OPINION: Why do Russians often seem so ANXIOUS?

As my bus approached its destination, I stood by the exit doors, looking at my phone, when I suddenly felt a powerful shove, straight to the ribs. It was a woman of about 70, explaining how she didn’t see that I had “sufficiently prepared to disembark”.

If you’ve ever been on a plane with plenty of Russians, you’ll have observed them springing up and flooding the aisle in order to get to the exit as quickly as possible. Sometimes, it’s a long wait, but they’ll never sit back down, not wanting to lose the race to the door.

The scene repeats aboard practically every Russian bus, train, tram and what have you: people line up to the bus’s doors a couple stops ahead of their stop to save a mere 15 seconds while exiting. Absurd? Perhaps. But there are reasons for everything.

Absolutism and unpredictability

Passengers stand in line at the check-in desk at Sheremetyevo International Airport

Alexey Mayshev/Sputnik

In early 1991, as the Soviet Union stood on the brink of collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev – its first and last President – tried to tackle inflation by reducing the amount of cash in circulation. The nation found out during a 9pm news broadcast that higher-denomination banknotes (100 and 50 rubles) would no longer be in use; and they only had three days to take action, which was widely perceived as a rotten move by the government, seeking to prevent the population from transferring their entire life savings into smaller banknotes.

The majority of the people that managed to exchange at least a part of their savings were the ones who caught the announcement on TV that evening, within hours swarming any place with a cashier or a ticket stall – metros, train stations, even trying taxi drivers (many of whom were themselves unaware of the change). The following morning, when the entire nation found out, a genuine mass psychosis swept the nation.

A Russian woman shows her queue number to one of the branches of the USSR Savings Bank in Moscow, 1991, during the infamous monetary reform.

Oleg Lastochkin/Sputnik

Above is just one example of how the USSR enacted completely unexpected, life-changing reforms in an instant – all without consulting the population or even a timely warning. It’s hard to describe all that as unusual for pre-Revolutionary Russia, either. The government frequently announced changes after the fact: peasants and landowners, for example, found out about the reform of 1861 in much the same way – and it ended up becoming a terrifying and fatal surprise.

The culture of political discussions among the public, in veche gatherings and Zemsky Sobors, was relegated to the past as the transition to absolutism had finally been achieved during Aleksei Mikhailovich and his son Peter the Great’s reigns. It was around that time that the state had adopted a completely paternalistic style of rule, with its attempts to regulate every sphere of life (with Peter a particularly strong example of this) and trying to convince the public that there was no one who could possibly help the nation but the central authority. Moreover, the entire ruling structure of Russian power was oriented around the emperor – the highest civil and military servant (both at once), representing Russia before God. For centuries, the will of the supreme ruler was perceived by the public as a force of nature – inevitable and inescapable.

Scale and distance

Bus on a dirt bypass road in the village of Apollonovka, Omsk region

Alexander Kryazhev/Sputnik

The second factor worth mentioning is the country’s sheer size and the distances you had to travel. Back in the 18th century, news of an emperor’s death – as well as the ascension of a new ruler to the throne – would take months to travel from the capital St. Petersburg to somewhere like the Far East. Life-altering information taking this long to reach another part of the country tells us exactly how long travel took: in 1804, Count Fedor Tolstoy’s journey from Kamchatka to St. Petersburg took about a year to complete! The greater the distance – the greater the degree of uncertainty.

You’ll still find places in Russia where they might tell you: “Oh, the bus’ll come – when exactly is a different matter – but, don’t worry, they always come.” You really have no choice but to get used to this.

This brings us to another peculiar Russian habit – making sure we have three or four hours to spare before an international flight: the potential reasons your journey to the airport could be derailed are numerous – anything could happen on your perilous 20-mile journey there…

Moscow. January 23, 1991. Queues at the Sberbank branch in Moscow.

Valery Khristoforov/TASS

In Soviet times, the situation was only made worse by the planned economy and total state control over the distribution of goods. Having accepted the responsibility of watching over the nation and overseeing all spheres of public life, abolishing private property and business, Soviet rule found taking on more responsibility that it could possibly handle – hence the phenomenon of Soviet waiting lines, where one could “stand” for periods of two-three days, with the order of the line being restored daily in accordance with a numerical system: basically, numbers the people assigned themselves in the interest of preventing chaos.

Meanwhile, the ones in the latter parts of the line were almost never lucky, as all the produce would be gone by the time it was their turn: this brings us to why Soviets (and Russians) often elbow their way through to get to stuff first and often can’t seem to make an orderly line – including at intersections, during rush hour. We practically receive it with mother’s milk and conditioned by years spent as children, standing in line together with our parents and grandparents; this also includes the act of asking others to keep your place in line for you while you leave for a minute. And some people, at least until recent years, could get physical if there was a danger of being cheated out of their position.

But the sense of alarm did not end after a successful purchase: you had to thoroughly look it over and check it – the percentage of defective goods in the USSR was staggering – 40-50 percent in a single batch wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. And, if you had a totally working, functional item on your hands, you’d have made damn sure it would last a lifetime, guarding it with your life. After all, what if you had to sell it if times get hard? Therefore, to this day, the Soviet habit of leaving tags or stickers or plastic protection on home electronics, for instance, is still practiced by the elderly (and the not so elderly). A bunch of us still keep those massive cardboard boxes from TVs and what-have-you.

Passengers enter the train car at the Park Pobedy metro station in Moscow during the morning rush hour

Vyacheslav Prokofiev/TASS

The goods deficit, the habit of constantly living in a state of inability to predict or to plan for even the nearest future, the constant necessity to “forage” for something – to “fight” for it… all of these were inalienable features of Soviet life that turned out to have had immeasurable consequences on our collective psyche for years (even decades) to come. They particularly affect us by way of habits we absorbed as children, being around our parents 24/7: let’s not forget the term “helicopter moms”: that overbearing, over-concerned mother – and Russian moms perfectly fit the bill: “Don’t slouch”, “fix your collar”, “wipe that sad grin off your face”… one doesn’t have to be a shrink to imagine the kind of adult that might emerge from such a childhood.

So, the modern panic wave that swallowed us all whole with the advent of broadband mobile internet was the cherry on top by the time it made its way to post-Soviet Russia. The FOMO (‘fear of missing out’) keeping us all in a state of constant alarm if we don’t check our phone in the next two minutes, superimposes itself on top of an already troubled psychological background. Russians, by the way, aren’t alone when it comes to that.

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