In The Other Side of Russia, author Sharon Hudgins relates her and her husband’s personal adventures as University of Maryland professors who taught and traveled in Russia’s southern Siberia and Far East during the early post-Soviet years (1993-1995), a period marked by political-economic and social upheavals following collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book’s aim is to dispel misconceptions Americans may have about the region, which the author points out was closed to the gaze of Westerners during most of the twentieth century. To clear up these misconceptions Hudgins has organized a potpourri of personal anecdotes written during her stay and combined them with scholarly reflection on the region’s history, custom, food, education system and the like.
The introductory chapter calls attention to “a psychological ‘them and us’ attitude,” which Hudgins suggests represents a dominant style of thinking among peoples of the region about the cultural and geographical distance separating “European Russia and Asian Russia” (p. xxiii). The author suggests this style of national imagining may have been cultivated during the 19th century when European Russian intellectuals returning from the region popularized their own feelings of alienation.
Less well articulated but still evident is the sense that the book will treat this area of Russia in the practice of a national culture survey—of the sort that anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead popularized in the second quarter of last century.
Unfortunately, tales of inconvenience take precedent over meaningful dialogue between Hudgins and the residents of this region. Time is lost in “waiting rooms reeking of stale cigarette smoke, unwashed bodies, and dirty clothes” (p. 67). Space is shared with “bored-looking babushki”, “gold-tooth hag[s]” and “shabby drunks” (p. 67). The pair is forced to part with personal belongings and food brought from home, leaving them in the “care of strangers whom they have no reason to trust” (p. 43). A scruffy young man threatens the couple with a knife on an overly crowded bus “filled far beyond its designed capacity” (p. 90). “Grimy pillows” and “grungy mattresses” await their sleeping hours (p.67).
There is an absence of interest and curiosity to communicate with persons actually living in Siberia and the Far East on topics the author has intended to dispel American misconceptions about. Her subjects are largely viewed as “passively accepting” their awful situations (p. 90). These situations are most frequently exemplified in the crowded, dirty conditions on their poorly maintained transportation systems (p. 28-30). When inhabitants of the region do react, their responses are limited to “frustrations” surfacing as “rudeness or rage” (p. 90). Included among the situations are the “corruption” and “mafia” which “are well established and pervasive as elsewhere in Russia and worked according to long-standing traditions” (p. 20).
Health care is a great topic to both capture American reader interest and illustrate the differences in ideas about the body, aging and state responsibility of this region. But again the reader is left with generalizing comments: “While politicians bicker, essential services such as state-provided health care continued to decline”. What, I wonder, is “health care” to these people? What is “care”? How do they understand what is “essential” and what is state “service”? Some discussion or even simple but insightful observation that follows through on such topics would give the reader a sense of what it feels like for these people, not just the Hudgins couple, to go through what must have been (continues to be?) a period of difficult transition.
This is not to trivialize the personal hardship of Hudgins’s own visit to the region. Her recollections of living in a concrete high-rise in mid-winter with only sporadic hot water, heat and electricity provide a vivid immediacy of travel in Siberia. Yet, Hudgins’s sense of isolation felt while living in Russia is barely audible amid the cacophony of living standard inadequacies which preoccupy her own national imaginings. The list identifying the lack of modern appliances is surprising: no coffeemakers, clothes dryers, garbage disposals, dishwashers, clean linens, dry bars of soap, proper computer paper, forks, knives (p. 157).
Hudgins receives partial comfort from a small group of American professors with whom she works. Their list of “running jokes…and…shibboleths” which are intended to capture the incompleteness of modernity in Russia’s Far East is insightful (pp. 85-88). It draws into focus the objects of these visitors’ affections and fascinations as well as locates the author’s more sensitive yearnings for intimacy, touch and feel: in the mass produced goods of American commodity capitalism and infrastructural convenience (“Have you ever seen anything manufactured in Russia that didn’t look like a reject?” [p. 155]).
The message of this book, it seems, is that while Capitalism has finally arrived in Russia’s Far East, Modernity lies elsewhere.