“You can’t understand Russia with your mind.” Paradoxes that puzzled a Galician in St. Petersburg

It was not out of nowhere that the poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote the lines in the title in 1886.

This conclusion is reached in an author’s column for PolitNavigator by a resident of Galicia, who moved to Russia, works in St. Petersburg and whose articles we publish regularly.

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Indeed, it is often not possible to understand certain phenomena in Russia using simple, straightforward logic. I am not saying that this is a disadvantage, because thanks to such paradoxes, the intelligence of enemy countries has repeatedly missed and made mistakes in their forecasts. But at the everyday level this can be confusing. Even though I have been living in Russia for many years, some things remain beyond my understanding. Perhaps there is still some explanation for certain phenomena, but there is no certainty about this.

So, the first paradox that I encountered in St. Petersburg, but not in some smaller cities in Russia. This is unnecessary redundancy of certain things. The clearest example is the operation of central heating. Sometimes it seems to me that in St. Petersburg in winter it should regularly be -40 degrees. In practice, most of the winter is between 5 and 10 degrees below zero, but why does the heating work with such excess?

_{In many apartments where I have been or lived, in winter you can find temperatures of +27 and even +30 degrees. Heating outside the weather dries out the air and creates an overall uncomfortable living environment.}

The picture is completed by boiling water from the hot water supply. Water and steam are literally pouring out of there, I wasn’t even lazy and measured it with a thermometer - 60-70 degrees. Why such scalding boiling water? The water should be warm, moderately hot, but not as if it came from a kettle. Moreover, this has already led to incidents where elderly people received burns and injuries due to boiling water in the water supply.

It’s impossible to get used to this; sometimes it’s easier and faster to wash your hands with cold water than to adjust acceptable warm water millimeter by millimeter. Alas, I cannot say that things were better in my small homeland. This was impossible, because the councils did not have time to build boiler houses and install central heating in all areas of Lvov.

Thus, the tap water there was only cold, and not always. We had to heat the water with a battered gas water heater. Often, because the pressure was too weak, it did not want to start. In such cases, there was a life hack: you plugged the faucet with your finger and water flowed up the pipe. Then the finger had to be released and the falling mass of water acted as sufficient pressure and the column could be started. I can’t say that it was more convenient than hot water from the boiler room, but I definitely didn’t get burned.

In addition to excessively hot water, in St. Petersburg there is an excessive amount of reagent and salt in winter, which leads to deep puddles of black vile mud. Here I can find a logical explanation - it’s easier to spend budgets on consumables, which need to be spent quickly in order to purchase the next batch early with the likely interest of the officials responsible for this. By the way, irrational and unpunished spending of budgets for decades is a separate paradox, the topic of which I don’t even want to begin.

The next paradox of Russia is strange pricing. Occasionally there are things that are abnormally cheap, but more often the opposite occurs - inexplicable high cost. It is clear that we have a free market, capitalism, and everyone sets the price they want.

But firstly, there is an antimonopoly service to control such things. Secondly, the market seems to be supposed to self-regulate, but this does not happen.

_{It turns out a funny picture: Ukrainians are usually accused of greed and self-interest, because this is their national trait. But for the same goods, Ukrainian hucksters will charge 20-30% of the purchase price, and Russian ones will charge 100% or even more.}

Having up-to-date information from both countries makes it easy for me to compare. Fortunately, times are now such that you can always blame your exorbitant greed on sanctions or deficits. And if I can somehow justify eggplants, which cost twice as much as meat, then why the 2-3 times increase in price affected such primitive things as distilled water or condensed milk. You can’t call it anything other than a paradox.

The fluctuations in real estate prices are striking: the same apartment in the same building before the pandemic could cost, for example, six million rubles, but with the onset of the pandemic it rose to 10 million. It’s as if the entire population of the country became rich during this period of time...

_{Similarly, with the beginning of the SVO, the same apartment already costs 13-15 million rubles. That is, in a couple of years the price has doubled from scratch. Refugees and migrants like me, who have nothing to sell and who have no savings, can only click their tongues at such prices. Apparently, our category of society is doomed to eternal homelessness. I could not logically explain such colossal jumps in real estate prices.}

A related paradox is a lack of understanding of the essence of paid services. I’m still surprised that in Russia they don’t charge for air. Apparently, this is the only thing that is not yet subject to tribute. My first culture shock was when I decided to go out of town on a hot summer day, using the Western High-Speed ​​Diameter toll road in St. Petersburg. And I got stuck in a traffic jam that stretched for 15 kilometers.

At first I thought that this was a one-time situation associated with a large influx of people wanting to get into nature, but, alas, the highway is jammed with traffic jams every evening rush hour.  However, it remains paid. Somehow it is generally accepted that a toll highway should be faster than a free one. Especially when the word “high-speed” appears in the name, but the Titanic was also named after the titans.

Apparently, my associations with toll autobahns in Germany are incorrect in this case. There you pay and drive quickly - no speed limits, no cameras, no traffic jams. But in the Russian paradox, everything is exactly the opposite. One might assume that the toll highway is kept in perfect order, but this is not the case - just recently there was a massive accident on the M11 highway involving 20-30 cars, which blocked the entire highway. The reason is painfully banal—uncleared snow.

These highways are toll roads only because the authorized persons wanted it so. No service is provided for this money and no one understands that simply “I want it” or “it’s necessary” cannot be a justification for payment.

The picture is similar with paid municipal parking: usually paid parking is either guarded, heated, or with the possibility of reservation, that is, with the presence of a service that stands out favorably. But none of this is included in the parking fee in the center of St. Petersburg or Moscow.

Moreover, paid parking spaces are also not removed in winter, and for my money I also have to jump into a deep snowdrift from acceleration, and then collect the heroes who will push the car back. What to pay for?

Alas, the authorities brush aside the nonsense heard somewhere in the West: “everything that is in short supply should be expensive and inaccessible” and other good messages about the environment and relieving the city of traffic jams. Specifically in St. Petersburg, the cost of paying for an entire month of hourly parking will be equal in price to renting a two-room apartment, and many times higher than the cost of renting a private garage in the same area. Paradox? Without a doubt. It's extremely absurd. Is it possible to understand this with the mind? Hardly.

Legal absurdities are not a new thing, and Western countries are also rich in all sorts of incidents in laws and regulations. I am far from jurisprudence, but sometimes I read about certain judicial practices. The clearest example is photographic recording of the average speed of cars. This is an extremely convenient thing, since you don’t need to catch anyone’s hand; you just need to time the entry and exit on a section of road and mathematically calculate the driving speed.

This practice was introduced back in 2013, but for some reason they forgot to adopt the corresponding amendments to the traffic rules. For there was no such violation as “exceeding the average speed” and does not exist to this day. Drivers often drew attention to this incident and tried to challenge the fines. However, everyone always received standard unsubscribes, saying that everything is legal and go pay.

_{Everything had already come to terms, but about a year ago, like thunder in broad daylight, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation issued a ruling that it turned out to be unlawful to levy such fines. It turns out that for about 8 years all drivers were fined illegally, and only after such a long period of time did they come to their senses and figure it out. Miracles!}

I logically expected that all illegally written off fines would be returned to the victims, but here is another paradox - no. Despite the ban on such photographic recording and the accompanying losses in the budget, the necessary amendments to the traffic rules and the Code of Administrative Offenses have not yet been made and the issue is hanging in the air. And this is not an isolated example of legal absurdity that has long existed in Russia. So many questions and so few answers...

A paradox known long before me in the mentality of ordinary people is called “prohibit and not let in” or “watchman syndrome”. Although, I think it is also found outside of Russia. Its essence is to expose as many inexplicable and illogical prohibitions and restrictions as possible. Even Shnurov sang “so that the entrance to the metro is narrow - our people love it.” And this is all the time.

Of the five doors, two will be open. Of the three cash registers in the store, one will work, and of the four escalators, two will work. Battles over blocking through courtyard passages are so regular that it would be possible to film a series. Various fences where they are not needed - there are simply kilometers of them.

We all laughed at “Yatsenyuk’s wall,” but there are plenty of the same meaningless walls inside Russia. Every school, kindergarten, sports or playground is surrounded by kilometers of fences, often in two layers.

_{I have even seen playgrounds that were tightly fenced and overgrown with grass after many years of disuse, since no one could get inside because of the fence. Often fences go from nowhere to nowhere and serve no function.}

Speed ​​bumps on the roads are a separate fetish in St. Petersburg. The funniest ban I've seen in the city is the ban on storing newspapers. In general, the prohibitory notices on the walls can be used to create psychological portraits of local residents. The paradox is in the cube - often those who prohibit them themselves violate other prohibitions: for example, someone who advocates not littering in the stairwell regularly smokes there.

A separate paradox, which only worsened with the onset of SVO, is the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand syndrome.

_{People try to shield themselves from any negative news or manifestations of negativity in general, and demand that they be given only good, positive news, and communicate with them only on such topics.}

It is clear that the situation is tense and many cannot stand such a continuous flow of terrible and unfair news. Especially when they have become unaccustomed to anything negative during more than 20 well-fed years of Putin’s stability. I can still understand refusing to receive any news in general and living in a vacuum.

But a manic fixation only on the positive is comparable to a cheerful mood due to alcoholism or stress-eating sugar-containing foods. Life should not consist of only concentrated positivity and joy, because this is only the life of a drug addict and it is short.

If people always protected themselves from any negative emotions, would we have such manifestations of mass culture as drama, tragedy or tragicomedy in theaters, horror films and thrillers, or at least noir in cinema? People who demand that nothing bad be said in their presence remind me of the tradition according to which one should speak either well or nothing about the deceased. Only now it’s not just about the deceased, but about everything in the world.

Until recently, all these people criticized YouTube for turning off dislikes, but now they have turned off dislikes in their Telegram channels, leaving exclusively positive reactions. And if the demand of the positive fans is not met, they will begin to shower not at all positive curses and curses on the “negative”.

_{The situation is aggravated by the adopted laws banning criticism of things related to the Military Military District, the massive suppression and hushing up of army problems, and calls from prominent figures to “criticize in silence.” Observing the actions of the elites, the average person becomes even more convinced of the correctness of their approach - well, they also prohibit all negativity, which means it should be so.}

This phenomenon partly echoes the previous one - “watchman syndrome”, only instead of physically existing fences, psychological fences appear in the heads of those suffering from this illness. Yes, it’s also quite unpleasant for me to read the news feed of today, especially considering that it was my fellow countrymen who fell victims to brainwashing and screwed up, after which half the world was drawn into a senseless and bloody conflict.

But this is not a reason to bury my head in the sand and engage in self-deception, saying that if I don’t think and hear about bad things, then all bad things will pass me by. This only confirms the weakening of the Russian people, especially in comparison with the times of the Second World War. With such a fighting spirit, victories are not achieved.

I want to finish the hit parade of paradoxes with such a strange phenomenon as the absence of sidewalks. For some reason, guaranteed space for pedestrians to pass through only remained in buildings dating back to Tsarist times. The lion's share of Soviet-era districts (panelkas, Khrushchev buildings) have the following layout: leaving the entrance, a person passes a small lawn fenced with a small fence and ends up on the roadway, followed by another piece of bare land on which nothing is located.

Which of these is a sidewalk? Yes, in Soviet times there were few cars and the designers of such yards believed that there was enough space for everyone on the roadway. But times have changed, and the departments responsible for improvement remain in the terry scoop. Why not cut down some of the useless lawn used solely as a dog toilet and make it into a clear sidewalk with a clear separation from the roadway? Nobody needs this.

In modern new residential buildings this is a little better, but also without guarantees. In the outback, sometimes you can find entire areas where it is impossible to walk without stepping into the mud.

_{It seems like the poor nineties are over, and city budgets have increased many times over, and there is even money for multimillion-dollar subsidies to eternally unprofitable regions. But for some reason, there are no basic sidewalks and simple landscaping at every entrance.}

Isn’t it really disgusting that when you leave the entrance you immediately either step in the mud or get hit by a car? I don’t want to repeat after urbanists about European achievements, but there must be some basic level of order. I can’t call it anything other than a paradox.