March 22, 2006
Russia for Foreigners, 2006: Museums Monasteries, Being a Tourist in the Proper Way
Caryl Emerson
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Minutes of the 25th Meeting of the 64th Year
President Bill Haynes called the meeting to order at 10:15 AM, John Marks led the invocation, several visitors were asked to stand, and Joe Bolster introduced Professor Caryl Emerson of the Slavic Languages Department, Princeton University. Topic: Russia, which she has visited 30 times.
She narrated a series of beautiful slides of a trip taken last year with Princeton and Amherst alumni – almost 50 years after her first trip in 1956. Her role: "cultural resource," on a 5-star Austrian ship traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg: many stops, "round the clock bar, 4 to 8 meals a day."
On her 1956 trip, three years after Stalin died, she had beena teenager, knowing no Russian language, and accompanying her grandmother. She said the country then was gray, dark, we were watched closely. "I somehow knew that what we were allowed to see was fake...but even the fakery struck me as heroic..." That trip "hooked" her on Russia and a decade later, after majoring in Russian in college, she went back. It was the 1960s...Soviet tanks had just rolled into Czechoslovakia, "despair, cynicism prevailed and over here teaching about Russia was like researching the moon."
She conducted many other trips in the 70s and early 80s with "well-behaved" or maybe "terrorized" students...The kids loved it." It was as if they were in a protective capsule, unable to speak to anyone. Their hosts despised the Soviet slogans, condemned everything that surrounded them. So little for the Russians to buy in stores, they didn't have real jobs, what they did have was time, they could consider moral and philosophical questions, read underground books.
It wasn't until the 2005 trip, that Professor Emerson, herself, was a tourist. "Does it have to mean something negative, shallow, superficial...not necessarily...but it means seeing something packaged. She showed a slide of her cabin – "if it looks like a prison, the fact is that we were captives in a country with many billionaires but where pensioners are living on $70 a month, where drinking, smoking and drug addiction are at crisis levels and an epidemic of AIDS is inevitable."
The standard of living has dropped disastrously, so has the birth rate and life expectancy (for men 58).. .where there are gorgeous palaces in amber and gold but where real life buildings are crumbling and the city streets look like dumps.
The other two resource professors, both from Amherst, were William Taubman – prize-winning biographer of Krushchev – and his wife, Jane, an expert on contemporary film. He gave lectures on post-Stalinism and on the Putin regime and in the evening she screened "one desperately depressing Russian film after another, on the war in Chechnaya, on juvenile crime and on the cynicism of the younger generation." We saw nothing of those realities but instead marched from monument to monument to ballet to opera to fancy restaurants.
She showed a map of the ship's route, with dockings along the Moscow River at such stops as Ublich, Yaroslava, Kizhi with wooden churches.
The group included several former CIA agents, one a highly ranked couple that had served in the Brezhnev era. Their suitcases were searched, and they were presented, politely, with a list of all their assignments during the Brezhnev times. Would he like to "come clean with any hidden agendas for this trip?" He said that they, as professionals, should not expect him to.
Passed many villages, church spires, "one billionaire's gaudy dacha," functioning seminaries. She played a lovely excerpt from a CD of one of the seminary choirs.
What is authentic about such a touristic experience, she asked rhetorically? Inevitably, there is fakery built into such a trip. But are countries denied the right to present whatever century of their culture they consider to be most essential to their own identity? Russia has a long history of putting on a show. Ivan the Terrible dressed up in religious robes in the 1570s and turned his torturing team into monks who did their bloody work in monasteries and invited visitors to look. It became routine to slap paint on houses that tourists drove by. But only so far up as could be seen from the buses to save paint. The most famous of all the public shows was the one that gave us the phrase "Potemkin Village." 1787. Catherine the Great was conquering the Crimea. The countryside was devastated, but when the Austrian Emperor visited Russia, Catherine's former lover, Gregory Potemkin arranged a trip past fake orchards, fake prosperous farmlands, fake villages, with peasants in costume staging dances.
The logic was to find out what others want to believe about you and then create an image of that until they go away – the logic of successful tourism, also the logic of Hollywood and Disneyworld.
Her trip was, she said, a remarkably honest display of new post-Communist Russia, a Russia that no longer praises its ideology, no longer knows what its ideology is.
The new Russia has learned its lessons from the West, how to manipulate an audience, not through terror but through fun and games. Most of us on the cruise felt optimistic about the new Russia for all its contemporary chaos.
There are different levels of tourism, she said: [l] Absolute fakery, dishonest, concocted to fool a rich audience, for a profit – a Potemkin village. One such place was Mandrogi, where they met a stuffed bear advertising 250 brands of vodka. The ship was required to stop there, although there was nothing to see, but the Russian millionaire who built it insisted on a stop there.
[2] A more respectable tourism, carnival-like, where all parties know what's not real, like Peterhof, with its palaces and gardens [where her husband posed as Peter the Great].
[3] Archaelogical tourism, where real skills are on display. Kizhi on Lake Ladoga. Peasants stringing real beads. Wooden architecture real thing. Money for renovation. Each shingle is being treated and replaced.
[4] Image-building tourism. St. Petersburg, itself. Bronze Horseman of Peter the Great. The Orthodox cross in front of the Church of Spilled Blood.
Under Communism what was faked was the future, supposed to be a radiant, prosperous future, even though everyone knew the present was decrepit, poor, violent. What is now being reconsidered, faked, is the past, especially Peter the Great, who caused Russia to experience separation, alienation, dislocation, loss of faith. Peter is being scrutinized carefully, though. After all, he divided Russia into the holy Russia of monasteries and the Russia in competition with the West where she was bound to lose. That half became bureaucratized and spiritually lost. It was because Peter had divided and weakened the country that the Bolsheviks could topple it.
She closed showing a slide of toppled gravestones of saints in a Leningrad cemetery after WWII. It was, she said, cultural capital on its side waiting for a new perspective to set it right.
BIG APPLAUSE.
There were about 10 minutes of questions dealing with the state of religion, the Cyrillic alphabet and other subjects. President Haynes closed the meeting at 11:30.
Respectfully submitted,
James Harford
She narrated a series of beautiful slides of a trip taken last year with Princeton and Amherst alumni – almost 50 years after her first trip in 1956. Her role: "cultural resource," on a 5-star Austrian ship traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg: many stops, "round the clock bar, 4 to 8 meals a day."
On her 1956 trip, three years after Stalin died, she had beena teenager, knowing no Russian language, and accompanying her grandmother. She said the country then was gray, dark, we were watched closely. "I somehow knew that what we were allowed to see was fake...but even the fakery struck me as heroic..." That trip "hooked" her on Russia and a decade later, after majoring in Russian in college, she went back. It was the 1960s...Soviet tanks had just rolled into Czechoslovakia, "despair, cynicism prevailed and over here teaching about Russia was like researching the moon."
She conducted many other trips in the 70s and early 80s with "well-behaved" or maybe "terrorized" students...The kids loved it." It was as if they were in a protective capsule, unable to speak to anyone. Their hosts despised the Soviet slogans, condemned everything that surrounded them. So little for the Russians to buy in stores, they didn't have real jobs, what they did have was time, they could consider moral and philosophical questions, read underground books.
It wasn't until the 2005 trip, that Professor Emerson, herself, was a tourist. "Does it have to mean something negative, shallow, superficial...not necessarily...but it means seeing something packaged. She showed a slide of her cabin – "if it looks like a prison, the fact is that we were captives in a country with many billionaires but where pensioners are living on $70 a month, where drinking, smoking and drug addiction are at crisis levels and an epidemic of AIDS is inevitable."
The standard of living has dropped disastrously, so has the birth rate and life expectancy (for men 58).. .where there are gorgeous palaces in amber and gold but where real life buildings are crumbling and the city streets look like dumps.
The other two resource professors, both from Amherst, were William Taubman – prize-winning biographer of Krushchev – and his wife, Jane, an expert on contemporary film. He gave lectures on post-Stalinism and on the Putin regime and in the evening she screened "one desperately depressing Russian film after another, on the war in Chechnaya, on juvenile crime and on the cynicism of the younger generation." We saw nothing of those realities but instead marched from monument to monument to ballet to opera to fancy restaurants.
She showed a map of the ship's route, with dockings along the Moscow River at such stops as Ublich, Yaroslava, Kizhi with wooden churches.
The group included several former CIA agents, one a highly ranked couple that had served in the Brezhnev era. Their suitcases were searched, and they were presented, politely, with a list of all their assignments during the Brezhnev times. Would he like to "come clean with any hidden agendas for this trip?" He said that they, as professionals, should not expect him to.
Passed many villages, church spires, "one billionaire's gaudy dacha," functioning seminaries. She played a lovely excerpt from a CD of one of the seminary choirs.
What is authentic about such a touristic experience, she asked rhetorically? Inevitably, there is fakery built into such a trip. But are countries denied the right to present whatever century of their culture they consider to be most essential to their own identity? Russia has a long history of putting on a show. Ivan the Terrible dressed up in religious robes in the 1570s and turned his torturing team into monks who did their bloody work in monasteries and invited visitors to look. It became routine to slap paint on houses that tourists drove by. But only so far up as could be seen from the buses to save paint. The most famous of all the public shows was the one that gave us the phrase "Potemkin Village." 1787. Catherine the Great was conquering the Crimea. The countryside was devastated, but when the Austrian Emperor visited Russia, Catherine's former lover, Gregory Potemkin arranged a trip past fake orchards, fake prosperous farmlands, fake villages, with peasants in costume staging dances.
The logic was to find out what others want to believe about you and then create an image of that until they go away – the logic of successful tourism, also the logic of Hollywood and Disneyworld.
Her trip was, she said, a remarkably honest display of new post-Communist Russia, a Russia that no longer praises its ideology, no longer knows what its ideology is.
The new Russia has learned its lessons from the West, how to manipulate an audience, not through terror but through fun and games. Most of us on the cruise felt optimistic about the new Russia for all its contemporary chaos.
There are different levels of tourism, she said: [l] Absolute fakery, dishonest, concocted to fool a rich audience, for a profit – a Potemkin village. One such place was Mandrogi, where they met a stuffed bear advertising 250 brands of vodka. The ship was required to stop there, although there was nothing to see, but the Russian millionaire who built it insisted on a stop there.
[2] A more respectable tourism, carnival-like, where all parties know what's not real, like Peterhof, with its palaces and gardens [where her husband posed as Peter the Great].
[3] Archaelogical tourism, where real skills are on display. Kizhi on Lake Ladoga. Peasants stringing real beads. Wooden architecture real thing. Money for renovation. Each shingle is being treated and replaced.
[4] Image-building tourism. St. Petersburg, itself. Bronze Horseman of Peter the Great. The Orthodox cross in front of the Church of Spilled Blood.
Under Communism what was faked was the future, supposed to be a radiant, prosperous future, even though everyone knew the present was decrepit, poor, violent. What is now being reconsidered, faked, is the past, especially Peter the Great, who caused Russia to experience separation, alienation, dislocation, loss of faith. Peter is being scrutinized carefully, though. After all, he divided Russia into the holy Russia of monasteries and the Russia in competition with the West where she was bound to lose. That half became bureaucratized and spiritually lost. It was because Peter had divided and weakened the country that the Bolsheviks could topple it.
She closed showing a slide of toppled gravestones of saints in a Leningrad cemetery after WWII. It was, she said, cultural capital on its side waiting for a new perspective to set it right.
BIG APPLAUSE.
There were about 10 minutes of questions dealing with the state of religion, the Cyrillic alphabet and other subjects. President Haynes closed the meeting at 11:30.
Respectfully submitted,
James Harford