New address

Dear friends,

From May 2009 onwards you will find my posts on a new Romanian-language blog: romania-multiculturala.blogspot.com

I plan to record there my experiences of coming back to Romania, living and working here, and exploring its diversity.

Looking forward to reading your comments!

Romania and Russia - cultural similarities and differences

The last two years spent abroad have helped me realize more things about Romanian identity, past and present. I've started to understand Eastern European culture as a whole, of which we are a part. Although we are separated by borders to the East which we do not usually cross, Romania's cultural and societal problems - lack of civism, intolerance to diversity, groupthink, nationalist pride - are by no means only ours. They are somehow diffused across Eastern Europe, from Serbia and Bulgaria all the way to Russia.

I've been following Russian events for some time now, and have tried to understand Russian society from stories I read and from the people I meet in the West. For one thing, I was shocked to see that bright, Western-educated young Russians present to me a totally different story than the ones I'm reading in Western media. They are pro-Putin, dismiss former chess champion and current dissident Kasparov as a lunatic and a marginal figure, and claim that many of Russia's problems are created by the West. I am always stunned to hear somebody who lives abroad and who owes so much to Western society, from a good education to his or her current means of living, describing to me in perfect English opinions like that.

This blog post was prompted by this article . I don't think it's a relevant article by itself - the girl will most probably not make it anywhere - but it's interesting to see the types of models that the Russian establishment is promoting. This led me into thinking what is the difference between the current "dissolution of values" in Romania, where most of the population have few - if any - good opinion leaders and role models, and the like situation in Russia.

And the stark difference is that Romanian "values" that dominate the airwaves, like manele, Becali, OTV, cheap starlets etc. are not centrally imposed - there is a sort of "marketplace of ideas" out of which, unfortunately, populism and superficiality come out winners. For the time being. There is this superficiality, lack of critical thinking, despise for diversity and for civism that make us Romanians not switch off the television when such garbage appears. But we do have a choice, and with the passage of time probably more and more people will start reading the books of Alina Mungiu Pippidi and not by Mihaela Radulescu. So basically, with the current situation, we're pretty much doing it to ourselves.

In Russia, the situation is a bit different. Opinion leaders from the civil society are jailed or killed, like it was the case of Anna Politkovskaya, and the sole opinions heard on the airwaves are xenophobic, nationalistic and racist. The government has a strong interest in keeping things that way, since the more "patriotic" the Russians become, the more likely it is that they will put up with the regime's abuses in the name of building a Glorious Russia. While in our camp, Romania will be slowly civilized by the European influence, I cannot say the same for Russia, where Putin and his cronies are going to be around for a while, and are going to try to create their own version of the Ubermensch, an upgrade of Hitler's 1.0 version. :)

An upcoming surge in nationalism in Romania

When the parties of Gigi Becali and CV Tudor did not make it into parliament in the November elections, everybody was praising the death of populist nationalism in Romania. I remember Cristian Parvulescu had a sobering editorial piece then, saying that Romanian nationalism is not dead, just absent for a while from the public agenda, and it will rear its ugly head again as soon as it will find better, more credible representatives. I believe this is exactly where we're heading, as I see that deep conservatism entrenched in us is still there, manifesting itself as distrust of the West and of progress, and as hate towards whatever is different.

Some of the readers of this blog might feel that I'm overstating this case, but the reality is that they, as well as me, are pretty much not representative for the mass of Romanians. We are just outliers, and if we take ourselves and the people we know as a sample of how Romanians think, we are faced with a gross sampling bias. If we take a random sample of Romanians, according to the results of various polls, we will see that traditional values still dominate: the majority will declare themselves orthodox, will have a deep distrust for foreigners and people of other ethnicities, will consider homosexuality as a "disease" and a "sin", will prefer a "strongman regime" to a democracy, will criticize a lot but not do anything to change things, and most interestingly, they will generalize their attributes to the whole of Romania. Because, of course, their friends are just like them, and there are no 'outliers' in their social network. From here, they will derive the stereotypes that whoever is not orthodox is not truly Romanian, that Hungarians and the Roma are a problem for Romania, that we are all homogeneous and we have been like that since our parents Deceban and Traian gave us birth. And, as some polls conducted by the Open Society Foundation, this value system is not really much different for young people. No surprises there, since there has been no reform of the school curricula.

What I'm afraid of is that the next wave of political popularity will be for an Euro-skeptic party, populist and traditionalist, that plays up people's disenchantment with the current political parties and claims to bring us back to the traditional values. The exponents of this trend are very varied in nature: the Orthodox church, Dan Puric, Victor Roncea and the Altermedia organisation, all sorts of religious NGOs that preach intolerance, and the neo-nazi organization Noua Dreapta. One might be tempted to play down their influence, or the traditionalism of Romanians, but every day there is reinforcing proof of this: pilgrimages of hundreds of thousands to kiss or touch old Orthodox relics, the huge hysteria about the "satanic" biometric passports and the Parliament's initial rejection of the ordinance on religious grounds, the success of Dan Puric's ideas among young intellectuals and the fact that he was the best selling Romanian author last year, the thousands of hooligans that gather annually at the traditional "beating up the homos" event in Bucharest, and that outnumber the gay people marching for their rights by a 1 to 10 factor.

Taking into consideration Dan Puric's ambition, he could become the new "providential" political leader who hoardes of disenchanted voters are waiting for. Of course it seems implausible that a "man of ideas" like him would want to run for office...or does it? He never misses an occasion to preach fervently against the consumerist society, but he also helped boost beer sales some years ago by appearing in an Ursus TV ad. :) He is also a staunch critic of Communism, the source of all evils in Romania, but he never seems to be too critical with PSD, and he was the chief supporter of ex-apparatcik Dinu Sararu as director of the National Theatre. Now I may be wrong, but the guy has plenty of pragmatism and we might see him as the new immaculate star of Romanian politics in not too long time.

Fascism on the increase in Russia

When I was living in Madagascar, I met some people who told me horrible stories about mounting fascism in Russia. My impressions on the state of affairs in that country were not overwhelmingly positive, but what I heard seemed outright incredible.

Out of them, Mike's stories were the worst. Mike, a Malagasy-Canadian who did his high-school in Moscow, told me without any bitterness or resentment some of the things he's lived there. Being dark-skinned, he would have skin-heads chasing him after school and occasionally beating him up. Once, a driver stopped next to him and put a gun in his mouth ... just for fun. He was living with his dad who was working in Moscow, but other international students who were living in a dorm suffered badly from skinheads. One time they set their dorm room on fire, making sure to barricade the exits beforehand so that no-one can escape. While he was there he remembers murders were regularly committed against Africans and Asians, and once a black woman was stabbed with her 2 daughters while walking on the street. On top of everything, he told me skinheads were celebrating Hitler's birthday in the tens of thousands, marching on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg with guns, and many times the local authorities took part in these events as well.

Here is an Economist article from last week, which pays homage to another assassinated Russian journalist. Reading it made Mike's stories a little more believable. Something really bad is going to come out of that country, and it's going to take many by surprise...





Anastasia Baburova, a Russian journalist, died on January 19th, aged 25

AP

IT IS still not clear why Anastasia Baburova was shot in the head. Was she a target—along with Stanislav Markelov, a human-rights lawyer who was shot seconds earlier? Was she an accidental victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or did she try to grab and disarm the killer after he shot her companion?

Both Mr Markelov and Ms Baburova were killed in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. The next day, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies. Her death was part of a continuing battle between fascists and anti-fascists in Russia, which is seldom so plainly revealed to the outside world.

Jumping an assassin was part of her nature. At any sign of violence or racism her nerves and muscles instantly responded, hitting out, resisting what was physically intolerable. “It is hard to look in the eyes of a Korean student who has just been hit on the head by two under-age jerks…giving ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes”, she wrote in her blog after seeing yet another neo-Nazi attack in Moscow. It was the same blog in which she enthused about roller-blading for the first time: at night, fast, without a helmet.

The fact that she worked at Novaya Gazeta was no coincidence. “Where else?” she asked her colleagues, rhetorically. She was the fourth journalist Novaya Gazeta had lost in the past eight years. But Russia’s most critical newspaper, co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of perestroika, was the natural place for her to be.
Stretching towards the sun

She was born in 1983, just before perestroika opened up the country. Like the best of her generation (alas, few and untypical) she grew up fearless, thriving on freedom and fresh air. Ms Baburova considered herself a citizen of the world; she had more in common with rebellious youths in Europe than with office workers in her own country. She spoke fluent English and learnt Chinese; yet she had little chance to go abroad, to London or anywhere else. Instead, she travelled through books. At 15 her restlessness was compressed in a poem called “Coffee Cup”:
Wake up in the morning
Stretch your arms towards the sun
Say something in Chinese
And go to Paris…
Every minute, somewhere in the world there is morning
Somewhere, people stretch their arms towards the sun
They speak new languages, fly from Cairo to Warsaw
They smile and drink coffee together.

Official patriotic slogans (“A resurgent Russia that is getting off its knees”) sounded false and alien to her. She was never on her knees, never humiliated by the Soviet collapse, even though she was born in Sebastopol—a Black Sea port redolent with past Russian glory—when it was part of the Soviet empire, and went to school there when it had become part of Ukraine. Instead of feeling inferior, she learnt martial arts. She managed to get into the Moscow Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), where the children of the Soviet elite traditionally prepare themselves for diplomatic careers—a miracle for a girl from Sebastopol, without connections. Her exam results were so impressive that she was offered a place at Yale. But she decided she wanted to be a journalist, and walked out of the institute.

She could have made a career at Izvestia, and did a short stint there, but never fitted in at a newspaper which in recent years has exuded nationalism, conformism and cynicism. She got into trouble for showing her press card, and was arrested for filming police evicting residents from a building which they had claimed for themselves. Vladimir Mamontov, the editor of Izvestia, who never met Ms Baburova, dismissed her as the type of girl “who knows very little about real life, but vibrates at the sight of a social change. They are waiting for a revolution, and when there is none they get bored.”

Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, knew her better. She reminded him of the young men who people Dostoevsky’s novels, youths with a heightened sense of injustice and a longing to change the world. Though her family came from the Soviet intelligentsia, her roots went back further, to the 19th-century thinkers who invented the word. Unsurprisingly, Ms Baburova had a soft spot for anarchists. Mikhail Bakunin, for example, who believed that without inner freedom for the individual, society can be neither free nor fair.

She and her friends rightly identified fascism as the biggest and most pressing threat to her country. She swore to fight it. She sensed accurately the social kinship between Stalinism and fascism: the link between attempts to portray Stalin as a “successful manager”, and the current upsurge of nationalism. Unlike many young people in the generation before hers, she did not see a safe job as an ultimate measure of success.

In Turgenev’s poem “The Threshold”, a young woman stands before a door. A voice asks whether she is prepared to endure cold, hunger, mockery, prison and death, all of which await her on the other side. She says “Yes” to everything, and steps over. “A fool,” cries a voice from behind her. “A saint,” suggests another.

Darwin Year

A campaign I support: Stop Religious Indoctrination in Romanian Schools

Moving to Madagascar

Dear friends, close followers of my blog:

From the 20th of September I will be living in Madagascar, doing a 6-month internship with the United Nations World Food Programme. To catch up with my impressions, please visit laurinmadagascar.blogspot.com

Cheers!