![]() It helped the czars and the communists maintain power after emancipation…and is a big factor in the government’s popularity now. See how long the echo of distrust and low self-esteem lasts in both countries? And the slave belief that a man is unable to influence his fate has remained an element of the Russian soul since then. He puts the same idea another way, pointing out how long it takes for any society to free itself of the slave mentality: “About 150 years ago, Russia formally ended serfdom-the same time as the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yurevich, another friend, has lived and worked in Moscow since completing his studies at the end of the 1980s. Street musician draws a crowd on Arbat Street, Moscow, 1988. It is not a coincidence that 75 percent of the population are content to live under authoritarian rule 24 percent think like communists-either thieves or despisers of private property and individual success and only about 1 percent we can call ‘neo-Russian’-those with a balanced view of the external world and a desire to live and function in a progressive society.” “The communists were in power for 74 years, and we’ve been free of them for 25 years. The Romanov dynasty started in 1613 and lasted 300 years,” Mikhailovich says. He believes that the factors contributing to an individual’s mentality are both experiential and hereditary. My friend Mikhailovich is a middle-aged entrepreneur who moved to Moscow from Kyiv as a young man. I turned to them to collect and distill their insights on how Russian thinking has changed since the end of the USSR. Living and working in Russia for the past three decades, I’ve become acquainted with people from a broad range of social strata-from government ministers to migrant workers. He and his countrymen no longer think they are “covered in chocolate”-a phrase going back to the Soviet era meaning “fortunate, lucky, living well”-as they build the socialist paradise while the West rots on the garbage heap of history. Thirty years later my fartsovchik is probably a successful oligarch. …” I began to understand how he chose who should be offered his znachki (pins) or money changing services. “The facial features, the shoes, the wrist watches, the eye glasses. Having purchased a fur hat from Sasha, the teenage fartsovchik (black marketeer) working the Oktyabrskaya subway station in Moscow that day in 1986, I earned the right to chat with him in my broken Russian.Īs he scanned the passers-by in search of potential clientele, I couldn’t figure out how he was able to spot the foreigners. At first it seemed to me as if he was wearing X-ray glasses.
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