Stand to the Side

~ Clarissa

We used public transport in the USSR all the time. People hoping to get on a subway train or a bus would stand very close to the doors of the stopping vehicle in a thick crowd. The doors would open, and there would be no way for the exiting passengers to disembark. The entering crowd would press against the people trying to exit. As a result, few people managed to enter the vehicle, even though the middle of the carriage might be completely empty. Some of those who needed to exit had to miss their stop. This happened every time. Zero exceptions. That’s how it always worked.

It would be much more convenient for everybody if the people waiting for the train stood to the sides of the doors, letting passengers exit, and then entered the vehicle without having to shove and push. How many experiences of this kind do you think people need to figure out that it pays off to stand to the side? Years, decades, a lifetime of experiences? None of this was enough. Mockery in the media, endless discussions, daily discomfort of having to beat your way in and out of a subway car. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out that this behavior wasn’t about finding a comfortable way to use public transportation. “I will not step to the side for anybody because it’s dog-eat-dog out there, and the moment you blink, people will eat you alive” is the motivating idea behind the behavior of those Soviet and post-Soviet passengers. It was a point of pride not to give way.

I’m back in America, and the absolute wonder of a culture where people control their tempers, control their impulses, and proceed from kindness and rationality hits hard as I spend more time than usual in public spaces. What causes me the most pain is that the people whose ancestors traveled for many generations this uncommon path of reason over instinct and civilization over jungle beast have absolutely no idea that their enormous advancement is not humanity’s default. What’s worse, they feel apologetic for their advancement.

Standing to the side of the door which you want to enter is a non-trivial cultural achievement. It shows that you can delay gratification. You can tame down the brute animalistic competitiveness and privilege collective peace and cohesion over the natural impulse to trample on others. Cultures that have learned to stand to the side have a much higher standard of living than those who haven’t. Third-world countries are the way they are not because of colonialism or oppression but because their inhabitants’ way of being produces exactly that system of social relations.

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Published by Clarissa

33 thoughts on “Stand to the Side”

    1. Very, very hard to build. Most importantly, it takes an extremely long time. It doesn’t happen naturally or casually.

      I just spent 30 minutes on an airplane shuttle where a dozen people who were all stressed out about possibly missing their flights kept their cool and acted with extreme politeness towards a bumbling older driver who was royally messing up the schedule. This kind of self-control only exists in small pockets of civilization. Let’s not piss it away.

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      1. “Very, very hard to build. Most importantly, it takes an extremely long time”

        I’m not entirely sure about that. I remember that kind of behavior, with people who want to get on standing in your way making getting off difficult… but I can’t remember a recent example. Getting on and off public transport was often an undignified rumble but not so much now, even in Warsaw (life in capital cities is often a lot more brusque in this part of the world).

        As far as I can tell, it’s just greater prosperity. No public campaigns (or only extemely modest ones like announcements on public transport) and in general people here are a lot more polite and considerate compared to the past.

        Of course Americans are the world champions of polite behavior in public but when life gets a little easier people tend to lose a lot of their rough edges.

        And of course grievance grifters hate that and decry polite behavior as ‘inauthentic’ or whatever other retarded jusitfication they can think up to keep people nasty and at each others’ throats.

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        1. Yesterday I was getting on an AirTrain at JFK. There was a group of Pakistanis (mostly young women) who stood exactly like this in front of the doors, preventing people with suitcases from disembarking. The entire trip was very uncomfortable because they were loud, rude, and acted like other people simply don’t exist. I had very strong Soviet vibes from all this.

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        2. People like Mamdani are a prime example that prosperity and class cannot beat out inherent sliminess. Also, it sounds elitist to assume that poor are the rogues of public life irrespective of culture — yes when the life is rough, people’s priorities and lifestyle are different but if anything they hold on to shreds of decency in their life even more steadfastly. Many poor farmers and laborers I come across in my travels to India are a prime example of this.

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          1. “it sounds elitist to assume that poor are the rogues of public life irrespective of culture”

            Who said that? Poland wasn’t especially poor by world standards in the 1990s (though people felt subjectively poor) and public manners inherited from the communist system were brusque to rude much of the time.

            Poland is a _lot_ better off now and public manners are much nicer.

            You’re confusing individuals and generalizations. Yes, lots of poor people are decent and kind and lots of rich people are scum. No argument.

            But public manners are a general case and public manners in much of the third world are pretty nasty (Indians do not have a good reputation abroad). People who might be absolutely lovely in private push and shove and yell and be jerks for no particular reason other than that’s how things are done.

            Bring a lot of pushers and shovers to your country will not improve public manners.

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              1. How’d I contradict myself?

                There are two separate spheres. Personal and public.

                In the personal sphere politeness has very little or nothing to do with socio-economic status.

                In the public sphere…. it depends. In lots of the world, politeness is something you extend to people you know and people you don’t personally know might as well be dumb animals standing in your way (and get treated as such).

                Alternately, a spirit of zero-sum… everything prevails in a society and people want to get theirs and don’t care what happens to those trying to get theirs.

                Socialism produces the second as there’s never enough of anything to go around.

                In Poland, which often had rude public manners (largely due to socialism imposed by the USSR) public manners improved tremendously as the country became more prosperous and it was no longer necessary to elbow bothersome people out of the way.

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            2. I had a Nigerian and an Indian run the lab some years ago. Each is a talented, lovely person. I love them both. We were great friends.

              But God, the dysfunction they created at the lab. The gossip, the drama, the not showing up on time, the incapacity to follow instructions. Involving everybody in the drama they had going on. The mess in the documentation. Letting me down constantly. Endless complaints from students and faculty.

              The lab was in its best shape when it was run by a middle-aged local woman and a younger French woman. Quiet, efficient, meticulous. I didn’t like these women as individuals anything like I did and still do the Nigerian and the Indian. But it was a pleasure to work at the lab when they were in charge.

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              2. Yes. I’m not positioning myself as a model immigrant who got it all automatically either. It took a long time to learn. But it’s one thing to absorb individuals. Absorbing millions – especially when they don’t want to be absorbed – is extremely hard. And this culture no longer has the confidence to absorb others successfully. Let’s not forget about that part of the problem because people keep comparing today to 100 years ago, and the analogy simply doesn’t work. There’s no self-confident America that absorbed the Ellis Island immigrants anymore.

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              3. “The culture matters, much more than personal prosperity or societal standing.” Agreed, and you can add ethnicity to the latter two. Culture, and most particularly religious belief, is simply the greatest problem plaguing integration, let alone the necessary assimilation.

                Hell, the West slaughtered each other for hundreds of years in religious wars; essentially weakening each other to the point of finally having to simply accept each other.

                Islam has yet to successfully undergo that yet. Everytime a group modernizes; society advances one generation, perhaps two, before harshly regressing. Syria is only the latest, Iran and Lebanon are other modern examples. The return “purification” consists of widespread routine rape and murder of the sects most likely to assimilate with others, such as Ismaelis, Alewites, Druze, etc. Yet the West allows widespread immigration from what are essentially still feudal societies, people basically trapped in the 8th century.

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  2. I wanted to add my perspective on taking the subway in USSR. Granted, I’ve only experienced the tail end of it, having been born in Kyiv in 1983. I took the subway a lot (with a parent). I used it to commute from the center, where I lived, to music school, a few stops away, starting in grade 1, and to my ballroom dancing classes, further away, from about grade 3. I emigrated to Canada with my parents in 1997.My personal experience was of people standing by the doors and letting passengers exit before entering, much like in Western countries. I asked my mother about her memories of the subway this morning over text, and she said the Kyiv metro was always very packed, so people had to let passengers exit before having a chance of getting on. She said there were maybe single individuals who behaved as Clarissa described. My mother was born in Kyiv in 1955, and had been using the subway from at least college age. I asked her if people were more worse in the 70’s. She said they generally weren’t, except for the WW2 veterans who were often purposefully rude, which she attributed to PTSD.I have never visited Kharkiv. The only other city I’ve used public transportation in personally a lot was the tram when staying in Odesa in summer. I also don’t personally recall much of such awful behavior.I am sorry about what you’ve experienced and assume we’ll do each other the courtesy of believing our memories (as well as my mother’s) reflect reality. I wonder what caused those differences. I’m sure there was awful behavior by people in Kyiv on other kinds of public transportation that I simply haven’t witnessed, but generally not on the subway.

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        1. “old, hilarious post on the subject”

          Years, ago a friend came back from a trip to Ukraine and said one of the weirdest things was that people wouldn’t get on trains until they started moving… (and of course all the tickets were sold to scalpers so you couldn’t buy them at the counter but only at inflated scalper prices).

          Anyway, he described people milling around on the platform but not wanting to get on board until they knew it would be going in the right direction (and there was a lot of pushing and shoving once they realized that).

          Was anything like that a regular occurence?

          A nasty trick I used to see in Warsaw years and years ago was with buses. The bus would be at the stop and someone would be running to try to catch it and it would stand with the door open. Then when the person was within a meter or two of reaching the door the bus would pull away. I saw it too often to think it was an accident.

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        2. I have the following question for you.

          What was taking the subway like in Kharkiv in 1989? Was it the way you described?

          If you don’t need Freud to explain why people bahaved the way they did; what, do you think, caused them to behave differently and have a different self conception in Kyiv?

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        3. I haven’t read this before and it’s amusing and sad. This sounds like a very Soviet experience that is luckily foreign to me personally.

          In my experience taking the Kyiv subway in the 90s it was not uncommon for people inside near the doors of a packed train to get out even if they needed to continue to let everyone who needed to exit to do so quickly. They stood immediately next to the doors (and people waiting to board let them do so) and then reentered the train as the people rushed in.

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          1. For now, the general principle we are finding is more Russian-speaking= behave more aggressively. We now need somebody from Lviv to share their experience to see how this works on a spectrum.

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            1. I thought of that, which would play nicely into the propaganda about russian vs Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, but I can’t explain Kyiv with that. In my experience growing up it was completely russian-speaking.

              My mom said that in her experience people were polite about giving up their seats for old people/veterans and pregnant women. And she took the tram in Odesa a lot. She said that when she was sitting heavily pregnant in a packed Odesa tram, a veteran told her that she must have gotten pregnant on purpose to avoid needing to give up her seat to veterans. Everyone except for my dad understood that as a joke and burst out laughing.

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              1. I remember a particularly polite situation when my sister was 9 and had a broken foot. My father was transporting her in a cast from the hospital. The nice, polite passengers called him a dirty kike, threw him off the bus, and entertained themselves by the spectacle of a weeping child who couldn’t get off the bus herself.

                Oh, memories

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              2. I’m very sorry about that horrific experience, Clarissa. It is awful in every possible way. There is a particularly cruel aspect of a father rendered unable to protect his child in front of that child. That seems uniquely devastating.

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  3. If the shutdown goes on long enough for large numbers of people to not get their EBT, we may get a test of how much legacy civilization we really have left.

    -ethyl

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  5.  “This happened every time. Zero exceptions. That’s how it always worked.” I lived in the USSR for 20 years and I don’t know about other places, but in Kyiv this was the exception for most of those years, not a rule. It got worse in the early 1990s, when public transportation began to deteriorate, and I remember well how a man shoved my mom out of the bus with his foot, but this was happening post-USSR.

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    1. I don’t make any distinction between Soviet and 1990s post-Soviet. I emigrated because I couldn’t see much difference (or any, to be honest) in how people were after 1991. By 1995, I was making enough to go everywhere in a cab, so I was free from public transport.

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      1. I emigrated in 1994 but remember the changes that started to happen around 1991-1992, when I was spending half-day going to different stores for basic food staples and standing in long lines for hours. The public transportation started to deteriorate at the same time.

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        1. We had a British girl stay with us for 2 weeks in December of 1990, and you can imagine what it took to find food to feed her. She kept complaining that everything was too salty and nothing was fresh.

          There was simply nothing to buy, anywhere.

          Curiously, when I visited her in Great Britain next spring, they were not managing to feed me either in spite of being wealthy. I learned how to feel hungry in the UK. 😆😆😆

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