From Russia with Gloves -No 1

I was in conversation with a ‘besty’ the other day (as in a best friend) about Russia or specifically in that conversation the feistiness of the Russian woman she had been talking to. She really liked her but wouldn’t have wanted to get into an argument with her. It made me remember some of the women I met when I was working in Russia.

That fact I worked in Russia, at all , may be a surprise to you so I had best explain why I was working there. Through much of my working life I have been a professional musician but I have had a few little things up my sleeve to back up my income and keep my brain working in different ways which is something that’s important to me. I’ll gloss over my ‘Equal Opportunities’ days. We’ll have a chat about them another time but as a result of those days I developed a skill in something that was called ‘participative training’. This is less like a stereotypical classroom or lecture style training and more about interactive tasks and exercises. I first starting doing this with ‘Assertiveness Training’ and later around various Equal Opportunities issues.

Along the way I’d met a woman via Nottingham Women’s Centre who had gone on to work elsewhere and she was part of a team, at DeMontford University Leicester, specialising in ‘social action’ research and training. Just briefly , in terms of research, it meant that it was far ore qualitative than quantitative . I’ll give you an example of how it might work so you can better understand it.

For instance, If you go in to an area that has had an issue with youth crime etc you might go in with a quantitative survey asking the residents if they would like CCTV camera’s. You’d get a yes or no answer which you could add up accordingly and would probably come out highly in favour of the camera’s as a crime solving method. However, if you go in with a blank sheet of paper and ask people to talk about what they like and don’t like about their area, what they might think causes the problems they perceive and what the possible solutions might be…you end up with a lot more information and quite probably none of it suggesting a CCTV camera. was the answer It is in depth, takes time and is labour intensive so to do research this way takes effort and money but the end results are often more fully embraced by the locals whose suggestions are taken into account and who’s views are listened to, than companies coming in from outside with a vested interest. Hopefully this explains, to a certain extent, the philosophy behind the Centre for Social Action. It won’t be a surprise then that they also did interactive training and preferred these methods as a means of helping people arrive at solutions to problems in their workplaces, charities etc. Due to the connections and skills I had already developed I was asked if I would be interested in certain bits of work that they had coming up and one of them was a contract they had secured in Russia.

This was very soon after the iron curtain had come down and Russia was developing it’s charity and voluntary sector. This was a newly exploding ‘business’ in society, with charities popping up all over the place, and a group of them wanted help in how to develop  avoiding  victorian philanthropic styles that patronise participants but help them to learn how to become user orientated and informed and I was part of the team designing an interactive program. How amazing to go and do something like that in Russia.

I have various memories which I’ll share with you but probably not all today. There may be one or two Russia chronicles. We had a translator and she was called Tania and she’s one of the women I got to know and remember so well. She was a simultaneous translator meaning she was doing Russia to English and English to Russian as we did the exercise.s This was a very important role because the exercises would have made little sense without an accurate description and we couldn’t have worked with the results without an accurate translation of the comments and reasonings. Tania became passionate about the way we worked and get that she was the right translator for the job.  She was brilliant.

There were so many memories of that first visit. One was walking out our first evening. We were in a hotel near the centre of Moscow and so walked through to red square. It was like walking into a fairy tale I had never seen anything like it. The colours of the Zwiebel (onion) towers  seemed to me as if they were from Arabian nights and with the snow falling…well it was magical. I never got fed up of walking into that square.

The hotel was interesting. Whilst it was evident they were doing it up the room I was given was on the top floor and hadn’t been touched for years. It was very small and frayed on all the possible edges you could think off with a hip bath in the bathroom and a lot of plumbing that was attached but only just. It was relatively comfortable and clean.

I can’t remember where we ate that first night because the view of that square burned it’s brightness into my retina and it’s still there. I hope to see it again one day.

If you bear in mind that one of the points was to help our participants give value to their customers equally. That may help explain some of the exercises. To get to the nub of Russian attitudes towards male’s and females I did a work and careers exercise. Quite simply I got them to list as many jobs they could on one sheet of paper and then allocate them, as they saw fit, to men or women. This immediately, as you would expect in a communist or recently ex communist country, caused a conversation about the fact really anybody could do anything but then the real discussions began…and sure enough there were some standard stereotypes. Road workers generally should be male, nurses female etc etc. What really mad me laugh was when they got to ‘plumber’. in one group they could not allocate plumber to male or female.

When I asked for an explanation a woman said, as translated by Tania in her delightful Russian accent, “We all know that really it is a man’s job but really we feel that if you want the job done properly you get a woman to do it”. This proved to be the case for carpenters too! It made everyone in the room laugh loudly and nod sagely. But what it reflected in the animated and frank discussion which followed and indeed was the intention behind the exercise. was that stereotypes and attitudes did exist. On following this up with Tania later she said frankly, ‘yes communism was all very well and technically women could train and be engineers if they wanted to, but they were and are still expected to come home and cook, clean and look after the children etc. ‘. In terms of the overall sexism and females in a relationship she felt little had changed for the better.

The other thing I remember Tania saying was that for women like her things were even more difficult. This came out of a conversation in the training room too. Some how we’d got on to a discussion about unmarried women. One man said it was an abomination and another said an unmarried woman in her 40’s should go and live in a nunnery . I felt shocked by this incredibly intrenched attitude and also I was conscious that Tania was an unmarried Russian in her forties. I tried to use myself as an example as an unmarred woman in my 30’s at the time. For me they made excuses. They referred to me as a ‘professor’, even though I explained I wasn’t they insisted in their eyes I was and this, for some reason, seemed to allow me to be ‘different’ and I suspect that being a foreigner meant I wasn’t judged in the same way.

On the whole we weren’t there to judge but to open up conversation so issues could be dealt with. I have to say it was also during this time that I became aware of how many Russians seemed very very anti-semitic. That also surprised me as I hadn’t expected that…and I’m jewish by decent too. The point of several days of exercises was to bring the focus back to the people they were working with. Their charity users who needed to be understood, respected, consulted and listened to in order to grow an organisation that felt inclusive .

Do you know what else I remember about that first visit? Our taxi driver form the airport into the city pointed out Macdonalds as we went passed. The first one to ever be allowed in Russia and the one that famously made the news because people were prepared to queue for a very long time and spend a ridiculously high proportion of their income on this novelty! There are many all over Russia now of course.

That was my first visit and we went back…so more of the Rissuan chronicles to come.