Every year before stepping onto main stages of Russia, famous group Terem-kvartet plays preview concert for students. Tickets for their concerts cost easily up to 50 euros, but students can enjoy their music for free at the state University concert hall (why don't we have hall like that in Tampere?). Although I was a bit skeptical (=didn't want to spend my Friday evening at some classical music concert) their music was surprisingly good. The group played classical (i.a. Swan lake) and modern (Mission impossible) film music with traditional Russian instruments: they had normal size balalaikka, giant balalaikka and accordion + some weird guitar-type instrument which I couldn't recognize. Music was great, and players were super-talented but the most interesting thing in the concert was the crowd.
In St. Petersburg it's totally normal that young boys and girls (here they start university at the age of 16-17) go to listen classical music with their friends. Even at the opera you may see teenage groups with their hair hanging in front of their eyes (big hit especially among emo-rockers), in their Converse-shoes and in super-tight jeans enjoying the classical music. Although teenagers may be reserve their emotions in everyday life, at the cultural events Russians don't hold back their compliments! At the Terem-kvartet concert girls ran up to the stage to give roses and kisses to the players, audience stood up to applause and everyone was obviously trilled by the music. You can leave that kind of ecstatic moment only with a smile on your face.
Beside the cultural trip among the teenage Russians, the State University was a sight already as such. Our Russian teacher (who invited us to the concert) teaches not only us at the European University, but also students at the State University. Salaries at the universities are even lower than the salaries of school teachers so in order to make your living, you need teach in two different places. After the concert Irina Aleksandrovna (you call teachers here with first name and with father's name) showed us "the longest corridor of St. Petersburg". Indeed, everything is bigger in Russia: the corridor was 800 meters long! Pictures of great men (scientist and artist) were hanging on the walls of the corridor. On the other side there were book shelfs after one another. In places like that you can really see still see some glimpses of the great tsarist country which Russia used to be (now the country is only a wanna-be superpower). Or could you imagine corridors like that in Nordic welfare states where all the big and glamourous are only tacky instead of being impressive?
After teaching at the State University over 30 years, Irina Aleksandrovna has many real-life anecdotes from the university. Her favorite topic is to complain how students (especially Chinese exchange students; btw, there's usually a small racist even inside the most-educated Russians) are getting more and more duraks every year, how they don't know history any more and how the general stupidity is taking over the whole country. The funniest stories are of course from the Soviet time.
When Mikhail Gorbatshov was nominated as the new General Secretary of USSR in 1985 he made his first official visit to St. Petersburg. Like all good Soviet leaders he visited of course the main university of the city and also the home "of the average Soviet family". So one morning when Irina Aleksandrovna went to work, she realized that the whole classroom was renovated and re-painted during the night and there were suddenly flowers growing on the back-yard of the university (it was still winter time). She was confused what's happened until somebody said that Gorba is going to visit the university. Of course Gorbatshov saw only the renovated classroom and met only students which had been up the whole previous night in order to practice what they should say and do at the meeting with the new leader. Also the average Soviet "family" of mother, father and two children met each other the same morning when they met Gorbatshov.
It's easy to laugh to the Soviet times but the biggest joke is that nothing has really changed. Usually when official leaders or important business men visit St. Petersburg they have some meetings at the sub-urban village in the middle of the beautiful nature. In addition to the state residency, in the middle of the small sub-urban village there's a sky-blue wall greeting the important visitors. What is behind that wall is real Russia, which is unsuitable for the foreign eyes. According to my teacher the blue wall was built to hide the poor people's shelter and the governor of St. Petersburg Valentina Matvienko ordered that the wall should be painted "with color of Putin's eyes". No need to say, whose ally Matvienko is. The same absurd theatre (see previous blogging) is going on in Russia which started after the Communist revolution.
Beside the cultural experience, the second positive surprise of the week was Russian TV-news. All the big TV-channels are under state control so the topics of the news they broadcast are quite limited. So it was a big surprise when there was story about the Anna Politkovskaya trial on the Russian news channel. And on top of everything, they let the representative of Politkovskaya's family speak freely! Until now Politkovskaya has been persona non grata on Russian main media. In fact I heard rumours that Putin forbid to mention Anna's name in public television which is easy to believe because after Anna's murder, Putin said "the dead of Politkovskaya has caused us more harm that her living". Nice, ice-cold attitude.
I could only cheer for a moment of the quality of TV-journalism when things got back to normal. The next piece of news was about president Medvedev in Siberia. The breaking news of that story was that "Medvedev visited aquarium and he liked especially the seals there".
Otherwise life has been quite easy and nice here. The biggest backlash of the week was the European fog and storm which held Thomas as a hostage in Paris for a night which delayed his arrival to St. Petersburg for a day. I was near mental breakdown when I got the message "I will come only tomorrow" because within the same 5 minutes my beautiful winter boots broke down and the cash registers of the shop were I was collapsed. Luckily I was on my way to my Finnish friends place for a brunch. Good company, good food, rehearsing Russian verbs and girls dying my hair pulled me back to the bright side of life. Hang-over Saturdays are awful alone, but in company they are one of the best days in life!
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