Living with the Wolves

One of the big attractions for me about working in Russia is the intensity. I feel like I kick into another gear when I am over there. It begins with the language. Russian uses six cases to indicate notions of position and action but there are really twelve since the plurals are different for each case. There are four types of nouns, masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, each with their own morphology through the cases. Then you’ve got your basic past, present, future constructions, each of which changes with the plural, yielding a further six constructions. Probably I’m getting the math wrong here, and a good linguist will hasten to correct me for overlooking something, but my rough estimate is that there are about two hundred and eighty-eight possible constructions, before you even get involved with the exceptions.

Figuring all of this out – and the process really is never-ending – pushes me into all kinds of wild mental gymnastics. I have to admit I get a rush from the extreme amount of energy I exert to nail down a good translation from Russian to English, or back again. Working with the Russian language is totally fun for me, but it can also be extremely exhausting (although less so as I became more and more practiced). When I worked as a company rep on a joint commercial fishing venture for Marine Resources, living and working on a Soviet factory trawler for months at a time, there was no respite from Russian. It wasn’t just the language for work; it was the language for fun, for eating, for making friends, arguing, explaining, asserting and apologizing. There was no way my college Russian was up to the task of covering everything but I was pleased that my grammar and basic vocabulary skills capably took me up the learning curve.

Virtually all of the company reps mastered a good version of meatball Russian while out on the fleet; it was either that, or go home quick, but that didn’t happen to many of us. We developed rather quickly an ability to communicate that exceeded our native abilities by an order of magnitude. Because of my MRCI experience, I liken my Russian language skills to a vezdekhod, the eight-wheel drive troop carrier used by the Soviet, and later Russian, military. It may not be pretty, and you won’t have a luxury ride, but you will get from point A to point B over even the toughest terrain.

This is part of the reason why I think years in Russia are lived like dog years – the intensity crams the equivalent of seven years of experience into each year. The other reason I think of Russian years as dog years is that the demands never stop when you are working over there. Virtually every job I’ve ever handled over in Russia – fisherman, guide, researcher, transportation manager – had its own zamarochki I nuanci (puzzlements and nuances) – things that just made no sense taken from the perspective of a westerner, but that made perfect sense in the Russian context. Like the practice of closing all the doors but one leading in and out of grocery store or shopping mall, even though there are two or 3 other doors that could be open to let people in an out without running into each other. It’s just something they do and you can’t imagine Russia without it.

Then the hours are brutal. At sea, I rarely got more than four hours of sleep a day, and sometimes wound up going for a full day or more without a chance to catch any real rest. My record for going without sleep was seventy-two hours; a rep from another ship had to go home unexpectedly, so I wound up managing two boats at once. After a while, I broke through into a kind of zone where I felt like I could go forever. I hustled to fill both ships up with fish so that their factories were almost jammed, then got a five hours of blessed sleep before working another twenty-four hours shift. Even working in an office, when I finally managed to get office work in Russia, wasn’t always better. The time differences between the USA and Russia got me into the office early or kept me late for conference calls, and then there were always RFPs or proposals to finish, or some task that would keep me into the office late.

Paradoxically, none of this intense work ever really exhausted me to the point where I felt I just couldn’t take it anymore. It would get stressful but the combination of using Russian constantly, long hours and dealing with the various Russian nuances, usually got me up for the work. The best part of any day was always feeling like I had managed to get something done that looked impossible when I first looked at it; or bringing staff along with me on the journey, and helping get their perspectives and solutions applied to the problem at hand. The long hours and days were necessary to make the work go, and getting things accomplished between cultures is richly satisfying. Maybe I should say better that years lived in Russia are canine years – and any westerner who has been through the experience knows, part of the fun comes from running with the pack. As the Russians put it, po volchi zhit, po volchi vyit; Live like the wolves, howl like the wolves.