Read Orrin's interview with Sharon Hudgins.

God is high in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.
    -Siberian adage

[D]uring the following sixteen months I lived through a time of rapid social, political, and economic change in Russia's early period of transition from an authoritarian to a democratic government, from a state-owned to a market economy, from a closed society to a more open one.

In the first half of the 1990s those processes of change were still in their initial stages. From the summer of 1993 through December, 1994, Russia--which had already seen the dissolution of its empire, the Soviet Union, and its collective security alliance, the Warsaw Pact--experienced a number of changes whose effects are still being felt today: the privatization of part, but not all, of the state-owned economy; a sharp decline in industrial production and a sudden increase in the importation of foods and other consumer goods; hyperinflation; the collapse of the ruble's value, and an enormous flight of capital from Russia; a rapid rise in unemployment and a significant reduction in social services; including health care; a substantial increase in crime, overt corruption, and mafiya activities; a bloody confrontation between Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, and members of the Russian parliament in Moscow, culminating in the storming of the parliamentary building by troops loyal to Yeltsin and the loss of more than 140 lives during that two-week political crisis; parliamentary elections, which brought contingents of Communists and ultranationalists into the Duma, the lower house of parliament; the adoption of a new constitution which increased the power of the presidency; and the Russian invasion of the breakaway republic of Chechnya, the beginning of a bitter and bloody war there. During that same period, the number of foreigners traveling to Russia--which had begun to increase in the early 1990s--declined significantly, as a result of negative news stories coming out of Russia about crime, living conditions, and the economy, as well as several Aeroflot plane crashes in 1993 and 1994.

They seemed to think of themselves solely as modern Sibiryaki, settled in Siberia and uninterested in where came from or in going anywhere else. Siberia was their world, their present and their future, and the past was a place to be forgotten.

At first I was surprised by this attitude on the part of my Siberian students, colleagues, and friends, particularly given their pride in Siberia as a land inhabited and energized by a people with a special, pioneering spirit, different from that of European Russia. As a child in Texas, I had grown up listening to my own family's stories about my maternal great-grandmother who had emigrated to New York from a village in Prussia in 1867, when she was only four years old. In 1883 she and her new husband had traveled west in two covered wagons to the Dakota Territory, where they built a ranch near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and befriended Sitting Bull and his band of Lakota Sioux during the last years of Sitting Bull's life. But the Siberians I spoke with had no similar stories of how or why their European ancestors came to Irkutsk Oblast', how they interacted with the indigenous Buryats and Evenks, or how they survived to bear the children whose descendants live in that part of Siberia today. Not only had much of Russia's national history been revised, distorted, or suppressed under the Communist regime--even many individual family histories, in this very family-centered society, were also a blank.

A Russian who worked at our university inadvertently supplied another slogan that provided an overarching explanation for all the absurdities we encountered in Siberia. The American faculty used our department's photocopy machine every day, but we were constantly frustrated by the paper's jamming in the machine. We knew why the paper jammed: Instead of purchasing reams of standard-size photocopy paper, the university had obtained huge rolls of blank paper, like newsprint--one meter wide and hundreds of meters long--which the Russian departmental staff had to cut by hand, with the office's single pair of scissors, into thousands of individual sheets supposedly the correct size for the photocopy machine. At least one-third of those hand-cut sheets would not even feed into the photocopier, and many of the pieces of paper that did go into it caused the machine to malfunction immediately. I finally asked one of the Russian staff why our department insisted on using this labor-intensive, misshapen, hand-cut paper that obviously caused everyone so much trouble. Was it because standard photocopy paper was not available in Irkutsk? Or was it because they had no money to buy anything else? Or was it simply because someone had donated those huge rolls of paper to our department? With a look of intense concentration on his face, the man considered my questions for a long time before he answered. Then--as if a light bulb had suddenly switched on above his head--he smiled broadly and replied: "It is because we live in Russia!"