More Russian TV News

There was a news story this evening about a toll road in Belarus. I guess I can see how the concept of a toll road would be odd to people used to the ideas of socialism, but it was still sort of funny how struck they were by it all. They filmed the sign with the list of fees, and they pointed out gravely that often a line forms when every car has to stop at the toll gates.
There was a clear struggle on the part of all involved to reconcile in their minds the concept that roads belong to the public sphere and should be free to drive on the same way the government should be guaranteeing you work and a pension and the argument of the Belarusian officials, repeated many times throughout the broadcast, that the road was a very good one, everyone benefits from a good road, and if a society wants a good road they’re going to have to pay for it.
Personally, I was pretty impressed with the road too. And, as Gogol, or perhaps some other Russian writer, said, in Russia there are two problems: fools and bad roads. So I think the Russians should be taking notes. Incidentally, it is because the roads are so bad that we don’t have McDonalds in Siberia- you never know if you can ship products in a timely fashion, so businesses that depend on providing the same products in a uniform manner are often out of luck. Sometimes all the stores in Irkutsk are all out of the same food item- and then you know that whatever truck was supposed to deliver it all couldn’t get through.

The news anchor was also a little indignant when reporting the next story: in Kazakhstan they’re changing the names of the streets to reflect Kazakh rather than Soviet history. No more 5-Year-Plan Street for you, whatever-the-capital-of-Kazakhstan-is. It was a day of activity in general in the former Republics: a very large factory opened in Kyrgyzstan, record-setting low temperatures are killing everyone in Tajikistan, well-dressed children gave out prizes at an industrial exposition in Moldova, etc.

The last piece of news, at which the anchor was very amused, was that the archbishop or something of Kamchatka has started a blog. It is much more impressive-looking than mine. Unfortunately I don’t think they said the address.

Update:
This semester one of my classes is “Post-Soviet History.” Right now we’re studying the last few decades of the USSR, for historical perspective. The reading, though it is taking me forever to get through, as it is written in a foreign language or something, is pretty amazing; it’s like the world has a whole other, alternate history. Soviet dissidents who I have always heard spoken of as heroes in the struggle for human rights are in this textbook members of a cultural elite far from the life of the people, ready to sell out the country for cosmopolitan glamour; ‘communist’ is not a synonym for ‘evil’, and the account of the Vietnam war is wholly unrecognizable. To confirm that the Vietnam part was not the version I had probably heard before, I just looked it up on the World Book that came with my computer, but it was too depressing to read and I had to switch to an article about ‘lilac,’ the first sentence of which is “Lilac is a beautiful shrub that is loved throughout the world for its fragrant flowers.”