War & Alcohol

Most of the groups spend the journey on the train editing their films. We all find ourselves at the wagon-restaurant, the only one with functioning electricity sockets. Every five minutes, the provodnitsas try to kick us out. We have to keep ordering to get some more precious minutes of electricity, even though no other customer is coming besides us. Every five minutes, we also have to ask them to lower the music (not very practical when editing a film), but every five minutes, they pump up again the volume to the maximum. It might look like a game between us, but more surely the provodnitsas behave like they were at home and we were bothering them.

In one compartment, an incident occurs. Several of us are threatened by a very aggressive drunken guy. The worse is that the guy got (God knows how) the pass to all the compartments. He came visiting us in the middle of the night even though our door was locked. He even opened the door of the toilets when someone was inside. To make it even more scary, we cannot even complain to the provodnik since he's a friend of the guy! After calling the head of the train and threatening the drunken man to be kicked out at the next station, everything slowly gets back to normal.

Later on the provodnik excuses himself in the name of his friend. He insists though that we should rather pity him: his friend just returned from two years at war, and that's apparently why he was behaving like that.

Sometimes this blog may sound like a series of negative clichés about Russia: the violence of human relationships, the Soviet mentality of the employees, the widespread alcoholism, etc. These are however striking features largely and commonly felt by all participants. Probably, by travelling on train and interviewing people we face very rapidly and directly the symptoms of the country. There's a strong feeling of Russia being a country very much at war or in war. Not only in the classical understanding of the word, but also a societal war. Something quite awkward for young Europeans.

Surprisingly, none of the participants decided to tackle the issue of the war in Georgia even though this war makes the headlines of both international and Russian news exactly at the time of our project, and very much deals with the theme of the European border.

Still we constantly meet with young soldiers, men returning from war (not necessarily Georgia), veterans, or people who have a relative at war. And the war has eventually infiltrated documentaries which were not at first place dealing with it. It's not by mere chance that Monica has found two characters very closely connected with the war in Chechenya, that Iris has collected a couple of dreams of people at war, or that the Moscovite children filmed by Denes were playing a simile-real war in the woods.