The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 41 tary Mikhail Gorbachev, some began to think that “help from above”—formerly the exclusive role of the party and its leader- ship—might now be coming from the West. Teens and young adults of the late 1980s and early 1990s began to get more access to Western goods and culture. The forbidden fruit tasted sweet. With the disintegration of the USSR, it wasn’t hard to conclude that communism had been a mistake. Many of that generation believed their government would learn from the West. Democracy was just around the bend. This kind of zapadnichestvo (reverence of all things Western) traces its roots to Peter the Great, illustrated in the 1928 satiri- cal novel by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, The Twelve Chairs . As the New Economic Policy–era collective discusses a way out of its dire economic straits, con man Ostap Bender chimes in with a typical Russian combination of sarcasm and faith, “Don’t worry. The West will save us!” This faith has not, however, been constant: the economic crises of 1991, 1998, 2008 and 2016 jolted some into doubting the sanctity of the world economic order and its worthiness as a role model. Yet my friend Yurevich remains optimistic: “In any case, we have become more broad- minded, thanks to the flow of information.” At the same time, this expansion of intellectual horizons has not been fully embraced by the government, since a free- thinking citizenry is not an element of a monarchy or any of its authoritarian permutations. Yurevich offered an example: I had been taught that Stalin locked up many returning Russian prisoners of war because they were considered traitors for allow- ing themselves to be captured. But Stalin’s real fear, according to Yurevich, was that the soldiers might share their impressions of the Germans’ high standard of living. The Door Is Ajar Mikhailovich concurs that the door to the West is still only ajar. The volume of exchange is paltry. The neo-Russian minor- ity—1 percent of the population—has begun to travel the world as tourists, students and businessmen. The West has penetrated their souls, at least superficially. But only a sliver of the total pop- ulace has experienced this, or had the opportunity to interact with intrepid foreigners studying and working in Russia. Thanks to subsistence-level salaries, labor market dynamics and registration rules, Russia remains a highly immobile soci- ety—especially for residents of the regions. The vast majority of the Russian population read about foreigners in books and watch foreign movies, but they have only a vague idea of how foreign- ers really live. The most mundane things can easily shock them. Lenochka, a young woman from central Russia, tells of the teacher