A Chechen in Kyrgyzstan is not Kyrgyz

By Kelly Raftery

First off, let me say I mourn deeply for the victims of the Boston tragedy. One of the three fatalities was a little boy exactly the same age as my son. His sister, who has been gravely wounded, danced the same steps as my child. That family could have been mine standing on the street, any one of the victims could have been you or me.

Listening to the media coverage today, I can’t help but cringe at the errors that are being presented as fact about the former Soviet Union, its peoples and cultures. Let’s start with geography. From 1917-1991 there was the Soviet Union, or USSR. The USSR was made up of fifteen Republics, which included the Kyrgyz Republic, the Kazakh Republic, and the Russian Republic among others.  The Soviet Union was one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries, home to over 100 distinct peoples, who were “encouraged” to adopt Russian over their native tongues, renounce their religions in favor of official atheism and live an appropriately Soviet life. 

A map below outlines the various countries that make up the former Soviet Union today. As you can see, fifteen countries emerged from the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

The fifteen Republics operated somewhat independently and when things began to fall apart in the early 90s, it was easy to divide up the Soviet Union into its constituent parts, despite the fact that there were many other ethnicities that also wanted their own sovereign states. In fact, an initial treaty drafted under Gorbachev allowed for eighty separate states to be formed out of the Soviet Union, but this document was set aside during Yeltsin’s August Coup. Among those embryonic nation states never to be formed was the Chechen-Ingush Republic. But, dreams of an independent Chechnya would not die easily and a separatist movement was formed with the goal of an independent state for Chechens. 

Now, let’s look at the map below – of southern Russia and the Caucasus and talk about some of the geopolitical and economic aspects of this area.  First off is a geographic map of the region, showing the three nations that emerged in 1991, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The map also shows southern Russia, including Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Chechnya, right next door. The second (color) map I am attaching shows oil and gas pipelines that run between the rich oil and gas deposits of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan and the markets of Europe. Please note that one major pipeline runs right through Southern Russia, jogging around to avoid most of Chechnya. The Russians were not and are not willing to let that extremely important piece of land between the two seas be anything other than part of Russia. The fierce and bloody war over this land has dragged on for decades between the Chechens and the Russians and President Putin was elected the first time on the promise that he would never, ever allow the Chechens to gain independence.

The other area of the world that has been much talked about is Central Asia. I have heard today the accused bombers being described as “Chechen” and “from Kyrgyzstan.”  I have seen people on social media claiming that these men are, therefore, Kyrgyz, having been born in Kyrgyzstan. Please look at the map at the top of this post again and note the distance between the two countries. It is 2,500 miles between Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and Grozny, Chechnya, about as far as Boston to Salt Lake City, with an inland sea or two and some mountain ranges thrown in for good measure. Chechens have a completely different ethnic heritage than the Kyrgyz. Quite simply, Chechens are to Kyrgyz like Brits are to Greeks.  Different languages, different beliefs, different cultures and perspectives on life.  And yes, Kyrgyz and Chechens all practice Islam, but the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland are all Christians, right?

Which brings us to our history point – why were these Chechens in Kyrgyzstan?   Our story starts with Stalin who ruled the USSR from 1924-1953, and was one of the people who actually drew lines on the map creating the borders for the Soviet Republics. The story goes that Stalin saw ethnic identity as a possible rallying point in Central Asia – as well he should, the Basmachi resistance movement in the area did not die until almost a decade after the Socialist Revolution – and so, when drafting the borders of the Central Asian Republics, Stalin was careful to include considerable ethnic minorities in the various Republics. What this means in real terms is that there is a sizable ethnic minority of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, a Tajik community in Uzbekistan, etc. The theory was that if any one group got organized to resist Soviet power, the leadership could take advantage of traditional ethnic tensions and create local unrest, thus taking the focus away from a revolt against Moscow. 

Stalin threw a few more ingredients into this cauldron of potential ethnic strife when, during World War II, he began to deport entire nationalities to Central Asia. The Chechen and Ingush peoples were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and deported to Siberia and Central Asia en masse. In February, 1944, villages were sealed off and people sorted into categories. The infants, very old or sick were deemed “unsuitable for relocation” and massacred immediately, the rest were forced into trains and sent to Siberia, the Kazakh Republic or the Kyrgyz Republic. Between thirty and fifty percent of the Chechen and Ingush populations perished in the first years of the deportation. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev “rehabilitated” the Chechen and Ingush and they were allowed to return to their home region, but they had been disenfranchised to such a degree that it was not a terribly attractive proposal for many. Additionally, people had already built new lives in Central Asia and chose to stay in their adopted homelands, which is why Tokmok, a small village outside of Bishkek, still has a  Chechen population today. It was this village in which the Boston Marathon accused bombers were born and spent part of their childhoods. Perhaps their family just stayed after Stalin’s deportation, perhaps when the war in Chechnya between the Separatists and Russia’s forces in the 1990s became intolerable the family went to other relatives or friends still living there, perhaps they made a conscious choice to relocate to Kyrgyzstan after it became an independent nation.  I don’t know.* 

When I lived in Kyrgyzstan I always posed the same question to the locals if they were not ethnically Kyrgyz, “So, who sent your family here, Tsars or Soviets?”  Never did I get the answer that an ancestor had just decided to relocate to Kyrgyzstan on a personal whim; it was always exile of some sort.

So, the Kyrgyz have played host to any number of peoples who did not want to be there, but who were sent there:  Russians, Dungans, Chinese, Volga Germans, Tatars, Uighers, and others. It is not unusual for an ethnic Uzbek or Korean to have a passport from Kyrgyzstan in modern times, but that does not make him Kyrgyz, either. So, while these young men were “from Kyrgyzstan” they were likely born there because Stalin committed atrocities against their people almost seventy years ago.  What complicated webs history weaves for us; her strands connecting the sins of long ago to the tragedies of today.

*  According to this article, the Tsarnaevs were in Kyrgyzstan as a result of Stalin's deportations, left after the 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union, then sought refuge from the war in Chechnya and returned to Kyrgyzstan in 1994.

Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down!

By Kelly Raftery

The last Romanov Rulers,
Nicholas II and Alexandra
at a fancy dress ball.

Today, there is a place called the Russian Federation. Before the Russian Federation, there was a place called the USSR and before there was the USSR, there was something called the Russian Empire. I know, super confusing. It gets worse when you realize that cities, towns, and other geographic features were renamed along with the political changes. To start at the beginning, the Russian Empire was ruled by a royal family, the Romanovs. These rulers of Russia were called Tsars or occasionally, Tsarinas (female rulers). Russian society was comprised of a small stratum of wealthy individuals and a huge mass of the very poor. Tens of millions of Russians were essentially enslaved to wealthy property owners to work the land, under a system called serfdom, which was only abolished in 1861. Former serfs migrated from the country into the cities, where they took up factory jobs. These new industrial workers (like many others worldwide during the Industrial Revolution) worked long days in deplorable conditions with no protections under the law. In labor disputes, it was the Tsar’s army that came to quell workers’ strikes with rifles and sabers. Urban poverty grew, Russia entered World War I and the situation was ripe for revolution.

No one monolithic organization overthrew the Russian Empire. In fact, even after Tsar Nikolai II was deposed in February 1917, his government remained at least partially in power, trying by half-measures to stem the rising tide of rebellion. Ultimately, a coalition of various Socialist factions united and took power in what was referred to as the “Great October Socialist Revolution.”  (To make things even more confusing, today the anniversary of the Revolution is celebrated on November 7^th.)  The Civil War followed hard on the heels of the Revolution and lasted for half a decade more. Reds (Socialists) battled Whites (Tsarist supporters) throughout the Empire from Ukraine to the Russian Far East, Novgorod to Bukhara. In Central Asia, a resistance group called the basmachi was not completely put down until 1934; seventeen years after the Revolution had begun on the streets of St. Petersburg. 

Let’s please take a moment to discuss definitions. The Soviet Union was never a Communist country, though it was ruled by an organization called the Communist Party. “Communism” and “Socialism” were theoretical stages of evolutionary economic development as outlined by Karl Marx, but whose theoretical roots lay further back with thinkers such as Thomas Moore in the 16^th Century England and Jean Jacques Rousseau in 18^th Century France. In theory, Communism was a more evolved form of society in which the means of production and distribution (e.g. land, factories, shops, etc.) were placed in workers’ hands. This more equitable distribution of resources would then eliminate poverty and industrial abuses. Socialism was the middle stage between Capitalism and Communism. The Soviet Union never “achieved Communism” but always strived towards it as a Socialist state. 

Propaganda poster reading,
"Long Live Equal Rights for Women of the USSR!"

Many of the men and women of the Revolution were idealists, dreamers who sought to bring about a more just, fair society for all citizens. Among the articles of the 1936 Soviet Constitution were: equal rights for women, the right to non-discrimination on the basis of race or nationality, the right to an education free of charge, the right to a workplace, the right to a limited hour workday and annual paid vacation time, the right to maintenance in old age, sickness or loss of capacity to work, free medical care and the guarantee of freedom of speech, press, assembly and protest.

Then, at some point along the way, the idealistic goals and heady dreams of the revolution–fair distribution of wealth and resources, equal rights for all citizens, collective ownership of farms, factories and shops and a better life for everyone got perverted. Some say that the entire theory is erroneous; some say it was Lenin’s (the first leader of the USSR) fault. Many more point to the Stalin era (1928-53) as the point at which the ideals of the revolution were warped by a tyrant who was willing to claw his way to the top of a towering pile of corpses to achieve his goals. 

"We live more happily with each day!"

At the end of Stalin’s time in power, the central government (not the workers) had control of all means of production and property, any opposition (real or imagined) was forcibly silenced and the Soviet Union was a modern, multicultural state. Tens of millions of men, women and children were killed under Stalin either through direct means like a bullet to the back of the head in the basement of KGB headquarters, or indirect methods such as starving to death as the result of harsh policies to wrest private farms away from “wealthy” peasants.  I wrote a bit about this time in "A Soviet Secret."

Double-headed eagles take the place of
USSR after 1991.

Under Socialism a person was born in a state-run hospital, educated in a state-run school, grew up and worked at a state-owned job and when he retired, he was provided with a pension from the state as well. Salaries were steady and adequate; the Soviet ruble was never floated on the international currency markets, thus did not suffer from value fluctuations or inflation. For thirty years, between 1961 and 1991, a ride on the metro cost 5 kopecks. It was not the workers’ paradise that had been promised, but there was no unemployment, no hunger, no homelessness and everyone had enough to live. There were no great upheavals, life was predictable. A person could plan for the future, save money for special occasions and provide for his children.     

When I taught Russian Pop Culture of the 20^th Century, I did an exercise with my students. Sometime about two-thirds of the way through the semester, I entered the room and put index cards on each desk. As my students filed in, I looked at them quite sadly. I then informed them that the Department of Foreign Languages had decided that they were not pleased with how I was running the class and therefore were terminating me immediately. The entire course would be restructured, all the work they had done to that point was no longer valid and a new instructor would arrive shortly and give them a new syllabus, texts and assignments. I reemphasized that everything they had done to this point was worthless and would be discarded. They would need to meet their new instructor and start all over again.

Once the hubbub died down, I asked my students to write on one side of the index card I had placed on their desks how that announcement made them feel. I then asked them to turn the index card over and write on the other side how they would feel if that happened to their country.

It has been over twenty years since the Collapse of the Soviet Union when one country became fifteen and the U.S. “won” the Cold War. A whole generation of children has grown up never knowing the Soviet Union at all. But, take a minute today and think about that time when everything people had known was destroyed – their currency, their government, even their belief system was negated, what they believed to be true, all plans for the future rent asunder and before them stood a great abyss of uncertainty and chaos.

Now how does that make you feel?   How would you feel if that was your country?

A Soviet Secret

 By Kelly Raftery

It was the fall of 1994, not too long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I had just signed on with a small company out of Washington, D.C., that had landed its first Russia contract. I was hired as the project’s country and language specialist, a hardened and tested post-Soviet veteran of two years at the ripe old age of 24. After two years of living in hyper-inflation, lawlessness and general societal chaos had not led me to be overly trusting of businesses or individuals, so I bypassed the lodging that was suggested to me and arranged for my own apartment until I could get my bearings.

After too many hours of flying, I remember being greeted at the door by a woman who seemed very old to my twenty-four year old eyes, but who I realize now was more likely in her late 50s or perhaps early 60s. Walking straight upright, her grey hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, she led me into her apartment, which was dark and close, but impeccably clean. The landlady showed me to the den, which would serve as my lodgings for the week. A fold-out sofa shared space with a wall of glass-fronted bookcases and a grand piano covered in intricate doilies. Large windows with orange velvet curtains let in great streams of light that highlighted the honey-colored parquet flooring.  

Before this job, I recruited personnel for a multinational corporation just getting started in the former Soviet Union and the rule was do not interview anyone over forty years old, because they simply would not be able to make the mental and professional transition from a Soviet mindset to a western capitalist one. Anyone over forty was simply a lost cause, according to the corporate gurus. My landlady still worked at her government job, but her salary amounted to nothing in those days of hyperinflation, when salaries remained the same but the money was worth less and cost of everything else increased by leaps and bounds daily. On the day before I was to depart the apartment and take up my long-term lodgings, I made a shopping trip and stocked her refrigerator and stacked her counters high with non-perishable goods. I suppose it was guilt that drove me to do it, knowing that I had paid hundreds of dollars more than she had ultimately received for use of her room, knowing that I had turned down desperate job applicants as lost causes because they were deemed too old, hoping that maybe if I helped one woman in this small way, it would make some difference.  I was idealistic.  

Stalin-Era Gulag,a likely destination for an Enemy of the People

When it came time to leave, I paced a bit waiting for the car and driver; my bags stacked in the narrow hallway, my landlady waiting for me lock the apartment door. I nonchalantly mentioned to her that my new lodgings came with a café that would serve us meals, so I was leaving all the food in the kitchen behind.  Tears showed in the corners of her eyes. Urgently and in complete silence, she grabbed at my sleeve and pulled me into a small space between doors, outside of the apartment, but not quite fully into the hallway. She stooped down low and motioned to me to do the same, bringing our faces within an inch of each other. She drew my hair aside gently and whispered to me, “There is something I must tell you. I have never told another living soul. But you are different, a foreigner.”  The silence stretched out as she gathered her courage and breathed into my ear, “My father. He was an Enemy of the People. They came and took him away when I was just a child. I never saw him again. I lived with this my whole life. Please don’t tell anyone.”  She straightened, turned and went into her apartment, puttering around as if nothing had happened. 

An Enemy of the People. I knew from my graduate studies what had probably happened to her father--picked up, maybe tried, either executed or sent to Siberia along with millions of others who likely had committed no crime at all.  Stalin was arbitrary and horrible like that. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the archives thrown open, and yet she still believed that the system that punished her father would come back to life and exact revenge on her. My landlady’s fear was real and palpable. I don’t know why she told me her secret that day, perhaps she had just carried the truth inside for too long, perhaps she thought her secret would be safe with me, or that I would not hold her father’s “crimes” against her.

A memorial outside of Moscow to the millions killed during the Stalin-era repression.

The driver knocked at the door and took my bags down to the car.  I said good-bye and thank you to my landlady. I never saw that woman again, but I never forgot her, either. For the first time in my life, history reached out and touched me viscerally with a tug on my shirtsleeve and a puff of air brushing past my ear.  Twenty years later, I still remember that moment, though I have forgotten which city it was or even what job I had been sent to Russia to do.  I still wonder about her story and all those years she lived with that secret.

    

Off The Beaten Track: For Whom You Were Named - Inspiration in Brighton Beach

Emily Rubin’s fiction has been published in the Red Rock Review, Confrontations, and HAPPY. Stalina won the Amazon Breakthrough award and was published in January 2011; it is now being released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 15^th. Emily is a past nominee for the Pushcart Prize. In 2005, she began producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading series that takes place in laundromats around the United States. She divides her time between New York City and Columbia County, New York, with her husband, Leslie, and their dog, Sebastian.

In the fall of 1997, I took a teaching job at the Neptune Avenue Campus of Touro College in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I was hired to teach “Oral History: Writing Your Story” to a class of Russian immigrants. The college was looking to expand its curriculum from computer, nutrition, and medical assistant training classes to include art courses in creative writing, dance, and fine art. A choreographer friend, who knew I had written plays and performance pieces based on stories I collected from my grandmother who was born and raised on the Lower East Side in 1898, recommended me. Rose Begun nee Kronenberg was one of eleven children of Eastern European Jewish descent who was born in an apartment on Cherry Street. Nanny, as my brothers and I called her, had very detailed recollections of life in that immigrant community at the turn of the century.  Even though I had a Russian background, my knowledge of Russia after my grandparents arrived in the United States and through World War II and after, was consigned to readings in history books, and films like Doctor Zhivago and others. I had visited Brighton Beach on many occasions to partake of the Russian food, life, and libations offered there, but I had never worked with anyone from that community.

 

I was looking forward to hearing my students’ stories and had no idea what to expect. As I trundled out on the F train to the Neptune Avenue every Thursday the evening’s lights of Brooklyn illuminated the neighborhoods. Elaborate decorations began to appear as fall turned into winter. Ghouls and giant spiders to crèches, menorahs, inflated snowmen, reindeer, and the occasional peace sign. As I noted the changes to the decorations of the homes that became familiar, I would contemplate the assignment I would give my class that week. I could see the front of the train from my last car vantage point as we swerved around the curves of the elevated tracks. The Atlantic Ocean peaked through the high rises as we approached the station. Seeing and smelling an ocean in New York City has always made me feel a connection to the earth, something that is easily lost in city life. My goal was to learn something about my students’ lives here and in Russia and perhaps show them something of what writing is all about. For myself, writing is often the act of taking difficult, sad, or awkward situations and making them humorous and poignant, and even beautiful. Early assignments were to write the story of the day they left their country, about a place where you felt safe or how they ended up in Brighton Beach. I thought how lucky my students were to live within earshot of the waves and could smell the salt air.  

The Touro College storefront campus was in a strip mall sandwiched between a Waldbaum’s supermarket and a Russian bakery, where I bought my weekly piece of chocolate babkha and a coffee to fuel my teaching adrenalin.

I had 25 students in the fall of 1997. They were in their 60s and 70s and had immigrated after the end of the Soviet Union to Brighton Beach. They all spoke varying levels of English, and many spoke several other languages as well. They had retired from professions as doctors, teachers, craftsmen, and physicists, and any pensions they were due in Russia had disappeared. The country was bankrupt; it was a sorry state of affairs for many of them. Touro offered classes and eligibility for public assistance if they were enrolled in classes. Not interested in the job training courses, many ended up in my class.

“We felt safe nowhere,” they would argue with me after I wrote the assignment on the board.

After all, they did grow up during World War II. A hellish time, but not without its glory. They expressed pride for the Russian Army’s victory over the Nazis. These were very tough people. At times, I found them affected to the point of snobbishness about their country. It was all justified nostalgia, with the truth of their experiences to back everything up.

“Okay, write about not having anywhere safe to go,” I suggested.  

Inevitably, they would come in with stories about their favorite blankets, cupboards, gardens, and barn lofts where they played and felt safe. They were well versed in the art of debate and would take every opportunity to engage in heated discussion, especially with me. These debates gave me an idea of how rigorous education in Russia must have been. They taught me something every time we met.

One week, I came up with the simplest but also most revealing assignment. I asked my students to tell me for whom they named. I thought about my own name. When my mother was pregnant, she was sure she was having another boy, so the name would be Willie after an uncle. When the name did not fit the little girl delivered on a cold winter night, my mother anointed me Emily. She had been at a friend’s house that weekend and their daughter, Emily, left an impression. I recently found out that my namesake was named for a family cat. I like that lineage. 


I have to preface the story of the assignment by saying that I had not thought about writing a novel at this point. I had segued from plays to short stories and had first started to submit to literary magazines. I had even recently gotten my first rejection, which at the time was kind of thrilling. I felt like I had made the leap and gotten over the trepidation of sending out my fragile little stories.

Even before this ‘name’ assignment, I felt inspired by the honesty and direct language my students used to write their stories. They were eloquent and courageous to write their essays in English.

Rather than write the stories, I had them tell us, as many of them wanted to improve their spoken language as well as their writing skills, and this seemed the perfect assignment to practice.

The students named Yuri, Stanislav, Ameilia, and Tatanya were named for uncles and grandfathers who were generals in the czar’s army, grandmothers who saved their children from Cossacks, and on and on. Then, a woman stood up. She had a Louise Brooks hair cut, long dark eyelashes, and heavy eyeliner. She wore a tight black dress, which she adjusted with a sultry swing to her hips as she got up to tell her story.

“My name is Stalina, and I was named for Stalin. My friends told me I should change my name, take the monster away, he killed so many. I told them no, I would not change my name, it is our history, terrible and sad perhaps, but it is who we are.”

The room became silent. I was taken aback, and thanked her and listened but was distracted during the remaining the stories from Tatanya, Anna, Vladimir, etc.

I am sure there were other gems, but it was Stalina who stayed with me. I left class that night and on my return trip to the Lower East Side, all my students’ stories began to swirl around my head. In Stalina, I had found a character to speak a story that would be an amalgamation of these forthright people, a coming of age and a coming of old story, and a filter for all the history of their country I had learned through the gift of storytelling from their very personal perspectives. Over the next five years, I wrote my novel. Several chapters were published in those literary journals that on occasion sent me the thrilling letter of acceptance. It was another five years until the novel would be published.  A long journey, but much like my trip out each week on the subway, so much was revealed as we came out from underground and the story found a way to be told.

STALINA: The Survival Expert

Russians have a peculiar habit of naming their young after poets, scientists and war heroes. Yet, it must’ve taken a special inspiration to christen one’s daughter Stalina after the ill-famed Soviet tyrant. Or, it may have been a brilliant attempt at survival: even Stalin wouldn’t send a Jew named after him to Siberia. While this cultural subtlety may not have been apparent to an American ear, it interested Emily Rubin, a New York writer, broadcast professional and stage manager, who herself had Russian roots. 

Emily met Stalina while teaching an Oral History class to Russian expatriates at the Brighton Beach Community College in 1997. Her students, the former USSR citizens in their 60’s and 70’s, told intense and vivid stories of the World War II, Stalin’s regime and life in their old country. Emily asked her students to tell her about the person for whom they were named. Each student’s account brought up stories of war heroes, scientists, painters and poets along with dreams for future generations. Among the Yuri’s, Anna’s and Tatiana’s there was a woman named Stalina. She stated very simply that she was named for Stalin.  With her name, she explained, she carried her country’s painful history. Emily said that in this stoic and alluring woman, she had found her main character.

A sixty-something émigré, Stalina became Emily’s inspiration for the book.  But, Rubin was interested not only by the woman’s life journey, but also by the Russian history and its citizens’ exodus of 1990s. To research her book, Rubin joined the Summer Literary Seminar’s program in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2002, where she conducted interviews, visited historical sites and read at the legendary Stray Dog Café frequented by many famous Russian writers and poets, including Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva. She also attended writing workshops at The New School.  It took her several years to finish the book, and her unexpected breast cancer battle had slowed down her progress, but she was determined to see her work in print.

Rubin’s vivid description of Stalina’s 18^th birthday instantly deposits us into the Leningrad’s reality of the 1950s.  Stalina is allowed to invite only three guests because Stalin is dangerously sick, festivities are banned and citizens are holding vigils at their radios. Seasoned survivors, Stalina and her friends find a way to celebrate without music and laughter: they agree to interact like their favorite silent movie star Charlie Chaplin. The talent of surviving with a smile becomes Stalina’s most distinctive quality. It carries her through the journey of leaving her motherland with a bag of bras and porcelain cats, and helps her make her American dream a reality as she transforms a short-stay Connecticut motel into a fantasy destination. It also fuels her revenge on the high-rank government official, who, years ago, was responsible for the disappearance of her father and her childhood dog Pepe. Once a professional chemist trained by the Soviets to “make things smell like what they are not” Stalina knows neither fear nor limits when it comes to choosing her weapons, including her mother’s ashes.

Stalina is a journey into an absurd world that nonetheless was reality for more than one Soviet generation. It won’t necessarily explain why Russians think the way they do, but it will put you into a Russian mindset for the duration.