The not-so-quiet American: a note from St Petersburg

I’ve spent the last day or so in St. Petersburg, and will be heading back down to Moscow tonight.

I spent almost the entire day yesterday on a city tour, including much (but certainly not all) of the Hermitage. We got started in the dark and finished in the dark — given that the sunrise isn’t until after 9:00 in the morning, that wasn’t as long a day as one might imagine.

I had lots of opportunities to talk to my guide, a St Petersburg native and an excellent English speaker. Over lunch (at the famous and vegetarian-friendly Café Idiot), we talked about Russian society and (since she she asked me what I did with myself) gender roles in our respective countries. Anna (not her real name) took the same view of both politics and male-female relationships: we human beings are under the influence of forces beyond our control. She volunteered willingly that she didn’t consider Russia to be a democracy, describing it instead (as many have in recent years) as an authoritarian state which tolerates a certain amount of freedom. Anna certainly prefers the present situation, however imperfect, to the USSR in which she was raised (she’s a few years younger than me, and was on the cusp of adulthood when the Soviet Union collapsed). But she regards voting as an exercise in futility; “All the important decisions are made by powers greater than us, and our vote has no effect on that.” Anna suggested tactfully something that any American who pays attention abroad will hear often: “Democracy is not the key to happiness, and I think that sometimes the USA connects the two too much.”

Anna took a similarly fatalistic, albeit cheerful, view of gender relations. “I think what you are talking about is fascinating”, she said with the politeness of someone whose services have been engaged, “but I think most men — and most women — can’t change their nature, and don’t want to.” She made a direct comparison between her belief that sex roles ought to be fixed more or less where they were and her belief that a benign authoritarian state guaranteeing security and an opportunity for at least a little prosperity was the best system of government. Anna suggested, with tact, that I — and perhaps many other Americans — placed far too much faith in the human capacity both to change and to self-regulate. Her cynicism about democracy, in other words, was rooted less in a belief that the current Russian government of Putin and his ilk wouldn’t permit it, and more in her conviction that most of her fellow Russians were too poorly informed or too blindly self-interested to be trusted with the electoral franchise. Having lived in the Soviet Union, as well as through the chaotic (and relatively democratic) transition under Boris Yeltsin, Anna finds the current regime (as undemocratic as it may be) to be vastly preferable to either. Similarly, she argued that a system which allowed women to work and be educated was of course better than one which didn’t permit either — yet Anna felt strongly that women should allow men to lead. “It’s more in their nature than it is in ours”, she insisted with a smile, shaking her head and laughing at what she saw as my naiveté about the mutability of gender roles.

My brother and I were both born in Santa Barbara, raised in the same home and with the same influences. (My half-sisters grew up in a slightly different environment). My brother has made his home in Europe, and is raising his three children in England and Austria. His worldview is hardly fatalist or quietist; he remains a thorough democratic socialist. But if I can speak of “souls”, his is far less American than mine. The sons of an Englishman born in Vienna and a mother descended from California pioneers, we were given two nationalities and exposed to different perspectives on the world and human possibilities. And I’ve come to see that the deepest aspect of my Americanness, if you will, lies in what Tocqueville noted nearly two centuries ago: an irrepressible belief in the human capacity for self-improvement and self-reinvention. I wouldn’t be so adamant about the myth of male weakness being just that, a myth, if I weren’t absolutely convinced (on historical, psychological, and experiential grounds) of the possibility for self-transformation. My brother doesn’t disagree with me about the need for progress, but he is alternately bemused and exasperated by what he (like lots of Europeans) sees as the mix of cheerleading and hectoring and preaching that is part of how Americans make the case for personal and political transformation to everyone else. (And often, as we both know that cheerleading is accompanied by military intervention, as the most powerful nation on earth engages in one of its quixotic liberal internationalist projects. When I read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, I shuddered at how much I identified with Alden Pyle.) Like my father, he also worries that in a world with such enormous and pressing environmental and human problems — the tragedies of deforestation, of the Congo, Haiti, and Palestine — this focus on self-reinvention is both myopic and self-congratulatory. And I insist, like so many Americans, that self-transformation is a necessary pre-condition for global peace and justice, something that strikes so many folks elsewhere in the world as both back-to-front and hopelessly bourgeois.

I’m typing this blog in the lobby bar of my St Petersburg hotel. Snow is falling outside; Nevsky Prospect lies a few yards away. Soft Russian voices surround me, and the smell of cigarettes (permitted almost everywhere in this country, it seems) brings back memories of my smoke-saturated childhood. And I miss my wife and daughter even as I am so grateful for the opportunity to see this city I’ve long wanted to visit; I miss my home, my Los Angeles, my city unburdened by an over-long history, my irony-and-cynicism-free zone.