another progress report

In a moment of… I don’t know what, I redid my word count to delete all the untranslated quotations. Now I’m way behind. But hey, I spent a nice couple hours writing today, and I made a dent in note taking over the weekend.

progress report

Today was actually the first day since Nov. 1 that I wrote anything (I was going to start yesterday, but midterm grading put an end to those plans).

I’m reporting a crazy word count, but a lot of it is quotes and I expect it to go later in the month. For now, though, I’ll be all smug.

May I whine?

So, theoretically, beginning today, I should be writing 500 words a day. I can’t write on Thursdays, though - my teaching days. I usually can’t write on Wednesdays - my preparing for teaching day (hey, those readings need to be done when you are a TF…). Fridays through Sundays are otherwise occupied. So I guess that means 1750 words on Mondays and Tuesdays, with research / note taking things on evenings and between other things. That sounds ok.

At least I’m not writing a 50,000 word novel.

InaDWriMo

OK, my dear lost readers. I’m back. Because I just found out about the International Dissertation Writing Month, and I think it’s just a fabulous idea (and yes, the first one was last year, but guess what! It’s happening again!)

I actually have no idea what word goal is realistic, so let’s say 15,000 in the form of a chapter. OK? Ok. That will be about 40% longer than my first, rather short chapter, and I’m going to count the changes in cumulative numbers, so if I edit something out, it’s gone.

in Moscow

I gain new respect for the art of suitcase making every time I travel. It takes a hell of a lot to make a suitcase that will survive even one journey - especially if it’s large and falls into the hands of a grad student who is too cheap to take a cab. I was mentally apologizing to my husband’s plastic Samsonite as we made our way down a flight of stairs in the Moscow subway. In the 1930s they didn’t entirely understand what escalators were good for and the two of us were paying the price: the suitcase mournfully counted steps with its plastic corner and I made futile attempts to lift it out of its misery.

Relief came in the form of a short Georgian man who lifted my long-suffering green monster as if it were a feather… Well, no, he didn’t. He actually grunted and asked me where I was going with such a heavy piece of luggage. It was seven in the morning, I was high on sunshine, crowds, and exhaust fumes, so I gave him my sunniest smile and said that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I had arrived and was planning to stay here for a while. And right away I knew the story he’d tell his wife in the evening: girl from the provinces, so naive, came to conquer Moscow with a suitcase she could barely lift, wonder where she’d end up waitressing.

Funny thing, I really did feel like a girl from the provinces. Moscow looks very different from Ekaterinburg. The shops are shinier and more expensive. The streets are wider. The buildings are taller. Men dress better. Women dress more boldly. There are sandwich shops, and outdoor cafes, and English spoken in the streets. And there’s nothing new about this, and there’s nothing Moscow can offer that New York cannot beat, and yet there I was, squinting suspiciously at ornate buildings (”is it 18th century or a 50s fake?”) and thinking about how shallow it all was, the worst of pretentious consumerism, built on the backs of real people who do real work on the wide stretches of real Russia. Hating Moscow is a hobby of mine, but this was a new sort of hate.

And then I went into a bookstore and wept, because it’s not right that only one city in all of Russia has decent bookstores but oh how nice it is to be in that one city.

medical wisdom

Five days before leaving Ekaterinburg I caught the tail end of a flu epidemic that, some weeks ago, led to several school closings due to quarantine. Fortunately, I’m done with all the archives, and all the most important library stuff - although I was planning to comb the card catalog for the last stray memoirs. The process, incidentally, is wonderful - I go through the alphabetical catalog in the “regional studies” section of the library (since other stuff can likely be found in the States, and definitely in Moscow) and pick out all the white cards. The library started using them in 1999. Coincidentally, engineers did not really publish memoirs in the 1990s but started doing in the 2000s. I love using the catalog in the way it was not meant to be used!

But anyway. Flu. I talked to mom yesterday, and she gave me the usual motherly advice: drink lots of fluids, eat lemons for vitamin C, don’t go to the library, stay in bed, warm milk with honey and baking soda for sore throat. The baking soda thing was new (Canadian, maybe?), and it got me thinking about folk medicine. Cold and flu are perfect objects for it - everyone gets them, they rarely kill you, and nothing you can do actually speeds up recovery, time after time. So, they encourage medical experimentation, with results that follow cultural and historical boundaries. Since I’m not fit for any actual work and mom’s forbidden me to go to the library, let’s play. I’ll tell you about Russian ways of dealing with common cold, and you, my three faithful readers with wonderfully multicultural experiences, will tell me yours.

Fever: aside from the obvious and common-sensical (rubbing alcohol), fever is treated with tea and raspberry preserves. Quite delightful - it probably doesn’t help, but it does make one feel better. My grandmother saved raspberry preserves specifically for when someone in the family was sick, which also made it a special occasion.

Sore throat: warm milk and honey. Has a disgusting variant - onions boiled in milk, also supposed to be drunk warm. Onions feature in another treatment procedure: chop them fine and breath over them. The fumes supposedly kill germs - or at least make them cry. Ice cream, or anything cold, are supposed to be Really Bad for sore throat.

Stuffed nose: breathing over chopped onions is supposed to help that, too. If things were really bad, grandma would boil a pot of potatoes and had me breathe potato steam, my head covered with a towel.

General care: lots of tea (Russians are not in the habit of drinking water or herbal teas, so this is just a variant of “lots of liquids”). Bed. Minimal contact with water (I would even be relieved from my dishwashing duties).

I’m actually curious about the “bed” thing, because I absolutely cannot do it unless really feverish. Does it actually help? Or is it a remnant of our peasant past when a person was either in bed or ploughing a field?

OK, your turn.

a little translation exercise

“Listen to the dream I had last night, it was something… I dreamt that I was finally defending my dissertation, but I did it in this weird way. I walked through a subway car and read passages from it - very loudly and in monotone. And before I started reading, you know, I’d apologize to the passengers for interrupting their journey and all that. And I had this box on my chest, and people would drop black or white marbles into it. And I could see that they didn’t really care, it was a bother, and rather distasteful… some had books in their laps, someone was writing a text message to his girlfriend on a cellphone, and there was me and my declamation. Some just waved me away and didn’t drop any marbles into my box - “God will provide”, you know - and some looked at me with pity, like, poor dear, how did you come to this? And old ladies grumbled behind my back - “lookit him, a healthy bloke, he oughtta be working a proper job…” And the subway cars were long, endless, practically tunnels. And I kept walking, and they stretched on and on, and it was dark… and I had to read aloud, remember. And I felt so awful, and embarrassed - it was terrible. I thought I’d never wake up. Thought I’d just die right there, in the middle of a subway car.
- And what is your dissertation about?
- That’s the thing. The influence of the Cohort’s poetry on the development of the French language.
- Ahhh… then yes. That was awkward.”

an overheard library conversation, from hildegart’s LJ (in Russian)

long-lost relatives

Last night I got a phone call from my grandma’s brother. I was seven or eight last time I saw him, and I only have a few scattered recollections from that visit: long scratches on my arms from picking raspberries in his garden, huge chunks of watermelon, which my grandma examined through her reading glasses, hoping to spot the signs of nitrate poisoning (was there ever such a food scare in the west?), a disappointing trip to a toy store, where I found nothing I liked in a roomful of stuffed animals. There was a friendship with his daughter, one year my junior, dedicated, it seemed, to exploring the shades of childhood terror: locking each other in dark broom closets, browsing an almanac of human deformities, inventing ghosts in the pantry, sharks in the bathtub, and monsters under the bed that later haunted our dreams. Once she poked a needle through her cheek (did she?) and rolled with laughter when I shrieked and flew under a bedcover. She teased me about being my AUNT, and therefore older, although actually younger.

The conversation with Georgy was sweet and a little awkward. He asked about my dissertation, requested a family visit and a photo of me and my husband.

My teenage rebellion expressed itself as contempt for family ties - so WHAT if they are relatives, I don’t even KNOW them much! It was a costless rebellion; ours is a scattered family that calmly acknowledges distance - many connections are latent, nobody expects phone calls from abroad, so nobody was any wiser about my defiance. Still, as these ties are slowly solidifying during my stay in Russia, I feel like I’m receiving undeserved blessings.

Better go dig out that photo.

defenders of the fatherland

I’m home today, because Russia is celebrating Defender of the Fatherland Day (former Soviet Army and Navy Day). There are two definitions of the “defender of the Fatherland” at play. One is a narrow professional one - the holiday, after all, started as a celebration of the military, and February 23 is still a military holiday. The other is much wider - the defender of the Fatherland is male, and to celebrate this, a woman is to buy him a new tie and some aftershave. Two weeks later, on March 8, the International Women’s Day, he will reciprocate with flowers and perfume.

When I was in primary school, February 23 and March 8 were parades of embarrassment. On the first occasion, girls of the class gave presents to boys - collectively, because giving an individual present to an individual boy is unbearable at that age - boys giggled, and the homeroom teacher smiled benignly looking at the fruits of her organizational labor. Two weeks later, the story was reversed. Since two thirds of my class was female boys always got a better deal out of February 23, so we were also bitter (after we stopped giggling). None of this, not surprisingly, had anything to do with the holidays’ original meanings, it was more like Valentine’s day split down the middle, the lovers separated by two weeks.

Russia, of course, is not the only country with a pair of gendered holidays, but what an odd pair. While others celebrate mothers and fathers - sexes in their most biologically essential - Russians celebrate men for their capacity to be soldiers and women for their capacity to work like men. Never mind that a growing number of young men evade conscription - and who is to say that serving in this fatherland’s brutal, hungry and inefficient army is the best way to defend it? Never mind that women certainly don’t get equal job opportunities or equal pay for equal work. It all gets lost in the flurry of ties and flowers, and the whole thing becomes a double farce.

What a sad reason to miss two days in the library.

But you know what? I’ll tell you a story about defenders of the fatherland. Men and women. Not fighting.

I’ve been reading a lot about the home front - memoirs, government documents, reports on morale. I don’t know yet which of these stories will become important for the dissertation and which ones will remain buried in my notes, but one of the things that keeps coming up again and again is that not fighting was hard.

I’m not even talking about food rations - so much smaller than rations at the front that all wounded soldiers marveled at how people survived, and some tried to speed up returning to their units because they were afraid of starving. And people at the home front did starve. Those in final stages of exhaustion were sent to “rest homes” for a day or two, to sleep, eat some more, recover a little. Some died on the first day of their vacation - and rest home directors wrote enraged letters to trade unions who sent people in need of an IV drip to get a glass of milk.

I’m not talking of twelve-hour work days, without days off. Or crowded homes - locals had to host families evacuated from the west. Or shortages of soap, boots, hats, coats (in the winter of 1941-42 temperatures dropped to -45 celsius, outdoor workers had twenty-minute shifts).

It was really hard to be left behind. Sure, there were people who didn’t want to go to the front and were glad to be left behind for any reason. But many, many wanted to fight.

Some considered themselves lucky to be drafted in the first two days of the war, before the state realized that it wanted some people to stay behind and started “booking” them. Some asked, and asked, and asked again, until someone finally gave them a gun (and some were repeatedly cursed at). Some were deliberately caught in a round-up without documents - those without proof of “booking” were conscripted on the spot (some, however, were found out, pulled off trains and sent back to their workplaces). Many of those who stayed played war.

One young Communist from Uralmash hit on an idea of a “front brigade,” which turned an ordinary work team into a military unit - with their brigadier a “commander” and a “political officer” in one, with military salutes, morning and evening reports, marching to and from work - and the idea caught like wild fire. When party propagandists did their jobs properly, there were days, weeks, months of “frontline work,” special efforts to help the army when it was retreating, or celebrate its successes when it was advancing, a constant attempt to sustain an emotional connection between the tide of war and the tide of work. When propagandists were absent, people moped and deserted (they often did anyway, for more pragmatic reasons, but there was a connection). Men of eligible age gathered after work - remember rations and 12-hour shifts - to march in the square, or go cross-country skiing in “military preparedness training” (”most had no proper footwear. They’d wrap newspapers around their feet to try and fit what was available,” “it was difficult to teach people in these exercises - everyone was tired… Men worked until 17:00 in the shops, and then, after work, from 18:00 till 22-23:00 marched in the stadium or did tactical exercises in the woods”).

In any country at war some of the “home” will be washed out of the “home front,” as normal activities acquire different meanings. In the Soviet Union, “home” was virtually eliminated and a lot of it was done from below. I suspect the party machine did not have to do too much to create the Myth of the Great Patriotic War - great army, heroic soldiers, brave leaders. For four years millions of people had played out this exact war.
Happy February 23.

tanks

This one is for Chris.

A cool thing about wandering all alone around a museum, with not a curator in sight, is that you can touch things. Now, I’m a sensible and law-abiding person and wouldn’t touch paper or fabric or really old things or anything under glass, so one can safely let me wander around most museums alone. But tank armor? Sure! If it can’t handle a little touching, we have a problem.

Uralmash made tanks and artillery all through the war - KBs first, and then T-34s - and there are pieces of armor plate in the museum. The thinnest one is 60mm, the thickest - 150mm, and each piece on display is about the size of a brick. Except I could hardly lift the thinnest one, and the 150mm one just laughed at me. I saw it. It suddenly made a lot of sense to me that Uralmash developed a technology for casting tank towers whole rather than making them out of rolled sheets of metal. It also suddenly made sense that tanks are so slow. I mean, I knew why, but seeing a piece of a tank brought it home.

I also got my hands on this document (from the archives):

Minutes of the party committee meeting, “Regarding the bombardment of factory #56 by tanks from factory #183.”

No, it was not competition for resources. It was comrade Shvyrkin, of the army quality control, accidentally getting too close to his industrial neighbor. Comrade Shvyrkin was expelled from the party “for opening tank fire on the factory #56’s territory” and handed over to the public prosecutor’s office, and factory #183 was ordered to repair #56’s road they accidentally destroyed and banned from letting its tanks come within a 1.5 kilometer radius of #56.