The young Russian girl in Starbucks Friday looked at me in a way impossible in the Soviet times. It was from her purely personal inner position with a purely personal evaluation.
In the 1980s, when I first came to Soviet Russia, and for the majority beyond its demise and thru until the end of the 1990s, there was still a certain "solidarity" of society and commonality of experience to most people's lives. They may not know, or they may know and hate, each other, but they readily understood each others lives, as most people were "in the same boat". Increasingly during the 2000s and now, that is not often so. There is now very little in common among many, and little can be presupposed in common between strangers. Now there is a great diversity of conditions to life, both inner and outer, with people of many differing conditions, experiences and possibilities.
That girl's representative look at me was mostly critically evaluative, but in a purely personal way. There was nothing assumed to be in common between us. And if there was a kind of "unconscious field" between people before, now encounters are often just from person to person, which is much smaller. The young girl only had her own self -- not some greater social ideology and system -- to view me from within.
In the Soviet time such a girl would -- in fact did -- look at me with very different eyes. And -- one more aspect of the many that most just blithely ignore in all the changes here -- she perhaps would and could not have done so even 10 years ago. That "look" was new in Russia.
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