The Russian
Game of Yell
(“Russian
Mindsets Series”)
Russians love haranguing one another in public. Shop girls,
people standing in lines—any place that strangers come together, interact,
there will be strife. Of course, there may also be strife in courtrooms,
political forums, at family gatherings, etc., but that is not the topic of this
piece. This is about how strangers relate to one another on the streets, at the
windows of kiosks, or at any other glass-covered windows, where the petitioner
has to bend down to the small slot at the bottom, so as to make himself heard
by the scowling woman behind that thick glass, who is “serving” him.
The first thing that strikes any American tourist visiting Russia is the spirit
of brusqueness and petulance that envelops the country like a dark cloud. Ask a
simple question of a person in the “service industry,” and you may get a snarl
in reply. Don’t expect service with a smile at the front desk of your hotel
(unless it’s a hotel for foreigners); sometimes you will not even be treated
with what Americans consider the bare minimum of politeness.
In fact, Russians are completely acculturated to brusque
interactions—between shoppers and salespersons, between strangers on the
streets, between petitioners and those who wait on them in the halls of the
complex bureaucracy, etc. In such situations what Americans see as rudeness is,
for Russians, just the norm.
Recently much has been made of the Russian tendency to
stroll about the streets with dour faces.[i] On
the basis of this one fact sunny-faced American tourists often return from Moscow or St.
Petersburg in astonishment: how come everybody over
there is so unhappy? They’re uncouth, they treat people gruffly, they never
smile, etc. Russians, with some justification, have replied that just because
you are not smiling all the time, that does not mean you are unhappy. Russians
smile when they have a reason for smiling. True, but they also (1) often look
upon smiling foreigners as idiots or fools, and (2) deprecate their own
compatriots if they smile overmuch.
It seems that somebody in the government has picked up on
this, because there are propaganda posters in the Moscow metro system of late
(2009), inveigling people to smile more. Is this the beginning of a new
official policy? Is it aimed, primarily, at encouraging more polite treatment
of foreign tourists who visit Russia?
If whoever came up with the idea for this “piar” (P.R.) campaign really
thinks that these posters will do any good, however, that unknown person has
another think coming. Why? Because changing long-standing cultural stances
anywhere is a near impossible task.
Can you equate smiling with happiness? By no means. Smiles
are used for all kinds of reasons, and a smiling face does not automatically
make for a happy person. In the recent Hollywood film “Ghost Town” there is an
American woman who sits in a dental chair, blathering on incessantly about her
son, smiling broadly—except when the irascible dentist, an Englishman, plugs up
her teeth and mouth with dental paraphernalia. Only at the end of the film do
we learn that this is her way of expressing (or concealing) her pain, since she
has recently lost her husband. The American smile, as well as the American
reply, “Just fine,” to the automatic “How you doing?” question, are often used
(1) for stifling inner pain (2) for keeping private sorrows private, or (3) for
self-encouragement. “Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue” is the American
way. Yes, we Americans do like to whine, but we also understand that the default
cultural stance, ultimately, is optimism. “You’ll find that life is still
worthwhile, if you just smile.”
If you keep on smiling and pretend long enough, you might
even pretend your way out of the blues, or (let’s hope) the global economic
recession and the pandemic. I once saw a psychological study claiming that not
only smiling, but also the very movement of the lips into the position of the
smile, help elevate a person’s spirits. Can’t prove this, but it just might
make sense.
Is happiness measurable? Hardly. No one can even define the
word “happiness,” and different individuals have different measures of personal
happiness. Americans over-medicate their unhappiness, their depression and
anxiety, and Russians are right to criticize us for this. It is, however,
difficult to ignore altogether the annual “Happy Person Index.” The most recent
one I saw ranked Russia
at #174 out of the 176 countries listed. It is also impossible to ignore the
suicide rates for the Russian
Federation. Perhaps one reason the
government is promoting smiles is that it hopes to promote more happiness and
less disgruntlement in these difficult economic times.
Getting Russians to overcome a thousand years of cultural
mores, of course, is, perhaps, the biggest problem that the country has. One of
these cultural mores is the imperative not to smile too much. Another is the
sheer joy that Russians take in disgruntlement.
Is it possible to find gratification in grumpy behavior, or even
in pain? Absolutely. While pain is practically against the law in the U.S.A., it is certainly not so thoroughly
disparaged in Russia.
Severe asceticism and mortification of the flesh are big in the tradition of
the Russian Orthodox Church. A passage from the Orthodox prayer book goes as
follows: “I thank Thee, O Lord, for the sorrow Thou hast sent me; as something
meet and proper I accept it in accord with my deeds. Pray for me in Thy
Heavenly Kingdom.”[ii]
In his novel about the tribulations of an émigré Russian
professor in the America of
the fifties, PNIN, Vladimir Nabokov eviscerates American meliorism and rants
against the Freudian love of “psychobabble,” which is still extremely popular
in the U.S.
fifty years later. At one point Professor Pnin states his opinion that “The
history of man is the history of pain!” At another point he propagates the following
“un-American” message: “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is
sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”[iii]
Back to the antagonism on the streets, in the queues, in the
stores, etc. Russians often play a kind of subconscious game called “You yell
at me and then I yell at you.” If you are in Russia, you’ll see this sort of
thing going on all the time: people fighting over taxis, arguing with those who
butt into lines, etc. Long standoffs often ensue. I once watched (in Moscow) a verbal duel between
an old woman and a hippified teenage girl. I was not there to see the beginning
of this episode, but when I walked by I noticed the girl (with a group of other
young people) and the woman, railing at each other. The old woman’s dog had
grabbed ahold of the girl’s coat sleeve with its teeth and held her arm tight.
The interchange went (on and on) as follows: the girl cursed and cursed and
told the old lady to get the dog off her. Occasionally her friends chimed in, adding
some strong opinions in support of the girl with the dog on her arm. The old
lady, for her part, repeated, over and over, the words, “Ne rugajtes’ matom!”
(“Stop using bad language!”).
Years ago I also once saw a bus conductor try to throw off some
“zajtsy”—people who had not bought tickets and were trying to ride for
free. Maybe they refused to exit the bus because it was not the conductor’s job
to evict them—that was up to a special ticket inspector who would get on the
bus periodically and check all riders for tickets. The conductor took it upon
himself to stop the bus and demand that the illegal riders get off, and the
illegal riders sat tight. The antagonists mouthed back and forth at one
another, but both sides remained adamant. The other passengers began grumbling over
the stalemate because the bus was not moving. Like the friends of the young
lady whose arm was in the dog’s mouth, they (the passengers) created a kind of
background chorus for the two main polemical melodies. Yielding, breaking off
your song (and maybe this is the most important point) means, of course, that
you lose face—and shame yourself in front of the chorus of onlookers.
These arguments are certainly genuine, yet somehow they strike
me as simultaneously ritualized play arguments. The game of yell livens up
what, for many Russians, is a dreary and lackluster life. If you get in a fight
(even if you lose), you’ll feel more alive afterwards—hyped up psychologically.
On the other hand, if you prefer not to play the game of yell, your best tack—I
use this all the time when I’m in Russia—is to reply to the yeller in a very
calm voice. Say, placidly, “Why are you yelling at me? Do you think that’s a
civilized way to behave in public? Am I yelling at you?” This usually gets them
befuddled and stops the game. They walk away, muttering to themselves, “Stupid
foreigner; doesn’t even know how to play the game of yell.”
When putting my website together a couple of years ago, I
had a young Russian woman read through my commentary on Russian mentalities.
She did so, then sent me an e-mail, in which she commented that she was impressed,
while simultaneously entertained, by my opinions. “You seem to know,” she said,
“more about us than we know about ourselves.”
This hardly seems possible; it’s most certainly not true.
But it is feasible that the viewpoint of a foreigner may have validity,
especially one like me, who speaks Russian and has studied the culture of the
country for forty years. After all, even if you are a proficient acrobat, you
can’t leap outside yourself, then look back and evaluate the soul and psyche you
just were a part of. Similarly, Russians are hard put to step out of the
national mythology they live by, in order to stand aside and take a fresh look
at it, and themselves.
The great émigré scholar George Fedotov once implied, furthermore,
that foreigners, being at one remove from Russians in the flesh, may be able to
see something of the forest through the birch trees.[iv]
Russian views on American idiosyncrasies (from informed observers) should also
be much appreciated. They (usually) are not. The reason is simple: nobody wants
an outsider rummaging around in his cherished cultural mores.
When I taught one course on Russian literature as a
Fulbright Scholar at Novgorod State University a few years ago, were there any
professors in the Department of Russian Literature who thought that I, an
American and non-native speaker, had any valid points to make about Russian
literature? There was a grand total of one—the brilliant young scholar who had
been assigned to chaperone me around while I was there, who sat in on my
classes—so that none of the others would have to bother with me. At the end of
my sojourn in Novgorod
I gave two open lectures on Vladimir Nabokov, in Russian, well attended and
much appreciated by the students who were there. None of the professors from
the department showed up for those lectures either.
Such widespread cultural chauvinism, however, was not
characteristic of a certain renowned professor at a famous Russian university
(we will name no names, places, or dates). This professor published an article
on a nineteenth century Russian writer who is canonical. The bulk of the
article was plagiarized from a book written, in English, by an American woman
scholar.
My respondent, the young woman who checked my website,
disagreed with a few things I said, including, most prominently, my remarks
about Russian yelling. She insisted that this is not a game at all: that
Russians are genuinely antagonized, and that’s why they’re always going chin to
chin. I agree. Am I ambivalent? Well, as the old joke goes, yes and no. By this
I mean that when strangers rail at one another in all sorts of public situations
they (1) are dead serious and (2) are playing a kind of game and deriving psychological
satisfaction from the play. Can a human being be dead serious and playing a
game simultaneously? Absolutely. We do this on a daily basis. Of all
nationalities, furthermore, Russians may be the most masterful at performing in
this psychological theater of the absurd.
Related to the yelling thing is the importance of pecking
orders in Russia.
Westerners have no concept of how important it is in Russian society to
establish your proper place. Countless times I have walked into a social
situation, smiling, affable, joking--in other words, using the American style
of social concourse: “I’m okay, you’re okay.” What response do I get from (many,
but not all) Russians? I discover that they’re up in my face, pushy,
condescending to me, disrespecting me. Whereupon I put on my mean side and get
them out of my face. They immediately understand the mistake they have made:
“Ah, so you’re higher than me on the pecking order.” Then they proceed
to wheedle and kowtow to me. But they feel better anyway. At least they know
where they stand.
On the other hand, this issue frequently does not even arise
if you are a foreigner from the West (the U.S.
or Western Europe). On the unwritten prestige
list America is still No. 1,
although the longstanding (centuries long) idea of the U.S. as a kind of Cinderella
promised land has taken a big hit since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In
the past thirty years, for the first time in their history, Russians have had
the opportunity to visit—or even live in—the U.S., and close contact with the American
Dream has made them much more cynical about the American Dream—and about the
acumen and even intelligence of the American people.
England is also near the top of that prestige list (despite
all the strife between England and Russia in recent times—over BP, over closing
down British NGOs, and over political murder). If you are British or American you
still get an almost automatic respect in Russia. But try asking Africans,
Asians, foreigners from the Third World how they are received in Russia. On the
international pecking order list they are way, way down. At the very bottom are
“guest workers” from former countries of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan.
It is among themselves, of course, that Russians battle most
strenuously to prove that they are SOMEBODY. That is why a woman who elbows her
way to the front of the taxi line, who successfully outshouts others in the
line, feels so good about herself as she rides off in that taxi. “I may not
have a job, I may not even have the money to afford to take this taxi home, but
I showed those lowdown worms, didn’t I?”
Here is a Russian scene summing up, from a slightly
different angle, much of what I have been discussing: interpersonal behavior in
public places, pecking orders, smiles—and laughter: which could be the subject of a
different, broad article about Russian culture. It is from Nikolai Gogol’s Dead
Souls, a novel composed in the 1830s, and, simultaneously, a novel telling
you many important things you need to know about how Russia operates today. Using one of
his expanded metaphors, Gogol describes the arrival of a high-level bureaucrat to
inspect a government office (Part I, Chapter 8).
At first all the workers put on faces of joy, mingled with
apprehension. They want to show the big cheese how happy they are to see him,
but they are scared stiff. Then, “after the initial fear has abated,” after it
becomes apparent that the cheese has “found a lot of things to be pleased
with,” they relax, especially when the important personage treats them to a
little joking remark. Gogol describes how that joke ripples out in laughter
over the assembled government officials, how they all guffaw obsequiously and uproariously,
until, finally, the ripple reaches a gendarme manning the far door, a man “who
has never laughed in his whole life, who just a minute earlier had been showing
his fist to the rabble outside,” and even he, the dour and strong-armed
enforcer, gives vent to something like a smile—although it resembles more
exactly “the kind of way somebody somehow screws up his face to sneeze, after snuffling
in a strong pinch of snuff.”
I’ve never been present when the redoubtable Vladimir Putin
has dropped in some Russian office for a visit, but the odds are good that—on the
days Putin’s in a joking mood—he too may make a jocular remark, and if he does,
we get the precise scene that Gogol has already described. Furthermore, we
realize that this scene is a part of the grand human repertoire, that it has
been acted out all over the world from time out of mind. This should remind us
that in speaking of Russian mindsets we are often speaking, as well, about
HUMAN BEHAVIOR worldwide.
That’s one thing I love about Russians: they are such human
beings. They represent the grand extremes of human activity, good and bad. They,
the Russians, often show aspects of ourselves to us, all blown up, magnified a
hundred times. If we were to assemble people from all over the world, put them
on the floor of a gymnasium and tell them to scream, who would be screaming the
loudest? The Russians.
To take another example of literary prescience, Fyodor
Dostoevsky described with precision the fallacies of socialism and communism—in
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, in THE DEVILS, and in other works of fiction—years
before Lenin seized power and the U.S.S.R. came into being, determined to put
socialism into practice. The lesson here is: Read the genius of Gogol, of
Dostoevsky; read classical Russian literature, the greatest literature in the
world.
Returning, finally, to the issue of the obstreperous “in
your face,” attitudes, I do not pretend that I have exhausted the topic in this
short piece. The yelling business ties in not only with things I have
mentioned, but also with any number of other intricate aspects of the Russian
national character: vulnerability, distrust of everyone except close friends
and relatives, the inferiority-superiority complex, and so on. These are all
subjects for separate articles.
[i] See, e.g., Marina Krakovsky, “Global Psyche, National Poker Face,” Psychology
Today, No. 1 (January/February, 2009).
[ii] This prayer, incidentally, did not originate in Russia. It is
an ancient prayer of St. John
of the Ladder, a revered figure in the early Orthodox Church (sixth century
A.D.). Fasting, self-abnegation, acceptance of pain are out of favor in
modern-day America, but these practices and attitudes were important in the tradition
of early Christianity, to which the highly conservative Russian Orthodox Church
adheres to this day.
[iii] Vladimir Nabokov, PNIN (NY: Doubleday), originally published in
book form in 1957. This novel is overflowing with creative insights into the American
character, presented from the viewpoint of highly intelligent Russians living
in the U.S.
My citations are from the 1984 paperback edition, p.168 and p.52.
[iv] “Some western writers. . . such as Leroy-Beaulieu in France, had been able to see
features of Russian mind and life which had escaped Russian observers who were
dulled by nearness and habit.” George P. Fedotov, THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS MIND
(I): Kievan Christianity—the 10th to the Thirteenth Centuries (Belmont, Mass.:
Nordland Publishing Co., 1975), p. xiii.
P.S.: This
article was written about ten years ago, but the basic situation is
little changed. In my last visit to the Russian Federation, November, 2016, I
came upon the usual screaming woman behind the thick glass partition at the
train station in Sergiev Posad. It was cold, dark, snowing, I was trying to buy
a ticket on the electrichka back to Moscow, and I made the mistake of
asking too many questions: where the platform was, how to get to it, etc. Things
I needed to know, but which she assumed I should already know.
