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But the disappearance of color had other associations and meanings, as I would find out later.
In midsummer, my two assistants and I flew from Zurich to Moscow on a private jet the Russian businessman had chartered for us. We spent a few days interviewing consumers in Moscow. There, a local crew joined our Swiss crew to fly our plane over certain sensitive military areas in Siberia and the Russian Far East. More than 4,000 miles later, we touched down in the town of Krasnoyarsk, where we met up with a Russian translator, a driver and a car. For the next ten days we traveled from one Siberian city and apartment building to another. At night, the car took us back to the airport, and we reboarded the plane. In four or five hours, during which time the three of us analyzed that day’s findings, we touched down in yet another withdrawn Russian town. In a week and a half, we passed through eight separate time zones, and at one point were less than a 45-minute flight from Tokyo.
In his 2010 book Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier writes that no political or territorial entity inside Russia bears the actual name “Siberia.” The world knows Siberia as a metaphor, Frazier writes, a geographical or social condition that connotes being rejected, or given the cold shoulder. Siberia is the table beside the restaurant’s kitchen doors, the seat in the ballpark so far away from the field you’re better off watching the game at home on television, the party you throw for yourself where no one shows up. Geographically, Siberia refers to the roughly eight-million-square-mile landmass from the Arctic Ocean to the Kasakhstan mountains to the borders of Mongolia and China. The American composer Irving Berlin was born in Tyumen, Siberia, and lived there until he was five. One of his biographers wrote that as an adult, Berlin had no memories of his childhood except one: in the wake of a pogrom, he remembered lying on a blanket on the side of a road, watching Cossacks burn his house to the ground. It’s no surprise that at the turn of the twentieth century, his parents emigrated to the Lower East Side of New York.
Bordering the easternmost chunk of Siberia, and further north, the Arctic, the Russian Far East isn’t a place where appearances matter much. Life is difficult, and the weather is extreme. In the winter, temperatures drop to as low as 50 or 60 below zero. The summers are warm and short. The length of a day varies from 21 hours in mid-July to three hours in December. Political correctness doesn’t exist. In the winter, fur coats, fur hats and boots made from reindeer are the only things that can insulate bodies against the cold, and the most desirable winter gloves are made out of dog fur. A Russian fashion consultant once told me that fashion stops at the Siberian border, where instead of showing off, the prerogative is survival.
The cities and towns of Dalniy Vostok Rossii lack even the dabs of color a visitor might see in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. The skies, streets, sidewalks, footbridges, lakes, shops and buildings all seem drained of life. Whatever trees there are were planted in a hurry a long time ago, and ankle-high pollen covers the streets and sidewalks like snow. In the winter, locals leave their cars on all day knowing that if they don’t they won’t be able to restart them. Now and then you catch sight of one that gave up, sunken down over flat tires and abandoned, its undersides rusted out.
Traditionally the way I connect with people is by subverting the rules. If you can’t connect with the natives of a country, you won’t get very far. As everyone knows, people send out unconscious signals, and, as I am a chameleon by nature, one of the things I do is “become” the person I’m talking to, since we tend to respond to the people who are most similar to us.
This turned out to be harder than usual in Russia, where trust is generally lacking. Most people there don’t look you in the eyes, and their gazes have a cloudy, dissociated look. Decades before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden made headlines, Russians knew their phone lines were being tapped. My Moscow-based employer had a dozen or so cell phones on him at all times. The people who mattered most to him had their own dedicated phones, and whenever one rang, he had to sort through his briefcase to find it. When he spoke, his words were hushed, a hand always covering his mouth in case someone could read his lips.
I’m always looking for topics, symbols, actions and behaviors that ground or define a culture and can serve as a footbridge of sorts between a stranger—me—and the local residents. I might show up at a bar or an outdoor farmer’s market or spend an hour or two with a local political figure. Knowing I would stick out immediately in a remote Russian city that few non-natives visit, I needed to make myself conspicuously visible. I needed to prove I was safe and worthy if not of friendship, then of being given a chance.
In the main square of Krasnoyarsk, I noticed that elderly men spent most of their afternoons playing long games of chess. There was a nice, obvious sense of community, fellowship and physical interaction, of residents looking out for one another. In my experience, the more physical touching there is among people, the healthier the country is (a point I’ll revisit later on).
With my interpreter translating, I challenged one of the old men to a game. Before long a crowd had gathered. As the games went on, I could feel myself becoming, at least from a local perspective, Russian. The expressions of the people in the crowd grew soft, and now and again, their eyes showed patience, or humor. At one point the old man I was playing against grabbed hold of my finger and moved the piece with me; a few minutes later, someone from the crowd sat down beside me.
It was the moment a stranger came over to where I was sitting that I knew I’d passed a test. Nothing was ever said, but everyone understood what had just happened: if I won the game, or even lost while playing honorably, or well, I would be seen as trustworthy, someone who had earned the right to do his job in their city, whatever that job was. Fortunately I’ve always been good at chess, and when I won a game or two, I knew I’d surrendered my outsider status.
There’s an iconic film in Russia wherein the protagonist comes home after work only to find he’s in the wrong apartment, and the wrong building, and the wrong city, but since everything in Russia looks the same, he doesn’t realize it, and now he has no idea how to get back home. No matter where I went in the Russian Far East—Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Yakutsk (known, unofficially, as the coldest inhabited place on earth) or Siberia’s largest city, Novosibirsk—the apartment buildings, where 95 percent of the population live, were the same. Not just similar but exactly the same. Most were built between the First and Second World Wars. They were all 25 stories high. The metal fences surrounding them were all the same height and painted in the same green and yellow colors. The trees around the circumference of every building had been planted in the same places. On the sidewalks and small lawns in front and on the sides of buildings were ashtrays made from rusted soup or stew cans, with butts sticking up out of them. Now and again I caught sight of a line of clothes drying in the heat. Cats prowled the paths and walkways. Inevitably there was a smell of something decomposing in the air, most likely a pet who’d died. The building lobbies were slapdash-looking. But more important than the exteriors and lobbies of apartment buildings, I later realized, was what went on inside them. If Russian apartment dwellers took the time to make their buildings’ exteriors neat, or beautiful, they might be seen as vulnerable. Better to appear not to care.
The first thing I noticed were Siberian doors. There may have been multiple locks on the outside, but inside, every door in every apartment I visited was thickly cushioned and upholstered. The effect was to create a soundproof space that deadened all sounds and cut the inhabitants off from the outside world. Inside, the rooms were functional, cramped and plain. Few residents had taken the time to decorate. Most apartments had two chairs and a couch, a television set, a computer maybe, and that was it.
Whenever I enter someone’s home, the first thing I focus on is the artwork. Around 90 percent of the people I interview have something hanging there. If a living place can be likened to a city, the art on the wall, or the lack of art, is the first sign you see on a city’s
outskirts, the one declaring the start of the city limits. The bedroom brings you closer to the city, followed by the kitchen and the bathroom, both of which take you into the “downtown” of someone’s living space. After first asking permission, I will generally look through women’s handbags, and even their clothes closets. What hangs there so that they can reach it most easily, and what sort of clothing is hanging the farthest away?
In Russia, I later found out, women are in charge of the home. Therefore, you can be assured that the way a man’s clothes are displayed in the bedroom, or the closet, reflects her desires, not his. For the next few weeks I met any number of worn-out, worn-down Russian husbands. They seemed indifferent to how they looked. Their pants were dirty, their T-shirts simple, their shoes old. But inside the bedroom, the fanciest men’s clothes could be seen hanging in the closets, visible but unworn. It was a hopeful gesture on the part of their wives. Though they never said so, it seemed they had hung the clothes there in an attempt to bring back the romantic potential of the men they’d married.
You can’t really talk about Russian women without bringing up Russian men. Across Russia, women have a much longer life expectancy than men, for one simple reason: alcohol. A 2014 study in the Lancet tracked 151,000 adults across three Russian cities for over a decade and concluded that up to 25 percent of all Russian men die before the age of 55, with liver disease and alcohol poisoning the main causes of death. Drinking and alcohol-related morbidity are linked to political volatility, too. In 1985, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, cut back on nationwide vodka production and passed a law prohibiting stores from selling liquor before noon. Consumption and overall death rates both dropped. When communism fell, vodka became available again, and rates of consumption and alcohol-related deaths rose accordingly. Russian women aren’t teetotalers by any means, but the average life expectancy for Russian men today is around 64, the lowest of any country in the world outside African nations.
Less important than what Russians drink is how they drink: like first-year fraternity pledges. Russia is a country of bingers. Natives seem to have convinced themselves that this is an unalterable element of what it means to be Russian, that it’s effectively baked into the country’s genetics. Others blame the alcoholism rates on the difficulty of life. Whatever the reason, almost every person I spoke to had up to a dozen different vodka varieties on hand. In one Yakutsk apartment, a sectional living room couch even had a hidden compartment in its middle that swung open to reveal a doll-sized magic kingdom of vodka and glasses, as well as a stack of Swiss chocolate bars. Based on the date on the package, the Swiss chocolate had expired 15 years earlier, but that didn’t matter. The owners had a private cupboard containing not just a pipeline to their dreams, but also to the safety, efficiency, cleanliness and order that Switzerland stands for.
I jotted down this piece of small data in my notebook, not knowing at the time the pivotal role it would play later on.
The issue of alcohol kept coming up, especially when I entered apartments where it was easy to intuit two levels of life—a public one and a second unseen one. One day I was interviewing a Russian woman when she asked if I wanted some water. When I took a sip, I nearly spit it out. It was pure salt and bubbles. It was like swallowing a mouthful of the ocean. At the time I had no idea why water that tasted like that would ever be for sale commercially, or why she would offer such a thing to a guest. (I later discovered that the salt water came from nearby lakes, and Siberians perceived it as clean, bracing and nutritious.) Later that night, back in my hotel, I realized that the salt water was in some respects an everyday substitute for alcohol. Like alcohol, salt is highly addictive, and if they’re not actively drinking, alcoholics are often drawn to things—cigarettes, coffee—that give them the same rush, and that also hurt a little going down.
I was picking up a clue here, a clue there: the indifference and lifelessness of the apartment exteriors and lobbies. The soundproof doors. Of course those doors kept out the cold in the winter, but could that be the only reason they were so well insulated? A high alcoholism rate that led to one hostess serving me carbonated salt water. Was salt water the only compensation for alcoholism in Russia, or were there others? If alcoholism masked or concealed a cultural vacuum, then what was it?
Almost every man and woman I spoke to in Russia told me that if given the opportunity, they would live somewhere else. The top destinations they listed off were Italy, France and Switzerland. Why Italy and France? The food. Why Switzerland? Because of its perceived security and safety. Most Russians had never been to these countries and had no idea what life was like there, but it didn’t matter. More important was what they symbolized—good food, smiling people, leisure, romance, beauty, flirtation and freedom. If the first clue revolved around desire, and discontent, the second clue had to do with aspiration, which brought up the subject of what it meant to be a Russian female living in a rough, survivalist nation.
Earlier I mentioned I am always seeking the exaggerated elements in a culture, the things that stick out. Almost immediately, two possible business ideas occurred to me. The first was an online medical clinic where doctors saw patients virtually, between certain hours of the day, but I soon found out that the Russian medical infrastructure is so byzantine that an online clinic would be almost impossible to put into place. Second, I’d noticed that almost everyone I’d met owned a dog, a cat or both. Why not launch an online pet store? Then I found out that Russian pet owners rarely spend money on their dogs and cats, and fed them whatever was left over from their own meals. I would have to do some more digging.
The next clue that showed up was more an observation than anything else. In contrast to the featurelessness of the apartments I visited, almost every woman I interviewed had extremely red lips. Why did Russian women wear so much makeup? By painting their lips like that, what were they conveying exactly? Was it the need to be noticed? If so, why? What sort of culture, or environment, makes a woman feel she isn’t getting the attention she needs?
It may sound overly dramatic, but men and women tend to rebel against whatever imbalances exist in their countries. They do this consciously and unconsciously. Whenever I visit the United States, for example, one of the first things I notice is that no one ever touches one another, especially the men. In America, touch is perceived as sexual. At the same time, American culture overemphasizes sports, especially football, which is one of the few places where men are given permission to touch, slap, wrestle, tackle and hug one another. France is renowned for the high quality of its food as well as its drawn-out, multicourse meals. Yet France is also ranked number one in the world when it comes to eating premade food, including frozen food, and McDonald’s revenues there are the second highest worldwide. Then there’s Japan, one of the most polite, controlled nations in the world, a place where if you bring up the topic of sex with a woman, she will literally blush. But Japan is also the country with the highest number of “sex hotels” and female-only train cars to protect women from being groped.
Back in Siberia, it occurred to me that the red lips I kept seeing symbolized the girl inside—the one eager but forbidden to express herself in a visual way. Those red lips were also a feminine way of controlling the home, a manifestation of a Big Mouth who can speak emotionally and without constraint. The combination of the exaggeratedly feminine and the confrontational kept showing up. One Russian woman I interviewed wore a black T-shirt with a front showing a white Persian kitten gripping an MK-47, as if the shirt were telling the world that its owner may have been soft on the inside but she also wouldn’t hesitate to kill you. When I asked another Russian woman to draw me a picture, she sketched out a beautiful mural of a school of underwater fish. The fish didn’t look like any I’d ever seen before. They were stylized creatures with Betty Boop eyes and—more confirmation, but of what?—red lips like flowers in bloom. A day later, another woman drew me a tig
er, again with a huge red open mouth.
Women as cats. Women as tigers. Women as pairs of oversized red lips. At that stage, I wasn’t sure what I was even noticing, but I jotted it all down anyway, along with another strange fact: there were no mirrors anywhere. In several homes in the places where mirrors usually hang—over a dresser or the bed, or against a bathroom wall—there were sheets of cardboard similar to the ones you find in amusement parks, where by poking their heads through a hole, children can inhabit the torso of a prince, or a warrior, or a muscleman, making them resemble their—or more likely their parents’—favorite characters.
Elsewhere, it’s unusual to see a house without mirrors—in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. Most people are in the habit of looking at themselves in the mirror several times a day. (On my own apartment block, workers recently wrapped the mirrored building elevator in plastic in preparation for new people moving in, and I noticed that someone had poked a hole through the plastic so she could check herself out in the elevator mirror before coming home.) But even the bathroom mirrors I saw were dark and somehow gloomy. Some were cracked, or dented. If a mirror serves as a frame for a piece of human art, the mirrors I saw looked and felt like afterthoughts. In many bedrooms I found small, wood-handled mirrors hidden away in drawers. Based on the smooth grain of the wood, they didn’t see much use. The absence of mirrors led me to believe that Russian women were deliberately muting themselves in order to fulfill someone else’s needs. The bright red lipstick was a call for attention, yet at the same time, these women avoided looking in the mirror. It made no sense. Or did it?