In Pursuit of the ‘Russian Perspective’

Emilie Flamme, third-year student at Amherst College (USA)

© Mikhail Dmitriev/ HSE

Emilie Flamme is a third-year student at Amherst College (USA), where she is a double major in Architecture Studies and Russian. She just completed a semester at HSE Moscow, during which she took Russian language and content courses. HSE News Service caught up with Emilie to talk about her studies at HSE, her thesis, and her life in Moscow.

On Studying at HSE

I studied in Moscow through a programme hosted by Middlebury College (USA). While I took all my Russian language classes through the Middlebury programme, I had the option of taking additional content courses at HSE. The only stipulation was that the courses had to be conducted entirely in Russian. (Students studying in the Middlebury programme are required to take a ‘language pledge’ and speak only Russian.) HSE provided the perfect setup for me: I could take courses in different subjects and not be stuck in just one department.

I took two courses – one on Global Cities (an Urban Studies course) and one on Soviet Film History. I did it because I really wanted to challenge myself—before coming here, I had only taken one year of Russian. So I really was just throwing myself into the vat and hoping that it would turn out okay, which it did. I contacted the professors of the courses and told them that my Russian wasn’t great but that I was going to be working on it, and most of the time they were just happy to have someone who wasn’t a native Russian come and be interested and do their best in their course.

Emilie Flamme, third-year student at Amherst College (USA)
© Mikhail Dmitriev/ HSE

My favorite course was ‘Megapolises of the World’ taught by Oksana Zaporozhets. In the course, we did not look at the largest megapolises, such as those in China, India or Japan, but rather at large European cities. It was interesting to learn more about how these big European cities are perceived and to talk about them in Russian. The professor was very knowledgeable and the course was very participatory; the professor really encouraged us all to engage in discussion. At the time I was not confident enough in my Russian to even think about participating, so I did a lot of listening, and it ended up being really informative. I got to hear how the Russian students of the course responded to ideas about what a city means and what common space means. A good amount of the students had recently returned from travelling abroad, so it was very eye-opening to hear about what struck them about the cities they visited, how they perceived leaving the country, and what they said about how these cities matched up with their expectations.

As for my Soviet film history course, we learned about salient themes of Russian film, and then, at the end of the course, we were given a list of four movies that we could pick from and watch, and that was nice, because it was a good way to dissect movies that I had either already seen or had been wanting to see and consider them in the context of visual culture, which is something that I’m interested in.

On life in Moscow

Living in Moscow is really awesome and overwhelming at the same time, as any big city is. 

The city never stops moving, so if you stop moving, it’s not going to wait for you. It’s really hard to take a break, because I feel like I’m going to miss something

In my free time I go to the gym a lot and I also take a lot of photographs. There is always something remarkable to photograph here. I’ve enjoyed taking photographs while doing field research for my thesis as well as just walking around Moscow.

On Her Thesis Work

Though one of my majors is architecture, I am more specifically engaged with urban studies, which means I study architecture through the lens of sociology. My thesis project is about Russian apartment buildings built in the 60s under Krushchev (known as piatietazhkior khrushchevski in Russian), which usually have five floors, and, in Moscow, are slated to be torn down and replaced with new residential buildings in the near future.

Emilie Flamme, third-year student at Amherst College (USA)
© Mikhail Dmitriev/ HSE

While at HSE I made a friend who studies architecture, so it was fun that we had a common academic interest and could talk about it. Generally, however, what my time here really helped me with was understanding that khrushchevkihere are not really a topic garnering a lot of attention. The term khrushchevka is also a loaded term with a lot of connotations, so I think I would rather say piatietazhka. In the American Slavic studies context, the word khrushchevki is used more, but in Russia, piatietazhki are what people will actually start talking about.  

When I tell people what I’m studying, many people ask, ‘Why are you studying this? What’s the point?’ And it has made me reconsider how I’m approaching it

Obviously I am approaching the topic from an American Slavic studies perspective, but if I am going to be representing that perspective in my thesis, I need to also understand the topic from the Russian perspective, or, in other words, I need to understand why it is that people in Russia don’t think it’s something worth talking about. So I think that was the way in which I was most helped in my thesis work here at HSE.

While in Moscow, I’ve learned that the piatietazhka is really an invisible structure; people don’t think about it because it’s so ubiquitous. But if the Moscow mayor’s renovatsiia (renovation) goes to plan, that whole aesthetic and the culture surrounding it—that whole feeling of small-storied Moscow—is going to disappear for the most part, and that’s really going to change the feel of the city in a lot of ways that I don’t think people are really thinking about—it’s just not an everyday thought. The city is definitely going to change in terms of vibe, feel, and texture, and that was something that really struck me. Because for me it’s like this pressing thing that I’m watching happen—I read the news every day and I follow all the relevant websites, I follow all the telegram channels that send out new info, and I feel like I’m on the ground watching this, but the average person just isn’t thinking about it.

Emilie Flamme, third-year student at Amherst College (USA)
© Mikhail Dmitriev/ HSE

I also think there is something really fascinating surrounding protest and physical space in Russia, because it is so hard to protest over something that is political or intangible.  What we’re seeing in Ekaterinburg right now (with local residents protesting the construction of a church in place of a park) is a prime example of things I’ve seen in Petersburg and other places where protests happen around something that can physically be surrounded, something that you can get some ground on, a place where even if people get arrested, there’s something physically there that also exists beyond the protest. I think it will be interesting once more piatietazhki get destroyed and more people become more aware. I’m intrigued to see what happens. Will people think of them as something to be saved? Or will they think, ‘Oh, that’s OK. They’re gone now.’ So far, the prevailing reaction I get is, ‘Oh well, they’re kind of terrible, aren’t they?’ 

I was fortunate to receive a stipend from Amherst to travel across Russia, so I went from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Tomsk and Novosibirsk, and I was looking at various raiony (districts). The more money there is, the better the buildings are kept up. One of the most striking examples was Akademgorodok (‘Academic City’) in Novosibirsk where most everything (all the institutes and all the housing) is from the 60s but it’s really well maintained. That whole town is so pristine; it looked like it was yesterday. No one there talked about khrushchevki in a pejorative sense. It presented a really interesting contrast to Moscow.