Many Russians Think of Themselves as Lonely
As modern technologies impede the human interaction they are meant to facilitate, those doomed to solitary confinement set an example of building successful relationships.
“Our polls shows that two thirds of Russians consider themselves lonely people,” said Olga Kamenchuk, the director of communications at the VTsIOM sociological center. “Internet and mobile phones don’t help. In their own way, they contribute to the feeling of loneliness that pervades society.”
On the surface, this observation may seem paradoxical. Historically, Russians have always taken pride in having strong friendship and family ties, which helped to survive in hard times. Sometimes, the high value that Russians assign to strong interpersonal ties was even seen as an explanation for the lack of political engagement among Russians.
“The Three Musketeers,” a novel by Alexander Dumas, is immensely popular in Russia because of its main message—friendship is more important than politics or sometimes even love,” said Tatyana Parakhina, a senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) in Moscow. “This idea is very dear to a Russian heart. In 1830, when the Polish rebellion against Russia started, Alexander Pushkin lashed out against his friend, the greatest Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. The reason was that Mickiewicz wrote insulting verses about his friends—the Russian poets who did not rebel against the czar. That does not mean that Pushkin was anti-Polish or that he adored the Russian czar. But Pushkin was clearly insulted by the fact that Mickiewicz put his patriotism above friendship.”
Opinion polls show that Russians continue to put family and friendship ties above any other kind of loyalty, including political, but the number of friendships and other successful relationships is shrinking. Why does that happen? Technically, loneliness is being attacked all sides by modern technology—namely by the mobile phone, this enemy of seclusion, by Internet chat rooms, by interactive media and a huge choice of friendship, marriage and sex ads. A highly developed network of cafes, restaurants and night clubs in Moscow and other large cities, absent in Soviet times, is now also at outgoing people’s disposal. The biggest problem that lonely Russians faced—where to meet a good friend and how to keep in touch—seems to have been solved. So where do all the lonely people come from?
Down with technology
Strangely, VTsIOM’s poll shows that 14 percent of Russians see the Internet as one of the forces destroying friendships, which cools lively relationships by making them “virtual.” However, the share of lonely hearts who blame their solitude on others being “unsociable” and “closed” is much higher—40 percent, VTsIOM figures show. People over 60 years of age raise that bar even higher—to 75 percent, but in their case, communication failures are made more bitter by old friends passing away.
The absence of old friends makes these people’s view of the younger generation’s ability to have friends even gloomier. “A modern person is made lonely precisely by his or her insistence on ‘finding oneself’ and finding an ideal partner, in the same way one finds an ideal product in a shop,” said Archpriest Vladislav Sveshnikov, the prior of the Tryokhsvyatitelsky church in Moscow. “Instead of loving other people and adapting to them, a modern person is constantly expecting others to adapt.” In Sveshnikov’s opinion, it is not computers but attitudes that make people lonely. “In order to have friends, one must first learn to be a friend,” Sveshnikov said.
Some people indeed have unreal expectations. Twenty-seven percent of the people polled by VTsIOM said that it was impossible to find reliable and faithful partners because such people simply do not exist. But the more “communicative” part of society is skeptical of such high demands: 19 percent of the people who did not complain of solitude said that lonely people have themselves to blame for their condition, since they are too demanding of other people.
At the end of the day, modern technology, which is theoretically supposed to save time, fails to deliver this very precious commodity. Seventeen percent of the polled complained that they could not find a partner because they simply lack free time to search. Again, this explanation is often frowned upon: 20 percent of the “not lonely” people accuse people who are “too busy to make friends” of careerism and greed.
Stories of strange success
Obviously, technology and even health are not the decisive factors in the field of communication, since some people who seemed doomed to solitude managed to escape isolation in a world where even the strongest athlete is sometimes lonely.
Thirty-one-year-old Irina Pozdnyakova, was put at a disadvantage in finding friends since her birth. Born with cerebral palsy, which impaired her movements and made her almost completely unable to speak, she grew up in a society where the disabled have long been seen as “naturally lonely.” Her native city of Ryazan, located several hundred miles southeast of Moscow, did not appear to be a good place for courageous experiments. But, strangely, it was Ryazan that became the launching pad for the movement for the “socio-cultural animation” of the disabled. “I met a wonderful person, Leonid Tarasov, also a native of Ryazan,” Irina said. “Leonid graduated from Russian State University of Physical Culture, his specialty is dance, but he chose work with the disabled as more rewarding. He wrote a dissertation on restoring the disabled as full-fledged members of society via physical activity, dances, excursions, drawing, writing poetry and prose. We met and decided to act. We called our new movement ‘animation’.”
After ten years of “animation,” Irina is the author of three books and the editor in chief of a literary magazine for the disabled. Her first book, published in 2003, titled “When the World Is Behind a Mountain,” tells the story of a young disabled girl growing up in a world where making oneself heard is almost impossible. “Lena was born with a disease. She could not walk in a normal way; she could not do anything with her right hand. Not everyone could figure out what she was saying—her speech was not clear,” Irina wrote about her main, visibly autobiographical character. Lena learns to read early, but her appearance makes adults believe that she lags behind her peers in terms of development. She is forced to put up with “well-wishers” who come up to her mother with suggestions to put her in a special school, where children learn to read by the age of 14.
Because of the wall of misunderstanding that her insensitive peers built around her, the girl prefers reading to the real company of other boys and girls. “Lena’s mother brought her books from two libraries. She could not go out of the house alone, but she didn’t mind. Together with the fictional characters of her favorite novels she stormed mountain heights, took space and sea voyages. This helped but also further complicated her relationship with her peers. None of the children in the neighborhood liked to read, and she hated playing hide-and-seek simply because she could not do it,” the novel reads. In the end, Lena’s team of fictional friends helps her find the way to real, valuable people, the modern likes of the immortal protagonists from the novels of Jules Verne and Alexander Belyayev. She grows up and says goodbye to the fictional world of her childhood as the author hints that Lena may soon find true love.
“Believing in great people is the first step toward finding them in real life—this is perhaps the best lesson a real writer can teach his reader,” Irina told a meeting of activists from the Disabled People’s Animation Club “Nadezhda” in Moscow. “After publishing my first book and starting a magazine, Fomalhaut’s Ray, named after a star from science fiction novels, I suddenly discovered I was not an introvert, as I had believed. I felt best when I was among other people, and I became a doer instead of a dreamer. The dream, however, came first,” Lena said.
The will to fight
Leonid Tarasov, who now heads the special “Odukhotvoreniye” animation studio in Moscow, says the only way out of solitude is action—both for the disabled and the healthy. “Working with the disabled is not easy, primarily for psychological reasons,” Tarasov said. “There are some people who came to cherish their isolation; it gives them a quasi-romantic feeling of being ‘beautiful outcasts’ in a cruel world. I never insist on anything. I just show these people that there are ways to make their lives better. If they prefer to stay in their splendid isolation, there is not much I can do about it.”
Leonid’s favorite example for the newbies is Maria Zagorskaya, a 38-year-old artist and writer working at the “Nadezhda” center, who was also born with cerebral palsy. Despite having problems walking and speaking, Maria managed to become a prolific painter and wrote several poetry books. She won several international competitions in horseback riding, including the Open European Championship in Hungary, an event sanctioned by the International Paralympic Equestrian Committee. She is now raising her son Mitya, aged ten, and supporting her family, which includes her 72-year-old father and her aged mother, by selling her paintings and teaching other disabled people to paint. At a recent celebration devoted to her ten years of creative work in the Moscow Union of Artists, hundreds of people came to congratulate her. “Loneliness is not a technical or a physical problem,” Maria said. “It is a problem of attitude. If you reconcile yourself with being lonely, if you don’t give any of your soul to the other people, you will never break out of this vicious cycle of solitude.”
Family matters
Zagorskaya’s husband, Fillip, is also disabled and can’t contribute to supporting the family. But Maria doesn’t lament her fate, saying that having a family life is a psychological reward in itself. Experts say that Maria is on the right track toward happiness and fulfillment “There was special research conducted on the origins of spinstership,” writes Svetlana Kuzina, a psychologist and journalist specializing in female psychology. “Single elderly women were shown pictures of men and their mental reactions were analyzed. The same was done to happily married women. In the case of single elderly women, men were viewed as a ‘danger.’ In the case of happy women, men were perceived in a much more positive light. The lesson is clear: the so called ‘men’s world’ reciprocates the same sentiments you have toward it.”
When Zagorskaya heard about the results of the above experiment, she said there was nothing to be surprised about. “Back in the 19th century, William Thackeray wrote that the world was a mirror we are looking at. When we smile, it still smiles back!” she said
