My two weeks of mayhem in Russia
Last summer I attended the World Cup in Russia and was completely blown away by the experience. I've been meaning to write something up about it for a long time, and decided that the newsletter would be a natural venue for sharing some of my notes.
I.
There was a brief moment during my first day in Russia for the World Cup where I thought it might be my last day on earth.
My friend and I had squeezed into a packed sports bar in Saint Petersburg just as the opening match of the tournament kicked off. Russia was playing Saudi Arabia, and early on it became evident that the tournament’s host was going to put on a show. Russia was shockingly nimble, putting away goal after goal, each one more electric than the last.
But perhaps even more exciting than the game was the crowd before me. A sizable group of bald and burly men sat along the bar, and every time Russia scored they seemed overcome by an almost violent pleasure, jumping on to bar stools, smashing televisions, vulgarly thrusting their Russian flags, and leading the bar in wild chants.
At one point I struck up a conversation with one of the men, and it didn’t go quite as I expected. The man placed one hand on my shoulder a little too tightly, leaned in close, and said, “It’s not so much about winning. It’s that we hate Arabs.”
It was a disconcerting moment: My friend Alex and I both look rather ethnically ambiguous, and we’re often mistaken for Arab. The man reeked of beer and his grip on my shoulder felt like it was growing tighter. I looked at Alex and swallowed. But suddenly the man cracked a smile, and belted out, “Well we cannot help it — it’s because we are Iranian!”
It turned out that the fans dominating the bar weren’t Russian, they were Iranian. And their fervent support of Russia was inspired by Russia decimating their geopolitical archnemesis, Saudi Arabia. As the conversation continued it became clear the man with the death grip had actually assumed when he said “we” that my friend and I were Iranian too. We all had a good laugh as we figured out who was from where and what was going on.
Throughout the World Cup, it often felt that the fun of it all was balanced on a razor’s edge. There is a delicate dance between nationalism and internationalism, love of glory and love of the game. I had flown to Russia sort of expecting at least some kind of anodyne veneer of intercultural harmony, kids with linked arms singing, “It’s a small world after all.” Yeah, that didn’t happen.
II.
I would not describe Russia as a welcoming place.
When I went through customs and immigration after arriving in Saint Petersburg, the agent who looked through my passport acted as if she was disappointed that I’d arrived and irked that I didn’t speak Russian. Border officials often have a dispassionate affect when interrogating people about their travels, but she simply seemed unhappy about my presence. When she was finished she declined to make eye contact and silently chucked my passport back at me.
During my cab ride into the city, my driver made significant effort to talk with me using the very limited English he knew. When he came to understand that I flew in from the States, he made a whistling sound that suggested that he was surprised that I’d come over. When I tried explaining that lots of other Americans would be coming as well it didn’t seem to register.
My first meal in Russia was a burger at a fast food joint. I tried practicing my “hello” and “thank you” in Russian with the 20-something-year-old cashier, who seemed in low spirits. A pack of obliterated Mexican fans marched by the windows, and I leaned over and said, “I think it’s going to get very crazy very quickly here.” She shrugged at me and said, “This is Russia,” seeming to suggest that Russia could not be made more crazy by the arrival of millions of unhinged foreigners.
As I waited for my food, Childish Gambino’s “This is America” came on over the restaurant speakers. Instantly she perked up, and a group of tatted up Russians sitting at a couple tables nearby started to dance in their seats. I probably heard the song half a dozen times when I was in Russia, and nearly every time I heard it, everyone started moving. III.
When, at the opening of a match, the two teams’ national flags are unfurled over the perfect pitch, the crowd explodes with every sound that’s possible to make with what’s in their lungs and in their hands, the players and the fans coalesce into one entity, and there is the real sense that everything is at stake and that anything is possible. I’m far from the first to observe that the kind of energy that people channel for war finds expression in sport; in this moment it’s hard to imagine any purer form of greatness than to vanquish every opponent you face in the World Cup.
And yet, somehow, when the game is done, most everybody is able to move on. Ultimately the crowd respects the games as meritocratic; bad calls can ruin a game from time to time, but true supremacy on the field is rarely sabotaged by a referee. And besides, as soon as one game ends, another one is beginning.
No matter how diehard you are about your team, a vast majority of the World Cup will be spent observing the abilities and fortunes of others. People gather in bars and restaurants and “fan zones” to watch games involving teams from countries that they generally forget about the existence of in their daily lives. Reasons I heard for supporting a non-native country in a specific match included: liking their style of play, supporting the underdog, living in that country for a semester, loving a star player on that team, hoping they defeat a rival country, finding players on that team attractive, hating the racism of the opposing country, liking the national anthem of that country, a desire to see ethnic/regional diversity in the final, hating the political leader of the opposing country, appreciation for their ambition on the field, wanting to face off against the country in a later round, racism, liking fans from that country.
This constant observation of others is a great connective tissue. To constantly watch and talk with strangers about other countries reverses the pull of nationalism, of the impulse to turn inward.
IV.
Among other things, the World Cup is the biggest party in the world. A majority of humanity tunes in to watch the beautiful game, and living in the epicenter of activity for a couple of weeks means absorbing that intensity through every pore.
Every day and every night, millions of people from all over the world flooded the streets of Russian cities. If you couldn’t stay put for a match, you could duck into any bar or cafe or restaurant while walking around and peek at the score on a television — many of them evidently installed just for the World Cup. During a flight a pilot kept us abreast of the latest scores. I peered over the shoulders of people who watched pirated games on their cell phones. Countries’ fans wandered streets in militant bands singing and dancing and seemingly hoping to launch their team into the final through the sheer force of their revelry.
Most nights it was easy to find people drinking and singing. Certain streets in Moscow were packed nearly shoulder to shoulder, with people dancing to pop, rap, and reggaeton blasting over loudspeakers. In Saint Petersburg, in particular, the nights took on an eternal quality because of the phenomenon of “White Nights” during which the sun never really sets, and one begins to feel that they could go on befriending strangers forever. In what appeared to be an homage to our host, international crowds would randomly break out into chants of “Roo-see-yuh” for no particular reason.
Russians aren’t particularly warm at first but they are fun to party with. They certainly know how to drink, and conversation gets interesting quickly because they’re unusually blunt. (It should go without saying that I’m speaking about trends in public culture; there is always extraordinary diversity at the individual level anywhere you go.)
Many Russians I came across didn’t speak English well, but they insisted on using the Google Translate app, which has a buggy and rudimentary program for live translation. Once someone labored intensely for about 3 minutes to get it to translate, “Where are you from?”
A common question I received from Russians was, “Do you like Russia?” It was asked sincerely and trepidatiously, as if the person was always aware that their country wasn't known for its hospitality. Whenever I said, "I love it here" I'd get a big grin.
V.
We spent a few days in Volgograd, and it was good to spend some time outside of the big cities. Volgograd is an industrial city that sits near a bend in the Volga River in southwestern Russia.
Volgograd was once called Stalingrad, and it is most famous for being the site of the bloodiest battle of World War II. Over the course of five months, the Soviet Union fended off Germany and its allies in a grueling confrontation that took the lives of an estimated 2 million people. Today a staggeringly large statue of a woman bearing a sword named "The Motherland Calls" — the largest statue in Europe — overlooks the city and serves as haunting reminder of the roughly 26 million Soviets who perished during World War II.
Volgograd has a population of around 1 million but walking around the city center it really feels like a town of 10,000. There are only a few major thoroughfares, and people complain about the flies that swarm the city in summer months. We rented out an apartment on the outskirts of town near what appeared to be a military academy. Men with guns drove by blasting Russian rap. The first night we got locked out of the apartment complex because somebody dead-bolted the exterior gate while were out, and I had to crawl underneath the fence praying that my friends and I wouldn't be shot for looking like burglars. When I told the owner the next day, using a shoddy Google Translate translation, he shrugged.
The match we saw in Volgograd, Tunisia vs. England, seemed like a set up for some trouble. English and Russian fans had clashed violently in 2016 in Marseille during the Euro 2016 (the Russian hooligans there reportedly trained very seriously for street fights), and political tensions between England and Russia had spiked recently due to the Russian government's likely poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on English soil. I saw some young Russian men chanting "Fuck the UK" in what seemed like a deliberate attempt to provoke the English fans standing near them the day before the match. But as far as I can tell, nobody really wanted to fight, and the occasion passed without controversy. During the match itself, I sat next to an old lady from Volgograd who communicated with me via her very patient son and who was overjoyed that I was willing to pose with her Russian flag for a photo.
VI.
In my estimation, Vladimir Putin was the winner of the World Cup.
To my knowledge, Russia emerged pretty much unscathed from the US's crackdown on corruption in FIFA in 2015, despite credible intelligence indicating that Russian officials had bribed FIFA officials to secure its 2018 World Cup bid over England.
The World Cup itself probably couldn't have gone better for the Russian government. Hosting major sports tournaments are typically a poor financial investment for governments, but they allow countries to project an image of power and prestige to the world. For an authoritarian former superpower constantly angling to reassert its role in global affairs, the World Cup is an excellent venue for expressing soft power.
This operated on both a domestic level and international level. Domestically, it's both a prestige play and a tool of distraction. For example, immediately after Russia demolished Saudi Arabia 5-0 on the opening day of the tournament, Putin announced that he was raising the pension age, a plain attempt at hiding bad news behind good news. And there was plenty of good news, as Russia shocked the world by making it to the quarter finals. (Concerns that the team might be doping given how fast they were moving on the pitch did not seem to overshadow their victories.)
On an international level, millions of visitors flew in to enjoy Russia's rich culture against the backdrop of the most riveting sports event in the world. Many Russians complained to me that the police were unusually lax about alcohol and drugs because they were instructed to be relatively hands-off during the World Cup, and that foreigners would get the impression that Russian authorities are more relaxed than they really are. In my conversations I found many people to have ambivalence about Putin, but rarely did they doubt his competence as a tactician.
My cab driver for my ride to the airport to fly back to New York was a pretty friendly guy, but he didn't speak much Russian. Shortly after we started driving, he tried over and over again to tell me something urgent. He wove through traffic repeating it but Google Translate wasn't picking it up. All of a sudden he pulled over on the highway, darted around the car, and started peeing on the shoulder. He got back in the car and cracked his first smile. Again, we tried to speak in English, and this time "football" and "beer" registered.
He turned the words over in his mouth, and repeated them back to me slowly. "Football and beer, huh?"
I nodded.
"This is good," he said.
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