Russian Facebookers

Russian Facebookers

CAVEAT, TO GET ME OFF HOOK: THIS A DRAFT FOR COMMENTS FOR READERS KIND ENOUGH TO READ/COMMENT ON THIS BLOG

At last, one can read spoken Russian in print.

For all my reservations about social media as a means of significant human communication, there is an exceptional development on Facebook: free-speaking Russians communicating in their spoken Russian language of today via the Internet.

Yes, a kind of Russian linguistic spring, expressing itself in a language that is not Sovietese, Putinese -- or "official" Pushkinese (the government-sanctioned version of the great Russian poet's works).

Russia is the country in Europe that has the most internet users (granted, as I understand it, not as a percentage of the total population).

During my many years as a student/admirer of Russia and her culture and, as a US Foreign Service officer privileged to have served in that unique country trying, as best I could, to master her language ("You want to learn Russian: the first twenty years are the easiest," so goes the quip), I all too often unsuccessfully tried to learn (of course, I take full responsibility for this failure) the tongue of this land by submitting myself to the following three forms of mental torture (I of course simplify):

--One, anti-communist emigres in the past century insisted on American students learning "classical" Russian, e.g., reading word-for-word Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and thereby inculcating US dumb barbarian undergraduate "Merikans" (and their perhaps one-sided judgment about their students was not totally incorrect) with the "true," classical language of Rossiia (but if you asked these cultivated persons for an explanation of what the instrumental case in the Russian language "worked" grammatically, forget about a clear answer).

--Two, culturally-blind non-Russian native speaking linguists, who sought to "explain" to you in arcane ways what was, indeed, the essence of the instrumental but who themselves couldn't speak fluent Russian and had noticeable American accents (We Americans refuse to realize our accent can rub foreigners the wrong way when we try to speak their language).

--Three, Sovietese, taught under the auspices of exchange programs during the Cold War for Americans interested going to the Soviet Union to learn the language at communist government educational institutes with the blessing of US-USSR cultural "agreements."

--As a footnote: I learned little, linguistically or historically, from most  members of US academia teaching poli-sci Soviet Studies from a theoretical point of view in US learneries; all too many of these "Soviet experts" could hardly utter a word in Russian, the language of the country they supposedly were specialists about.  (I was, however, privileged to have advisors  of  a humanistic bent in graduate school who spoke elegant Russian).

Much -- and I mean much -- adding to all these obstacles to learning Russian for foreigners is a unwillingness of Russian themselves to communicate with foreigners in their own mother tongue, attributable in part to Russians' desire to expand their linguistic skills without listening to foreigners butcher their own language-- in other words a parochial view, on their part, that "no one can speak Russian except us Russians," at odds with the American nice-guy perspective that if you can order a hot dog in English, you're ok (although, as we know here in the USA, if you don't speak English fluently there's something not quite right with you; but  if  a foreigners tries to speak with us in English, we're happy to oblige without cringing).

In such linguistic situations, Russians remind me of the French, or at least of the French of earlier generations. Their faces would contort  when an amerlac would say "Je parle francais." I still share some of this French linguistic snobbery, given that French is my native language.  When I hear a US fellow-citizen trying to pronounce a French "reh" only to utter the American "ruh," I cringe too.

I know a splendid, charming Russian interpreter of English who will never allow me to speak Russian before her, despite my years dedicated to the study of her native language. Well, my fondness for her is still unlimited, even if she will never allow me to share her language with me.

And now, to get seriously back to Russia, we have Putinese, what some Western "Russia-experts" read/see/listen to on the government-controlled media to earn their daily bread. Putinese, almost as repulsive as Sovietese, is the new Russian "official" language. (When I look at this sinister former ex-KGB official, a control freak in a century that is no time to be a control freak, I cannot but associate his name with the French word for "whore.") In all fairness to him, however, he is known to use swear words, which suggests that the language he uses is not completely dead.

But lo and behold on Facebook in recent months -- and, to anyone interested in the Third Rome --- one can, so far as I can tell, real spoken Russian -- granted, communicated among a small segment of the population, the Internet-savvy (mostly Moscow, it appears) intelligentsia, which is quite mentally/socially distant from the insular Putin-crowd and its hoped-for reliance on government propaganda and the silence of the xenophobic, silent  narod ("ordinary people") to maintain, Ivan-the-Terrible tsar style, their muscle-boy gun-lover's power forever through Putinese, among other tools of social control.

The Russian Facebook linguistic explosion reminds me of the aristocratic kruzhki (circles) of early 19th century Russia, when Western-oriented, close but often acrimonious friends would meet to discuss artistic and political issues. Such contacts resulted, arguably, in the 1825 Decembrist revolt against the tsarist regime, the first modern Russian revolution (and a very limited, failed one at that). Some Decembrists ended up in Siberia.

Such early 19th-century linguistic contacts in urban salon atmosphere contributed to the creation of the sublime classical Russian language, as represented by Puskin's poetry -- and I am not referring to "Pushkinese," Pushkinese being the poet's works vulgarized ("edited/selected")  by tsarist and Soviet authorities. Rather, I am evoking all of Pushkin's works, which linguistically show an infinite variety not all foreigners (including myself) can grasp.

Meanwhile, in cyberspace, the "great divide" between the articulate "let's-go-Western" intelligentsia and the silent-majority narod, a constant theme in Russian history, continues -- as seen from the arguably smarty-pants, snarky Muscovite Facebook entries, which show much linguistic/artistic genius but little mercy for the Russian masses or the reactionary Russian Orthodox Church (not so speak of the Putin government). Many reactions on Facebook, by the way, to a young African (evidently a student from that continent) holding a Russian-language pro-Putin sign were negative, and showed a non-politically correct covert racism that so-called "color-blind" Westerners would condemn.

I do hope a diligent archivist at the Hoover Institution, a right-leaning and efficient treasure-collecting organization of data on totalitarism (as it interprets it), is making sure the Facebook messages of the Russian linguistic spring will not vanish in cyberspace (or in Facebook/FSB data banks).

Some might, rightfully, object to the reactionary Hoover Institution (too unfair an adjective to describe a scholarly institution?) undertaking such a Facebook conversation preservation project, given its political outlook and affiliations. But how is the linguistic creation of  this internet-expressed Russian language going to be preserved, except by a well-funded US anti-totalitarian organization -- and (ironically) the Russian FSB. Maybe the two could cooperate.

Further on this subject, for anyone who was in the USSR during Cold War, of which the creepy Mr. Putin is an antiquated promulgation: Russian "secret services" are doubtless immensely grateful that Facebook and other Western social networks are providing them with the kind of instant information "they need" about "troublemakers." Can the services keep up with the flood of cyberspace info? I would not underestimate them.

I, reflecting my Cold-War days as a US diplomat and perhaps attributing too much power to Putin and company, and on my part assuming that dissidents' every inspiring/ironic words will be captured by the authorities, am amazed by how "self-sacrificial" savvy Russian Facebook users are -- Russian cyberspace versions of Tibetan monks immolating themselves -- somehow not taking it for granted (or, maybe, in fact fully realizing, in a typical Dostoevsky stradanie [suffering]  fashion)  that their every word will be captured by the authorities so that they can ultimately be liberated by being imprisoned/exiled/shot. (Of course, not in a Gulag, but a cyberspace equivalent of it.)

But thank God times have changed, and maybe ePutiners and erefuseniks will be "feel groovy" exchanging messages on Facebook without real/virtual-world fear of recriminations.

Meanwhile, here, in  the USA, we have the Orwellian "Department of Homeland Security" watching over us to keep us "secure" from "terrorists" and we're dropping presidentially-sanctioned deadly drones on "enemies" via computer-directed military staff at bases near Las Vegas ("sin/entertainment city") and we wonder how the personal information we so readily, and so naively, provide on (I should say to) Facebook will be/is being used by secretive corporations/the Government, organizations all pretending to be "transparent" so opposed, those in power say, to the mean, anti-American regimes/groups outside the USA Promised Land.

Russians Facebookers, with all their illusions about the purity of Western democracy (their invented alternative to their own bankrupt political system), seem to have no concern that "freely" expressing themselves on Facebook is actually a two-way mirror for those providing them with a "free" communication service. Actually, it is a means  -- pardon my paranoia -- of tracking the users of such a "service" (in all countries, including the U.S. and Russia) with the cut-the-crap, good-for-profit-of-business aim of selling targeted consumers "products." I hope I am wrong in this evaluation of the social media about which I have such doubts.

It's just that I believe that face-to-face is far more important than facebook-to-facebook, although (presumably fb2fb can bring people together in the non-virtual world).

I guess some paranoia does bring Americans and Russians together ...  No wonder some said, during the Cold War, that the U.S. and the USSR would "converge."

With these concerns in mind, I am still in awe of the Russian linguistic spring on Facebook. As the twitter on cyberspace, "awesome"!