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Taking the taxi home on the eve of Christmas

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I had an interesting taxi ride home.  The driver was Lithuanian, which is pretty rare these days.  He was complaining about the Central Asians taking over Bolt, which is the service I use.  They don't speak English.  They don't speak Russian.  It is impossible to communicate with them, he said.  God knows how so many got in but Bolt doesn't seem to care what language its drivers speak as long as they can meet the heavy demand for rides this time of year.

The driver became even more animated when I told him I was an American married to a Lithuanian wife.  How do you guys meet all these Lithuanian women?  There are only 3 million of us and more than 300 million of you.  I would think it virtually impossible.  Just lucky, I said.  He laughed as we putted along in heavy traffic.  

He spoke between Lithuanian and English.  I could pick up most of what he said as long as he didn't speak too fast.  His biggest frustration was with Russians.  They've lived here all these years and they still don't speak Lithuanian.  Don't even try.  I've heard this any number of times although it isn't true.  The Russians I know all speak Lithuanian much better than I do.  

He wasn't much younger than myself so he grew up in Soviet Lithuania.  He had no choice but to learn Russian.  He refuses to speak it now unless it is the only means of communication available.  A sentiment shared by most Lithuanians.  This came long before war.  I was looking at my journal from 1997 and had noted that Daina's friends all shunned the language, although they still had their favorite Russian novels and movies.  

Culturally, there was still a fair amount of interchange before the war in Ukraine.  There was the Russian theater in Vilnius that did plays in Russian.  It has since been renamed The Old Theater of Vilnius and taken in Ukrainian actors.  Every year Russian actors would come to Druskininkai to put on a summer theater filled with interesting productions like "Lion in Winter" with the actors wearing fur coats on stage with the temperature a sweltering 35 C.  This too has ceased.

In some ways it's too bad.  Daina and I both loved Sergei Makovetsky, having seen him in a wonderful production of The Black Monk.  Unfortunately, he like so many Russian actors have stayed silent on the war and are no longer invited to Lithuania.  At least he hasn't gone so far as Vladimir Mashkov, who openly supports Putin.  He was another one of our favorites before the war.

The driver spoke in prosaic terms.  He considered Russia a primitive state.  You go beyond Moscow and it is like stepping into the 16th century, he said.  The driver had been a construction worker at one time and noted a guy who had built a big house for himself including bathrooms but still used a privy outside.  You can still find privies in Vilnius and community water pumps, as not every house has been updated since independence.  However, it speaks more to how primitive things were before independence and these people just haven't had the means to modernize.  He said that was the case all over Russia.  Of course it is anecdotal but when you hear of the barbarous methods being deployed by the Russian military in Ukraine you get the sense that this is a country lost in time, still fighting as if they were in Ivan the Terrible's army.

Russian leaders have long evoked this greater Russia of the past, a form of pan-Slavism that they feel entitles them to eminent domain over any country that speaks a Slavic language.  I suppose that is why they refer to Lithuanian as a proto-Slavic language even if it existed long before Ruthenian became the lingua franca of the region.  Russian tsars tried to repress the language when they annexed Lithuania in 1795 but the archaic language persisted in the fields and eventually enjoyed a renaissance in the late 19th century, albeit filled with Slavic cognates.  After first independence in 1918, Lithuanians tried to purge these cognates.  Although it was easier said than done.

Even if a language is Slavic, like Polish or Czech, the cultures have split profoundly over the centuries so that you are hard pressed to find any commonality.  Neither of these countries used Cyrillic after adopting Catholicism in the 9th and 10th centuries.  Only Slavic countries that still answer to the Orthodox Church use Cyrillic and even here the languages have drifted apart.  It was only when countries were completely subjugated, like Ukraine and Belarus, that the original Slavic languages were stifled and its citizens mostly spoke Russian.

Ukraine is not only trying to revive its original language but has turned its back on the Russian Orthodox Church by choosing Gregorian Christmas over Julian Christmas.  This is probably the oddest anachronism of all - a religion holding onto an outdated calendar which most countries had rejected by the 19th century.  Even Russia only uses the Julian calendar when it comes to religious holidays.

There's no turning back, the driver said as we neared my house.  Russia will collapse at some point, he said, just like the Soviet Union.  You cannot live in a world full of lies.  Maybe I put those last words into his mouth.  



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