Elective

On Thursdays at about a quarter to six, I say goodbye to my coworkers at the Interjournalist Center and head over to the history department, conveniently located just a couple blocks from my internship, to attend my elective seminar, “Social Movement and Political Thought” («Общественное движение и политическая мысль»). As I am auditing, and thus not threatened by the specter of a high-pressure oral exam at the end of the semester, I am free to get what I can out of the lectures without worrying about what I’m missing (which, if I do say so myself, isn’t much. What a thrill to know I can understand a real lecture meant for real Russians!).

Our class is composed of six Russians, me, and Berney. I don’t know our classmates very well yet, but they are sociable and friendly, and I hope to get a chance to know them better before the end of the semester. We sit around a long table in a small, stuffy room with green walls and a weird plant on the table. Our teacher, Viktor Stepanovich Brachev, is the absolute picture of the absent-minded history professor: silver-haired, with bent-up glasses he half-cocks to the side to read his scribbly notes, always in a suit and carrying an umbrella. A thick stack of indecipherable, hand-written notes comprises the material for his lectures; each lecture is separated by a section of that slick, colored advertising paper that comes in the middle of newspapers. It’s just a hunch, but I suspect he’s been lecturing from the same set of notes since long before the fall of the Soviet Union. Viktor Stepanovich is missing two neighboring teeth on the bottom and the one right above them on top, giving him just the faintest lisp (and, oddly, giving me a little window to the rich phonetic opportunity of seeing exactly where a native Russian’s tongue is located when they produce certain sounds).

I am surprised and pleased to report that I don’t find these lectures boring in the least. For one thing, Viktor Stepanovich clearly knows his material and clearly cares deeply about it, and thus injects that little bit of life into his lectures that can quickly disappear when a lecturer is bored with his subject. Additionally, his very manner of lecturing cracks me up. I’ll try to demonstrate:

“Tonight we will be discussing Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev, Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev, Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev. He was an important what? A Mason. There’s nothing very surprising in this, everyone was a Mason back then [Note: also nothing surprising since we’ve been talking about the Masons for a month now]. If you went into a university in the Soviet Union, every professor was a what? A communist. A member of the party. There is nothing surprising about this, it was completely normal. You were either in the party or in Kommsomol. In the same way, Radishchev was a Mason….

“Radischev was a what? A radical. Lenin called him the first what? Revolutionary. The first revolutionary, the first revolutionary. And he was an aristocrat! Thus he was the first revolutionary aristocrat, revolutionary aristocrat, who was a radical Mason, a radical Mason, a radical Mason.”

I wish you could hear the intonation that goes along with all that repetition. Believe me, it’s hilarious. It might seem like it would be tedious to listen to an hour and a half of such speech, but it doesn’t bother me as much as I’d expect. Sometimes the repetition, particularly of names, helps me take notes, as I don’t always catch names the first time around. And when it comes down to it, Viktor Stepanovich is simply telling a story, which I find the most engaging and appealing way to study history.

In fact, that is one aspect of the Russian education system that I am growing to appreciate more and more. Russians are raised and educated as orators; from their earliest days in school, their knowledge of a subject is evaluated based on how much they can talk about it, organizing their ideas clearly and logically. This makes them very good at retelling information clearly and logically, and I am always surprised at how much the Russians I know can say about various subjects; they are extremely comfortable with the oral presentation format. By the time they themselves become teachers, they are truly master orators. Having grown up in a culture that clearly values critical thinking over information recall, I used to be highly skeptical of the Russian model of education. While I still maintain that the Russian education system (and, by extension, whole society) could benefit from an injection of critical thinking and dialogue in the classroom, I have really grown to appreciate the ability to recall information and present it in a pleasant and engaging manner, particularly as fact recall and oral presentations are not my personal strong suits.

In a particularly amusing digression this evening, Viktor Stepanovich related the tale of having to pay a bribe to get on an airplane to Ukraine, for which there were “no tickets” (during the Brezhnev era). He was extremely nervous, having never bribed anyone before, and having been, after all, well-raised to always be honest. The bribe went down without a hitch; the biggest surprise of all was the discovery that the plane was nearly empty! They flew together, five or six people in the whole plane, to Ukriane, to Ukraine, to Ukraine. Thus Viktor Stepanovich explained how he could empathize with the hero of Radishchev’s book Travel from Petersburg to Moscow, in which the hero must pay a bribe of 20 kopeks to get fresh horses at the way-station.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment of Social Movement and Political Thought. I know I will!