Why Russia is a medieval state?
This talk given by Andrey Konchalovsky was the motivation for me to write this post.
Being a Russian citizen I feel ambiguously. There are situations when I feel proud of my country, but sometimes I feel sad about it. I want to share some of my thoughts with you.
Russia is a country full of well educated people. We have a lot of great universities, but after the perestroika most of them became corrupted and the most valuable thing you can get there is a diploma. When I’ve been studying in the university bribes were highly anticipated by tutors in case you wanted to get the perfect mark. Most of the curriculum came straight from the 70's. Why would someone need to learn PDP-11 octa-based assembler in the 00's?
There was an extreme lack of computers, we had to hot seat near one computer(it’s when you stand in line and wait when a computer gets vacant) to pass a CS assignment. Computers were outdated, most of them were DOS-based. It was really tedious to study there because of the lack of equipment and bribes. For us as future engineers the most frustrating thing was a fact that after we graduate from university we won’t be able to find a job in tech. Mostly because job market doesn’t need someone who knows the PDP assembly and how to write programs in Prolog. After i’d spent there more than 5 years i was almost hostile to education. I had lost my belief in it’s power(thanks to my curiosity I’ve restored it simply by reading books).
I think that zero tolerance is another great problem in Russia. I’m Tatar, sometimes I do things the most of the Russians won’t consider as appropriate(like greeting or smiling to strangers, which is uncommon in Russia). People don’t like when I tell them that I’m not Russian. There is no thing like national purism, but I’ve decided not to talk about it because people tend to stop talking with me when I tell them that I’m not a part of majority.
The third thing that I don’t understand is why the people say that our nation is better than all the others. This idea is widespread on TV. There’s even a comedian who made laughter upon Americans the main subject for his jokes. He’s not alone with it. There is a lot of propaganda in mass media that neglects the other nations. I don’t understand the intentions of doing this, but it is definitely embarrassing.
There’s a popular joke. If you were able to graduate from school, you should go to work to police. If you couldn’t do that then you must become a security guard.
The guards and police are almost everywhere. Even the smallest shop in a mall has a security guard(i’m not sure how they pay him for his service).
You don’t have to be someone(even finishing school is not important) to work as a security guard. You will have a mediocre salary, a permission to carry handguns (which is illegal for civilians) and you can take bribes and terrorize whoever you want.
As for me all these things(outdated education, zero tolerance, neglecting the other nations, being a police state) are attributes of medieval state.
