I’m getting really good, interesting questions on the USSR. Thank you, everybody, for participating.
Reader Pen asks:
“Is there a cursive form of the Cyrillic alphabet?”
Yes, there is. And it’s a total bitch. I recently tried to write a note to my husband and discovered that I don’t remember how to write cursive Cyrillic any longer. That was embarrassing.
Also, you’ve talked a bit about the schooling conditions in the USSR while you were growing up. I know you said you went to a fancy expensive school where they taught you English. What were the schools like for students whose parents couldn’t afford something like that? Is this in any way similar to the schooling situation now?
Now, the schools in the USSR were free. We didn’t have to pay anything to the government or the school to attend. However, at my fancy high school, bribery was rampant, shameless, and pervasive. Teachers extorted bribes very openly. They simply refused to give you a passing grade – irrespective of the quality of your work – unless you gave them a bribe.
All of the students who were from really poor families were squeezed out of this school by the 8th grade. Those who remained either gave bribes or accepted low grades. But it isn’t like anybody had to stay at that school. People could choose to go to regular schools where everybody was equally poor and unable to offer bribes.
That school didn’t teach me English because my English was already better than that of all the teachers combined and multiplied by 11 by the time I came to that school (at the age of 11, actually.) Once, back in 1988, we had a delegation of British doctors visit our school. I was invited to serve tea and coffee to the group. The British doctors suffered through an hour of the teachers’ broken English until one of the doctors dropped something and I picked it up, saying, “Here you go, ma’am”, or something of the kind. After that, the British doctors started yelling, “Oh my God, look at the little one! She speaks English!” And I was the center of attention of that encounter until it ended.
And two years later, I was able to visit two of the nicest among these doctors at their house in Kent. The house was more like a mansion, and I remember being very confused as to how somebody of such a lowly, unprestigious profession could live like that and have a collection of antiques at home. When I brought photos of the doctors’ (actually, they were a doctor and a nurse) mansion back home to the USSR, my Soviet relatives and acquaintances kept persecuting me with questions of the “Are you really sure he is a doctor???” variety.
I love these questions. We should do this more often.
Clarissa's Blog 
Also back in the 80’s, when I was a college student, one of my Russian professors, who was a Soviet emigrée, said what you said, that physicians were a low-status profession in the USSR, and also said they were a predominantly female profession, or at least much more so than in America, where about 1/3 of doctors were women at the time. And that Soviet propaganda was of course cherry picking the data about gender representation in the profession, apart from the data about its status level, etc.
What is you understanding of how the Soviets had a woman cosmonaut a solid 25 years before NASA’s first woman astronaut? Is it the case that the early cosmonauts were essentially expendable test pilots?
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“What is you understanding of how the Soviets had a woman cosmonaut a solid 25 years before NASA’s first woman astronaut?”
– The rights of women in the USSR were about 90 years ahead of the rights of women in the US. Right now, Americans are where we were back in the 1920s on this issue. So if you want to see the woman of the future, look at me. 🙂 I’m what the American women will become by year 2100. 🙂
“Also back in the 80’s, when I was a college student, one of my Russian professors, who was a Soviet emigrée, said what you said, that physicians were a low-status profession in the USSR, and also said they were a predominantly female profession, or at least much more so than in America, where about 1/3 of doctors were women at the time.”
– Everybody who was not a party apparatchik or who didn’t work in sales was considered low-status and lived in poverty. This was not a gender issue. My grandfather was a doctor and he was famous in the city among the adoring patients. Obviously, he got paid the same low salary as his female colleagues. He was also constantly persecuted as a Jew.
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“Yes, there is. And it’s a total bitch. I recently tried to write a note to my husband and discovered that I don’t remember how to write cursive Cyrillic any longer”
I (still) find Cyrillic a lot harder to read than Greek for example. I learned the Greek alphabet many years ago but still read the letters easily (slightly less so if its all caps and I never learned Greek cursive, but…)
I was speaking with another multi-lingual person (Croatian) and he has the same experience of finding normal printed Cyrillic being harder to read. Supposedly it has to do with the overall lack of ascenders (like latin t, d or k) and descenders (like latin g, y or j). It’s not the kind of thing that causes problems for native speakers (since they don’t decode each letter separately ) but it does make Cyrillic harder to become fluent for non-native learners.
Interestingly, Bulgarian (cyrillic I’m most familiar with) seems to be experimenting with fonts for domestic usage so that there are more ascenders and descenders, with б and л being made to look more Greek (and taller) and к made to look more latin and more substitution of the hand-written g instead of д. Occasionally it’s confusing as it might take a moment to realize that a sign that looks like gokmop is actually cyrillic доктор.
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The alphabet (including cursive) was the easiest part of Russian for me. The hardest parts for me are numbers (especially 4-digit years), verb aspects, and “verbs of motion.” This is the whole dilemma of knowing the difference between a EXATb context and an ugmu context. Too many rules of thumb. On verbs of motion exercises I consistently got lower grades than I would have by making random guesses.
Many got confused between participles and gerunds (same ending in English but different in Russian), but I didn’t because I had had English teachers who made me diagram sentences.
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“On verbs of motion exercises I consistently got lower grades than I would have by making random guesses”
That’s good! That shows you’re using some kind of system with rules, you just need to refine the rules.
Most of that other stuff is harder in Polish (especially numbers, don’t get me started on those).
Though actually living in Poland and using the language everyday the exam’ and ugmu difference and aspect aren’t such a big deal. Aspect is largely determined by tense and a few very simple rules and the vehicle/foot distinction is often avoided by other types of constructions: I didn’t “go to” the doctor, I was at the doctor’s.
Even the numbers aren’t that big a deal in everyday usage, the formal system is so convoluted that even Poles can’t keep it straight and if you don’t decline most of them at all no one really notices.
Overall verb conjugation and noun declension are easier in Russian than Polish while participles are harder in Russian (as is word stress the changes in vowels that go with it).
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