A Tale of Two Dissertation Topics -- Part II

So I managed to fall back into the soup of indecision about dissertation topics and have been stewing here alongside the squishy boiled vegetables in the salty neural broth of my brain avoiding the writing of another blog post that should preferably end in some convincing form of conclusion about what I’m going to do here. The time pressure is asserting itself too. My language classes are drawing to a close at the end of next week, the deadline I renegotiated for submitting my prospectus is also at hand. And I know that I don't really have to know. I don’t really have to commit. I can pick a topic that I don’t particularly love, write a prospectus that is coherent and will tick all the necessary boxes to move me along in the PhD process, set out on my research and then change course, change questions, change approaches at any point. And really that’s what I should do. It’s what I will do. But somehow I have it in my head that there should be some divine form of intervention beyond my will, a lightning bolt of an idea that strikes me to the ground and upon picking myself back up gives me a sense of purpose and devotion to what I’m about to do. It’s a personality flaw, I know, obsessive compulsive perfectionism with a dash of masochism and illusions of grandeur. But there have been so many times in my life when I’ve waited and hemmed and hawed in this same ridiculous angst-ridden way (albeit less publicly) only to stumble onto the absolutely right job to take or the completely ideal master’s program to matriculate into or even the ridiculously perfect car to buy. When I find those things I just get this palpable buzzing of “yes!” up my spine, like it’s a perfect fit without any chafing or cramping around the edges of how I see myself, like these things were made for me and out there just waiting for me to navigate my way to them. And I know it’s a crazy high bar to set, but I can’t imagine committing to a project on which I have to spend the next two years of my life working intensively, a project to which in total I’ll have sacrificed 5 years of a decent salary and professional experience, so literally a project running into the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs, university resources and government grants by the end of it, unless I am completely in love with it and have that tingling right feeling reverberating through my nervous system.

That said, here are my options: Project number one, formerly inspired by my weekend in Moscow and reconnection with the elite scene of ex-pats in whose company I love to guiltily indulge myself at the expense of connecting with local people in capitals around the world, and the associated Moscow crush that has since fizzled into a more flaccid form of friendship, would be an in-depth ethnographic look at the World Bank and EU projects in the different republics of the Volga region. In Kazan, for instance, the Bank sponsored a project to tear down some Khrushev era apartment complexes near the center of town and relocate all the residents to newly constructed buildings in another district. There are all kinds of rumors flying around about the why and the who of these relocations in addition to the ethical concerns of uprooting people that could make for an interesting investigation. And I think if I were able to talk with the people at the Bank in DC and Moscow about their perception of the project, lay out all of their documentation and its inevitable gibberish about sustainable development and capacity building, interview Russian and Tatar officials who helped with the implementation here and then go talk at length with the residents who were actually moved, spending time in the buildings where they’re now living, I might actually be able to document the contrast between the “simulacrum” of progress laid out in the Bank’s official records that normal academics or policy makers would use for making conclusions and decisions and the lived reality of what happened to the moved community on the ground in Kazan. That’s only one World Bank project of course. I would root out the others in this region and hopefully they would take me to strange places where I could document a similar clash of cultures between the jet set English-speaking internationals parachuting in to hand over ridiculous sums of money to dubious local officials and NGOs to implement projects likely ill-tailored to the communities they are meant to serve. It would be more political anthropology than political science, which is probably better suited to my less mathematical, more narrative strengths anyway, and it would play into much of what I’ve already seen and take issue with in the world. 

Project number two, formerly inspired by the crush on my Russian grammar teacher that also fizzled out for reasons of its own, is a look at norms around sex, dating, marriage and divorce across the different cultures, economic situations, exposure to western culture and urban-rural divides of the region, maybe throwing in Moscow as well to show the contrast (or lack thereof) between sex and relationship norms in the capital, regional capitals, small towns and villages—kind of Sex in the former Soviet Union. This you might say is even less political than the last topic. And you might be right. But the motivation comes from a not entirely large N, but certainly not indeterminate sample of romantic encounters with men from the post-Soviet space and the radically different way they approach sex and relationships, which I think I could argue and hopefully even show with some clever survey research, is highly correlated with illiberal political attitudes deeply entrenched in the society. Ok, that last sentence employed far too much jargon for most normal people. This is the idea: some people have said that “we” as the US or the West or the international community, take your pick, don’t actually care about spreading “democracy” in the world, but we care about other societies adopting our ideology of liberalism under which the state protects the rights of all citizens as free and equal individuals. These individuals are allowed to bobble along through space and time making individual choices for themselves, being as crazy and creative as they like, as long as they don’t break any laws or get in the way of other individuals. It plays into our much beloved Adam Smith’s economic idea that each person blindly pursuing his own self-interests will lead to the best outcome for society. Politically and economically, the power of choice is decentralized to the individual who gets to express his truest desires. This is very different from the paternalist authoritarian perspective still alive and well in countries like Russia where the state like a good parent or overbearing husband knows what is best for its citizens and attempts to limit their individual freedoms of expression and assembly and so on in the name of stability and the better interests of society. I think, and admittedly a little wackily so, that you can see the same pattern play out in personal relationships. In the West, our philosophy of romance is very individual driven. Love and lust are imagined as forces that come from within and propel us each toward one another as unique independent actors. There is this capitalist period of dating in which you try people on for size and are very likely to return them to the store before you find “the one.” Bodies come together and come apart with relative ease. Moreover, once you are in a relationship it’s ideally built on mutual trust and belief in a love that is bigger than you both, keeping you together. A relationship is “bad” if instead one member is constantly worrying about the other’s love or fidelity and “really bad,” even illegal, if that commitment is enforced with psychological or physical abuse. And since we’re all individuals on unique paths, it’s possible if not likely that two people each pursuing their own interests will grow apart, in which case, a divorce is preferable to dissimulation, and there’s hopefully a new “one” around the next corner better matched to this new version of you. My experience dating post-Soviet men and listening to girls and women of all ages talk about their experiences has revealed quite the opposite. For one, there is no concept of dating, certainly no concept of dating, having sex and then moving on to the next guy, not for a girl at least. You get who you get in a likely uninformed choice made at a young age heavily influenced by your parents, you marry him and you make do. The sex is awful. There is no playfulness of spirit, no fun, no romance, no foreplay and no social or moral imperative for the guy to worry about the girl’s pleasure. And I think this can in part be attributed to the fact that there’s no competition in the dating market—girl’s aren’t making decisions about who they’ll marry based on how good the guy is in bed so there’s no incentive for him to develop skills or knowledge about how to please her. Moreover, the dynamics of the relationship are based on crazy levels of jealousy. Freedoms are restricted and the commitment is policed rather than just assumed. There is no trust. There are constant accusations of infidelity. Every action is watched. It is absolutely illiberal in every way, just like the authoritarian government assumes the worst of every individual and devotes far too many resources to watching and policing for signs of infidelity. And I think that I could use all of my political psychology training to put together a survey with embedded experiments that might be able to show the correlation between illiberal attitudes toward sex and toward political authority, which could potentially show some interesting differences across ethnicities, religions, class and geography, might let me make some greater kookie point about the deeper internalization of political values, which I could maybe make more political by tying to women's unwillingness to allow the state to empower and protect them in their personal relationships, and which would definitely hold my interest as long as I worked on it.

The third project, which actually did descend out of nowhere and very temporarily gave me that feeling of “I need to do this” sounds so boring after the last two that I can barely bare to write about it. It’s looking at the provision of minority language schooling in several of the different ethnic republics and one of the Russian provinces in the region. The federal government has been trying to standardize education in line with Putin’s greater centralizing reforms and in some articles I have read that this threatens the provision of local language schooling in the ethnic republics. For example, in Tatarstan right now, even though only 50% of the population is ethnically Tatar, all students are required to study and pass proficiency exams in Tatar language. The center does not like this, the Russians in Kazan grumble about it terribly, meanwhile, the Tatars think that just as Estonia and Uzbekistan require all citizens to speak Estonian and Uzbek, Tatarstan as an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation is entitled to the same right. Meanwhile, in Mari El, where there are fewer Mari and more ethnic Russians running the government and allegedly suppressing the expression of Mari culture, not only are non-ethnic-Mari students not required to learn Mari, but the Mari students may not have the option of studying their native language in school at all. Who knows what is going on in the allegedly more mild-mannered and democratic Chuvashia or in the ethnic villages of the Russian province of Ulyanovsk. The project would therefore be going out to lots of villages of different ethnicities in different federal units and mapping out which languages are actually taught where. That is, if I go out to a Russian village in Tatarstan, are they really complying with the regional government’s requirement that all students study Tatar or are they falling into line with the center and only teaching Russian? If I go out to a Tatar village in Mari El are they subverting the federal directive and teaching Tatar, are they able to do this with help from the government of Tatarstan, and are the Mari able to do the same? It’s a question of who has more control in the periphery—the central, regional or local governments—to actually change the reality on the ground. This project only works, however, if the center really is trying to squelch minority language schooling and I am having a hard time getting a straight story on this. No one here in Kazan claims to know anything about the change in the law. I’ve found and translated the law and can see that everywhere it previously said “regional standards” or “state” has been struck and replaced with “federal standards” and “federal state.” However, the federal standards are really ambiguously and crazily worded and I can’t seem to figure out if the center has actually tried at all to enforce the law in a way that is trying to get rid of minority language instruction. All of the misinformation and vagueness might be part of the story though. I imagine if I found a completely strange patchwork of who is implementing the law where, I could tell a story not only about the relative balance of power between the central, regional and local governments but also about how Moscow’s assertion of a power vertical extending from the Kremlin to the villages is more of a smokescreen that everyone buys into because they never actually go out to the regions let alone villages to inspect the reality on the ground. Even though there’s something that seems a little dull or dry or even misconceived (I mean, what if the law really isn’t trying to thwart minority language schooling at all) about this project, I like the straightforward structure that it would give me. I could approach it like an election mission, divide up the territory, get in a car and go out to villages every day to interview officials, teachers, parents and whoever else is around to talk to me. And in doing this very systematically I might stumble onto some other pattern or phenomenon of interest out in the villages that I wouldn’t necessarily find skulking around Kazan, which even though I complain about it endlessly as if it is the end of the world, claims to be Russia’s “third capital.”

Thus, I leave you still undecided. In the midst of writing up the third project in prospectus form just to get something submitted and approved. About to take the leap into actual research in two weeks time. Gulp. Feedback, as always, much welcome. And I promise next time to pass along more entertaining stories from life in Kazan rather than force feeding you further unsavory angst and gristly bits of dissertation stew!

Election Interlude

The topic-searching, prospectus-writing drama is ongoing but I thought I’d take a break from it all to tell you about the “high drama” of the local elections here in Kazan last Sunday. Over 77 Russian constituent regions held 7,900 elections with over 109,000 candidates and the seats of 53,259 deputies and heads of local governments at stake across Russia, including elections for the city council and some form of administrator in Kazan. However, when I google-news-ed “Russia” in English the morning of election day, it spit back stories of Russia’s defeat of Ireland in the Euro 2012 qualifier, a spacecraft docking at the International Space Station, the Finance Minister’s projections for the economy based on current oil prices as well as a slew of stories still talking about President Medvedev’s ouster of the Mayor of Moscow two weeks earlier and a few on Arnold Schwartzenegger’s trip to Moscow’s new technology hub (with a stop in Kazan!), but not one English language news story on the local elections. Russian media had only a little more coverage, all very dry and pre-programmed emphasizing the unusually large number of elections in one day, the new voting machines in Chelyabinsk and the security provided to keep the elections safe from terrorism.

I was at first appalled by this journalistic travesty. Look how everyone was snubbing the periphery again. But then I went out to the polls with my host mother and it all became very clear. It was a crisp but sunny day as it’s been in Kazan the past week and we strolled along through the back alleys of neighboring apartment bloks to get to the school where Valeria would vote. On the way she told me more about her ex-husband. Apparently, they divorced 4 years ago because he cheated on and then left her for a younger woman. She said she wasn’t upset because she was tired of him anyway but the loss of the second income had made her life financially difficult. I asked if he paid her any alimony and she looked at me like I was crazy. He cheated and left and then took it upon himself to divide up their assets from on high giving her the apartment and some money from the sale of a garage though using the bulk of that profit to buy a new apartment in another city for himself and the new wife. He also got the dacha and was kind enough to let her use it but recently has been threatening to sell it. This has caused Valeria immense distress because as Soviet urban as she seems with her high heels and over-reliance on hairspray and blue eye shadow, she goes out to the dacha almost every weekend to get some clean air and pick vegetables—most recently we wound up with a kitchen full of mushrooms that sat in huge wicker baskets until they were variously boiled, canned, pickled and set out on the balcony in jars. Recently she had hatched a plan to sell part of the land on which the dacha sits and use it to buy out the husband and keep the dacha for herself. Unfortunately, it seems no one is interested in buying the land so she’s back to the state of dacha-induced stress in which I first found her. I asked if any of this seemed fair to her since he was the one who had cheated and left and why she didn’t just take him to court. Again I got the blank stare meant to remind me of our different “mentalities” and she curtly stated that she had no desire to get the courts involved in her private affairs. And it is always surprising to be reminded of just how indoctrinated into the American ethos I am. Stepping back it is actually a strange concept that the state would or should step into a personal relationship and decide that a cheating husband has to compensate his wife financially for his sexual infidelity, and I can see how years of fighting to preserve that small personal space separate from the totalitarian state has made Valeria wary of giving them any entry into her private life now, and how all other experiences since have signaled that the new incarnation of the Russian state is not particularly concerned with helping her out. Still, the uppity entitled American in me is appalled that she just has to suffer while he gets the girl and the lion’s share of their property in addition to the power to sell the dacha and its mushrooms out from under her high heels.

We arrived at the school and from the street the signs for the election were not even visible. As we got closer there were two small sad fliers on the door and some kids playing on a swing set but not another voter in sight. Inside, a small room of the school was set up as I’ve seen hundreds of post-Soviet schoolrooms set up for election day: a row of sleepy officials with lots of paperwork, two booths with polyester curtains, some policemen milling about. On the way there Valeria had mentioned that she had no idea what the elections were for or who was running. I walked up to a board with all of the relevant information to figure it out for myself as she signed in and got her ballots. There were four standard-issue stern-faced pictures of the candidates for an administrative position that at the time I assumed was the head of the city council but later could not confirm as such—3 Tatar, 1 Russian, all grim and Soviet looking. Below each picture was a brief profile that listed their education—all “higher” meaning college or technical school, their professions—one docent in the Politology faculty of the University, one director of a chemical factory, one that I can’t remember and one, the Edinaya Rossiya (i.e. Putin’s ruling) party candidate, was currently the administrative head of Naberezhnye Chelny, the next big town over from Kazan. It also listed their salaries—the highest of which was the factory director’s at 900,000 rubles (about $30,000) per year. Next to the esteemed gentlemen was a list of the parties competing for the council seats—Putin eliminated the direct election of representatives and replaced it with a closed-list party system a few years back—and they were Edinaya Rossiya, a regional Tatar party, the communists and LDPR, in that order.

The School/Polling Station from Afar, No Sign of Election

Valeria called me over before she stepped into the booth to show me the ballots and explain who was running. I looked self-consciously around at the police and election officials ready to be reprimanded for “family voting” but apparently they didn’t care that there was some American girl exerting her influence on a voter in front of them. She said that she didn’t know any of the candidates and shrugged as she went into the booth. I stood there thinking about the contrast between these local elections and the ones at home in the States. As my address is always in flux, I’m still registered to vote in Pennsylvania at my parents’ house and usually they convince me it’s crucial that I come home or send in an absentee ballot because every vote really does count in our small-to-medium sized township. My dad will feed me stories of who is suspected of mismanaging funds and who made a fool of himself on local television at the supervisor’s meeting, while my mom will gossip about how that woman backstabbed her friend and they now don’t talk when they run into each other at the supermarket. They know these people running for office intimately well from “the community,” from the seemingly endless civic organizations to which my dad belongs and committees on which my mother has served, from my dad’s own foray into local politics as the town auditor and my mother’s stint as PTA president, as well as from local events they’ve helped organized like the Taste of the Suburbs and the Optimist Club Annual Trout Rodeo. It’s the embodiment of what Tocqueville and Putnam described a few centuries apart about the thriving, churning milieu of American social life feeding into politics via the dense social networks of civil society organizations. There are 20 year rivalries, personal friendships, shoddily produced campaign materials and sometimes even scandals like a hate letter that was hand-delivered to everyone’s mailbox one year. It has a completely different quality than presidential elections because it’s so personal and in a way it is almost like there is more at stake. Not that anyone will actually make any radical policy changes in the Township and have any kind of noticeable effect on good old King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. But it is more like high school student council elections, like a highly personalized popularity contest that gives the winners social status, bragging rights and an air of smugness, while leaving the losers bitter and grumbling for the next few years. And it’s true that I am a terrible citizen in that I don’t do my own research and figure out the platforms of the different candidates. I just listen to what my parents have to say and am happy to add another vote to the family block on my way to get some Wawa coffee.

And then here I am in Kazan, this comparatively huge metropolis with an almost infinite number of rivaling constituencies from big businesses and pensioners to different ethnic groups and religious communities and the local politics are dead and flat, devoid of any drama. Despite the fact that the local government actually controls a relatively large budget and is responsible for things with real impact on daily life like schools, roads and healthcare, there is absolutely no sense that one party or candidate stands for a different position on which roads to fix, which schools to refurbish, which health programs to initiate. There’s no tie to local issues, no information on who these wooden candidates might be and whose interests they might represent. Politics here are in that sense apolitical. And it makes perfect sense that none of my journalist friends or their colleagues bothered to take a trip out to report on this colossal non-event in action.

The Only Election Poster I Saw Anywhere, for the Communist Party

There was also this notice informing residents of my building that they could vote 

with a mobile ballot box if needed

But they would have to find said notice to the right of all the others

Georgi Derlugian, whose Tale of Two Cities is one of the most brilliant and funny juxtapositions of American and Post-Soviet life I know of if you haven’t read it, came to a Comparative Politics workshop I attended last year and mentioned the fact that political scientists never talk about variation in the “emotional energy” of politics. And at the time I remember thinking since he is from and writes about the Caucasus that he meant the kind of emotional energy in politics that results in a drunken 16 year old Dato and the rest of his teenage friends being handed machine guns to fire on the Parliament during the 1992 coup in Georgia. But thinking on it now, it’s exactly the emotional energy coursing through my parents’ veins as they go to the polls to very peacefully vote in friends or vote out foes in the US that is completely lacking in the apolitical politics here in Kazan. Everyone I’ve talked to since who bothered to vote in the election had never heard of any of the candidates. They voted out of some sense of civic duty engrained from Soviet times when voting was not just mandatory but a huge celebration. There used to be concerts and a huge buffet, my host mother nostalgically recalled as we left the polls and headed home. The buffet was a big deal, she said, because at the time you couldn’t buy anything in the stores so the government laying out tables of smoked fishes and meats and mayonnaise-laden salads was such a huge incentive to draw people to the polls that they rarely had to go rapping on doors to remind them of their obligation to vote. “Now we can buy all the things in stores if we have enough money and the government no longer provides the buffet” she explained unwittingly encapsulating one of the best descriptions of the post-communist transition that I’ve heard.

And obviously everything I’ve just written is all anecdotal. I have no way of telling you whether the factory director running as a candidate for the head of Kazan’s city government was just a stooge who never stood a chance, if he faced any kind of repression from the authorities that had kept him from actively campaigning, if there really was a big constituency of like-minded citizens or mobilized factory employees behind him or if there was any actual competition or doubt introduced into the outcome of the race between these 4 candidates on election day. I just know that my host mother cast her vote for Edinaya Rossiya, as one does, not under any pressure or with any hope for improvement in the city or her own situation, and that these elections seemed really sad and Soviet, but without the buffet.

A Tale of Two Dissertation Topics -- Part 1

Ok, so I am going to break this post up into two parts. I have been slow in writing it for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to include personal affairs that involve other people and my mind has been reeling with considerations of their privacy and the feedback loop this blog could create into my actual personal life. I always thought that the more transparent I could be, the better for me, the better for society. And I do still think that the willingness to expose the most private and vulnerable workings of my inner life is in large what makes what I write worth reading. However, it was a completely different proposition when I was sending out emails to a bounded group of friends and colleagues most of whom I wouldn’t see for another year or two. Now not only do I know that certain people I would normally write about at length in emails they would never see, are reading the blog, but I also worry that others through word of mouth or internet searches will stumble upon it without context and find themselves talked about at length in surprising ways. After much hemming and hawing I think I have struck a fair compromise between the emboldened salacious details I would normally pack into a private email and the sterilized version of deliberate omission I would pass along to professors and parents. The second source of delay is that when I started this post I framed it in a way that was meant to conclude with a very bold and decisive statement of my dissertation topic as the big pay-off at the end. And sadly, while I am closer than ever to making that proclamation, right now, I am not there yet. Finally, this post became unwieldy fast and is already quite long so in the interests of not boring or blinding the few people who actually read this thing, here you go, part one:

It has happened. Finally. I suppose I have not actually spoken much about it in the blog, but I spend most of my waking hours either torturing myself about the fact that I do not yet have a dissertation topic or attempting to blot this fact out with a neuro-chemical cocktail of endorphins stimulated by television, chocolate, drinking and carousing with 20 year olds, which then generally leaves me feeling all the worse about myself in the morning. Only in the American system can one be in the fourth, yes I said FOURTH, year of a PhD program and still not have a dissertation topic. There are two years of classes, a year of teaching, summer fellowships, guaranteed funding, workshops, conferences, all of which seem to have acted like a washing machine on my brain, leaving me tossed, turned, bleached, discombobulated, cleansed of all the bright ideas I came in with and questioning why I set out on this whole endeavor, so late in life relative to the nubile 24 year olds who came straight in from undergrad or took a year or two off to work at and buy into the rhetoric of a DC think tank or international NGO, in the first place. Not that I am the only one in this position in my program— having taken the leap into the abyss with no plan and no institutional infrastructure after college, having gotten my bearings, worked at multiple real jobs around the world and in the process built up ideas of how I think the “world” (loosely defined) works and where it’s flawed. But the lot of us who came in late don’t seem to be fairing particularly well and all seem to have a similar “lost dog” quality about us as we bumble off into the field trying to make the academic jargon and flawed methods we’ve acquired in the PhD program match up with what we once knew about the way the world works in practice and what we want to spend the next two years researching and writing, potentially building a career on.

And you can feel free to skim or skip down to where I actually start to tell the story of the last few weeks and the stumbling onto not just one but TWO viable dissertation topics to which I am finally willing to make a commitment, both of which are motivated by and deeply entangled with schoolgirl crushes I’ve developed on not just one but TWO inappropriate guys. For those of you with any interest or investment in what I think I’m doing in Kazan and more generally with my life, here is the quick and dirty version of how I think I got myself here via autobiography, much of which may be irritatingly repetitive or self-aggrandizing in which case I again exhort you to skip or skim. So in my last year of undergrad, having spent four years reading novels, writing bad poetry and hanging out with would-be artists, I start scrambling for something to do with myself after graduation. A friend recommends I apply for a fellowship he took that sent him to Estonia, which sounds strange enough to capture my attention. So with no prior knowledge of politics or post-Soviet affairs, I take this random fellowship to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tallinn, Estonia, under Toomas Ilves who grew up in New Jersey, went to Columbia, used to listen to Nirvana in his office and has since become the president of this former-Soviet US ally. The fellowship consists of a rag-tag group of Columbia students funded by a German Columbia alumnus in New York who has realized that by starting his own fellowship he can have a network of loyal young informants working out of government offices in countries where he has investments. I bullshit my way through the fellowship part of the summer by writing a report on how Estonia could better structure its process of European integration, again with absolutely no prior knowledge of Estonia or EU integration. Meanwhile, the rest of my brain and body is jolted awake in an entirely new way by the absurdity of the post-Soviet world and by the shocking inequality of power I watch playing out economically and socially between Americans working abroad in Tallinn and the local people interacting with them. I’m both repulsed and titillated by the soap-opera-cum-carnival-esque drama of expats living it up on the post-Soviet playground and upon return home to the States decide I want to go back for more. So I get sent to Georgia on the same fellowship in 1999 and begin working as a speechwriter in the Chairman’s office of the Parliament for Zurab Zhvania who later mysteriously dies of asphyxiation via the same kind of kerosene heater I used to use while living in Tbilisi, and alongside Misha Saakashvili who also studied at Columbia and later becomes the President of another strategic post-Soviet US ally in a highly emotional election following a bloodless coup. I am living politics but I don’t know it or have any real interest in or understanding of them at the time. Instead I am still busy marveling at the disconnect between the parallel societies of Georgians living without electricity in an urban wasteland where guns are regularly fired at random in the streets and meanwhile, in a parallel reality, ex-pats get chauffeured to and from their big houses with generators on the side of the hill to their air-conditioned offices all the time thinking they live in the same city as and have an idea of what life is like for the rest of the population. We’ve been through the whole part where I date the Georgian rock star and unwilling to exercise my hegemonic American economic and social power to leave him behind, I attempt to use it “for good” by bringing him home with me. One day a year and a half later I wake up in a studio apartment in Beverly Hills married to an immigrant husband who calls me fat, stupid and knocks me around in an attempt to control my every movement and ensure my love for him. With us in the apartment are two cats, a pit-bull with an aggression problem (the source of which is over-determined by her genetics and the brutal puppy training to which she has been subjected by the Georgian), and his cousin living in our closet, which is to say that I have actually managed to export the absurdity of the post-Soviet experience with me to Los Angeles by carrying a single individual with me. I do however at some point (ok, trite but after 9/11) realize that I am free to return to my regularly scheduled Ivy League existence and flee to New York in a two-door Toyota filled with all of my worldly belongings including the above-mentioned pets, picking up my father at the Las Vegas airport along the way, which is comforting but slightly problematic as the pit-bull who is strapped into the back seat with her yuppy dog seat-belt attempts to take his arm off every time he exits and re-enters the vehicle. I return to the macro level political arena as a speechwriter for the South Korean delegation at the UN just as the North Korean nuclear issue resurfaces and the US decides to invade Iraq, events which require a lot of blustering commentary from the South Koreans as penned by me, a 25 year old American girl who majored in medieval English literature. I still see myself as a writer, not someone political or involved in politics, but merely a mercenary making my living off of them. Then one day I write an innocuous speech on the “Transitional Economies of Eastern Europe” for the General Assembly but something funny happens. As I’m reading the repetitive jargon-laden UN report I realize that it has little bearing on anything I lived through in Estonia or Georgia. Since the Koreans don’t care or know anything about Eastern Europe, I take some liberties with the speech. That afternoon, Counsellor Shin Boo Nam comes into my office slightly puzzled and tells me that four of the former Soviet delegates came over to him to ask for copies of my speech after the session, something completely unheard of in UN etiquette. I realize at this point that I am onto something, that inserting “truth” or a version thereof, inserting words informed by real life experience rather than secondhand reports, into the simulacrum of bureaucratic UN politics doesn’t result in its going unheard with the rest of the rhetoric but actually wakes people up from their stupor and connects as signal rather than noise in the ears of those who recognize it on the other end. My second epiphany occurs in my second year of speechwriting when it becomes clear that I am only regurgitating the same speeches from the previous year because the only thing that has changed in the new UN reports is the latest short-list of buzzwords. I realize that my work is more mathematical than literary or political. There is a formula for everything that gets produced. I realize that I am participating in a strange simulacrum in which we pretend we are in control of and acting to remedy the problems of actual people living in disadvantaged conditions in the world when none of what we do has any affect on them and reciprocally none of what goes on in their world below the radar of the UN bureaucrats and international journalists skimming its surface affects the work that goes on in our parallel elite society. I at this point become interested in politics, namely because I think so much of it is bullshit. I apply and matriculate to SAIS, get roped into Conflict Management as a concentration by a charismatic professor who walks into school wearing a green suit on the first day of orientation and proclaims that international law does not really exist. That summer I do a research project for the OSCE in the North of Kosovo and date a guy on the Serbian side of the divided city of Mitrovica while living in the Albanian South, which entails walking over a bridge full of tanks and evasion of OSCE security protocol to stay in his small apartment that like all the others around it does not have running water and in return I am exposed not only to high levels of lead contamination but also to all of the shit that people on that side of the bridge are subjected to by their own leadership who are not only working against the interests of their own people, who just want jobs and schools and water and electricity, but stirring up problems with the equally malignant Albanian leadership on the other side of the bridge, all of which is presided over and facilitated by the hapless UN Mission of people who are living up on the hill in the capital, Pristina, with their generators, untouched by but still complaining about the backwardness of the disputed territory and escaping to Greece in their Landcruisers on the weekends. I interview people on all sides of the conflict to conclude that the UN’s policy is doing more to pit the Albanians against the Serbs and enflame the conflict between them than making any sort of positive change on the ground, while if you were to read the reports manufactured by the UN and OSCE you would instead observe the steady march of progress and a whole new multi-ethnic country unfolding in the simulacrum. I get into the election monitoring business which involves even more holding of my tongue as the events I observe unfolding as violence and coercion all around me on the ground get written out of the official tale of progress and improvement that the academics will later draw from for their datasets. I watch this spinning of what we want to be happening into a web of bureaucratic documents that do not match the reality of what is actually happening on the ground. I go to work for the OSCE in a role that rather than commenting on participates in and legitimates this parallel fantasy world of international politics, during which time I date a lovely, smart British diplomat and temporarily live the good life on the hill with him and his generator hopping into the LandRover for trips down to Greece on the weekends, and immediately upon realizing what I’m doing apply for a PhD to get myself out of the system. I can’t be a part of it. I need to write about it. And yet, I get to grad school, which had I gone the British route would have entailed my sitting down to read relevant articles and write up my experience to date, but instead back in America for the first extended time in a long time I am thrown immediately into “math camp” where I am grappling with linear algebra and multivariate calculus on the most preposterous leap of faith that *this* is somehow going to make me more effective in either explaining or righting the wrongs I’ve had the weird perspective to observe in the world over the last ten years. I try my luck in other departments—fall in with the right-wing bigwigs in the history department who self-consciously teach the reproduction of Anglo-American hegemony to Yale undergrads, with the narrow neuroscientists who have no desire to look up from their petri dishes to help me trace the path I want to illustrate from stress-induced neuronal damage in the amygdala to cultures of fear and ethnic hatred that perpetuate bad leadership in the world’s hot spots, and finally I do find some sympathy with the social psychologists working on automatic processes that we aren’t aware of but that wind up dictating a multitude of our behaviors, but it’s too late. I have already applied for and won grants to go work in Russia and Georgia and Tajikistan for the year and I’m off to the field before I can synthesize and make sense of anything that’s happened to me.

The first of the two schoolgirl crushes currently dictating conflicting paths for my dissertation research set in in the chaos of the Moscow smog in August. Embarrassingly enough, my eye started to alight on a friend’s ex-boyfriend whom I had adamantly advised her to break up with years ago because he didn’t like dogs. It seemed harmless enough until last weekend drunk at a friend’s birthday party in Moscow and sitting on a ladder adjacent to the kitchen where a small Indian man in a doctor’s mask had spent the night frying piles of paneer for the party and left behind a redolent smog of cooking grease that must have psychologically triggered the suffocating emotion of August, he informed me that my friend, his ex, had in fact sanctioned our union over gchat with something to the effect of “Dude, she’s completely crazy, smart, funny and loves living in post-Soviet shitholes, why are you not sleeping with her already?” I am not allowed to discuss the events that ensued in further detail due to a code of silence I may have already violated. But I will say more generally about the weekend that after two years of self-imposed celibacy, it was refreshing to return to the international trampoline of my pre-PhD lifestyle full of brilliant colorful characters living and drinking and dancing to extremes, having informed conversations about crazy politics, people doing things, making the world spin, not just watching and ruminating, my age and older, probably pedigreed in some way but not gauche enough to let on how, like this guy I chatted with at length about the pagan rituals of the Mari people who someone later mentioned offhandly is in line for the Russian throne via Catherine the Great, wine flowing, vodka shots, champagne, a return to “real” life, ex-pat style, which no matter how much I claim to disdain, I love being a part of. The next night we all reconvened at a VIP concert by an edgy strung-out lesbian Bashkir singer at a new high modern architecture school where again all the people were beautiful, if not physically, sartorially, aesthetically, more drinks, the world spinning in a good way. The next night, my last, meant to be a low key dinner at a restaurant frequented by the opposition, billed as bohemian, we started with kir royales and they didn't stop, perfectly cooked steak and spinach, more people I'd wanted to reunite with from the smog-bonding while in Moscow, and suddenly it's 6am and I need to run back to Miriam's and pack to catch the cab to my 10:00am flight back to Kazan. It was not just ideal as a bounded weekend adventure but jolting as a return to a self I thought I’d lost in all my grumbling and ruminating and disdain for the elite ex-pat world I love as deeply as I fear being a part of.

Back in the periphery, I was seriously questioning what I was doing in Kazan as I crept along on my busted tram, the smell of human excrement still lingering in my nose because someone had literally taken a shit in the "lobby" of my apartment building days earlier and no one had bothered to clean it up. Somewhere between the over-indulgence in kir royals and getting on the plane to Kazan, I had internalized the incensed encouragement of a mutual friend to “go for it” with the Moscow crush, because she assured me, he was very interested in me, and parlayed this advice into very embarrassingly initiating a drunken late-night “relationship” conversation with him. He had made it clear that while he found me fun and attractive, he didn’t want to pursue anything further because he did not want to get involved in another long distance relationship. And while, clearly, this is only a sympathetic and polite version of the “I’m just not that into you” blow-off, it hit all of the right buttons to make me crazy about the fact that I’d chosen to come to Kazan. Why was I here on the periphery in a region no one even knows let alone cares about and not in the capital? Why was I not studying elite politics that mattered? Why was I subjecting myself to all of the difficulties of living in the middle of nowhere when the payoff wasn’t even clear? My mind immediately snapped back to the bigger picture, to international relations, to Russian foreign policy, to projects that would require my carrying out research in Moscow. I wanted out of the wasteland and back to civilization and relevance as soon as possible.

The only bright spot in Kazan was my second and in this case quite literal schoolgirl crush on my Russian grammar teacher. From the outset I connected with Lev and it really pains me to change his name because in real life it’s so dramatic—the first part rare and old Slavic and the last translating loosely to “divinity.” He’s my age, 35, and built like a Serb, 6’4 and broad through the shoulders, with big amber eyes, short cropped dark hair and that feeling of post-Soviet brokenness about him that I find again and again in people, particularly men, my age from the former USSR and Yugoslavia. I don’t know how to describe it exactly but it reminds me of my cat Joe, also a product of the former-USSR, who as a kitten was loud and demanding of attention and saw himself as the center of the world until we brought home another cat, and until that point I don’t think he had realized that he was a cat and wouldn’t grow up to be like me or Dato, and upon seeing this other cat and understanding his place in the world, he became very silent and not sullen but sad in Zen way, like he had accepted his lot in life but still remembered a time when he had imagined so much more for himself.

Lev was assigned to test my conversation skills and we wound up talking for over an hour about world politics, my Russian never sounding so good as I went back and forth with this sharp and well informed instigator, whose realpolitik perspective snapped me back to the way the Russians see the world, without any of the cotton candy gauze of an “international” community or saccharin sweet rhetoric of freedom and human rights for all, gumming up and obfuscating the “real” picture of governments vying for world power. We have our one-on-one tutorial together in this weird ecology building off campus filled with plants and soil samples, fish, toads, snakes and mushrooms living and growing in various aquaria. And even before I had admitted the crush to myself I remember having the feeling that the lady at the front desk who handed us our key read Lev’s teaching credentials with deep skepticism and threw me a disapproving look as if we were going upstairs to use our ecologically musky classroom for illicit purposes beyond participles.

Just back from Moscow, everything about Kazan seemed small and sad, except for Lev, who was wearing a white tee shirt just tight enough that his arm muscles casually bulged through the sleeves. He asked how my trip to Moscow had been and when I told him about hanging out with my friends, the international journalists, he tilted his head and squinted at me skeptically in this way that he does, which coming from anyone else would seem utterly condescending, but which I’ve learned to associate with my further edification about life in Russia, and asked me, “So what do you think about the reporting by the foreign correspondents in Moscow?” I looked at him blankly, knowing there was a catch I wasn’t getting, “I don’t know. It’s pretty good, no?” “Do you think they are very complete in their reports about Russia? Do you think they understand Russian politics or society?” “Well, yes, I think they do. Most of them speak Russian fluently and have been studying Russian politics and living in Russia for many years.” He did not look impressed, “Have they been living in Russia or have they been living in Moscow?” I laughed and he launched into a diatribe about the rest of the world only getting reports of the politics in Moscow and then assuming that those politics sum up the reality of the country, that Moscow is in full control, that Russia is a completely centralized state, and the rest of the people living throughout its vast landmass are just peasants or pastoralists, sheep of some sort that tow the center’s line. He claimed that Moscow feeds stories about their full control to international and domestic journalists alike who in turn report on and reinforce Moscow’s control as social reality in Russia and the rest of the world.

And right, that’s why I was here on the periphery. In Moscow I’d been sucked back into the elite perspective, into “seeing like a state” if you will. The periphery became just a backwater again, important only when something explodes onto the radar of the media or into the laps of Moscow politicians. But isn’t the project of academics, as the people with the time and resources and outsider’s perspective, to try to figure out how those explosive events develop, what conditions contribute to them, how and when everyday life becomes political to the point that it makes the news? And if we pay more attention to the stories of local politics before they hit the news, if they make their way from the vast darkness of the periphery to the elite discourse of international journalism and UN rhetoric, does that actually shift the politics themselves, creating new centers and capitals? Sadly, I am without answers. So I will leave you hanging here with the problem of the dueling worlds unresolved—with a deep desire to be a part of the elite action in Moscow and a commitment to understanding how regular people live in the republics of the Trans-Volga as deeply motivated by divergent crushes and will potentially update you with a dissertation topic that takes both into account at some point next week.


p.s. feedback and possible dissertation topics/research questions very welcomed at lesliehough@gmail.com