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Post-Soviet Culture 101 with Tyotya Valya:

1. She's visiting her daughters in Germany in May. She was telling me about all the paperwork she needs to complete in order to be allowed to leave the country. Now, I had known from discussing student loans with my fourth course students that you aren't allowed to leave Kazakhstan if you are making loan payments—one of the major reasons this is still such a cash-based economy. What I didn't know is that Valya has to hand over documents about everything from her pension to her dependents to verification that she isn't paying rent on her flat. She even needs to prove that her husband is dead—I guess because they suspect she's abandoning him. Only the Soviets could come up with this kind of buearocracy, and in the FSU it shambles along under its own inertia long after the reasoning behind it has faded.

I would really not be surprised if, somewhere in the desert near Baikonyr, there's a massive cube-shaped prison full of booby-trapped cells with detailed and complex serial numbers engraved on their hatches. And only with the help of David Hewlett can you escape.

2. I should mention that Valya loves Vladimir Putin. She thinks he's amazing and has told me several times what a shame it is that he has to leave office next year. As soon as Dmitri Medvedev was rumored to be Putin's pick for the next president—a week before he actually announced his candidacy—Valya would point to him on the TV and tell me, "That's the next president of Russia." She does not mind in the least that her own president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, is constitutionally allowed to run for president as many times as he likes, and wishes Russia had the same rule so Putin could rule forever. Her reasoning: "How it goes for Russia is how it goes here. If it's bad in Russia, it's bad for us."

But she's also proud of Russia for getting a shiny new president (with better hair, but not so good a voice) and worries about what will happen to Kazakhstan after Nazarbaev. So, incidentally, is the US government. Because fifteen years of a low-key personality cult don't help nuture real democracy, and if Nazarbaev goes suddenly, the worry is that the political stability of the country might go with him.

3. I really do not understand how some products get to the market here. You can usually tell what countries something is meant to be sold in by the labeling—the main language used reflects the country of origin, but often there's information in multiple languages depending on the market. We've got Ukrainian juice and Russia soap powder that also have labels in Kazakh, Polish, Romanian, Georgian and Kyrgyz, and the markers we used in PST were labeled in Russian, English and Czech. The exception is stuff made in China; then you're lucky to get pinyin on the label, let alone English, and I have yet to see Russian.

But every once in a while—well, remember that the Family K---ev in The Village got ahold of that American blender? I don't know how those got there, but I've seen more than one in bazaars in different towns. And today, Valya gave me a bottle of toilet cleaner made by Unilever UK, with a monolingual English label, and asked me if it was English or German, and what the big orange caution sign on the back was about. She knew what it was by the shape of the bottle, I guess, and bought it just to try it.

(The amount of English labeling here—most American and British-made products don't translate their logos—is interesting to me, particularly since most people can't actually read it. They just know they want Garnier or Colgate or Head 'n' Shoulders, and identify it by the overall packaging. The same skill is used by young children and functionally illiterate adults—in Shirley Bryce Heath's communicative ethnography of rural South Carolina, she found that her kids could easily "read" familiar brand names and even put the scrambled letters back in order, if she showed them labels cut off the packaging—but they couldn't even recognize the words if they were typed or handwritten any other way.)

4. There's a show on Channel One every week called Zhdi Menya, which is sort of a cross between America's Most Wanted and Oprah. People come on the show looking for people they've lost, in one way or another. Maybe they were separated from their siblings in an orphanage. Maybe they lost track of someone in the breakup of the USSR. Maybe somebody never came back from the grocery store or never got on the train. They come on the show with photographs and tell their stories, and there's a hotline if viewers have any information; every once in a while, the host will announce that the show's producers have turned something up and then there's a tearful reunion. They've found people from Togo now living in France, long-lost siblings of different descriptions, even a guy who was captured by the Germans in WW2; he turned up living in Canada with five sons and fourteen grandkids, and all of them got flown to Moscow to meet the four siblings he left behind in Russia. But you just know that half the people on the show—maybe most of the people on the show—are never going to find their missing person. That pretty young girl who disappeared while walking home alone at night? Is not going to walk into the studio with smiles and flowers. She's probably not walking anywhere ever again.

Valya and I were watching this show tonight, and when it was over I noticed she was wiping tears from her eyes. I figured, hey, it's a tearjerker show. But then she says, apropos of nothing, "I have a brother like that. He emigrated to Russia in…oh, '95, '96, and we haven't heard from him since. We even wrote to this show."

What do you say to something like that?

5. I am all atizzy about yarn right now. Between the sweater I'm currently knitting (stalled because I ran out of yarn) and getting my Stitch 'n' Bitch book in the mail, I am feeling very crafty. Wednesday's expedition into Karaganda will include an attempt to buy needles in Russian (Извините, у вас есть специи, размер три и двадцать пять миллиметра?) and I have been eyeing all my students' sweaters, trying to figure out the construction. My eventual goal is to knit myself a badass long sweater with big lapels, bell sleeves and a waist sash, going to about mid-thigh, from some kind of lovely brown wool-acrylic blend. There will be shaped shoulders and i-cord and maybe even cabling. Anything is possible, as long as I can afford the materials. (I know straight needle are available at TsUM, and I've seen circular needles so they've got to be around here some place. And three-millimeter double-pointed needles mean socks!) In fact, I'm kind of tempted to buy one of the knitting books I've seen in a local book store, just so I can decode the vocabulary I'll need to talk about knitting in Russian. Not, you know, so I can oggle more patterns. Well, not just.

I've also been thinking about making a blanket for Valya, perhaps for a going-away gift if/when I get my own apartment. She's got these doilies on her armchairs made of a dusty yellow yarn, and the pattern seems like a simple crocheted square; I could easily make a granny-square afghan from the same or similar panels, if I could find a matching color, and she could use it as a throw. Wool-acrylic blends here run about half the price of pure wool, and since it's kind of a lacy pattern I wouldn't need too terribly much to get at least a lap blanket. I got this idea a while ago, but I'm becoming more set on it every time we're watching TV and she puts one sweater around her shoulders and another sweater or a pillow in her lap. Blankets, woman!</a>