I lived in Russia for nearly a year, and spent another few months in Ukraine. Although I’ve forgotten 75% of the language, at the time I spoke fluent Russian. Here are a few comments on Russian culture, since this most-hated country is so frequently in the headlines.

1 – Russians are not soft

200 years ago most people were living on the edge. Starvation, privation, no safety net. Since then we’ve pulled ourselves from the primordial ooze and created a level of abundance that’s unequaled in history. The serfs and vikings were not obese.

Prosperity is great, but it breeds a race of doughy humans who care more about personalizing pronouns than preserving prosperity. We’ve forgotten that 99.99999% of human history was a mad dash to get enough food to not transition to a corpse.

The Russians have not forgotten.

Almost every Russian either knows privation today, or has direct memories of it. They are used to pain and going without. Their society will not melt down if they run out of avocado toast.

One blustery afternoon a naive, younger version of myself lamented how my childhood was oh so hard, with my parents divorced and having to get a job at 16 and oh woh, woh truly is me.

My girlfriend’s face reflected disgust, that I could be so arrogant as to believe my hardships noteable. She said, “My classmates from university ate out of the dumpster from behind the school.”

2 – The fatalistic attitude

Russians generally have an understanding that things suck, and they’re probably going to suck worse in the future. An embrace of fatalism you could call it. Tough to grind a culture down if the grinding is already priced in.

My girlfriend (who came from a wealthy family by Russian standards) kept her car on the third floor of a parking garage. To exit the garage you had to drive down a steep, spiraling exit ramp with no room for error. One day she misjudged and scraped all the paint off the front of her bumper. She accepted the situation with poise, and referenced the inevitability of misfortune in life.

3 – Russia is not in the middle of a culture war

In Russia, a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Russian culture is more united than western culture at the moment. Words are not violence in Russia, violence is violence.

One time while walking home from work a police car drove by, a small Lada, not a square inch bigger than a Mini Cooper. Each of the two policemen had an AK-47 in his lap and the barrels were pointed up and out the window, seeing as there wasn’t enough room to put them anywhere else.

4 – Russians know where things come from

Check out this awesome song and even better music video: Нефть. The chorus of the song goes, я люблю нефть, which translate to, I love oil. The song begins with the intro,

As long as there is oil in Russia,
Milan has me,
If Milan has me,
That means there’s oil in Russia

Russians understand energy and commodities. They know what keeps the winter at bay. They are incredibly unlikely to ever put themselves into a state of infantile dependence on other countries, if they can avoid it.

Unrelated: I also find this song to be beautiful in a very different way

5 – Russia and Ukraine is a low trust society

Walking through a Ukrainian village of several thousand people, nothing stood out more than the continuous fence stretching for hundreds (thousands) of feet. Difference styles of fence in front of every house, connected to the neighbors fence, so you could walk a quarter mile past dozens of houses without seeing a single front yard. Stranger danger, we don’t want anyone to come in, go away!

In Moscow I went to the bar for a beer. I was fluent in Russian by this point so I said hello to the guy sitting next to me. He replied, “you’re gay.”

“No I’m not,” I retorted.

“Yes, you are,” he assured me.

Russians do not trust strangers and are generally not open to engaging with new faces. The man thought I was gay because I must have had an ulterior motive to initiate the conversation. This mistrust of the “other” can be annoying, but it makes a lot of sense given the country’s history.

Fin

To summarize in a sentence: Russia is a less creative, trusting culture that is nonetheless homogeneous and better able to stand pain than the west. Also, in Russia they sell 2 liter bottles of beer. Just like Sputnik, they’ve beaten America again.