Chapter 7 – Alone in the Big City

19 December 1998

My first trip to another city alone. I left from yet another airport in Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, a city of 1.2 million in southern Russia on the Don river that separates Europe from Asia near the Baltic Sea. Because of the relatively warmer weather, it is a big agricultural area. At the metal detector, they searched my fanny pack and missed both the mace and the Swiss army knife. When we stepped out of the airport onto the tarmac to wait for the bus, the scene was magical. The sky was the color of lead, the feel of ice, the taste of snow. The low gray sky simulated the roof of an airplane hangar, and lines and lines of plane stood in silence like they had been put to bed on a starched white sheet with a blanket of snow.

The plane did not have doors on the overhead bins, most people never put on their seatbelts and kept on all their heavy coats. The next morning from my hotel window on the 13^th floor, the world was shades of white. The frost on the bottom of the window obscured the view. A mist of damp lay low over the valley. The still river was mercury silver. Smokestacks pumped white billows upward to join the white clouds overhead. In between only a hint of blue topped by a blush of pink signals that it’s time to say goodbye to the night and hello to the day.

The breakfast buffet was shredded cabbage, shredded beets, shredded carrots, undiscernible meat wrapped in cabbage covered with tangy sauce, meat battered and deep fried, buckwheat, boiled sausage, fried eggs wrapped in tortillas, and sliced, boiled eggs, juice, coffee, tea, and a variety of breads and rolls. Best of all was a kind of fry bread with cottage cheese in the middle.

I tried to iron my clothes, but the board was set up for a short left handed person.

The woman in the black dress, blond hair and pink barrette was beaten later by her husband and spent six weeks in the hospital. That was enough to charge him criminally as a hospital stay had to be more than three days to be serious enough to criminally charge him.

Chapter 8 – Teaching in a New Culture

21 December 1998 Kaliningrad

The very first seminar I organized as I would in the U.S. Give them the rules or structure i.e. the law, give them the hypothetical problem and ask them how they would apply it to resolve the issue. The audience of mostly male attorneys just stared at me. I asked again, “Well, what do you think?” They stared. I asked my translator, “What’s wrong? Why aren’t they responding?” He shrugged his shoulders. Finally a man raised his hand and said, “In Russia the instructor does all the talking. You tell us what the answer is, and we write it down. We don’t solve the problem and tell you.”

I reshuffled my mind to say this was an example of how one would do it and proceeded to do it myself. Then the next issue, I had them just talk to their neighbor about it because I figured it would be someone they knew, and they want to gossip about this crazy American woman anyhow. Next, I had them “discuss” in groups of three etc. By the end of the day, I knew I had to really change my process and introduce them to the idea of interactive teaching.

Later I learned that every law lecture was preapproved by the Communist party and the instructor just read it. No questions were allowed because the instructor might say something while answering the question not approved by the party. The entire structure of my law school education by Socratic method that was to make the student think and work out the problem and argue with others was absent. These “lawyers” were just functionaries to pass on what the party said. I knew I had a steep hill to climb to make real lawyers out of them.

At the law school in Kaliningrad, I gave law students identical resumes except for designating them male or female. The resumes were reversed in the other half the room. In both sides, they hired the “male” as being more qualified in spite of the fact the qualifications were identical just the name changed from side to side. The same thing happens in U.S. law schools and hiring.

For lunch we had crab salad, mushroom and sour cream baked in a teeny, little frying pan, great salmon appetizers, some kind of calf sliced very thin and put in a batter and then fried.

23 December 1998 – Tver

Oktybrina Cheremovskaya, a medical doctor specializing in the use of leeches, with a husband who is a police officer, tired of her patients returning time and time again bruised and battered by their husbands so she decided to start a crisis center.

The women who started the crisis center. Oktybrina is the woman sitting down in front with the red pants.

The similarities between domestic violence and rape in Russia and the U.S. are great as is the response of law enforcement and policy makers. Stereotypes, denigrating the problem, claiming family problems should be kept in the home, claiming police have “serious” crime to attend to are all familiar themes to me from years of work in domestic violence in the U.S.

Often police officers, lawyers, and even prosecutors stated Russian law incorrectly. I always distributed the actual law itself so I could ask, “Well, what about section X? How does that apply?” As an attorney from the U.S., it was the only way I could show that the speaker was wrong and not insult the entire room.

The organizers of the seminar had not provided any food or drink for breaks, so I had my driver get tea, coffee, cookies and buy cups, napkins etc. When it was time for the break, Tanya announced it, but no one came out of the room to the lobby where it was set up except the presenters and the Americans.

Tanya and I looked at each other and went back upstairs to the conference room. The women told her they thought it was just meant for the speakers and not them because they were not used to everyone being included. Still serfs.

When I returned back to Moscow, the apartment building front door had been broken and homeless people were sleeping in the lobby and using it for a toilet. Unadorned feces decorated the corners.

Chapter 9 – Getting Through the Winter

25 December 1998

I learned why Russians never look at anyone when they are walking. Their eyes are trained on the sidewalk – in the winter to avoid the ice and in the summer to avoid the potholes. I also figured out why they all walk down the middle of the sidewalk and not on either side. If there is rain or snow, the cars fly by and splash you. If there are icicles, they fall on you from the buildings. Usually at least eight people are killed every winter from falling icicles due to improper guttering.

28 December 1998

With a friend, I went to what was allegedly a gay bar in Moscow. It was mostly men. I was hustled by two women in their twenties looking for a sugar mama. I bought two appetizers, two beers and two cokes for $25.00. When I paid it, the hostess commented that $25 was her grandmother’s entire monthly pension. She got a big tip – for her grandmother.

2 January 1999

My language teacher invited me to her home. She lives in a standard Russian apartment block but when I went into her apartment, I was stunned. It was beautiful. Two bedrooms, living room, balcony off the living room, foyer big enough for a couch. A hall and a very modern and well-equipped kitchen, and a little room off their bedroom where they sit and have coffee or tea and overlook the city.

Her husband is very handy and has worked on the apartment every night for three years. He built in shelves and furniture in all the rooms, built tables and dressers, redid floors, walls, ceilings, windows, light fixtures, and completely refitted the kitchen. The bathrooms are refitted and have modern appliances. He needs to finish the floors in the kitchen and bathrooms and the walls in the bathroom and he’s done.

She showed me pictures of the place when they moved in and it was what I would have expected, a dark, dreary, junky, slummy place. Now it’s beautiful. They also have a dacha in Kelm where Checkov was born, near the Russian “Silicon Valley.”

For dinner we had biscuits stuffed with cabbage (pelmini), borsch with cabbage, a hot dish that was in the skillet that had cabbage, carrots, onions, tomato sauce, lemon and chopped up hot dogs. Other than the hot dogs, it was very good. They have cabbage in everything like we have potatoes in everything. Cabbage is healthier.

Their Christmas is January 7, and bunnies are the theme at Christmas rather than Easter.

I wrote an article for a women’s journal and my translator came to me to ask about two words he didn’t know how to translate. One was “civics.” He had no idea what civics was and when I explained that it was not only how government worked but the duty of a citizen to participate in that government. He thought that was quite an idea. Since our schools have dropped civics in the last twenty (now forty) years, soon our population will think that is quite an idea too. Today that is indeed the case.

The other word he didn’t understand was my usage of “power.” He said there are only two kinds of power – the kind the government has and physical strength. He couldn’t understand power as a concept that people could use or an ability to get things done without the use of the government. This is what 80 years of authoritarian rule will do to a mind.