Word: russianness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hats sticking out like ungainly wings. A settlement of wooden farmhouses with carved filigree windows swept by, seemingly unchanged in centuries."So, you're really going to Tambov," said a Moscow friend, surprised that I would be traveling to such a provincial and undeveloped place. "There's a Russian saying: the Tambov wolf is your comrade." I remembered his sneering tone as I stared at the flat landscape from the two- bunk compartment I was sharing with Yuri Shchekochikhin, a commentator from the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. So, you are heading off into the wilds of Russia? See for yourself...
...taxi pulled away from the Tambov train station, spraying mud and loose gravel from the potholed roadway. The landmarks were typical of a rural Russian administrative center. A tank seemed poised to topple off the memorial honoring the heroism of local citizens in the Great Fatherland War, as World War II is known. A crane loomed above the construction site of the new Communist Party headquarters, just across from an imposing statue of Lenin thrusting his arm into the future. Political posters and slogans of a type that had all but vanished from Moscow could be seen on billboards...
...been back since 1982, and was eager to see how life had changed in this region on the edge of the Russian steppe. Now, looking at the streets of Tambov, I wondered what was new in this city of 300,000. They were building new houses, stadiums and schools? They had built them before. The slogans were new on the posters? Even in the past they updated them from time to time...
Like the boy in the Russian folktale whose magical hat allows him to see and hear everything unobserved, I sat at the dinner table and listened to Razhev and Karpov. The exchanges about ecology and the financial obligations of local factories to the surrounding community crackled. But it was not the flow of argument that impressed me so much as the fact that an American was allowed to listen. Had Soviet officials always spoken so bluntly among themselves? Or was this a reflection of plyuralizm, a borrowed word slipping awkwardly off Russian tongues...
...then, the great leap forward. An equally random visit to a bookstore in an Uvarovo housing complex turned up the unexpected: two copies of George Bush's autobiography, Looking Forward, translated into Russian. The shop manager told me he had already sold 28 copies...