The name Krasnoyarsk means “red pit.” The valley the city lies in is sunk below a lip of reddish clay earth.
I left St. Petersburg and the harmonic music school apartment to fly to Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, in the dead of winter. There I met Yulia, and things were not harmonious.
She had grown up in Kras, as it’s often shortened, and much of her family still lived there. The first thing Westerners think of when they hear “Siberia” is, of course, gulags, but Krasnoyarsk is a normal city of about a million, the third largest in Siberia. The magnificent Yenisei River cuts through the centre of town.
We stayed in her mother’s apartment on Karl Marx street, a one-bedroom flat, with her mom, two insane Yorkshire terriers named Risska and Zhulka, and her sister, who was visiting from Moscow.
The first day I was there, we went for a walk around Krasnoyarsk’s Red Square, a small park with a phallic monument, and looked at the swimming-pool green buildings. On his travels across Russia in the late nineteenth century, Anton Chekhov was particularly taken with Krasnoyarsk’s beauty, and there is a statue of him there. As in all Russian cities, there is also a tremendous Lenin statue.
As you move east across the country, Russia gets more extreme in every respect. In St. Petersburg, it was cold. Here, my nostril hairs and eyelashes froze. This is how cold it was: After walking for a while, we wandered into a grocery store. I took off my glove and grabbed a bag of frozen peas. The frozen peas felt warm to the touch.
To anyone accustomed to the Romper Room safety of North American streets, where everything is padded and railed and of a certain height and of a certain specific design to avoid even the remotest possibility of human injury (and the subsequent lawsuit), the basic infrastructure of Russia can be a shock. In Russia, ordinary objects seem intentionally designed to pose safety risks. There are literally holes in the street. Also, poles and pipes and stakes and protrusions from buildings and vehicles and surfaces. When walking on the sidewalk, one keeps a sharp eye out for icicles dangling off rooftops. The street surface is a skating rink, and the ice forms severe transitions from the street up to the sidewalk. Traffic is even more treacherous than usual in such conditions. If you miss your footing crossing the street, you slip backward underneath the car that is too impatient to give you a berth.
“I think our marriage is over,” Yulia said.
I said nothing.
In these kinds of crises, I guess, they say that you are supposed to talk. You are supposed to formulate some new policies to get you out of the debacle, spend down your foreign currency reserves to support the ruble, and so on. We did the opposite of what you are supposed to do. We ignored everything that was wrong. We didn’t talk.
We passed by Krasnoyarsk’s Havana Club. A banner hanging out front read Pay Half, Hang Out 100%. Party in Crisis Style at Havana Club. Cheap!
While I was there, we mostly sat inside and watched TV. Yulia’s sister Sasha was on an all-day-every-day Dom Dva binge. Something like Big Brother, Dom Dva (Second Home) was one of Russia’s most popular shows at the time. The premise was simple: a group of whiny twenty-somethings trapped together in a house fuck and fight and try to become stars.
During a commercial break, Sasha told me about her plans for the near future. She would stay in Krasnoyarsk to have her son. She would return to Moscow on her own in May to fetch spring clothes. She’d spend the summer in Kras and then go back to Moscow with the child.
“The most important thing,” she said, “I want to find a man as soon as possible. I don’t know how to raise a boy.”
The father of her child hadn’t wanted anything to do with her once she became pregnant. Even worse, once her employer found out, he fired her from her secretarial post. Appalling but not uncommon. The world of business is one that largely excludes women except as eye candy or maternalistic administrative assistant types. Only three percent of the country’s senior executives are female.
I ask her what the dating scene in Moscow was like.
“Women don’t meet men in nightclubs or cafés anymore,” she said. “They meet them in cars. You can meet men in the metro. But it’s a different classification of man.”
“They meet in cars?”
“All my friends who have cars met their boyfriends that way. The man pulls up next to her. Lowers the window. And they exchange phone numbers.”
“This is the new tradition of courtship in Russia?”
“Yes, and I don’t have a car. It means I don’t stand a chance.”
When I would next see her in Moscow, her son had been born and she was eagerly enrolled in a driving course. So I think she really believed this. And who’s to say? Maybe she was right.
In that short break before Dom Dva came back on, I asked her what, if any, was the effect of the ratio of men to women in Russia, in her opinion. The fact that there are eleven million more women than men must make what might ordinarily be a challenge into a competitive sport.
“Men already think of themselves as a present,” she said. “They don’t need to do anything but wait for you to come up to them.”
When foreigners travel for more than a few days around Russia, they’re required to register their visas at the post office. This is often a lengthy bureaucratic hurdle because of long lines, so I was psyched when I walked into the post office with Yulia’s mother and there were only two people in line. Yulia’s mother went up to the woman at the end and asked her the typical question: “Are you the last one?” An old man sitting on a bench on the other side of the room said, “I am the last one. And all these people are before me.”
The room was filled with benches and the benches were filled with people. So while only two people were standing in line, a sum total of twelve people were actually in the line. The entire room was in the line. She told the man, “We are after you.” Then she told me she was going to run some errands and I should hold our place.
I wasn’t sure if I should sit down or stand. So I stood.
The next person who came into the post office asked me if I was last, and I said yes.
“I’m after you,” the man said, and found a seat on a bench.
In one story in Tom Bissell’s collection God Lives in St. Petersburg, which is mostly about Americans fucking up in big ways all around eastern Europe, a character named Donk divides the world into Chaos People and Order People. He says that Americans are Chaos People who think they’re Order People, and that Russians are Chaos People who know they’re Chaos People. Even though I don’t think Donk gets Americans right—to me we seem very much Order People who think we are Order People—he hits the nail on the head with Russians. The system is pure chaos, and it is the system that Russians embrace.
American lines occasionally honour a request to “hold a place,” but even then, it seems to me, it’s done with some reservations. We want to enforce order, and a violation of order to us means you lose the right to your spot.
Russians, of course, have a long history with lines. The Soviet period required standing in a queue at length for anything, and often required standing in many separate queues to get everything you needed. Mothers would assign their whole families to various lines and agree to rendezvous later with all the goods. The Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin wrote a brilliant novel, perhaps the last great Soviet novel, called The Queue, in which a cast of characters spend their lives wandering in and out of a line, waiting for what they don’t even know.
North Americans will generally sense the chaos approach in their first ride in a Russian car. Russian drivers pay little attention to the lines on the roadway. They will drift out to pass while going around sharp curves, and it’s the responsibility of any oncoming traffic to get out of the way quickly.
The chaos is even built into various systems. There are pedestrian walkways in the subway tunnels of Moscow—a subway system that accommodates ten million people per day—in which two lanes of human foot traffic suddenly switch sides in the middle of a turn, resulting in a flustered and chaotic X of people running right into each other.
My line at the Krasnoyarsk post office became confused when a second window opened. Everyone got up to re-establish position. Everyone seemed to know whom they were after, and I stuck to the person I was after. That is why the initial question is key. Your place is dependent on someone else’s place. Our “lines” were one amorphous mass of people who all knew whom they were behind.
Then an old woman came in.
“Who is last at window number four?” she said.
A girl at the back said, “I am standing in both windows.”
“You can’t stand in two windows. You can only stand in one window. You have to choose.”
“I am standing in two windows,” the girl said.
“Is this two lines or one?”
“It is two,” one younger girl said.
“It is stupid to stand in two lines. Let’s make it one.”
The girls behind the counter pursed their lips in barely suppressed amusement. If, as in North America, they were to come out and settle the situation, organize the line, surely the crowd’s fury would turn on them.
“It is one,” another person said.
“Where is it written there should not be two lines? Who is last in the line this girl is not in?” No one answered. “All right, I am going to stand right here and I am behind this woman and that’s where I’m going to stand.”
The woman in front of her said, “No, the girl who stood behind me was behind me. She’s going to be in front of you, lady, and you should be after her.”
I’d been standing in line for about an hour and a half and I was somewhere between three and seven people back.
The old woman looked to the bench where the girl who was behind the woman at the end of the line sat. She sighed. She was not pleased with this development, but she trusted that the chaos would get her there eventually. She went and sat next to the girl on the bench who was currently last in one of the lines or the other or both. “I’m behind you,” she said.
Yulia introduced me to three of her friends from school. Their stories were remarkably similar. They had all gotten married right out of school and within a year they were pregnant and, within months of giving birth, their husbands, heavy drinkers, punched their faces, and then they all got divorced and moved back in with their parents. Compared with their relationships, I thought, what kind of problems did Yulia and I have?
We met one of them at a café. Tanya was the only one whose lifestyle and successful business made it possible for her to meet us in a café—an extravagant luxury for the others. She had started her own kitchen design company, which was doing very well. She had long blond hair and big blue eyes. She was soft-spoken and smart and savvy and beautiful. She was really into these audiotapes that are all about positive thinking leading to positivity in life and negative thinking leading to negativity in life.
“The problem, Jeff,” she told me, “is that there are no men in Russia.”
Tanya liked to emphasize, when showing off her car or her rings or her apartment, that all of it was paid for with her own money. The money she earned from working. She didn’t travel much, and when she did, it was on the cheap. Many Siberians don’t travel much. The average salary here was around two hundred dollars per month. A reasonable rate for a plane ticket from Krasnoyarsk to Sochi, a popular Black Sea resort town, runs much more than that. The train is an option if one is willing to give up four days to a week on either end, depending how far you’re going. So, Tanya explained, you save for the ticket. Then, once you get there, you rent out a room in a house with some grandma, stock the fridge with food from the grocery store, and take the shuttle buses to the beach.
Yulia asked Tanya what she thought about a new decency law proposed in the Duma that would prevent girls from wearing revealing shirts in public.
“I am all for this law,” Tanya said. “Let me tell you why. I don’t have a nice belly. These girls, they have very nice bellies. Much better than mine. So if my man—I don’t have one—sees her nice belly, he will go after her.”
Cars idled in rush hour traffic. Yulia and I walked along Mira street faster than the cars moved. The idling buses were packed full of people exhaling so much collective hot breath that a layer of ice formed on the windows inside. Passengers’ fingernails chipped away at the ice as we passed.
The entire city centre of Krasnoyarsk was lit up like a Christmas tree. Lights hung over the streets, fake trees with electric branches lined the sidewalks, animated creatures of all sorts adorned the street lights. Everything was lit up except the park at Lenin Square, where the complete absence of lights made for a shroud. You could only barely make out the silhouettes of the two massive objects there: the statue of Lenin pointing to Moscow and the cement exhaust pipe, part of an abandoned subway construction project, standing ominously together in the dark.
A higher-up whom Yulia’s mom knew at the Pushkin Theatre had gotten us tickets to the dress rehearsal for the new production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The crowd included punk rockers in spiked belts with dyed pink hair and more proper theatregoers in evening gowns, as well as the casual masses in jeans and sweaters.
Yulia pointed out a guy who spent all day every day on the streets outside the theatre, begging for money until he had enough for a ticket. He took a seat in the third row.
Streetcar is my favourite play. And I liked the bizarre performance: Tennessee Williams filtered through a twenty-first-century Russian lens with a psychedelic seventies aesthetic bent. The men were manly and powerful and sexy—Mitch like Indiana Jones; Stanley, a New Russian Scarface—and Blanche was a fragile but electric Russian call girl–cum–lingerie model.
The production said a lot about gender roles in Russia. There was the macho, violent, crude, aggressively sexual Russian man—a type personified by none other than tiger-hunting, bear-tranquilizing, fighter jet–piloting judoist Vladimir Putin.
Because it was a dress rehearsal, the director—a man with curly shoulder-length hair, spectacles, a blue blazer, and a white dress shirt—spent the entire play pacing the aisle, chain-smoking, and barking directions at the actors.
There was a bed on wheels that rolled away under the propulsion of Stanley’s thrusting when he and Stella went at it. There was a quasi-stripper scene with Blanche dancing in the kitchen in her underwear. And when she was led away to the crazy place, the stage lit up with palm trees and carnival lights. Something seemed to be missing from the final scene, in which Stella should find herself torn between her repulsion for Stanley for raping her sister and her animal desire for him (or whatever that desire has become by the end). They shared a vacant, resigned hug, and the stage went black.
A great moment for me was when Blanche called Stanley a polack, and he said, in perfect Russian, “Ya stoprotsentny Amerikanets!” I am 100 percent American!
Afterward, I saw the theatre-beggar at the coat check retrieving a mink coat.
One morning, I took a marshrutka out to the state-run Crisis Centre for the Assistance of Families and Children in the suburb of Shinnikov, in the Leninsky district. I wanted to understand what kind of support there was for girls like Tanya and others in Krasnoyarsk. The ride was a convenient hour and a half from the city centre. When I got off the bus, I saw a shopkeeper from one of the kiosks burning old fruit boxes beside the streetcar tracks. A couple of stray dogs came close enough to sniff the smoke and ran away.
The crisis centre used to be a pharmacy. Inside, the first thing you saw was exercise equipment: a treadmill, a pull-up bar, an exercise bike. No windows. Various offices housed different kinds of family specialists. A sign on the door of the woman who dealt with children’s issues read Session in Progress. The Russian word for “session” is pronounced seance, and whenever I see it in this context, my immediate register is always: “Seance in progress.”
The crisis centre had opened almost nine years earlier. At first, the plan was to offer counselling and shelter, but even though they had the sleeping space and multiple bathrooms, the authorities required a special room for disinfecting clothes, so the idea was quashed. Now the centre basically offered day services, legal assistance, counselling.
Galina Fyodorovna met the women and families who came here in a room stuffed with plaid and paisley armchairs. She had been working there as a psychologist for six years. I sat across from her in one of the paisley chairs. A stuffed white bear sat on a speaker next to me.
Galina Fyodorovna told me some basic facts about their situation. Almost every abuser they dealt with was under the influence of alcohol. The police perceived such domestic abuse as a personal matter that should be dealt with among the family, and they refused to intervene.
She told me that it was a frustrating predicament for her. “People have lots of ideas, ways to make the country better. We all have a lot of ideas, but no way to put them to work. If you start doing it, they’ll stop you. There is a frame in which you can act, and if you go outside the frame, you’ll be stopped. If, for example, the project is not directly beneficial for the government, it won’t be approved. Whereas in other places, in other countries, projects are initiated and evaluated for their benefits later.”
I spent two hours there on a Tuesday afternoon. No one in crisis came through the door, and I asked Galina Fyodorovna how many cases of domestic violence they’d had that past year. She told me there had been a total of five, which is a rather small number in a country where thirteen thousand women are murdered by their partners each year.
“They seldom come here,” she said. “They are afraid their husbands may take revenge. But when they do, they come because their feelings and their inside world has changed, and during our discussion, during our talk, I understand that they are being beaten. Women here think it’s usual and not a very serious crime. I mean, the women, when beaten, they know it’s an offence or crime, but they don’t pay attention to this.”
So she and the psychologists on her staff were diplomats of sorts. Since they were limited in what they could do, they did what was possible. Once a complaint was lodged, they invited the man in for a talk.
“If the husband agrees to come in, they will achieve the point where they have good relations—by, for example, resolving conflicts between the husband and wife through argument rather than through a physical fight. We talk to the person who commits the violence. We talk to the man, and after that, usually, the man becomes better.”
If the man refused to come in, they took different approaches. They invited the children in and taught them to protect the mother. They also taught the wife how to respond without provoking the man.
I asked her for some specifics on how women could respond without provoking. She didn’t give me specifics. She called the techniques they taught techniques of “usual communication.” I was reminded of Anatoly Ivanovich, the matchmaker, speaking in similar terms about instructing women on how to make themselves desirable to men.
Galina Fyodorovna approved of the Year of the Family and the new holiday about love, because she saw the Russian family as an institution in crisis.
“The responsibility of men continues to drop. The role of the father weakens. On the whole of civil society, it’s noticeable that the value of the family as a unit is disappearing.” She worked with kids in schools, and she told me that in one class, out of twenty-five kids, twenty were being brought up by single mothers. “We don’t know exactly the cause of divorce in these situations. But we can say that violence is a primary cause of divorce in general.”
One change she had noticed was that more middle-aged women and even pensioners in abusive relationships were seeking help, and she attributed this to some feeling of hope.
“They were hopeless because women thought that’s the way life was supposed to be like, and now they can see the situation,” she said. “Now older people see the way young people build lives and relationships and think they can rebuild their lives.”
On the Western Christmas Day, Yulia’s grandmother was travelling by train to have some special mineral mud treatment on her knee. While she didn’t have to be at the station until ten in the morning, we left the house at seven to pick her up, load her things, and take two buses to the train station.
On the way, we stopped at a kiosk. In front of the kiosk, a man was lying on the ground. Probably he was drunk, but it was minus-twenty Celsius. People stepped over him to get to the kiosk, bought their produce and whatnot, and stepped over him again when they left.
Yulia’s mother noticed some yellow stuff bubbling out of the man’s mouth and nose. They asked the owner of the kiosk to call emergency services. By the time they arrived, he was already dead. We said farewell to her grandmother at the train station, and when we walked by the kiosk again, the police investigator was standing next to the man and writing a report. Someone had pulled his coat over his face.