Moscow Orientation – Day 17 – Back to Russia?

We returned to Moscow early this morning. Despite getting plenty of sleep on overnight trains for some reason I still emerge from them completely spent. I went home and crawled into bed for a couple more hours of sleep. The rest of the day was free, so I had plenty of time to reflect on our trip.

Everyone kept saying that Moscow isn’t Russia – it’s an international center of so many things, with so many foreigners, that it’s closer to London and New York than to the rest of the country. In some ways I suppose that theory is accurate. In my opinion, though, you can take Moscow out of Russia, but you can’t take the Russia out of Moscow. All the modern advantages and problems of the country are writ large here; wonderful culture, hospitality, corruption, disparities in income, economic development, the precarious balance of history and development. Whatever you call Moscow, it’s a bustling, exciting city of people hustling and hurrying to go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s a little further than where they are now. I’m pretty happy to be back in the un-russia.

Even in Cheboksary, we ran up against that attitude. “Ahhh,” people would say, “Cheboksary isn’t representative of Chuvashia.” And in some ways, the economic success and stability of Chuvashia isn’t representative of life in the regions of Russia. I think its kind of like the weather; wherever you go in the world, people always tell you that the weather was beautiful the week before you got there.

Our trip was a fascinating experience, and we met with interesting people at every step. At every step, however, out official delegation was carefully monitored and managed. Two handlers ushered us from place to place, and a photographer documented everything. The problem is that I began to chafe under so much control and began to see some real problems with the reasons behind our close stage managing. For instance, after giving an interview with a local television station, my colleague Nathan began to chit chat with the reporter – one journalist to another. Our handlers interrupted the exchange and gave the reporter a dressing down for the conversation. In addition, our photographer was actually an official from the presidential press agency, and I think that had some bearing on the conversations that we had with other people.

For that matter, there weren’t really any other people. Our schedule didn’t permit any free time to even go into a café and have a cup of tea. Granted, we only had limited time in the Republic, but perhaps they didn’t want us to meet up with anyone else. By the end of 3 days of such sneaking suspicions, the police escorts felt like they were there to prevent us from doing anything unscheduled rather than ease our path to somewhere else. In sum, after 3 days in Cheboksary, I have absolutely no feel for what life is really like there.

In the evening, I attended a symposium on corruption at the Higher School of Economics. The speaker was the head of the INDEM foundation, a think tank that did a huge study on corruption a few months ago. I had read the paper, so the presentation wasn’t too new. Still, there are some surprising findings; the highest growth in the volume of bribes was in two areas. One is avoiding the universal conscription into the army, and the second is gaining entrance to higher education institutions. That second one caused some squirming in the audience among administrators and students alike.

Reaction to the study was a bit strange. Some people took the massive volume of bribes as a positive; if bribes are increasing, then the unrecorded part of the economy must be growing at a very past pace – which is good for the country. Also, several people were willing to add the foundation’s estimate of total corruption back to the Russian official GDP tally and then compare that figure favorably to Germany and France. The first is fooling yourself that corruption doesn’t choke out legitimate and illegitimate business activity equally effectively. The second is intellectually dishonest and self-aggrandizing.

Intellectually dishonest and self-aggrandizing, huh? I think I’d be better careful here in my glass house.