Forced Communality

After the horrifying school shootings in Kauhajoki and Jokela, Finns started to seek for the lost "communality" (=yhteisöllisyys). It was amazing for the Finns how these young boys could isolate themselves from society which alarmed people to ask where the Finnish sence of communality had gone.

After living in Russia, I know where it went: the searched and desired communality escaped to our Eastern neighbour. Although Russian state with journalist-killings and with cruel wars in Chechnya can seem awfully cold-blooded and ruthless, the every day life here is filled with face-to-face interaction between people. And I think these everyday meetings are the glue which keeps society together. 

Even if you feel like not speaking to anyone, it doesn't work in Russian. In a normal weekday you'll face at least the following meetings with fellow citizens:

When you take the marshrutka to university, first you hail to stop it and maybe ask the driver if the minibus takes you where you're heading to. Then you climb into the back seat and start to search for the right amount of money to pay the ride (fee is something between 15-30 rubles). Because there are no electronic tickets or automats, you have to always pay in cash. So after finding the right amount of money, you ask the passenger in front to you to peredat, pass forward, your money to the driver. It's purely impossible to stay mute in Russian public transportation. Even if you manage to pay the ride without using a single word, you have to stop the marshrutka by shouting "Ostanavite, pazhaluista" to the driver when you want to get off. 

So before you even reach your university you have talked - or at least muttered something- to some people you don't know. Next step in daily routines is entering the university. First you have to greet the babushka who's guarding that only students and people working in university get in. If you forget to do this and thus look suspicious they may check your student card. After guard-babushka, you head to the cloakroom where you leave jacket for another babushka. If your jacket is somehow hard to hang, you will hear about this. (Once babushka criticized that my jacket was hanging too much on the other side because of the original design)

At the university you can become part of faceless mass only in Finland. In Russia the small study groups (3-8 students) force you to open your mouth on every class you want it or not. At the cafeteria between the classes you have to order everything behind the counter (unlike in Finnish self-service university kitchen) and probably explain why you cannot pay with smaller money. Sometimes even note worth 100 rubles (2,5 euros) is too big for them.

After university you go to the corner shop next door to buy some food. Usually they are Soviet style shops, where you have to ask for each item behind the counter. Again you probably have some discussion about with what kind of money you can pay the food. Some times you even get advice (unwanted) if you buy something "stupid". I have fought with babushkas about lip balsam which was "too expensive", whether cold beer is unhealthier than warm one and should bananas be in a plastic bag or not (I think not, and babushka though it was the most stupid thing ever NOT to pack bananas into plastic). Try to mumble something about nature protection in that situation.

When you finally leave the shop with the food babushka allowed you to buy, there will be many more encounters before you get home. It happens more than once a day that somebody ask you direction on a street. Once at Nevski Prospekt (main street of St. Petersburg) I was asked "Where's Nevsky Prospekt?". Believe me, this street is hard to miss even if you're not standing on it!

Only tourists use maps, Russians trust more each other (and also the tourist with maps) in order to find the right direction. Maybe this is because during the Soviet time the maps were either forbidden of fake ones so that Soviet people couldn't find their way out from the communist wonder land.

In addition to the lost Russians, you may meet some babushkas who need assistance. Especially during the cold winter months, the babushkas wear some much thick clothes they can hardly move. More than once or twice babushka has shouted me "Devushka, come here to help me" which means that I have had to pull them up on stair(s) because they are too packed to lift their legs high enough.

On a street you also meet people selling all sort of stuff (herbs, tights, fish, books etc.), bumming cigarets (the unwritten rule in Russia is always a give one if you have) and unfortunately also people begging. 

You may also go to gym, where it's almost impossible to train without the instructor coming to you to order you to have heavier weights or to do some motion in a different way. In trains (if you're girl) you never have to lift your luggage to the self because there are always some Russian men doing that for you. In a train between Finland and Russia, it sometimes shameful to see how Russian men help women while Finnish men are sitting quietly and doing nothing. Or at most telling their stupid businessman wanna-be-funny jokes in Finnish when they think nobody understands them.

So all in all, you meet at least dozen stranger during your normal routines in a normal day, not to mention your friends and other people you choose to meet. Sometimes, or actually quite often, it is really annoying to face all these encounters everyday, but that is what communality is about: meeting people, even when you prefer to be left alone.

In Finland like in some other Western welfare countries the services and state support are functioning almost too perfectly because the society is working without people having to really meet each other: machines sell the bus tickets, you get into university with an electronic key, on a lecture you study with dozens of other people without hardly any discussion with the professor, at the gym even the skinniest anorectics can exercise without somebody telling them to stop, on a street people almost never ask direction from strangers, and in some shops you may even pay for a machine instead of a shop assistant.

Of course in Russia, there is no welfare society taking care of people, which is not only a good thing either. Despite (or because of) all its dysfunctions, in Russia people still have to lean on each other. Maybe this is one reason why they never had a large-scale school shootings.