russia

TwinF Tech Report – Russia Scandinavia and Europe

By: leelefever on January 1, 2007 - 1:15pm

 As I’ve done a few times on our trip, I’d like to get a little geeky and provide our experiences with mobile networks, Internet access and mobile blogging across regions of the world.  We try to buy a local SIM card and experiment with the local networks via prepaid mobile phone plans, when reasonable.  I cannot vouch for the completeness or accuracy of this information – it changes quickly and my perspective is one of a traveler.

See Also: 

Russia

Mobile: The problem we experienced with the mobile networks in Russia was that we could never find a pre-paid SIM card plan that would work across the whole country – they may exist, but we couldn’t find one.  Megafon may be a good bet. Also, see this list of Russian providers.

We moved quickly on the Trans-Siberian Railway, so it didn’t make sense for us to get a SIM card that may only works for a few days.

Russia cities generally have both GSM and CDMA.  Our friends from the UK were able to use their phone from home to SMS family in the UK through many parts of the Trans-Siberian trip.  GPRS is also available in Russia depending on the service.

Internet:  Wifi access is growing quickly in the major cities we visited, with access being very common St. Petersburg, where our guesthouse (and many others) provided it for free.  While our hotel in Moscow didn’t have wifi, there were many cafes and bars that had great free wifi access. Irkutsk and Yekaterinburg both had cafes that advertised free wifi access, but we rarely found anything that worked for us.  Internet cafes were quite common and sporting strong connections.  However, unlike Asia, I was not able to plug my own laptop into their network.  This trend lasted through all of Europe.

 

Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark)

Mobile:  If there is anywhere a mobile device should work, it is Scandinavia, home of Nokia and some of the highest rates of mobile phone adoption in the world.  It’s true, it is easy to get a SIM card and the network is 3G, fast and consistent. However, the problem in traveling across Scandinavia is that the PrePaid plans do not work across countries without burning up minutes with expensive roaming.  Plus, if you get a plan in Finland and run out of minutes in Norway, it is impossible to top-up your plan.  The pre-paid plans don’t travel well.  I was hoping to find an all-Scandinavia plan but came up empty.

Internet Access:  We found free wi-fi to be quite easy to find in cities like Helsinki, Oslo and Copenhangen.  Many hotels offer wifi as an included part of the room – though you may have to ask for the password.  While wifi is easy, Internet cafes are not as easy.  We’ve found that, in general, Internet cafes are easiest to find in a) places where people cannot afford personal computers, like in SE Asia b) places on the backpacker trail, like Florence, Italy.  With Scandinavia being neither, internet cafes are harder to find – but still available.

 

Europe:

Mobile: We entered Europe from Amsterdam, Holland and it was from here that we started our Vodafone adventure.  Vodafone is one of the major European providers that is close to providing near-seamless access across the continent.  The key point with a service like Vodafone is that you can travel across countries and still be able to top-up your prepaid account.  Vodafone stores are everywhere.  However, if you have a Vodafone card from one country and travel to another *be sure* to explain to the Vodafone rep that you need a refill voucher card for foreign cards – they are different from domestic cards.  Also, when topping-up your account from abroad, note that you must use a different menu item on the voice menu – wait for the menu to ask about a *foreign* voucher number.

We bought a Vodafone prepaid SIM card in Amsterdam and immediately connected to the voice network.  However, the phone (Palm Treo 650) would not connect to GPRS with the built-in settings.  When I would try to edit the GPRS Network settings provided by Vodafone, the phone would tell me they are locked.  After talking to the Vodafone helpline a couple of times, I learned that I had to add a new network connection with a different APN.  I’m sorry that I don’t have the info on the APN right now, but the Vodafone help line can help.

Within a couple of days, we had both GSM and GPRS working on the phone.  Then, we left Holland and quickly discovered that the coverage may be near-ubiquitous, but there are penalties for roaming.  After leaving Holland, we burned through prepaid minutes like wildfire.  I was amazed at how quickly GPRS access would burn up minutes.  Usually, international voice costs about 1 Euro for the connection and then something like .75 Euros per minute after than.  The EU is about to regulate the industry in Europe by forcing them to cut roaming charges by 40-60%I am a fan – the charges are ridiculous.

Then lesson here is to watch out for roaming charges within Europe on Vodafone.  You cannot travel across countries without roaming charges. 

Internet: In most of Europe there is no shortage of Internet cafes, particularly if backpackers are frequent.  Most cafes charge 3-5 Euros per hour of access.  No Internet cafes would allow me to plug my laptop into their network.  However, many Internet cafes have wifi that you can use for the same rate as a terminal.  We found that outside the major cities in southern Europe, wifi is less available. 

A final note:  A gadget that would be amazing to have while traveling is a wifi detector so that you could be walking through a new city and find a wifi signal with ease.   People sniffed out a wifi signal on a random section of street in Siena Italy.

 

 Conclusion

In general, across all 29 countries we visited (except Japan), an unlocked GSM phone will work for voice calling.  What is much harder, but still possible nearly everywhere is connecting to GPRS (Internet, email, data).  If you absolutely need to connect to GPRS, take a very mainstream and popular phone, such as a Nokia, because the phone store people will have instructions for the connection.  I had problems using a Palm Treo 650 because many foreign data plans did not support it for GPRS.


On Communism

By: leelefever on December 28, 2006 - 10:31am

I wrote this entry in September of 2006 from Helsinki, Finland just after arriving there from the Trans-Siberian Railway and a month in China.  For a while I was consumed by learning about Communism and needed to get it on paper, so to speak.


This post is a bit of a departure from the usual travel topics and I hope you’ll pardon its serious and dark nature. Having been to Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic, Communism seems to be a recurring theme and something to which I’ve devoted a lot of time reading and learning. I’ve developed a fascination for the subject, likely more than any other subject on the trip.

I figure that the root of my fascination is related to the fact that so many smart people believed in it so fervently and killed so many in an attempt to make it work – and the work continues to this day.  To me as an American entrepreneur, Communism is endlessly fascinating because it diverges so greatly from my world view.  The more I learn about it, the more baffled I become that so many could believe that it is a perfectly reasonable way to run a country.

I started the trip knowing very little about the Communist ideology, Marxism, Leninism or the history of the peoples’ revolution.  After reading a number of books, visiting museums, etc., I think I have a handle on some of the basics.  To test myself, I’d like to try to describe my layman's version for you as briefly and simply as possible.

Karl Marx was known as the father of Communism and the author of the Communist Manifesto – the first declaration of his theory in late 19th century. To Marx, capitalism (free markets, supply and demand, etc.) was evil and would eventually cause great misery to the people of the world. His goal was to stop it. 

To understand why he thought this, we must consider the lives of workers in the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.  At the time he saw a world where people were either rich owners or exploited and unhappy workers.  Marx saw this as a great injustice that was getting worse through the growth of Capitalism.  He foresaw a future where Capitalism would create a small handful of rich people and a world of miserable people that would get more miserable over time. This would even be extended to a worldwide scale with the world eventually being run by a few rich industrialists. This was what some called Imperialism and it was the end game of Capitalism.

Marx was successful in convincing a lot of very smart and powerful people that his was the true vision of the world and his Communist ideology its savior.  He promoted the idea that the true power of a civilization lies within the working class and if properly motivated, the working class can rise up in revolution against the rich land owners. This was revolution and it was the first stage of building a Communist system which would be fair to everyone – a single class society that worked to provide what it needed for the whole society. The government owned everything and everyone worked toward a common goal of self-sufficiency.  In fact, according to the theory, there would be no need for government in the future – it would “whither away” as the Communist utopia was achieved. Everyone would be well fed, protected and happy as they worked together as one.

Of course, history shows that this is not the case.  Two contributing factors:

  • Marx got it wrong.  He did not predict the rapid rise of the middle class.  Before he died, he saw Capitalism creating opportunities for a new class that were neither the rich owner nor the exploited worker.
  • Marxism was just a theory:  It described how things should work and what should happen, but it never described *how* Communism or revolution should actually be managed.  It was a theory with no doctrine.

Of course in the 20th century there would be no shortage of world leaders to test the Marxist theory in the form of prompting a revolution and establishing a Communist government – supposedly freeing the working classes from Capitalist oppression.

The first serious revolutionary was Lenin in Russia. He put Marxist theory into practice and established the first Communist government in 1917 and in doing so created Leninism – the way a person goes about revolution and enacting Marxist principles.  This created what is known as Marxism/Leninism and became a complete package for people like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot in Asia.  They now had the idea (Marxism) and the practice (Leninism) for Communist Revolution.

What has happened since then is the subject of great debate. Most would agree that if there is a winner in the Cold War, it is Capitalism. Many questions remain about what went wrong with Communism.  I’ll let you research the myriad perspectives on what happened and leave you with my own admittedly half-baked answer.

I think there are two main reasons Communism failed.  The first is human nature.  Communism underestimated the human need for achievement, competition and recognition.  Making everyone the same reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator and bred more misery and frustration than it prevented.  The second reason is leadership.  Have you ever heard of the founder of a company having to hire a CEO?  It happens often because the people that start things are not often the best people to manage them.  Revolutionaries are great at revolution, but can be poor at administration and management.  The history of Communism is rife with stories of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot making ludicrous decisions that caused the deaths of millions of their people.  They grew omnipotent through revolution but lacked the skills to use that power in any responsible manner.

My guess is that human history will show Communism as a destructive and deadly force in the world, not because of the idea or theory, but its implementation.  It enabled the centralization of absolute power that bred mass corruption and quickly became unmanageable.  To give you an idea of the level of destruction, consider the number of deaths in these countries in the Communist era:

  • China and Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1950’s)  - 30 million dead from starvation
  • Cambodia and Pol Pot’s Communist Revolution (1970’s) 7 million dead from starvation and executions (1 in 7 Cambodians)
  • Russia and Stalin’s Iron Rule (1920-50s) – 40 million dead from starvation and executions

… and this is not counting the unquantifiable misery wrought on families and individuals in these countries as secret police, hidden agendas and propaganda were a fact of life.  

Could a system of government that produced numbers like this be considered a positive force in the world?  I think not. Yet, the Communist Party is still a major player in world politics.  In Vietnam and Russia it has considerable power and of course in China, Cuba and North Korea it is the dominant force. How could this be? How could there still be demand for such a system?  The answer lies somewhere in the real world security and equality that Communism provides the working class.  Despite the horrific past, some people still yearn for a system where they can depend on the government for everything – they are ready to trade freedom for security.

Maybe the real root of my fascination with Communism is related to how it helps me to understand all the things I take for granted.  The more I learn, the more I wonder what my life would be like if I was a child of Communism.  With an entrepreneurial American worldview, I find it nearly unfathomable.

For more reading, check out the Wikipedia entries on:  Communism, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Karl Marx, Marxism, Capitalism, Dictatorship of the Proleteriat, Imperialism

 


The Russian Customer Service Handbook

By: leelefever on September 29, 2006 - 5:08am

 On a personal level, we have met wonderful people in Russia.  From our guides to our homestay hosts to friends like Lilia, Diana and Olga.  However, there is an element of the Russian experience that leaves me cold:  customer service.  The handbook below is dedicated to our not-so-wonderful adventures with Russian customer service people.

 

The Russian Customer Service Handbook

As a person who is about to enter the customer service industry in Russia, it is important to understand the environment in which you will work.  The points below should be followed without exception.

  • Under no circumstances should you smile or laugh.
  • When someone approaches you seeking help, feel free to ignore them for as long as possible.  Finish what you are doing first and quickly look for other items to make you appear busy.
  • If they speak a language you don't understand, the most effective response is to roll your eyes and sigh while turning away.
  • Do not greet a customer or recognize their presence until they demand your attention. 
  • A cold scowl is the standard facial expression- use it effectively.
  • When a transaction is complete, slide the money to the customer and walk away.  "thank-yous" are not recommended.
  • As you are completing a transaction, ask yourself "Am I being as efficient as possible?" If so, slow down or stop completely.  Efficiency only matters to the customer.
  • If your friend calls your mobile phone while you work, by all means answer it and do your best to complete the transaction while talking.
  • Eye contact should only happen by accident.  Try your best to make the customer feel as if they are inhuman, like a robot.
  • Remember that foreigners are a nuisance and should be treated as such.  They deserve no special treatment whatsoever.
  • Because foreigners have not taken the time to learn the Russian language, their method of pointing and gesturing to communicate should be viewed with contempt.  Remember: ROLL THE EYES - it is the perfect response.
  • Foreigners do not understand how to deal with money and never provide exact change.  When this happens, raise your voice a bit and hope that someone else can translate.
  • If a foreigner cannot provide exact change, snatch the money from their hand with an aggressive motion.  After you've gone to all the trouble to make change, slap it onto the counter forcefully and walk away.  Perhaps, over time, they will understand.

If you should have any questions or concerns about this handbook, please don't contact me.

~Your Russian Customer Service Manager


Filed Under: | | | |

Mostly Mixed Moscow

By: leelefever on September 29, 2006 - 4:34am

It’s quite apparent that the Russians have mixed feelings about Moscow (depending on where you ask) and after a few days there I think we feel the same. It was at once harsh and smooth, rude and friendly, ugly and beautiful.  Overall though, I’d say it was better than I expected.

Of course we had friends in the city that showed us around their neighborhoods and homes, which was a perfect introduction to the city. The warmth of the personal connection with people in Moscow made us feel at home.  However, once we ventured out on our own, other sides of the city appeared

 

Suddenly I found myself in center of the former Communist stronghold, surrounded by reminders of the Bolshevik Revolution, the USSR and Communism.  I saw the Kremlin-adjacent apartments where Stalin’s cronies were arrested and shot.  I ate at places where people once stood in line for bread.  All the things I learned about the Russians and Communism were right there before me and I could feel the power.  In Moscow the grandeur of the buildings are awe-inspiring – monuments to a government that controlled 1/6th of the earth’s surface and had plans for world domination.  This was the place, right under my feet.

 

And it is beautiful.  Tiananmen has nothing on Red Square. The parks, rivers and thoroughfares are quite delightful, especially on a nice day.  I had no idea that Moscow was covered in parks. The legendary Metro subway system is showing its age, but still maintains a world class level of elegance and efficiency.  The street food is always-on and yummy. The drab and cold Moscow I expected was a distant vision, but some of what I had heard was confirmed.

It is said that Moscow is the “dictator” and St. Petersburg is the “artist” and having visited both, it is obvious why.  Moscow is not a warm and fuzzy sort of place for the visitor.  Customer service is very short and cold, there is no English anywhere and downtown sometimes seems covered in police. The people you encounter appear quite gloomy with very few smiles. Also, there is no affordable lodging in the center of town, forcing travelers 20 minutes outside the city.

 

One of the important things that travelers must remember in Moscow is to carry copies of their visa and passport with them at all times.  Often police/military will stop foreigners and ask for passports to extort large sums of money.  If an actual passport is handed over, it may cost to get it back.  One of our friends was caught urinating outdoors by a young military officer in an oversized uniform and threatened with the “Gulag” if he didn’t hand over his actual passport instead of copies. Our friend pretended to call his embassy which caused the officer to reduced the penalty to 500 Rubles (USD$20).  They ended up settling at 200 Rubles. To be fair to both sides – public restrooms are impossible to find in Moscow, and the military boys do not get paid one ruble for their two years of mandated service.

 

On the other side of the coin, the personal experiences we had with random Muscovites were more positive.  While looking at a map on a street corner one night (the “tourist distress call”) a friendly young woman pointed us in the right direction.  It seems that in general, the young people represent a new generation of Muscovites who are more likely to smile, provide great service and welcome foreigners.  I would love to come back to Moscow in 15 years to see how it has changed.  I’m quite sure that it will be less of a dictator.


Things Have Moved Too Fast

By: leelefever on September 27, 2006 - 11:43pm

Phew!  The Trans-Siberian Railway trip is officially over - we arrived in hip and modern Helsinki, Finland yesterday. Despite all the writing and videos on the train, we've fallen a bit behind - and we haven't even talked about Moscow and St. Petersburg.

We'll say more soon, but we both want to say a BIG thanks to Lilia, her sister Diana, and her friend Olga for showing us their Moscow.  Lilia is from Moscow but lives in Holland and recently did an internship at Microsoft in Seattle, where we got to be better friends.  We can't say enough about the generosity and hospitality of our Muscovite friends.

This is Sachi and Lilia over the Moscow River:

 This is Olga with Matt (a fellow American traveler) and Sachi in Moscow.


 And how can we forget Kuzya,the resident parrot, who can be bribed into speaking a few words for a pomegranate seed. 


Trans-Siberian Railway - Leaving Siberia

By: leelefever on September 26, 2006 - 12:40pm

From the moment we arrived in Yekaterinburg, Russia, I had the song "The Cold Part" by Modest Mouse playing in my head, which is a dark and desolate song that sings "so long to this cold, cold part of the world". I don't think the city is as cold and dark as I chose to display in the video, but I do think the video fits with the soundtrack that was playing in my head at the time.

The scenes at the end are from our homestay in Yaketerinburg. We stayed with a local named Eleana for two nights in former Communist housing blocks. She was nice, but was caring for a friend who was sick at the time and we have both become ill after staying with her. The housing was warm on the inside, scary on the outside.

Yakaterinburg is famous for the deaths of the last czarist family in Russia, the Romanovs, who were killed in a cellar in the city by the Communist Revolutionaries as a symbol of the end of their imperial rule. A sad and controversial story.

Yekaterineburg is at the imaginary border between Asia (and Siberia) and Europe, so the song even fit as we left...

so long to this cold, cold part of the world


Video: Trans-Siberian Railway - The Vodka Train

By: leelefever on September 25, 2006 - 9:50am

It is a Trans-Siberian right of passage - drinking vodka with Russians on a train in the middle of Siberia. This video shares a few of the moments I'll never forget and a few that I can't really remember.

Read the story from this night


Too Much Vodka with the Russian Locals

By: leelefever on September 25, 2006 - 6:04am

 Given the opportunity, we will choose to hang out with the locals and in nearly every instance.  The vast majority of the time, it has been a rewarding and interesting experience.  However, on the Trans-Siberian Railway we’ve learned that there are Russian locals that you don’t necessarily want to “experience” for 2 days on a train.

Peer pressure is an issue on the Trans-Siberian train with consistent reminders from other travelers that this is the “vodka train” and you must drink Russian vodka.  This pressure is lost on the Russian locals though as they need no pressure whatsoever to drink on a train.  It is a requirement for them and when mixing with foreign travelers the requirement is shared by all.

So we found ourselves in the dining car on the second night of a 48 hour journey from Irkustk to Ekaterineburg.  

Between Slava, the gigantic ex-Russian Army captain with bullet wounds and Victor, the pudgy Belushi-esque ex-Mafia family man, we had our hands full.  While our English friend Paul was busy being pressured by Slava into drinking more vodka than he wanted, I got a dose of vodka with Victor and his fellow Russian friends, who seemed to be complete blockheads.  We drank more, became friends, toasted to health, arm wrestled and looking back I can say that I have never witnessed so many scars on so many people.  I think these guys have had a hard life.

For some reason I accepted Victor’s invitation for me and Sachi to come to his room and drink more vodka. Not only did this end up with me losing a few hours of memory, but it caused Sachi to end up babysitting Victor’s Coke-spewing 4 year old child “Sergei” for over an hour.  She was not happy and I had no idea why.  What I did remember was Victor telling me at some point in the night that the wolf tattoo on his arm was from his 3 year prison term.  Apparently had “only killed one person” while in the Russian mafia.  Had I had my wits about me, I may have escaped at that point, but I didn’t.

The next day I awoke to a hangover, an upset wife and a half-drunk Russian ex-con banging on the door at 9AM with a 2 liter beer in his hand.  We were still friends and he was clearly doing me a favor by bring over the beer.  He started with the old Russian saying “A good friend drinks vodka with you yesterday, a great friend drinks vodka with you today!” as if I might appreciate the classical nature of the moment.   I would have none of it, despite him barging in, pouring a glass, spilling it on the floor and insisting I drink no less than 15 times. Of course Sachi was now noticing that she would now clean up after both father and son in our compartment. I was at a loss for more ways to say “nyet” – nothing seemed to work. Sachi would later say that when he came in she wanted to kick him in the face.  Of course, I was implicit in this frustration.  

Later Victor hooked back up with the Blockheads and they formed a roaming band of drunk-in-the-morning Russian annoyances.  They went from one end of the train to the other, peer-pressuring everyone from the night before to drink with them.  One of them even forced his way into the compartment of understandably shaken American and Canadian girls.  He would later be quite accurately called a stalker.

This band of drunks eventually caused the revelers from the night before to close their doors and hide out for the majority of the morning.  Many, including Sachi and I ignored knocks at our doors.  The foreigners on the train tried to memorize compartment numbers so we could visit one another without keeping a door open.  There was talk of passwords being used.  We were held hostage by the locals.

By about 1pm the drunk Russians had passed out – we could hear Victor snoring through the compartment walls and from that point the foreigners on the train began to appear like refugees after a bombing campaign.  Shaken, annoyed and hungover, we stuck together and decided that drinking with the locals is fun, but sharing 2 days on a train with the same people is another story all together.

 Watch the Video Here.


The Siberian Village of Bolshoe Goloustnoe

By: leelefever on September 24, 2006 - 12:06am

We were greeted in the "Siberian Capital" of Irkutsk by a nice surprise.  Our guide for 3 days was a Siberian named Eleana who looked like she stepped out of an REI catalog, both in slick outdoors clothes and fine model-like looks.  She spoke near-perfect English and had a laid back attitude - a stark contrast to the flag nazis in China.  So far, I love Russia.

The tiny village of Bolshoe Goloustnoe (pop. 700) is two hours from Irkutsk on the shores of the world's oldest and deepest lake, Lake Baikal.  I knew we were going to the right place when, about 45 minutes into the drive, the road turned to dirt and didn't stop until we arrived 1.5 hours later.  We were as remote as we could manage in one of the world's remotest places and assured that we were the only Westerners for miles and miles.

For the first time since visiting small villages in Japan, I felt that we had arrived at a tiny part of the world that exists according to tradition and not the tourist dollar. Bolshoe Goloustnoe is undeniably real and an authentic article of Siberian culture. 

 

The town on the South Eastern shores of Lake Baikal sits on two main streets surrounded by single story dark-wooden homes with gardens and livestock sharing a slice of property. In fact, the livestock are not bound by fences except the fences to keep them out of personal gardens.  As Eleana explained, the cows roam free and return home occasionally for feeding time.

The homes themselves are remarkably similar, with dark wood and ubiquitous, but unique window dressings called Siberian Lace.  The Siberians believe in spirits who are able to enter homes through windows and the windows are designed to prevent the spirits from entering. The windows are colorful works of art that beg for photos and appear too good to be true.  If they were plucked from this Siberian location and appeared in a city, you could imagine flag-bearing tour groups ooohing and aaahing at the traditional designs. Yet, here they are surrounded by gardens, livestock and splashed mud. These windows are an example of the reality of travel that I long to experience. 

 

Another Siberian experience is the use of a “banya” or sauna.  The tradition works like this… The banya is prepared by building a fire in a furnace-like compartment of a small wooden structure. The fire heats water that is used for bathing and the “sweat room” where you sit naked and relax.  I have decidedly mix reactions to the sweat room. I don’t like heat and I already sweated enough for 5 years in Asia, so I didn’t feel the need to sweat, or suffocate for that matter.  The thermometer in the sweat room read 85 degrees Celsius, which is 185 degrees Fahrenheit.  Is that possible?  Could it really be that hot?  It seemed that way as the air I inhaled would burn my lips as it entered my mouth.  My mind raced a couple of times as I had the fleeting feeling that I wasn’t getting enough air, nearly causing me to rush out of the room.  The most enjoyable part of my first banya experience was the exit when the air was luxuriously cool and full in my lungs.  To really enjoy a banya, I think you need to have been really cold, as Siberian fisherman surely are.

Bolshoe Goloustnoe, more than any other village we’ve visited on the whole trip, seemed to take us back in time. Here are a few examples.

  • The toilets are located outdoors and over a deep pit in the earth near the garden. When it fills up, they cover it and dig another hole.  Yes, despite pulling fresh, clean water from an aquifer that is associated with the lake, the homes in the village do not have running water.
  • Only a few weeks ago mobile phone service arrived in the village.  Prior to that, the only phone in the village existed in the Post Office and even it was often in disrepair.
  • The village does not have Internet access.
  • The villagers are very curious about foreigners, described as a look at someone from another world.
  • Few vehicles exist in the village and some of the old-timers have never left the village in their lives.
  • Many of the farmers in Bolshoe Goloustnoe are subsistence farmers, growing food to eat rather than sell.
  • The village lacks tourist infrastructure – no restaurants or souvenir shops.

 

I didn’t realize it until we arrived, but Siberia has a history similar to that of the Western US.  Just as the Europeans migrated westward across the US and through Native American land, the Russians moved eastward across Russia and through Buryat land. The Buryats are the indigenous people of Siberia, descended from the Mongols (more info here).  Eleana described the Buryats as being nearly completely integrated into the Russian culture or "russified", with their being very little discrimination. We saw evidence of this in the village as nearly every group of people was made up of white and Buryat individuals (see photo below).  I asked about the Russian migration and told her about the sad history of the American frontier when Native Americans were exploited and killed for their land.  She described the Russian experience much differently with the explorers making friends and working closely with the Buryats. She described the expansion in terms of it being a win-win. Curious, I asked about many of the modern problems of Native Americans such as alcoholism, lack of job opportunities and poverty and it sounded like the Buryats were experiencing the same problems.   While I’m sure the eastward expansion in Russia could have been much more friendly that that of the American West, I can’t help but wonder if this story of mutual beneficence is more convenient than it is factual. Perhaps my time in China has taught me that a Communist government has the power to mold historical perspectives into a form that is more easily digested by the people and the international community.  Could it be that Eleana’s perspective has been subject to the creativity of government historians of yesteryear?  Judging from myriad examples of European expansions into native lands, I somehow doubt the win-win perspective of the story.  Maybe I’m just cynical.

We didn’t expect it, but Bolshoe Goloustnoe and Lake Baikal was one of our favorite places on the trip so far.  Like Japan, the village seemed too real, too authentic to be true.  It didn’t get any more real than our homestay host, Tamara, mother of 6 and lifelong resident.  Could you imagine a more Siberan looking host?


Video: Incredible Lake Baikal, Russia

By: leelefever on September 23, 2006 - 5:10am

To look at Lake Baikal doesn't do it justice - it is just a big lake in a beautiful and peaceful setting. Only by learning a little about it can you appreciate what a special place on the Earth it really is. You can learn more via Wikipedia too.

Music: Yo La Tengo - You Can Have It All


Syndicate content