Russia is overcome by fear and paranoia – an unease which predates Putin and his propaganda. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Oliver Degabriele / Flickr. Some rights reserved. We were off on a family visit to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. My sister had dropped out at the last minute, so I had a spare ticket. It was a student ticket, not an adult one, so I gave it to the first student I met. There were any number of families with young people looking like students, so I went up to one. “Hello”, I said, “I have a spare concessionary ticket; you can have it for free.” The mother immediately frowned and grunted, “Don’t want it” – looking not even at me, but at her son, who was ready to take it. I approached a second and third family – and got a similar response. The father of the fourth family I found nodded at his daughter, saying dryly, “You take it”. The girl took it without a word. Her look suggested it wasn’t even worth a “thank you”. It was no big deal – I wasn’t looking for gratitude. Yet the feeling that I wasn’t a respectable art lover, but some kind of drug pusher lurking in a doorway, wasn’t even dispelled by gazing at Vrubel’s Demon. Does our distrust of one another outweigh even our love of a freebie?
Much ink has been spilt about Russians’ crisis of trust over the last few years, but it’s in no way an exclusively Russian phenomenon. The American political scientists Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama both described a decrease in both these values not only in the USA but across the developed world.
Fear of this Other, be they a nosy neighbour, a collective Putin, a chance passer-by or a telephone that won’t stop ringing, is again universal in Russian life
