Kalinka

So, Maselnitsa. I don’t know too much about this traditional holiday, but what I do know is that it has pagan roots and that it's supposed to mark the end of winter. Maselnitsa, or Butter Week, also involves the mass consumption of blini, and during the weekend, there are carnival, fair-like celebrations all over the country. 

My host mom had been making blini all week, and I’ve been eating said blini all week, so I guess I’d technically been celebrating it even before we went to the carnival on Sunday.  We heard that there were some festivities going on at the Peter and Paul Fortress, so we met up there after lunch. After we left the metro station Gorkovskaya, we were met with crowds of people walking through the park, both on their way and heading back from the carnival. We passed by people of all ages, but there were a ton of kids. Once we got into the fortress, which is more or less filled with open courtyards, we could see different touristy booths and blini stands. But besides that though, there wasn’t a whole lot actually, which was disappointing. People crowded the lines from blini enough to dissuade me from wanting any, and the touristy booths had cheaper looking souvenirs. There were a few puppet shows going on, and a bunch of weird clowns on stilts walking around. There was also a small band of men and women dressed in traditional clothing, and they appeared to be providing the music for some old folk dance going on in the center of a crowd on a makeshift stage. I took a few pictures and watched the various families and people with what looked like caramelized fruit on a stick walk past me. 

We continued to stroll along the fortress, and not before long I found myself in a crowd in front of a big stage where 6-7 women, dressed in bright yellow and orange colors and caked in bad makeup, danced and sang traditional Russian songs. The beat was catchy, so I found a spot in the concert and watched. People all around me were clearly having a ball. When the group of women got done they were replaced by another group of men and women dressed in more traditional Russian clothing. The men wore tall, black fur hats and bouncy Aladin-looking pants with funky shoes, and the women wore dresses. They squated down to a level that made my knees ache and did some of those classic Russian kicking moves. At this point, my friends had fallen behind (or forward, I had lost them a while ago), and it was just me in the crowd. To my left a few groups of women had linked hands and started dancing. There was another random man bouncing up and down next to them with the jolliest look on his face. More people had linked hands and formed a dancing circle, and everybody was laughing and having a good time. I took pictures, enjoyed the music, and couldn’t help but laugh myself. Am I really in Russia? How did I get here? This is going to sound cheesy, but while I watched the concert and observed the people around me, I had one of those, how do I put this, “they’re-just-like-us!” moments. They have their silly dances. They have their traditional folk songs. They all celebrate things and they are raised knowing that grabbing some stranger’s hand to make a random dance circle is the thing to do on Maselnitsa. I couldn’t help but think about everything that is going on in Ukraine right know as I watched these people; the potential for a civil war is brewing not too far away from here and meanwhile, Russians are dancing and singing and celebrating their culture. It was all so... innocent, and as twisted as it was, it made me happy too. It made me wonder how we could hate or discriminate against a group of people, or declare war on them or treat Russia as the west has done over the centuries (it was all probably mostly deserved though, I will say), after you see these people in their element. I don’t know. Do I sound like John Smith from Pocahontas? Or Jake Sully from Avatar? I don’t mean to sound so naive or wise or whatever it is that I’m coming off as. I just, in as few words as possible, felt overwhelmed by how simple, in a way, people are and that war is stupid. That people who don’t consider people’s culture when they go to war are stupid. That there are so many obvious reasons why we should NOT be fighting each other. My god. 

That was beyond cheesy, I’m so sorry (but not really).

After watching the concert for a while, I found my friends. We all watched the concert for a little bit longer, and before we knew it, the people on stage worked their way through the crowd and started skipping around the crowd, grabbing random people’s hands to join in on the dance circle. Somehow, I got swept up into it all, and I found myself hand in hand with some random Russian women dressed as if she were straight out of a fairytale. The circle broke and another began, and this time I had a little girl with pink gloves hold my hand. She was blond, blue eyed, and she looked radiant. At one point I asked myself what in the world I was doing here. How did I end up here? At the beginning of March dancing in a circle with a bunch of Russians to celebrate some pagan holiday? It was mind boggling, but at many points during that dance I turned to my friends and said, “I’m so into this!” 

Okay, I gotta go. I’m off to a Pushkin museum, and I need to leave soonish, so I don’t have time to really edit this. Forgive my typos!