In my absence from blogging, regular reader and commentor of many Arsenal blogs, TheSKAGooner, has kindly offered to write today’s article for me. You’re in for a treat with a very interesting take on Andrei Arshavin’s take on life in England.

You can follow TheSKAGooner on his twitter feed, @TheSKAGooner, as well as catch his comments on a number of Arsenal blogs.

Take it away, TheSKAGooner!

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First, let me start off by saying that I’m both thrilled and honored to step in with a guest column for Third-Gen. Jammathon does a fantastic job with this blog, and we all should be appreciative of his efforts.

Secondly, I must admit that I am an avowed Russophile.  I’ve been fascinated with Russia since it was the Soviet Union and my sworn “enemy” given that I served in the US Navy.  I’ve softened my stance quite a bit since then.

I had the very good fortune to live and work in Russia for two years.  I’ve been back to visit several times since returning to the US and have many close Russian friends.  Despite having lived and worked there, I am never at a loss to learn things about Russia and Russians.

I’d like to talk a bit about our very own Matryoshka doll, Andrei Sergeyevich Arshavin, his home country of Russia and offer some tips to help you decipher Shava’s English language interviews.

If you’ve been reading the red tops recently, or some of the blogs, you’ll know that Andrei has been critical of his performances this season. He’s been quite open that he just hasn’t hit top gear yet and we all find his honesty refreshing. Even after last year’s spectacular 4 goal haul at Anfield, he played down the goals and mainly made comments to the effect that he really was invisible for most of the match.

This is not uncommon for Russians. They can be hyper critical of themselves sometimes and while Russia has thrown off the Communist yoke almost 20 years ago, these cultural remnants remain.  Indeed, it’s a staple of the Soviet/Russian school system to practice self-criticism. Not so much to deflect any success, but rather as a mechanism for constant self improvement. Andrei grew up in Leningrad (it wasn’t yet St Petersburg) and was drilled in this thought process. It remains ingrained in him fully to this day. I doubt we’ll ever see a time when Andrei turns into a chest-thumping self-promoter.

Another thing that gives us all a good groan now and again is how direct Andrei can be with his comments. Again, this is a VERY Russian thing, but also a bit of a dichotomy.

Let me give two personal examples. I was at a pub in Moscow one evening and came across a friend of a friend – this friend knew I was an American and asked me, out of the blue, what my salary was.  I nearly choked on my beer!  Such a direct question would be beyond impolite to a British person or an American.

But to a Russian, it’s second nature to ask such things.  Russians can be uncomfortably direct.  When Shava says things about taxes, it’s much less a negative comment on the English tax system than it is his way of recognizing a difference between Russia and England. Trust me, there are far fewer things he paid for in Russia than he does now in London.

Contrastingly, when I was working in Saint Petersburg, all of my staff were Russians.  Good, well-educated people all. All of them spoke excellent English (thankfully, seeing as my spoken Russian is horrendous).  As the project manager I would sometimes run into problems getting the full picture of things from my staff. They would attend a client meeting and afterwards tell me “Things are great, boss.  No worries,” only to be followed up at our weekly board meeting with the client to learn that things were anything but peachy keen.

I explained to them that it’s difficult to assist them on their tasks if they were not open and honest, even if the news wasn’t positive. They stated, to a person, that they did not want to disappoint me and felt it was better to keep things positive. Russians can also be frustratingly circumspect in their comments and dance around an issue, so to speak.

The last thing I’d like to touch on is the actual language issue – it is an issue because Russians and Westerners simply do not have the same thought-process and that’s reflected directly in the language.

If you’ve got a mate down at the pub you know by first name and perhaps where he works, you probably wouldn’t have a problem telling another person about “this mate of mine down at the pub”.  A Russian would never do that.

So it was with great humor that I read all the comments on the blogs when Andrei first arrived to Arsenal and said that he and Pavlyuchenko weren’t “friends”. Of course that’s what he’d say.  He’s Russian.  He only played with Pav on the national team, never played club football with him and probably wasn’t close socially.  To a Russian, that would make Pav an “acquaintance”, and to a Russian there is an extremely wide gulf between being a friend and being an acquaintance.

During Soviet times, being “friends” with someone could have dire consequences.  You might laugh at that, but the mindset of being overly cautious about naming someone as a friend still persists within the Russian psyche. When Andrei is speaking to a journo from The Sun, for example, he’ll speak English.  He’s gained enough confidence to do so.  However, Russian and English do not translate well.  Andrei is still thinking in Russian, translating as best he can in his head to English, then speaking the English version of what he’d like to say in Russian.  It’s a real hash of a mix, to be honest.

So next time you’re reading some comments from dear Andrei and he drives you to shout “What a wanker! You’re on 60k a week!” – do take a moment to understand that he’s still struggling to acclimatize himself not only to speaking English, but also to thinking less in Russian.  He’s got all the English words, but not yet the nuance of speaking English.  It’s going to take awhile to get the hang of it.

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