Adding to this was a large group of tourists who came to Vytegra for the day. They traveled in mobs from museum to museum, from the Sretensky Cathedral to the Soviet-era submarine, dropping litter, getting lost, and in general being a nuisance.
When some of the tourists stopped me to ask for directions, and I was actually able to explain how to get where they wanted to go, I started to realize how Vytegra has come to feel like a home to me. I know where things are located, which stores are open around the clock, the names of people from different organizations, which cafes are cheaper and have friendlier staff. I even get impatient with out-of-towners. To all outward appearances, I'm a local—until I open my mouth and garble a few words in my silly American accent, that is.
At some point in the morning, I noticed a mother and teenage girl wandering around the cathedral yard, looking lost. Feeling indulgent, I asked them if they were trying to find the entrance to the bell tower. They were, so I showed them where it was and decided on a whim to go check it out myself. I'd already been up there, but this time the weather was nicer, and I was able to take pictures.
Afterward, at lunch, I was introduced to a totally different aspect of life in Vytegra I'd never noticed before. The cafe I normally eat at was closed "due to reasons" (their sign didn't say which reasons), so I went to a different restaurant not far away. Despite it being lunchtime and the streets being full of people, this restaurant was completely empty. The food was delicious, almost exactly the same as at the cafe that was closed, so I could think of no reason why they had no other customers.
Later, Sasha, one of the students I tutor in English, explained it to me. When I told her where I had eaten lunch, she wrinkled her face and exclaimed, "How can you eat their food?" I told her I thought it tasted fine. She shook her head. "No, I mean, how can you eat their food?"
Evidently, the restaurant I had eaten at was run by Caucasians, immigrants from the Caucasus region. Muslims, most likely. Sasha had nothing good to say about them. They come from far away, she told me, and take all the best jobs. They are rich and stingy, dark-skinned and ugly. We don't like them.
Before this, I wouldn't have pegged Sasha as being prejudiced. In fact, at our last lesson, she told me how embarrassed she was by white supremacist groups in Russia, that such racists make their country look bad, and it is wrong to think some people are better than others because of the color of their skin. So I was shocked to hear her so quickly dismiss a whole race of people.
But when she explained further, I started to understand. Sasha's father works for Caucasians. She says that he works long hard hours for them and hardly gets paid a dime, while they sit back and get rich. It seems that the immigrant Caucasian population has formed something like a merchant class here, moving in from the south and running obviously profitable businesses while native Vytegorians (Vytegorites?) struggle to find jobs. So to Sasha (and to a lot of others here), the Caucasians symbolize greed, and she has learned to resent them as a unit based on the position they have taken in society.
This is the first time I felt any sort of racial tension in Russia. I do remember seeing at the open-air marketplace that a couple of the stands were run by women with black scarves wrapped around their heads (Russian women tend to wear more colorful headscarves if they choose to wear one), and a friend of mine warned me to be careful talking to them. Perhaps she only meant that they drive a tough bargain.
Even so, I'm saddened to see racial resentment in this quiet little city. I had heard a lot about problems in Chechnya, in the Caucasus region, in Georgia and so on. But I thought that here, so far removed in the north, people could live peacefully with each other as one. Of course, that was just naivete. Fairy tales, as Ruslan said. Anywhere you go, people will make up reasons to hate one another.
Having learned this, I see Vytegra somehow as a different city. Not necessarily worse—rather, more real, more lifelike. Just like in any city in the U.S., you can find people who are racist, small-minded, willfully ignorant. You can find them here too.
Thus I came to realize that I'm not a local, like I had felt this morning. I'm just a well-informed visitor who can carry out a short conversation in Russian. Many of the nuances of life in Vytegra and in Russia in general are still lost on me, and they will likely remain that way.
Part of me wants to seek out a Caucasian family and get to know them, to find out what their lives are really like, but I only have three days left in Vytegra. This trip was about the Veps people. If I want to find out about Caucasian peoples across Russia, I guess I'll just have to make a separate trip.
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