student safety in St Petersburg

[Valery Belyanin]

As I wrote a couple years ago, a colleague of mine who worked in Japan
preferred to live in Piter with his 30 Japanese students not in the center,
but in a far off area (in the guarded dorm of the SPB U). He said that he
had multiple complaints from his Japanese students (of all ages) about
racial verbal attacks (_uzkoglazyje_ was one of them), and one old gentleman
received a spit in his side. That was a very disappointing for people of
another culture who loved Russian culture. Some of them stopped learning
Russian after the trip to Russia.

As for my American students, I had one black girl who did not go to Russia,
and another _smuglaya_ girl who once cried bitterly because, as she said she
mentioned aggressive glances. Another boy had to cut off his beard because
he was stopped by _doblestnaya moilicia_ too often. One student was attacked
by homeless dogs. One student had talks about his Jewish name with the guard
in the dorm. A dozen of credit cards were stolen or captured by ATMs,
cameras, purses, money and even two passports were lost or stolen (one was
returned for free). The _dezhurnyje_ in the dorm behaved sometime like
_SSovki_. Some Russian people delivered me lectures about the necessity to
overthrow the Bush administration and to rape Condoleezza Rice, who was
considered to be _ischadije zla_, I had questions about the presence f
_dusha_ at _tupyje amrrikosy_, etc.  I felt myself at the forefront of
ideological war.

My main concern about the program was the safety of my US students in Russia
(we lived in Moscow, and also travelled a lot). But the students kept
together, travelled alone very rarely. In Piter we were always together.
Actually our four days in the Piter summers were filled with multiple
excursions, and a lot of foreign buses and groups from cruise ships were
everywhere. And we had no problems.

IMHO, one of the reasons that everything was pretty smooth was due to the
instructions I gave them in US.  [I had also meetings and told different
stories in Moscow, asking students to share their experience]. In US I
delivered a one hour PowerPoint presentation with pictures of homeless dogs,
Gypsies, new_Russian’s cars going on pavements, and weird people in the
streets. Some students wrote later that my lecture was intimidating, and I
even heard a word “Rusophobic” in my address. But my aim was to caution them
of possible dangers. We had a lot of problems, but no one was raped, killed
or attacked. I and my students were lucky.

Valery Belyanin,

Resident director of Moscow program of the U of Pittsburgh (2004-2008).

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