his Chechen friends, who lent him a couple of his people to take with him to the park where he was supposed to hand over the money. When they arrived and the Russians were told whose people he had with him, they apologised, said the whole thing had been a mistake and that of course they didn't want his money. The Chechens said they thought it must have been a mistake, but just to make sure everyone understood the situation, they told the Russians that if anything happened to this guy [the producer] they would hunt them down and kill them all.

2. If you want to get to know people (and if you don't, you should), open a restaurant
The only reason anyone opens restaurants is to meet people. It is the best way to make contacts quickly, and it means you can hang out and people will come to you, instead of you needing to traipse around the whole city. Of course, this does mean that your interests are not aligned with those of the people putting up the money for the restaurant, but hey, more fool them.

3. Speaking Russian is totally unnecessary
He claimed to negotiate business deals with people in Russian, without speaking a word of the language, and only finding out after the fact what he had agreed to. This cannot possibly be true. People here are smart and would take him apart in about five seconds.

4. To avoid having to pay bribes, make friends with the Head of the FSB
Actually, I thought this was inspired. He was asked whether he paid bribes, and he said he had never paid a bribe in Russia (which he had to say, really, being a US citizen). The way he avoided it was by making friends with the Head of the FSB, and having a photograph of him and various Chechen people on the wall of his office. Then, whenever anyone came to see him, he would find a way to bring these friendships into the conversation, and hey presto, no one dared ask him for any money.

The main problem with what he said was that you had to stop after every sentence and consider whether you believed him or not. If you're a salesman, especially if what you are selling is your network, it pays to exaggerate what you have done and who you have met. Probably half of what he said never happened. But even so, this man's world is so far removed from anything I have ever, or will ever, encounter, that it seems incredible that both his life and mine are taking place in the same city. Moscow is an interesting place.

Большой Театр

I have been to the Bolshoi twice recently - once to see Ruslan and Ludmilla, and once to see Boris Godunov. I don't know what it looked like before the restoration, but now it is stunningly beautiful. As the BBC reported at the time, the renovation cost half a billion pounds, and took six years. They cleaned everything using vodka and squirrel tails (huh?), and replaced the frescos and gold leaf. I am not generally a fan of too much gold - I think it can look very heavy and over the top, but the effect in the Bolshoi is not like that - the place is light and sparkling.

The tickets are also a fraction of the price you pay in Covent Garden. The most expensive grade of tickets, barring I suppose what I guess used to be the royal box, cost around £100 if you buy them on the website of the Bolshoi itself (which most foreigners don't - they use tour companies instead and hence pay much more). In Covent Garden you would be paying double that on a normal night. The main problem is getting your hands on tickets, which can sell out months in advance. When the theatre reopened in October last year there was a big fuss made about tickets for the earliest shows, because ticket touters paid homeless people to stand in line all night so they could be the first to get hold of tickets.

So if you are ever in Moscow, I definitely recommend going to see something here. The sets were gorgeous, the music was amazing, and the audience appreciative (well, for Boris Godunov anyway. Ruslan and Ludmilla was a done in a modern setting complete complete with naked people wandering around the stage for no apparent reason, and so was a bit odd). Plus the subtitles are in English, so you can understand what is going on.

How old is old?

Russia is not the place to come if you are a single women above the age of twenty-five and are anything other than supremely comfortable with that. Or at least that's been my experience. Whilst travelling from Vladivostock to Moscow this summer, the most common question I was asked was about my age. The conversation usually went something like this:

Local: How old are you?
Me: Thirty
Local: Thirty??!!! What do your children think about you leaving them to go travelling?
Me: I don't have any children
Local: No children? What does your husband say about that?
Me: I'm not married

At this point, several people basically told me to get a move on, one man asked me, quite seriously, if I realised that no one would marry me now, and one woman recommended a particular shrine in Siberia to me, where women went to pray to God to send them a husband and children. The point of this is that ideas about age are slightly different here, partly because life expectancy is lower. In 2009 CNN reported that the chance of a 18-year-old man reaching retirement age in Russia was only 50%, vs. 90% in the West. In this context, leaving it till past thirty to get married and have children is leaving it a bit late.

Yesterday I had a conversation about mid-life crises with my english conversation class. I explained that this was something people might go through around the age of forty-five or so, to which one man pointed out to me that in Russia that was a bit late to be having a mid-life crisis, when you might well only live for another ten years (he was slightly on the pessimistic side here - life expectancy at birth is 62.8 for men and 74.7 for women. Still, the figure for men is more than fifteen years lower than the comparable figure for men in the UK).

Paying for language school

Today I needed to pay for the next couple of months of language school. "Oh, ok," you say, "so you went into the school and paid by credit card", at which point I fall off my chair and roll around on the floor laughing. Hellllooooo?! [knocks on computer screen]. We are talking about a country where I need to get a form filled out and signed in order to take a suitcase out my apartment building. Let me explain to you the ways of paying for language school.

Task 1: Find the director of the school
You might think this would be easy, that he would be in his office, between the hours of, oh, say, ten and three in the afternoon, but in thinking this way you would be completely wrong. In fact, on any particular day, he might not come in at all, or he might spend the entire day in the cafeteria. When you have found him, you tell him that you want to extend your stay in Russia, and then he tells you approximately how much this is going to cost you in roubles.

Task 2: Collect the money
Since almost everything is done in cash here, you now need to assemble $1,500, using cash machines. This will almost certainly take up a couple of days, unless you feel like risking your debit card being stopped by the bank and causing you the mother of all hassles.

Task 3: Get first lot of forms
Now you have so much cash you can't close your wallet, go and find the director again. At this point he will then fill out and give you your first two forms and two copies of your contract, which you will need when you try to extend your stay in the общежитие (this is a whole other story).

Task 4: Swap one form for another
Take one of the forms, go downstairs to a different office, and swap it there for another form.

Task 5: Go to bank
Take both forms, and then take a tram for 20 minutes and find the bank. There is only one bank you can use, so don't bother trying anywhere else. When you get there, you will be required to stand in a queue for at least half and hour, at which point the lady behind the counter (it always is a lady) will take both of your forms, and use the information on them to fill out two more forms. She will also stamp your existing forms. She will then give you all four forms back, and you will need to stand in another queue in order to give someone else your massive wads of cash. This person may well then tell you that all the computers in the bank are currently broken so they can't take your money, at which point you must resist the urge to tear your hair out. Eventually they will start working again, at which point she will take the two forms the first lady gave you, stamp them, tear bits off, staple receipts to them, and give them back to you.

Task 6: Back to the director
Go back to the school, taking with you the four forms you have collected, and show them to the director. He will take two of the forms back, photocopy them, and give you the photocopies. He will then update your student card. Then take your two remaining forms to another room and give them to the people there, along with two passport photos of yourself, a copy of your contract, and your passport. They will in turn give you a piece of paper that you can show the police if they stop you, explaining that they [the school] have your passport.

Task 7: Wait ten days
After ten days, go back to the final room and collect your passport and a photocopy of your new visa indicating that you are going to be a student for another two months. Congratulations! Now you must go back to the общежитие and do the same thing there.

Total number of forms/ miscellaneous pieces of paper: 6. Affect on blood pressure: terrible. As to why this is all necessary, I have no idea. There must be a small mountain of paperwork on me scattered around Moscow, or there would be, if I wasn't convinced that as soon as I have left the room they just tip it all in the bin. But, as one librarian said, after my friend exploded on hearing how many forms she would need to fill out to get a library card, "bureaucracy makes life interesting."

Spring in Russia

Today the temperature went up to 4 degrees Celsius. Spring is here and the snow is beginning to melt, which means it is time to un-sellotape the windows in my room. In January when the temperature first went down to -20, my roommate and I duct-taped all round the windows. This didn't stop the cold air getting in, so we then tried to insulate all round the windows using foam sticks they sell here for that purpose. That didn't work either, so we papered over the worst-offending window with newspaper, again without much success, except to deepen the already permanent gloom in the place. Finally, facing a choice between light and warmth (I was already sleeping under 13 layers at this point, and it was still getting colder), we sellotaped the curtains together and to the wall. We unstuck the curtains sometime in February, and today, we opened the window for the first time since December. This may sound gross, but you have no idea how cold it gets here - it went down to -35, which is the coldest I have ever experienced. Anyway, all the Russians do it too (probably without the curtains bit), so it wasn't just us being pathetic.

The authorities here have been preparing for the melt as well. People have been breaking up the top layers of snow (presumably to increase the surface area), and for some reason they have also been slicing off the front part of the snow blocks that cover all the flower beds, so there is a gap between the snow and the metal railings that delineate the flower beds from the pavement. I have seen people do this so I know it is happening, but I am not sure why. Trying to allow air to get to the soil? Trying to ensure when everything melts it goes into the soil and not all over the pavement?

British scientists discover...

This is something that came up in my English conversation group a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about "what women want" or something, and for some reason one of the students asked me if I knew any jokes about British scientists (I didn't). Apparently here in Russia there are lots of jokes about British scientists doing bizarre or pointless research. So if someone has done some research to show that alcohol makes you drunk or something similarly self-evident, they will say that it was probably done by a British scientist. I am not sure what to make of this, especially because it is not only in Russia - another student said there are lots of Czech jokes about British scientists as well. Not really complementary, but definitely interesting.

The joys of В Контакте

Russians don't really use Facebook that much, instead they have В Контакте. I have no idea if this is better for keeping in touch with your friends, but it is a lot more useful for learning languages. On В Контакте you can watch films, TV shows, music videos etc etc, in Russian, for free. This is probably illegal but people seem quite relaxed about copyright here. Currently I am watching the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast in Russian whilst trying to read Lermontov. The songs are pretty distracting, because since I know all the words in English (and why not?), I keep trying to predict how they will translate them whilst trying to keep the rhymes (like "large" and "barge" when Gaston is singing about how many eggs he eats).

But the best thing so far about В Контакте is a Russian soap opera set at the beginning of the 19th century called Бедная Настя. It's weirdly addictive, a bit like Sunset Beach (with similar production values and believability of story lines). I think it was made for the hard-of-thinking, because everyone speaks really slowly, so I can actually understand what they are saying. Plus, like Sunset Beach, nothing ever happens. You can skip four or five episodes and the same people will still be in the same room talking about the same thing, which means lots of repetition of vocabulary. One girl spent three episodes complaining about being locked in her room, trying to pick the lock with a variety of knitting needles, combs, hair pins etc, before it occurred to her that she could just climb out the window. Another scene involved a serf theatre rehearsing Romeo and Juliet in Russian, with the барин yelling at some poor serf girl about how could she not know the balcony scene - EVERYONE knows the balcony scene. I can't think of any British soap operas where people quote Shakespeare (although to be fair, this may be because I don't watch any British soap operas). Yes, so Бедная Настя is fantastic, even if they do dance to pop music at their balls.

Is the basement infested with asbestos?

On the whole, I think it is. I looked online at some photos of asbestos cladding around pipes, and it looks like what is in the basement of the общежитие by the washing machine room. The pipes that have fibres flaking off them continuously. Since I have been walking by these pipes four times a week for the last six months, this is less than ideal. It also means I should probably do the rest of my washing by hand in my room. I tried this last week and it made me very grateful for washing machines - it takes an age, the soap is a pain to get out of the clothes, and then you have to wait two days for everything to dry. On the other hand, it is a lot better than lung cancer.

There is a possibility that the whole building is, in fact, made of asbestos.