Slavs don't smile

Out the window of the trolleybus a man is crouching on the side of the road, right down on his haunches, smoking a cigarette. He isn’t smiling. Neither is anyone else on the trolleybus. Or in Odessa.

Of course glumness is not unusual on public transport no matter where you are in the world, but the Slavs, I must say, take the cake. It’s like they’ve seen one too many men taken away for crimes against the revolution. The men look through you, as though they are waiting for you to reveal one of your soft-cocked, gay-loving weaknesses, like being friendly just because.

I was on the way to the beach in Odessa. The summer heat was sending beads of sweat from my arm, reaching up to the handrail on the roof, down the side of my ribcage. Outside I could hear the honks of traffic over the clangs of the trolleybus as we rattled past the crumbling, regal old buildings that are central Odessa, ensnared in vines and foliage.

Odessa on the Black Sea has the easy living feeling of one of Europe’s Mediterranean cities, filtered through a half century of communist stagnation and two decades of corruption and mismanagement. Huge trees overhang the roads, the occasional breeze moving the patterns cast in beams of dusty sunlight. The unmistakable smell of sewage greets you from time to time from beneath metal sidewalk grates. Odessa, a name that brings to mind an exotic and perfumed history.

Now it feels scrappy and desperate. A few minutes on Tinder shows stunning woman after stunning woman but I am told to beware the traps set out to catch undiscerning tourist men. Two guys in the hostel told me of a scam in which a woman arranges to meet at an expensive place for dinner. Halfway through she takes a call, pre-arranged with the restaurant, and the woman scrams leaving you to pay the inflated bill.

Men come to the Ukraine for its fabled gender imbalance. Here there are eighty six men for every hundred women. Thanks to Ukraine’s blood-soaked twentieth century (civil war, famine, the ‘Great Terror’ and World War II) and, more recently, to alcohol and suicide, men die on average at sixty five, ten years younger than women.

The trolleybus stops and I get off. I buy a bottle of water from a vendor and start down the hill. I have my first view of the sea. I can spot launches and yachts, the playthings of rich Russians. When I get to the beaches it is worse than I feared: the shore is a string of gated dance clubs, each spilling out generic high-tempo dance music. Pot-bellied and balding Russian men with fake-breasted blonde women sullenly amble up and down the strip.

Squashed between two concrete piers is the small sliver of crowded public beach. The gentle waves have washed up a slick of seaweed and plastic into one corner. Two red-faced Ukrainian women, one waif-thin in a baggy sky-blue t-shirt, the other rotund and wearing a silly-looking umbrella hat, walk up and down in the sun selling a selection of dried fish. One long thing looked to be some sort of sea eel. I still can’t see anyone smiling.

I would get used to this during my travels. Moving from Odessa in a long loop across the Balkan Peninsula in a sort of grinding gloominess I passed through Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. The normally imperceptible gestures of friendliness that I was used to lubricating the machinery of daily life were replaced by sullenness and impatience. I was struck, on arriving in (non-Slavic) Albania five weeks later, at the different energy I felt in the air: optimism, expressiveness and conviviality.

But that can’t be right, can it? Is it really possible for an entire region to be, on the whole, in a totally different mood? This had me puzzling over an even deeper question: How much can I really trust my perception of a culture different from my own? Are facial expressions universal? Where I see jaded resentment could there in fact be genial optimism? Could what appears to me to be a leering Slav, in fact be something completely different, like an excited-to-the-point-of-orgasm Slav?

No, not really. That’s the short answer. Apparently it doesn’t really work that way. A psychologist called Ekman did this research back in the sixties. He showed photographs of faces to people from twenty different Western cultures and eleven isolated or pre-literate African groups. Faces that showed happiness, content and disgust were all identified as such by upwards of 90% of respondents of all groups. The findings have been replicated since. More recent work has been done with babies under one month showing that the same stimuli produced the same facial reactions across different cultures. Ditto between blind children and sighted children.

According to Arthur Dobrin at psychologytoday.com, “It is beyond dispute that smiles are understood as revealing happiness, frowns sadness and pulled down mouths disgust.”

Ok, well, it’s not a total surprise that the Slavs are a little glum.

There are something like 360 million Slavs in the world. Of the ten most populous Slavic countries, every single one is shrinking in size. All of them endured fifty years of communism. Not a single Slavic country makes it into the top 30 least corrupt countries in the world; those outside the EU don’t crack the top 60.

There’s even a theory that Orthodoxy, the religion practiced by most Slavs, makes people relatively unhappy and is unconducive to capitalist success. In a recent World Bank working paper, using data from over a hundred countries, the authors found that, relative to Protestants and Catholics, followers of Eastern Orthodoxy were more likely to prefer old ideas and safe jobs, to more strongly support government involvement in the economy and to agree that getting rich can only happen at the expense of others. As, Ivan Zabaev, a Russian sociologist who works at Russia’s top Orthodox university, puts it, “The specific character of Orthodoxy is that it regards not vocation or professional activities as a means to salvation, but obedience and humility in relation to a (spiritually) more experienced person or a person at a higher place in the hierarchy.”

The paper also found that Eastern Orthodox believers are less happy than Catholics and Protestants. All of these findings persisted even after an exposure to communism was accounted for and controlling for health, employment status and various other factors.

Because I know very little about Orthodoxy I have no way to evaluate his claims, and of course there are also plenty of Slavic Protestants and Catholics (e.g. all of Poland), but it did have me nodding in rumination.

Anyway, what is true of the Slavs more generally is even truer of Ukraine. It has had an absolute shitter of a past two decades. The average Ukrainian is poorer than when the Soviet Union collapsed. The total economy is almost a third smaller. The 2017 Transparency International report placed Ukraine 130th in the world for corruption. Something like 8% of Ukraine’s farmland is contaminated by industrial waste. Its population has declined by 12%, over six million people, since 1990. By 2050 the UN estimates it will be less than two-thirds the size it was at independence.

Their country has long been the sandbox of Russia: first as part of the empire, then as a satrapy in the Soviet Union, now as Putin’s playground. In 1994 it agreed to give up its residual Soviet nukes in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the Western allies. These were ignored by all sides when Russia helped itself to the Crimean peninsula and 4% of Ukraine’s population, after Ukrainians decided they want to join the West.

Ukraine is being torn apart, their economy is stagnant, the population is shrinking and the rule of law is a farce. And here, on the beach, Russians come to eat and drink and leave their cigarette butts in the sand. No wonder they seem so glum.

I fold up my towel and put it in my backpack. I’m glad to be here, you know. This is a part of the world that not many outsiders pay attention to, yet interesting things happen here. Geopolitics and twentieth century history are carved into the lives of these people.

I walk back up the hill and walk to the tram via the pedestrian shopping street. Luxury brands gleam from behind the plate glass store fronts and a crane is working on the upper stories of the luxury hotel, in the tasteful shape of a cruise ship. The sun is lowering and the dirty window of the trolleybus lights up in an explosion of refracted light. Outside I spot a white limousine with what looks like bullet holes. The ticket lady, plump and bored, takes a moment to sit down and flick her finger over the screen of her smart phone. Behind her a pockmarked elderly man with a wide squishy nose looks defiantly forward.