Guest columnist: An American in Siberia

As our plane descended into Moscow’s Domodedevo airport, the peat smoke from wildfires across the country greeted us before the wheels touched the ground.

The airport wasn’t air-conditioned, and there were no special procedures in place to remedy the fact that every terminal was hazy and smelled like someone had decided to start a bonfire in the baggage claim.

California has wildfires too, and although I like to think that in the U.S., which places a premium on consumer satisfaction, someone might have thought to provide masks or set up ionizers in the airport, our airlines do not seem all that incredibly devoted to pleasing their customers either.

As soon as we hit the highway in our American-made Ford van, I felt like I was right back in the United States.

Volkswagen and Lexus dealerships lined the highway, the roads had wide lanes and clear signs, and the drivers were more cautious than in any other part of Europe I have visited.

During my short time in Moscow and my slightly longer time further afield in Tyumen and Khanty-Mansiysk in Siberia, I was continually struck by the eerie similarity between my home and this country I had always perceived as incredibly foreign.

In Tyumen, our partner university’s classrooms were equipped with technology that many IU classrooms won’t have for years.

In every city I visited, SUVs were the preferred form of transportation, and residents enjoyed a variety of ethnic cuisine from Italian to Georgian to Mexican. And most people didn’t speak a second language.

Russia shares this emphasis on technology, love of oversized cars, varied dining options and disregard for foreign language acquisition with its Cold War adversary. I would guess that years of being a global superpower caused America and Russia to develop somewhat similar national attitudes.

I saw differences also: whereas an oil spill off the coast of the U.S. this summer sparked national and international outrage and a tremendous clean-up effort, there are areas of Western Siberia where we could drive right up to several oil     pipeline leaks.

The companies and the government do not engage in remediation efforts, only occasionally covering up the oil with piles of sand, which actually impedes oil breakdown and dispersion.  

These cultural differences are the typical fare of international travel, but in this case, the atmosphere of the cities I visited, the overall priorities of the people I met and the pace of every day life in Russia felt more American than in any other part of the world.

During the Cold War, it might have been those very similarities that made Russia such a threatening enemy in the eyes of the American public and policy elites — we often dislike in others what we truly dislike about ourselves.

Today there are many shared priorities for Russians and Americans on the international stage and in terms of average citizens’ most basic hopes, and a stronger partnership promises benefits for both countries.


E-mail: swilensk@indiana.edu