I know that this blog is read by many people who work in my university system (which will remain unnamed; we all know what it is.) I believe the following will be of interest to them, so listen up.

Today I went to a talk given by the President of our university system (who will remain nameless). He talked about the impending budget cuts. Then there was a Q&A session. People mostly asked vague and meaningless questions, announcing in advance that they expected no answer because “these are philosophical questions that don’t have an answer. So I got up and asked a direct question. (An aside to Americans: seriously, folks, will there come a time when you will wake up and take matters pertaining to your own livelihoods into your own hands or will you navel-gaze and ask philosophical questions while the dirty work of speaking clearly and directly will fall to everybody else? I’m not having a good day, as you can see.)

My question was, and I quote, “Is there a possibility that our university system will eliminate academic programs and departments? And if so, what will happen to the tenured and tenure-track faculty members of those departments?”

There was a lot of flowery admin-speak in response but this is what I gleaned from the President’s response:

1. Yes, academic programs and departments will be eliminated.

2. This will not happen immediately.

3. There will be “productivity measures” (re)introduced aimed at deciding which departments will be eliminated. “Productivity” obviously has fuck-all to do with scholarship and research. Quality of instruction is also of zero interest to anybody.

4. There is time for faculty members to prepare an exit strategy.

5. We will still get to take the students already in our programs to graduation.

6. After that, we can fuck off.

Obviously, this was not said in these words. I’m giving you my reading of the response. As you know, I read and analyze texts for a living, so I stand by my analysis. I believe it’s better to know than not to know.

The organizer of the Black Lives Matter vigil got accused by several professors of promoting hate speech. According to these professors, saying “Black Lives Matter” is the same as saying “White lives don’t matter.” The white organizer of the vigil says that it has been suggested that we use placards saying “All lives matter” instead. In response, we are extending our Black Lives Matter vigil for one more week.

So my adventures in promoting hate speech will continue.

Two bits of news:

A. The state of Illinois refuses to honor its obligations as to funding a percentage of our university’s budget.

B. The state of Illinois has adopted a law that will prevent professors at public universities from getting published and advancing their careers as researchers. I guess the idea behind this is that students at public schools do not deserve to be taught by scholars. This definitely sounds like the final nail in the coffin of the public higher ed system. If professors can’t do research, there is no chance they will stay at such universities.

A great question from Evelina Anville:

This is about the USSR specifically– but more about your experience living in multiple countries. Is the racism in the United States particularly bad? I have travelled quite a bit but only lived in this country and it seems to me that –while other countries certainly have their problems when it comes to race relations– there is something particularly violent and institutionalized about American racism. For instance, I don’t read or hear about police officers in other (developed) countries who shoot or choke unarmed citizens. But perhaps it’s because I’m ill informed. But this is a long way of saying: what’s your experience of racism living in other countries?

This is a very good, important question. 

When I first moved to the US from Canada in 2003, I experienced a huge culture shock that was enormously higher than the shock I experienced when moving to Canada from Ukraine. I had major depression for a long time, it was just bad. Racism was one of the main reasons for this shock. I had been laboring under the mistaken belief that Canada* and the US were very similar, so I was simply unprepared for the endless barrage of racist jokes, comments, news items, etc. I just didn’t know how to inscribe myself into all this. I have this insistent feeling that when the white people around me see a black person, they don’t see who I’m seeing. I have a feeling they see something – not even somebody, but something – else.

I never feel like such a total and absolute alien as I do after events like the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. I don’t understand other people, I don’t get the tone of the discussion. It’s like they speak a language I don’t understand! And please don’t roll out the “not everybody” argument. No, not everybody but in the country of the US’s history and demography, way too many. Racism is like a poison that seeps into everything and makes everything scuzzy and degraded. And I see barely any awareness of that.

Ukrainian people are very racist. But this is a country with a mono-racial population where everybody looks like me. Their racism is about people and things they see on TV. It’s still racism, it’s still bad but it isn’t about denying your own history, your own past, present and future. It isn’t about killing your neighbor. It isn’t about cheering the killing of your neighbor.

When I was a little Soviet child, I would pray to God every night, thanking him for  sparing me the horrible fate of being born in the USA where racists lynched black kids. When I got older, I decided that was all stupid Soviet propaganda and laughed at my childish beliefs. I was thinking about this today, as I stood at the vigil in memory of Michael Brown.

* The only part of Canada I knew was Quebec.

P.S. What I dig about this blog is that any discussion leads to a variety of interesting and often unexpected places. Thank you, my friends, for asking questions and reading the answers.

Reader Crystallizing Chaos asks a question I love:

What did the soviet public think of India (if at all)? Growing up we also heard so many stories about our friendship with the Soviets – how they liked Bollywood movies and how Russian and Sanskrit had common roots.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was something of an India-craze in the USSR. There was an enormous curiosity towards all things Indian. In what I consider to be the greatest Ukrainian novel of the second half of the XXth century The Cathedral by Oles Honchar, there is a plot line that exemplifies the curiosity towards India in those decades (the novel was published in 1968).

In the novel, a group of characters from the Ukrainian country-side travels to India to assist in a massive construction project. This is considered a great honor but there is one character who uses the freedom of India to behave in a non-Soviet way. The rest of the characters, however, manage to behave appropriately. The protagonist has a dream that when his little son grows up he will marry the non-white daughter of an Indian colleague. There is a lot of orientalist exoticization with a racist flavor in the novel, as I now understand, but we can get a good understanding of how Soviet Ukrainians were trying to process the information about the subcontinent.

At the time when I was reading that novel, I also read many British novels set in the subcontinent, and I remember how hard it was for me to process the idea that this was the same India as in the Ukrainian writer’s novel. With all its flaws, Honchar’s description is nowhere as dehumanizing and vicious as that which these British writers created casually and matter-of-factly.

Bollywood movies were insanely popular in the USSR. I loved them passionately and still do. I pick Bollywood over Hollywood any day of the week because it’s simply better. I have definitely watched more Bollywood films than Holywood in my life. It isn’t for nothing that I did a Minor in the post-colonial literature of the subcontinent during my graduate studies. The Minor didn’t inform my own research in any way but it was exceptionally enjoyable. Of course, I don’t presume for a second to be any sort of a specialist on India. My knowledge is extremely limited, and I wouldn’t venture to offer any opinions on this very complex country. What I can say for sure is that the future of the British culture, literature and art is in the hands of the people from the subcontinent. It is highly possible, as well, that one day it will be up to Ukrainians to decide whether to keep the Russian literature and culture in existence or not. And I hope that Ukrainians are as generous and kind with the culture of their colonizers as the people of the subcontinent are with the culture of theirs.

P.S. The posts about the USSR seem always to end up being posts about me. I hope nobody minds. I have my own USSR, just as everybody else has theirs.

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.

This is the longest day of the semester for me. I have a meeting, my office hours, three overview lectures, and then the presentations of my research students that will go on until at least 7 pm. So I decided to do something for myself and went to a vigil in honor of Michael Brown.

At the vigil, we stand in silence for 4.5 minutes, which, of course, symbolizes the 4 and a half hours that Michael’s body was left lying in the street after Michael was murdered. We are gathering to do this every day this week. There were only 12 of us there today, and there was a moment when we were approached by a belligerent student who wanted to express his disagreement. However, the belligerent student soon got so impressed by our dedication to the cause (it is quite cold and windy outside) that he bought cookies for us and distributed them among the group.

And then I went back to class with my “Black Lives Matter” badge on my chest. I don’t think this can be considered a political opinion because it isn’t like there is a political party in this country that espouses the belief that black lives don’t matter. Right?

The recent poll showed that the readers of this blog have an overwhelming preference for posts about the USSR. I’m very ready to satisfy this curiosity. If there is anything specific you want to know about the Soviet Union, Ukraine, or Russia, please leave your questions in the comment section of this post.

Remember that there are no stupid questions or questions that are too basic for me to answer. I will stick this post to the top of the blog for a while. Please scroll down for new posts.

“There is no need to worry about anything now or do any testing because you are so YOUNG,” the doctor said. “What are you, 38? That is very YOUNG. For somebody so YOUNG, there is no need for any of this testing. At this YOUNG age, there are just minor issues. Of course, when you become OLD, meaning after the age of 40, it is crucial to do a lot of testing. Because when people are OLD it’s really not the same as when they are YOUNG, as you are right now.”

So I’ve got 16,5 months left until old age. Good to know.