What is a Nazi, Pt. 2

People may be a bit confused about the title of yesterday's blog. This entry will clear it all up.
I came back to Moscow from France last Wednesday, and when I landed I didn't feel like seeing anybody. So until Saturday night I just kind of hung around, reading and sleeping, apart from one well-paid class with private students. On Saturday night, though, I decided to call a few people and let them know I was back. One of them, my friend Alexei, is in Germany, so I called Dima, the warm-hearted communist mini-bus driver I spoke of in the last post.
I gave him a call around 4, and he "generously" offered to "let" me come to his place. I use quotation marks because he lives pretty far, and I often see this as being a way to get me to do all the traveling to meet up. On the other hand, in Russia it is considered a real gesture of friendship and generosity to invite someone into your home, especially if the person sleeps in your place.
I chose to accept his offer, and go all the way over to his place. I always feel a bit uncomfortable accepting such offers, because I know there is going to be hard drinking and salty food until the wee hours of the morning. I have, as I mentioned, stopped drinking both alcohol and caffeine, and Russians are often hurt when you don't drink with them. And besides, the last metro leaves at 1 am, which means you are obliged to sleep at the other person's house.
I decided to go for it anyways. I got my stuff together, walked to the metro and off I went. When I arrived at the station in the kind of ghetto-y southeast of Moscow, I gave Dima a call, and he promised he would arrive soon with bicycles and that we'd ride to his house. While waiting, I took a look around- nothing special, blaring idiotic dance beats coming from the inside of kebab shops with neon lights, gray sky, shabby-looking Soviet highrises, rows of pre-fab kiosks selling fruit and vegetables and alcohol, some open green spaces, and across the street the House of Culture, which had been a factory but was now a center for theatre performances. As soon as he arrived he gave me a big hug and asked how my trip to France had been. He explained how to use the shifters, even though I told him I knew how, then gave me the worse bike, telling me it was the better one. Whatever. It soon became apparent from his riding that he was drunk, and he began complaining that he lived in a ghetto, and that he had been fighting with his wife.
We stopped in a kiosk and he asked me what beer I wanted, and I refused explaining I wasn't going to drink a drop till Christmas. He couldn't quite grasp it, and when I explained some he just interrupted, telling me I had to drink. I was tempted, but stayed strong. Finally he went in and got me some kvas, a non-alcoholic drink made (I think) from rye, and again we were off, this time to a big artificial lake held in by rocks held back by chicken wire. Seeing a syringe on the ground, I asked him whether people shoot up here even during the daytime, and he said yes, at all hours of the day. He said such people come up and demand all your possessions, but that they're weak, and you just tell them to get out. He also said someone had drowned his friend in this very lake 20 years ago. I also mentioned I was looking for a new place to live, as the landlady is raising the rent, and he said we'd go to a friend's place, as he was offering a free room for only 10000 rubles, around half of what I am paying now.
Off we went, arriving at some low five-story flats. The whole neighborhood smelled like shit, a fact I was prepared to ignore considering the price. I asked Dima how he knew this guy, and he said it was an old school friend, a real honest guy, but an alcoholic. He added that I should never bring cash to the apartment. In typical Moscow fashion, I began calculating whether this was a good deal or not. I'd save 400us over my current flat, more after the price hike, but I'd have to go to the bank more often to deposit the cash my private students pay me, so as to avoid getting bumrushed by this guy. (I think the very fact that I considered the offer not unattractive says a lot about the Moscow real estate market: "take any offer").
It was already quite dark, and we were off again, this time crossing over some railroad tracks on foot. Lots of beer bottles, some syringes, highrises in the distance. Dima began telling me about how he had pressured four different women into getting abortions- this had happened four times- and that he could never forgive himself.
After arriving at his apartment, Dima told me how his parents had gotten divorced at age 60, how his father, who was a complete drunk, was living in the spare room and how poor he was, although the whole flat had just been renovated and even had a nice Italian coffee machine. Soon, not entirely drunk, he was launching into a tirade about Jews, telling me that Hitler was a Jew because in the Bible it says the world would end after the Jews started living together in the desert, and that Hitler on the Jews urging killed the Jews so they'd all live together in the desert. He asked if I had a girlfriend, and he called her a whore, and asked if I knew that 1 in 5 Russians has AIDS (that's not so, it's more like 1 percent), asked if I had syphilis, and whether I wanted to sleep with a French woman he knew. Not long after he was offering me a small pebble and telling me that it was a sign of friendship and happiness, and that my angel wasn't with me because I was too naive and stupid to accept Christ into my life. He demanded I put the pebble, which had a small hole in it so that you can wear it on a necklace. He speculated for quite awhile about how the hole had gotten in the necklace, and concluded that it had been made by a mollusk.
Afterwards we went to a bar and met his wife and the French woman, who turned out to be well overweight, 40, and not French.
Afterwards we returned to his home with his wife, and he began ranting again, this time about people from the Caucasus. His wife said they need to all be killed, they come to Russia and "occupy our territory", they "even own businesses, and the bosses tell Russians what to do", "we need to kick them out or kill them", "we need to break their heads in", "they aren't people", "they're like Jews", "they found a severed head in the supermarket, who knocked that head off? WHO? Who do you think?", "Russian women sell themselves, and then these dark men think they can hit on any Russian woman. The last time one did that I got some Russian men together and they beat him up", "soon there's going to be war between rich and poor, and the dark people [Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijainis] are going to lose", "our taxi driver [we had taken a brief taxi ride after which Dima embraced the taxi driver, who was from Tajikstan and with whom we had had a very cordial conversation], today I hug him, and when the war comes, I will be ready to kill him". All this over a giant bowl of mayonnaise-globbed vegetables, my favorite. Dima even drank the mayo-veggie runoff from the bowl, the sound of which greatly complicated my task of eating the vegetables, and when a chunk of tomato fell on the table, Dima slurped that shit right up off the table with his lips and went back to talking about how Georgians are dirty.
Hoping to hear more idiotic ravings, I asked if he thought that Africans have the same violent character as Georgians. His wife said that Africans smell. I said that wasn't so, and his wife countered that "black people squat in the 60 degrees [Centigrade] sun, doing nothing all day, how do you think they are going to smell?"
I wound up sleeping at their place, and the next day, Dima and I were watching Olympic boxing, the match was between a black French guy and a Russian. Dima said, "you remember you asked me whether Africans have the same character as Georgians. Well, look how the African is hitting the Russian guy. You see how he hits him? You see how he grabs the Russian? What do you think?" I wanted to tell him that it's fucking boxing match, people hit and grab each other, but in these moments I just maintain an air of respect and wait until it's time to leave. I may even try get this guy on film at his very worst.
American xenophobes talk about expulsion and border closure. Russian xenophobes talk about extermination and enslavement. That's probably just because Russian xenophobes on the whole have more of a grievance with the world their American counterparts do and dream of being able to relish seeing someone below them. I always think of asking such people how they are in any way different from Nazis. You see, in Russia, people are often quite comfortable with the content of Nazism, as their country was the one most responsible for defeating Nazi Germany and the one that suffered most because of the war. But I would be very afraid to tell people with such views that they are in fact Nazis.
It is a banal point to make, but Nazism and communism have a lot of similarities, or at least get their support from the same quarters. Nazis and communists alike have a hate of the rich, and especially among the Russians I have met who long for the old regime, there is a marked hate of Jews characterized by wild conspiracy theories running the gamut from "the Massad is reading my icq's" to "Hitler was a Jew and the Final Solution was all part of their big plan. In Europe, the accepted historical narrative says that the Jews were the group that suffered most in the Second World War. In Germany or France or Britain, anti-Semitism is far less acceptable than here because people saw the barbarism it resulted in. In Russia, on the other hand, communists, and by association, Russia itself, are seen as the main victims, not Jews. That view is not such a complete stretch, but this narrative means that anti-Semitism was never so completely discredited as it was in Western Europe or North America. I'll be writing more about racism in Russia, and trying to see how typical all this is.