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Group Writing: Understanding Why the Russians Don’t Smile (and We Do)
“So, my dear, I am guessing that you are American?”
I w
as surprised by the question, even though I had seen this serious older woman every morning for over a week behind the pastry counter in the market next to my hotel in St. Petersburg. I responded in my customary overly-effusive manner, and bubbled, “Why yes. How did you know?” “That,” she replied, pointing at my lower face. “Only Americans smile at everything.”
Her terse but honest comment verified what I had often observed during my travels in Russia: we smile, they don’t. And because they don’t, they are suspicious of those that do. A helpful cabbie explained the general Russian consensus concerning a smiling stranger: 1. They are insane, or 2. They are an American.
American smiles are frequently taken as a mark of insincerity in this dour nation. What we might consider an expression of courtesy or goodwill can be interpreted as misplaced levity: “You can’t possibly be happy all the time, so why are you smiling?” Russian humorist Mikhail Zhvanetsky described Americans smiling “as if they were plugged into the wall” and novelist Maxim Gorky observed the only thing you see on an American face is teeth. Ouch.
I actually have a great affinity for Russia, her culture and her people. I am attempting a screenplay set during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) and plan to make a third extended visit to St. Petersburg again next year, so I have more than a passing curiosity concerning the Russian frown. This is what I have come to understand concerning this national pastime.
First of all, not smiling is as much a part of this culture as borscht and vodka. Read a Russian novel, see a Russian play, listen to a Russian symphony and you’ll quickly understand that this is simply part of the centuries-old national character. In Dr. Zhivago, Alec Guiness’s Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago muses that Russian people have a “cursed capacity for suffering.” Chalk it up to brutal winters and seemingly endless wars. But don’t take the Russian reluctance to smile as a lack of emotion; far from it. Russians get very emotional when they elect to share their life stories; even if you are a relative stranger. (You may not get a smile, but you will get a story.) Being a relative stranger also doesn’t inhibit their use of personal space; i.e. there isn’t any. Up close and personal is their style. I have learned this is largely due to years of communal living. It is natural to be in everyone’s face.
Another factor contributing to downturned mouths is the relative homogeneity of the Russian population. Recent research indicates that a nation’s overall emotional expressiveness is correlated with diversity. In other words, the larger the number of immigrants, the more the native population is apt to smile to socially bond and build trust, especially if there are language barriers. Even many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is much about the Russian society that remains “closed.”
Finally, I have discovered a strong sense of fatalism in the older generations of Russians who remember the Soviet Union. They are not lazy or indifferent, but rather seem to have transferred their responsibility for change to an outside agency – destiny, luck, or the government. This results in a certain emotional malaise … and a lack of smiles.
I encounte
red this non-smiling fatalism in a kind gentleman I met on a street corner in St. Petersburg. I don’t know his name or exact age or much about him, really. But I saw him every morning down the block from my hotel where he sat with his accordion as he played plaintive songs. I always stopped and listened and gave him a round of applause and 100 rubles. (Don’t faint; that’s about $1.80.) We briefly “chatted,” mostly through short phrases and hand gestures. But I found out he didn’t like how big and busy the city had become; and he felt his luck had run out; and like many of his generation, he harbored a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union. I sensed he missed the sense of personal empowerment that comes with belonging to a powerful nation. “We were strong then and we will be strong again!” And being strong means you are selective with your smiles. Strength is definitely the quality Russians admire most in their president, and ours. I never saw a picture of either man with a smile on his face during my entire time in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Strength also means resiliency. Cultural communications author Anna King writes, “The [Russian] national ability to overcome hardships has been proven by history. As the words of a modern Russian pop song have it, ‘We Russians will get up from our knees despite everything!’” I also have come discovered this to be true. The Russian people will stand and they will squarely face the future.
Just don’t expect them to smile.
Published in Group Writing
Very interesting! Great closing sentence. Interesting because I once had a Frenchman tell me something similar. He first said the French always recognize Americans by our teeth, and then he said they see us as a big friendly dog wagging his tail, knocking everything off the coffee table. (Thanks?)
One of my sons lived in central Russia for two years, in three or four different cities. He remarked on that characteristic, too. There is a stoic fatalism in the population. They love Mother Russia, but know that it is a fraught relationship.
Can’t we be both?
This very interesting conversation giving insights into how other people see Americans is an entry in our Group Writing Series under July’s theme of Understanding. We still have ten future openings starting as soon as Bastille Day, if you have some understanding to share with Ricochet. Why not head over to our schedule and sign-up sheet to reserve a day to share your story?
Great image … and so true. At least the French see us as friendly. Some cultures interpret our smiles as the up-to-no-good snake-oil salesmen. (Truth be told – how can any of us tell the difference sometimes?)
“Fraught relationship” is the perfect way to describe Russians and their homeland. They seem to struggle with certain aspects (and tell you all about it), but almost none of them move to other countries. There is a complex loyalty, for sure.
What must “the pursuit of happiness” seem to them?
A friend will travel to Russia soon. She offered to investigate the veracity of my German ancestors’ roots in Russia by looking at records there. The story goes that they left Russia because the government exempted them from military service if they farmed a particular land and the government reneged on that agreement. But maybe they were kicked out for smiling.
????
There are approximately 20 million university-educated Russians. Only 10 million live in Russia. The other half have immigrated. I have them all around me. It is one of the failings of Russia that the educated immigrate when they can. But you right about complex loyalty – it exists among those who have left.
I also know there is some diversity. One of my friends growing up works in Moscow for Gazprom. I’d love to hear what he has to say about Trump’s latest.
So very, very true. Even more true if vodka is involved.
That’s fascinating to hear; I was only speaking from my (limited, admittedly) experience – and what individuals there have told me. (I should have stated it as such.) In addition, they may have only been referring to older generations. I have had a number of Russian students myself, but I truly didn’t know the numbers where that large. I remember this one woman claimed the village of her birth had remained virtually “unchanged” from her childhood. (She may have been wishing it were so, of course.)
It isn’t difficult to believe that about villages in Russia. They don’t seem to have changed much since the 1950s. Before that, from 1920 to 1950, they lost about 80% of their population for many different reasons – and it was the old and single women who were left behind. And villages is where 90% of Russians were a century ago – in a small village – one generation out of serfdom or slavery. If you get a chance read Orlando Figes’ “The Whisperers” for an insight into “the Russian Soul” and how/why it was formed.
I look forward to your program/movie on the Siege of Leningrad. One Russian movie I remember had to do with the Hermitage and reminiscing about its history – part of which had to do with the Siege. And Putin’s family went through this and his older brother died. Sad, sad time.
We tend to want to make treaties with Russians when they are down that are very much to their disadvantage. It is a huge mistake. Because they will always come back and it will be with a vengeance.
A very interesting post and responses. I learned something about Russian people today.
We noticed the same thing in our extended time in Bulgaria. We noticed dire countenances and muted enthusiasm everywhere (except the day of a soccer match). We chalked it up to fifty years of living under the Soviet Union.
I’m kind of goofy and got plenty of stares, partially because I was the only man in Pleven wearing shorts in March.
Ah, so all the scowling pictures of Trump that we see in the media are really a dog-whistle to the Russkies!
Seriously though, I noticed what seemed to be extremely stern expressions on the faces of the older men in a Russian-speaking church in the USA. I gathered from the friendliness of the congregation at large that it was probably a cultural thing. This supports my supposition.
Things were different under the Soviet Union. I used to know a documentary maker, a Russian Jew, who defected, and they didn’t let any of his family members leave so they could hold their well-being over his head.
For whatever reason, this conversation reminds me of an awesome Wendy’s commercial …
Best ever. “verrrry nice”
I suspect the “or” was a courtesy to the audience.
I’d love to see a strong Russia; I just wish they didn’t conflate “strong” with “communism” and “police state”.
My ancestors are from Ukraine and I’ve always been curious about it – my aunt always told me to wear my babushka when it was cold! – we ate stuffed cabbage, and other Eastern European foods, and always fish on Friday.
I just started a new (old book written in 1990) called Spymaster by Oleg Kalugin – If you can read some of the beginning on Amazon, it is powerful – the guy was a Soviet spy for 40 years starting at 24, when he was planted in NY at Columbia U. posing as just a foreign exchange student, and rose to become a general – he defected to US eventually, but his doubts were always with him about their system – he just loved his country like anyone and its heavily propagandized. He doesn’t mince words nor is sympathetic to the socialist mindset, including Putin – only on Chapter 2 but it is extremely interesting.
Well, they got the swimwear wrong. I can remember being down in Odessa in August back in Soviet days. Nothing like seeing 250-lb women in bikinis.
Goofy? I’m not saying you are goofy, although I can see the inference drawn by the locals given the season. But maybe there is a certain degree of goofyness about us. What exactly are so many Americans smiling about? Are things all that great? Maybe the older civilizations have reason to be pessimistic. And maybe we are overly optimistic about the way things work out.
I am not a constant smiler and have frequently been chided for it, so have paid attention to this phenomenon. (A young man who worked for me was even less of one; on his office wall he placed a poster his daughters had given him, of a fierce-looking eagle with the caption underneath, “I am smiling.”)
When I first started watching Russian news programs on the internet in the mid-2000s, I noticed the news readers/announcers did not smile much. But this was about the time Putin was taking control of the news media, and soon I noticed that they did a lot more smiling than before. I do not know if the two items are related; Putin himself does not smile much. And I don’t know if the trend has continued.
But when did we start smiling? So many old pictures of 80 years ago or more show no smiles.
Ha! The first cameras had such slow action that the subject had to remain perfectly still and not even breathe. So most of them look like a bunch of dead bodies propped up. And as a matter of fact, some of them actually were dead, a weird Victorian custom.
This is what I’ve understood as well, RA. It is much easier to hold a neutral expression for the extended time it took to take the photos. (But corpse photos? Yikes…)
I favor it, too, as long as it’s not at the expense of their neighbors, who should be strong and independent, too.
You are not alone, Reticulator. I have heard of “smile coaches” that are brought in to encourage the practice among employees – especially if the profession has a high degree of public contact. Regarding Russian television announcers, I was in St. Petersburg during March of this year and watched Russian news programs every night and remember the readers being fairly pleasant, but decidedly Undramatic. (I was there during the presidential election, and the results were read/announced [from Red Square] in a relatively low-key manner. The contrast between our two countries on that count was staggering.)(This may be partially due to the inevitability of the Russian results.)
What exactly ARE Americans smiling about? That’s a good question. I don’t think it has all that much to do with circumstances – it’s more about cultural conditioning. Smiling cultures see smiling as a mark of respect for the other person and use it as a diplomatic tool to foster positive relationships. That’s the stuffy academic answer. I actually prefer Right Angles’ we’re-big-friendly-tail-wagging-dogs explanation (#1).
I hadn’t thought of the length of time it took to snap a photo in those days. Perhaps that’s an explanation. However, I do think that not smiling is a bit of an old world phenomenon, but that’s oversimplifying, I suppose. I lived in Russia for 5 years and can tell you that the winter and the general difficulty of life can drain you. One time, a Russian coworker of mine came to me at the office laughing. He said he had just seen me earlier in the morning on the street and I had a dour, brooding countenance and that I looked like I had become a Russian. I thought that it was both really funny and very interesting. I do believe that their past suffering explains a lot, yet Norwegians and Swedish don’t seem to be that way. They are cold-weather countries but their suffering has been less epic. Finland is definitely more like Russia, though.
I’ve asked myself the question, ‘why do we smile?’, many times in the years since I first heard of this observation of the Russians.
I have settled on an answer, that we delight in each other, and that we are communicating a question to each other, something like “Isn’t it a beautiful life we share in this country?” or, “Aren’t we blessed?”
There is something quite a bit more to it, and something a little less, some variation from time to time, place to place. From person to person, I suppose: I’ve not asked any of the others. I suppose I prefer simply to think about it as I walk around giving and receiving these messages, until I start to think about something else. I don’t care to learn that I’m wrong.
I once spoke for very long time, and at a profound level to a Russian Jewish emigre, a physicist, and to his parents, about what it was like to live in and to escape Russian socialism, but I will not take time to speak of it now, even though it gives something of the other side of the answer, the Russian side.