By Jean-Philippe Deschamps-Laporte, HEC
Jean-Philippe Deschamps-Laporte has been a member of the Network for 4 years. He went to Russia for one semester as an exchange student, as part of his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in Applied Economics at the École des Hautes études commerciales (HEC) in Montréal.
Life is full of surprising twists and turns. I would have never believed that my interest for Russia and my passion for its fantastic history would take me there one day.
I was the first exchange student from my program to visit Russia. This has its advantages but also its disadvantages. Right from the start, as I was choosing my courses, I began to see that Russians do things differently. This impression was continually reconfirmed to me over the months following my arrival.
Two things made my exchange trip a success: firstly, my long-time Saint Petersburg friend, Оксана Девочкина, and secondly, my knowledge of the Russian language. After taking some intensive courses at Université de Montréal and having my mistakes literally drummed out of my head by my Ukrainian teacher, I was good to go.
Arriving in St. Petersburg via Germany, I immediately fell in love with this incredible city. I had prepared myself by reading the work of Pushkin and Gogol, but really didn't think that the city would look so much like it had in the 19th century. I found out later that the imperial palaces of the czarist era had been practically destroyed during the siege of Leningrad. It was all rebuilt at tremendous cost during the communist reign and the opulent excess of the recent capitalist years. The citizens of St. Petersburg have thus paid twice, not only in the form of thousands of rubles, but also with thousands of lives, for the megalomania of successive regimes.
During my time in Russia, I wanted to learn as much as possible about this mysterious people. I wanted to explore the dark corners, and find the skeletons in their closets! I learned to know and understand this nation, which defies comparison. In an effort of self-determination, Russians repeatedly told me that there were other models than that of the West. And to those who accuse Russia of having its priorities mixed up, of its contempt of minorities, of the excessive coerciveness exercised against its own people, the standard response is “eta Russkaya dusha” (“It is the Russian soul,” an expression often used in Russian to designate the uniqueness of Russians).
Life for expatriates in Russia has its dark side. For example, one of my friends, a former captain of the Bundesliga ( Germany’s premier soccer league), was the victim of a bombing two steps from my house. A few months earlier, he had been drugged by a stranger who took him to his place and stole everything he had. Another friend, a Finnish exchange student, was beaten up in an alleyway a hundred metres from my home. His attackers wore police uniforms. Five friends of different nationalities were imprisoned for sunbathing in a public park in the middle of the day. They finally had to bribe their jailer to get out of prison. I got to know a Russia where there is not necessarily a rule of law and politicians and government officials try to exercise the most power possible over each other. I was on my guard all the time. Smiling on the street? It’s not really recommended. If you do, you are outed as a tourist, ergo rich, and therefore a potential victim for the bad guys. It wasn’t until I took a short trip to Finland that I became aware of how used I had become to not smiling, out of fear that I would stand out in public places. (But fear not: smiling is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it!)
Russians in exile and others who had lived in Russia told me to always run from the police. Corruption is rampant in Russia, and has made many victims. In her book, Putin’s Russia, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, for whom I have the greatest respect, compared dark episodes in history to cancer and its tendency to reoccur. She went on to say that only radical treatment, that of rapid eradication of the diseased cells, gets rid of it, but that Russia had never applied that form of therapy. Ultimately, she says that the USSR gave way to a new Russia still infested by Soviet vermin.
I should qualify what I am saying here. Despite the horror stories that have been and continue to be told, Russia remains a fascinating country in every way.
In one of my many walks, at the end of the wharf of the Peter and Paul Fortress, I realized how lucky I was to be there at that exact moment in its history. Russia is in a state of flux, it is growing, opening up (yet without a shadow of real democracy experienced by the citizens peeking through) and I know that my children will see a more Westernized Russia in 20 years, more optimized, with more “mass appeal.” Russian opera every evening, art galleries piled chaotically one against the other, sewers emptying into the Neva (the great river that runs through the city) and the winter swimmers that swim in it, people eating ice cream at -25 C, respectable ladies enveloped in furs, vodka bottles in hand, all these fantastic things won’t be the same in the future.
An article in the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, talks about a youth club in Putin’s party, United Russia. The party organizes a game in which the young people are invited to shoot at posters of Boris Berezowski, Garry Kasparov and other personalities with political ambitions. The candidate whose poster receives the most bullets is deemed an “official enemy of the Russian people.” It is exactly that type of barbarism that will contribute to keeping this democracy to a single party, this masquerade of human rights.
I’m convinced that I will go back one day to find, I hope, that young people have finally put an end to the collective catatonia. In this country, where repression is tolerated, where state propaganda on the national television station is swallowed hook line and sinker, where the environment is a futile concern, where the well-being of the society in general takes precedence over individuals, I hope that things will change for the better.
I have to admit that I have little hope that this type of change will occur in the short term. Putin will soon pass on the torch, but without relinquishing power. This former KGB agent represents and centralizes power. Appearance is everything and decisions are made behind the scenes. The man is contemptible because he has fundamental contempt for his people.
All in all, I loved the exchange, despite the absence of clean drinking water and clean air. The toughness of the people gave me the opportunity to learn so much about the tenderness hidden in each of these men and women hardened by 70 years of official totalitarianism and then the last 15 years of living under the absolute law of the jungle. I learned very little at the Institute of Finance and Economy, but so much from the heart of this city that Dostoyevsky called “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world.”
