I could dedicate an entire post to the history, ecology, and beauty of Lake Baikal, and still come up short on words to describe what it is really like. Even then, Baikal is but one part of the Siberian territory we traveled to. I want to talk about the journey there, and of what you see when you look out the window during hours of travel on dirt roads. When we were driving to different destinations outside of Ulan-Ude, for example on our way to the border town of Kiakhta, many of us on the bus were discussing which American state looks the most like the Siberian steppe. Some of us agreed it looked like New Mexico, others thought it looked Colorado. If you heard Americans discussing the similarities between those two states, however, you’d probably raise an eyebrow at the conversation. It’d probably be far easier to tally the differences between New Mexico and Colorado, and this gets at the heart of how new, unexpected, and difficult to describe this one part of the Siberian terrain is. Personally, I had never seen steppe before and was fascinated by it. The truly 180-degree flatness I witnessed bothered me at times, because it was perfectly flat to the extent that it seemed surreal. To top it all off, there were rivers running through it and mountains or hills on either side of us. Not like a valley, not like a plain, not like Colorado or New Mexico, the Siberian steppe is in a field of its own. It’s green, shrubby, flat, and unforgivingly windy.

After leaving Ulan-Ude and driving towards Baikal, the terrain shifted radically. Now we were always on dirt roads, driving alongside massive rivers, and surrounded by towering birches and pines. It resembled nothing of the flatness that resided only a few hours in the opposite direction. The wind was gone but new colors came to fill the void left in our senses, especially purple. Siberian rhododendrons were in bloom and ever more frequent as we approached the shores of Baikal. I still had yet to see any snow and I was in Siberia for several days.

The rolling hills of the steppe were replaced with massive snowcap mountains lining huge portions of Baikal’s south-eastern shore, and I saw my first sandy beaches in Russia. Standing on the edge of the shore of Baikal while watching the sunset, I never imagined that this is what Siberia would look like. It was certainly not the frozen tundra of legend.

When you think of Siberia, I hope you’ll make room for the purple rhododendrons and the stunning shores of Baikal. And when you think of Russia in general, I hope that my blog posts and those of my classmates will help clear away the stereotypes which many of us hold.

I had been to M.R. on a handful of occasions prior to this assignment, in which we were asked to go to a neighborhood of Moscow and explore, converse with locals, and write up our findings. I knew from prior experience that this neighborhood is home to the city’s Jewish quarter, as I celebrated Passover at the JCC there. M.R. has certain characteristics that I haven’t seen elsewhere in Moscow, such as a whole city block lined kosher delis and business names on windows written in Hebrew. The Jewish community’s presence is palpable here, and it goes beyond just these delis. Amidst the many museums in M.R. stands the Jewish Museum of Tolerance, an institution whose presence radiates beyond the block-long chunk of land it sits on. Not far away is the Moscow JCC in its new, several-story building that was constructed in 2001. With its functioning synagogue, reception hall, recreation spaces, art gallery, children’s school, and more, the JCC feels like a condensed city. My partner Oliver and I went into the JCC hoping to speak with some locals about the neighborhood’s history.

Entering the JCC’s front doors, we passed through security and then we had to don yarmulkes once inside the complex; I travel with my own, and Oliver borrowed one for visitors. It was early afternoon when we went up to the second floor and entered the synagogue, hoping to find someone who would talk to us. One man in the back of the synagogue seemed interested when we approached him, but upon hearing that Oliver is not himself Jewish, pointed us in the direction of an office on the second floor. “There”, he said, “are two women-administrators who you should talk to”. When we knocked on their door and they welcomed us inside, I gestured my hand out towards one of them for a handshake. She politely reminded me that she cannot greet me like that, owing to orthodox Jewish laws. Oliver and I explained our mission, and I was surprised at the amount of questions that they had for us. They asked me especially about Jewish religious life on Carleton’s campus and about how it’s organized. They were surprised to hear that the rabbi at Carleton is a woman, and that I did not attend a Jewish university. This latter comment speaks to the identity of Mariina Roscha’s Jews, but I will talk about this later.

Moscow JCC Exterior

When it came time for Oliver and I to ask our questions, we learned a significant deal about the Jewish history of the neighborhood. “Mariina Roscha has always been a Jewish neighborhood”, one of the administrators said. In terms of the history of Jews in Soviet Moscow, they didn’t mince their words in giving a grim description of what it was like. Systemic discrimination by the government, ubiquitous anti-Semitism in people’s attitudes, and Jews gathering secretly so as to protect themselves from harm, pepper their description of Jewish life here not more than 50 years ago. If you were Jewish, they recounted, then that was your marked nationality in your domestic passport. Whether or not one identified as a Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh, or any other nationality, you were officially labeled a Jew, and this identity came with legitimate burdens and discrimination. Jewish life in the Soviet Union, by the account of these two women, was a dark and dangerous time by contrast to today.

When the new Moscow Jewish Community Center opened in 2001, President Vladimir Putin personally attended the ceremony. He even allocated government funds towards the new center’s construction, an act that appeared to be symbolic of his relationship towards Moscow’s Jewish community. Before continuing, I want to state that I am not a scholar on contemporary relations between the Kremlin and Russia’s Jewish population. I am writing about that which I gleamed from locals’ interpretation of this dynamic. As they told it Oliver and I, President Putin has been good for the Jews of Russia, especially in Moscow. While anti-Semitic attitudes persist in the countryside, the cultural and quotidian landscape of Jewish life in Moscow has veered towards a positive change. I asked the administrators if they would feel comfortable wearing Jewish yarmulkes or other attire out on the street, to which they answered “absolutely”. It seems bewildering to me that things could turn around so quickly in such a short period of time, in terms of how the citizenry relates to its Jewish neighbors, but the administrators assured us that this is the case. And, I guess, it makes sense since the president and premier of the last 18 years is attending the opening of a new JCC in the country’s capital. This sends a strong message about the standing of Jews not just to everyone in Russia, but to the Jews here themselves.

Stemming from the discrimination and intolerance against Jews during the Soviet Union, the administrators told us that many Jews left the country or gave up their religion, whether voluntarily or not. Now, they said, Jews are returning to Russia and emerging from the woodwork. Even though I have heard conflicting accounts of anti-Semitism in Moscow, the beauty of this new JCC is a testament to their resurgence.

I decided that this year I was going to attend a seder dinner in Moscow long before my plane landed. I was anxious to reconnect with my religion, but besides that, I thought a Russian-style seder in Moscow would be an interesting cultural experience for any person, of any background. Hours before the start of the seder, I went to the Moscow JCC in the Mar’iina Roscha neighborhood of Moscow to buy myself a ticket. The JCC is a beautiful new building, constructed in 2001 after the older synagogue nearby burned down in the ‘90s. After conversing with employees of the JCC, I learned that President Vladimir Putin allocated government funds for its construction and personally attended its opening.

There were two seders on the Friday of Passover and I bought my ticket for the “discount” one, to take place in the basketball gym. The other ticket, three times the cost of mine, was in the main reception hall and featured dressed-up waiters and full service. I was anxious to see what my set up would be like. When I reentered the JCC a couple of hours later, the security was tight. The first time I arrived, there were metal detectors, x-ray machines, and plain-clothes guards in the foyer, but now the entire street was sealed off and there were three police cars with officers around the outside of the building, with one policeman inside it.

Since it was Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest when use of all machinery (including electronics) is prohibited, the indoor policeman’s electronics were either muted or turned off. This is also why I don’t have any pictures from this evening, as use of cell phones and cameras violate the laws of Shabbat.

The atmosphere of the JCC was overwhelmingly vibrant and welcoming. It was like being at a wedding where all of your family members have reunited for the first time in several years. Whereas earlier, the building was quiet amidst preparations, now every square foot was filled with people chanting in prayer, greeting one another and laughing together. There were senior citizens, young children, people in normal street garb, people in traditional religious outfits, conversations in Russian, and conversations in Hebrew and Yiddish. An entire of corps of rabbis was on the second floor of this six-story complex leading Shabbat prayers amidst the hundreds of people schmoozing about. When prayers concluded and the lead rabbi set about wandering around, shaking hands with everyone who smiled at him, he shook hands with me and greeted with a “Shabbat shalom”. Now, it was time to file into the seder dinner.

When I walked into the basketball gym on the top floor I was very nervous, for right away, the only seat available was two to the left of the rabbi. Even though I speak Russian, I was concerned about him potentially asking me for help and my not comprehending him. I took my seat amidst 70-80 others. I gather the average age of the room was somewhere around 60 years old; the youngest person I met that evening was 32. I was also the only foreigner in the room. The rabbi was an older man named Moishe who commanded a wonderful sense of humor, but not a whole lot of charm. The person sitting to my left, a Jewish man from Dagestan named Azilii (Азилий), by the end of the night became a good friend. He showed me the ropes of seder in Russia, and I wanted to take a picture with him but he would not do so because of Shabbat.

The feast was different than any I had been to before in my life. Even though I knew the prayers and the story of Passover, the minutia of this seder dinner were totally new to me. Take this difference for example: at my seders in the United States, we dip parsley (bitterness) in salt water (tears) and then consume it to remember the suffering of our Jewish ancestors in Egypt. We don’t eat a lot of parsley, since the act is symbolic by nature. In Moscow, we dipped large chunks of raw white onion into salt water before eating it, and this truly almost brought me to tears. I ate what I felt was a sizable chunk of onion and put the rest of it down, but Azilii tapped me with his elbow and just shook his head, instructing me to eat the whole thing!

The dynamic between the rabbi and the participants was also new to me. Whereas at home the leader of the service is aided by the participation of those in attendance, in Russia this participation means something else. When the wine was beginning to be served, for instance, Moishe said to the four waitresses that the table of older women will have juice instead. The open rebellion amongst the Jewish babushki was swift, merciless, and very loud. Without actually using curse words, they thoroughly cursed out the rabbi who in turned raised his own voice and futilely tried to talk over them. “We will have wine, because you will have wine!”, they shouted. Moishe lost that battle, and this shouting match is something that I will never forget.

The rest of the night proceeded with sporadic outbursts of rebellious participation (“I’m hungry, let’s eat already!”) and of Azilii shaking his head in frustration at me when they happened. This was always followed by a request for me to fill his glass with wine. Oh, and the sheer quantity of wine was a noticeable difference between my American seders and this Muscovite one: can you guess which one wine features more?

In concluding, I am deeply pleased that I went to a seder in Moscow. Beyond the physical aspects of this new experience, it was personally significant too. I felt more connected with my religious traditions, and perhaps most of all, this was a watershed moment for my comfort level with Moscow. After a week here where everything was new, I participated in a tradition that I’ve known for my entire life. Although it was with strangers, the bond I felt with everybody in that room was inspiringly strong, and Passover made me feel more at home than ever in Moscow.

The Bronze Horseman Statue

I should start with the State Hermitage museum, which left a strong impression on me because of its historical significance and the reverberating vestiges of Empire that echo through its halls. Palace Square struck me right away as a testament to the power and wealth of the Russian Empire. One feels so small standing at the edge of it and looking at the panorama of the palace complex. The same is true of museum’s interior. The entire time I was inside I couldn’t keep my eyes on anything for more than a couple of seconds, with the exception of the museum’s Raphael and Michelangelo works.

The architecture of the halls and the quality of the artwork inside them caused me to feel conflicted and unsure about what to look at. Often when I’m overwhelmed by a museum, I take pictures of everything I see because I am unsure of what to pay attention to. Although I did stop to scrutinize portions of the museum here and there, such as the Hall of 1812, I wish I would’ve slowed down throughout our tour of the museum. I have around 100 pictures from 2.5 hours of walking, plenty of material to look back on if I ever get too bored… On top of the beautiful architecture and the world-class art on display, the museum is even more breath-taking when you remember it was an oft-used private residence of the Romanovs. Once I was reminded of that, the enormous contrast between the lifestyle of the emperors and of the city surrounding them was clearer than ever before.

Two days later I encountered one of the emotionally heavier experiences of my travels in Russia, at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. There are several features of this cemetery, dedicated to those who perished during the Siege of Leningrad, that gave me chills. Piskaryovskoye weighs on your senses in a profound way. There is an eternal flame at the entrance which stands in the middle of a long, wide walkway towards a towering obelisk at the other end. On either side as one approaches the obelisk are the rows of mass graves of citizens and soldiers, creating a spatial vastness reminiscent of the tragic number of casualties.

While you walk across this path, classical music subtly plays from speakers and heightens the significance of the memory this cemetery preserves. More than the Hermitage or anything else I encountered in Russia, this experience gave me perspective. Here I felt a connection not just to Russian history, but to humanity.

I came to Saint Petersburg unsure of how Soviet and imperial history would coexist or interact, and I realized that sites belonging to both eras in Russia’s history are complementary rather than divergent. While Saint Petersburg is the city of the Romanovs and the origin of the Revolution, the entire city feels like a museum of Russian history of the last 300 years.

Sunset on Nevsky Prospekt

For this cultural excursion our program was divided up according to gender, with male-identifying persons in one banya and female-identifying persons in another. It is not uncommon for people to use the banya while nude given how unforgivably hot it can get. The hostess with whom the men in our group were living with gave us a tutorial on how to navigate this longstanding institution of Russian culture. Upon entering the banya house in the backyard there is an antechamber with a Russian pechka (stove) and a couch. This would be our link to the outside world; the next door led to the interior of the banya. Once inside, the heat is sourced from a burning pechka and the steam comes from hot coals upon which you pour water, with other liquids or oils as one pleases. The slightest bit of water generates a disproportionate amount of steam and generates an unprecedented degree of heat. And the longer we stayed in there, the hotter the coals burned. To cool off we were given buckets of cold water which, when I poured it on myself, produced such a feeling of relief from the intense heat of this small wooden chamber.

The experience of the banya proved greatly relaxing when it was all said and done. I didn’t have anything wrong health-wise when I went in, but I came out feeling healed. Emerging from the banya at night after almost two hours, clean and dry, I was ready to collapse into a deep sleep. Traveling through Siberia in a small bus on rocky roads, and knowing that a lot more of this would be coming, it was a much-needed experience which I’m glad to have shared with some of my friends on the trip.

Murom is among Russia’s oldest cities, having been founded in 862 A.D. Between its landmarks, famous residents, and lengthy history, Murom is a fascinating city. One of the oldest monasteries in Russia is in Murom, and it is mentioned in the Primary Chronicles dating as early as 1096 A.D. Ilya Muromets, one of the three legendary Russian Bogatyrs, was born there and his statue is one of the city’s most impressive sights. Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of television, is also a native of Murom. Sovereigns such as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great made special visits there, and during Soviet times, owing to its important role in industrial and military manufacturing, Murom was a closed city. I haven’t even gotten to the Kalach yet, but there is so much history in Murom that I never knew about.

Statue of Ilya Muromets

So, as our group of 6 pulled into the train station in Murom late on Wednesday night we were met by the professors who were hosting us, Elena Nikolaevna Pankratova and Natalia Vladimirovna Zhilenko. Our group was taken to a college dormitory where we stayed in comfortable suites on the ground floor, designed for housing guests of the university. The living accommodations were generously comfortable, but they are no match to the hospitality of our hosts.

Our professors scooped us up on Thursday morning and treated us all to breakfast at one of the cafeterias in the humanitarian studies building. They showed us their offices, where I was struck upon noticing two pictures on the wall: one featured our program leader (and steady vozhd), professor Diane Ignashev, with our host professors of Murom’s foreign language department, and the other was of three Russian majors who are all currently seniors at Carleton. (Shout-out to Lucy, Anton, and Urmila!) I couldn’t help but smile at seeing these pictures, at a university several hours from Moscow and in a city that less than thirty years ago was closed to foreigners. This was quite a sight for me to take in.

“Seven students of Carleton College, from the United States of America, accepted an invitation to participate in the discussion and assessment of presentations at a student conference of the Cross-cultural Communications department.”

We were shortly taken to the classroom where we each gave a presentation on American culture to a group of first-year students, who are all studying English. I led a trivia game with a variety of questions relating to culture and other topics, while Owen Yager led the whole group in singing a cowboy song, and Julia Preston brought American peanut butter for everyone to try and even told its history, something that was new for me too.

I think the students enjoyed our presentations, and I know without a doubt that everyone from our delegation enjoyed giving them. The atmosphere in the room was cheerful, and our hosts were so welcoming to us, professors and students alike. I felt that we really connected with the students there, and that was even before they invited us on a tour through Murom. Right after our presentations, we were given time to chat with the students in English and then it was off to lunch together as a group. Our hosts arranged for us to go on a tour of the university and its historical museum, where interesting artifacts like a 1930s record player that was assembled in Murom (with an original vinyl to boot) are on display. And, the crank on it still works! Our tour through the city is an unforgettable experience: it was led entirely by the students, given to us in English, and we all walked and talked together.

At one point, I noticed that an image of city seal had three pieces of ring-shaped bread on it, and when I asked a professor, they confirmed what I was eagerly hoping for: it was kalach! This past winter term, I took a course on Russian culinary culture and history (Food in Russian Culture RUSS 237), for which I studied and gave a presentation on this uniquely-shaped bread. In the course of my studies on kalach, I found myself relying on information from the website of a bread museum based in Murom. I couldn’t find a single Russian grocery store in Minnesota that sold kalach, and began to obsess over finding it. So there I was, not only about to try kalach for the first time, but getting ready to do so in the city most famous for it. One of our friends from the foreign language class, Sergey, listened to me babble about kalach for some time and then ran off. (I would have done the same, if I were in his shoes.) About ten minutes later, one of the other students called my name and asked me how many kalach I wanted; Sergey ran off to bring us some! Sharing this huge loaf of bread with the others students and professors is one of the highlights of my time there.

City seal of Murom

The day was spent with superb company and I could not have imagined how much fun my one day in Murom would be, a city which I was unfamiliar with prior to arriving. To our hosts at the university, the students and the professors, I thank you so much for your enormous hospitality and for being so welcoming to us. This was a day which I will never forget!

-Schuyler Kapnick ‘19

Perhaps the most important difference I want to write about is the aforementioned change in setting. I was born and raised in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago with about 35,000 residents, before enrolling at Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota, where there are approximately 20,000. While Northfield is a more rural community and further away from the Twin Cities than Highland Park is to Chicago, this change in scenery wasn’t too drastic for me. My high school’s enrollment is even about the same as Carleton’s. It comes as no surprise then, that making the leap from Highland Park and Northfield, to Moscow, is much more so.

Although I’m only a couple of weeks into the term, life on a day-to-day basis is vastly different at MSU than at Carleton. Every morning, afternoon, and evening presents an opportunity to go somewhere in the city and discover something new for myself. I see that everyone in our program, sophomores and juniors alike, is equipped with the linguistic know-how to get about the city. Most of us travel using the metro, which is a ten minute walk from where we live in the dorms. It is the iron-clad troika upon which we can explore the expanses of Moscow. Like Carleton, the Northfield Lines bus stop is never too far away, waiting to whisk you away to your Twin Cities adventure!

Once on the metro, though, the entire city is at your fingertips. The Moscow River is one stop away, and Gorky Park, one of a couple of Moscow’s Central Park-esque fixtures, is three stops away. Red Square, the Kremlin, and the Bolshoi Theater, to name a few, are no more than a twenty minute ride away, only six or seven stops from our station. And to top it all off, a lot of the metro stations look like marble carvings! The change in background, as a student, has changed so much about my experience between Carleton and Moscow.

One of the things I value dearly about Carleton, as do so many other Carls, is our beloved arboretum (known to us as the “Arb”). The Arb is a versatile student resource: in the fall and spring you can do homework there, in the winter its landscape becomes even more beautiful, and no matter what season, walking through the Arb is always refreshing and relieving, even if there isn’t a purpose for it. Yes, my fellow students and I treasure the Arb. This new urban setting, however, is enthralling. I’ve touched upon Moscow’s landmarks, but it’s helpful to look at some numbers as well. A quick search on Google reveals that Moscow’s total area is 2,511square kilometers, about 1560 square miles. That’s just the city on its own, not its regional district! A similar search will tell you that Northfield’s total area is 8.61 square miles, Rice County’s 516 square miles, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, 1,021 square miles. If there are there any students with a quantitative-based degree that are reading this post, please comment below how many times Northfield fits into Moscow.

I don’t have that number prepared, but what I can report, is that the feelings and experiences between these two cities are worlds (4900 miles) apart. On campus here, for instance, I am afforded a degree of anonymity which I have previously never known. I miss my friends at Carleton, and I miss seeing familiar faces, but there is something about being one person in an unknown crowd of students who don’t know each other that is pacifying and relaxing. If I keep my mouth shut on the city streets, I sometimes manage to blend in to such a degree that a couple of Russians have even asked me for directions to this or that place.

The differences between Carleton and MSU, in my experience so far, are best encapsulated by the change in scenery: from Northfield, to one of the largest cities in the world. Stay tuned for more updates!

-Schuyler