Searching for a smile in moscow

Last weekend, I was stand­ing in a long line to enter the Pushkin museum when I chanced upon a conversation with some Italians who were more adept at the English language than your average, well, Italian. When I told them that I have been living in Moscow for many years, they gathered around and stared at me like I was the Mona Lisa. I swear one old lady wanted to take my picture, and I’m not remote­ly photogenic. Then they began to bombard me with all sorts of silly questions, as if I had been living on planet Pluto or something.

Actually, this made me think of a great business idea for an expat looking to make some extra cash: set up a kiosk on Tverskaya Street with an adver­tisement on the awning that reads, “All the Mys­teries of Russia Disclosed in English.” I can almost guarantee that you’ll be a famous oligarch at the end of the first month.

But you must be prepared to answer the most frequently asked question by visitors to Russia, which is, of course, “Why don’t the Rus­sians smile on the metro?”

Then you, in your very best Sam Kinison impersonation, will scream through the window: BECAUSE THEY ARE GOING TO THEIR JOBS! DO YOU SMILE ON THE SUBWAY IN THE MORNING ON THE WAY TO THE OFFICE? Aaaaahhhhhh!!! MAYBE RUS­SIANS WOULD BE SMILING TOO IF THEY WERE ON VACATION IN A FOREIGN LAND (Excuse me, dear reader, but sometimes nothing really expresses one’s inner emotions like rude large-cap letters).

Seriously, the next time you find yourself in New York, Paris, or maybe Hong Kong, take a morning ride on some crude form of public transportation and count how many beaming faces you can find amongst the maddening crowd. How many businessmen are carrying their bagels and briefcases while whist­ling Dixie? How many students are showing their pearly whites at the thought of sitting through 6 hours or more of tedious lessons? How many mothers are transporting their screaming offspring to expen­sive daycare with the placid Hollywood facades of Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt? Okay, okay, I admit it; maybe there is a grain of truth about Russians and their stoic expressions, which sometimes seem chiseled out of quarry rock. I’m not an expert, mind you, but maybe the fact that parts of Russia average about 52.3 days of sunshine per year (about the same as Pittsburgh, by the way) explains the lack of teeth on the streets. And then there was that nasty fling with communism, which I guess made smiling in public some kind of act punishable by law. Only the crazies could smile then, and we know what happened to the crazies. They either got elected into a government position or were transported east of the Urals without a hat.

The problem is that when we see a fellow New Yorker, for example, not smiling, we don’t take this as an affront. But when a Russian fails to show us his gums in public, we take it personal; “they don’t like me,” we think, “because I’m a Yankee.”

Russians never smile? Hogwash, I say! Of course Russians smile! Attend a Russian party, or see the Russians at home in their native habitats, and you will see more flashing canines than in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. Russians just don’t wear their smiles like fake fashion jewelry everywhere they go. Russians smile, but a person must truly earn it, which makes the Russian smile all the more wonder­ful when you finally find one. After all, if you found a four-leaf clover every time you went out looking for one, the four-leaf clover would become a bit boring and predic­table, right?

Robert Bridge

The Moscow News 14/02/2009