A Feature that I had to write...

[DolphinDevil28]

I take Feature Writing, a mass communications class at LSU.

I had to do a personality profile on an individual important to the LSU community.

There is a Russian Politics teacher who has traveled to Russia several times, and I think he's interesting. So I did it on him.

Tell me what you think. It's kind of long, but interesting.

Give me some feedback!





Rustin Legendre

MC 3002


The teacher strutted in holding a stack of blue books. He plops them on the old stained wooden desk as he announces “I have the tests graded.” His collared dark gray shirt contrasts the dirty green chalkboard behind him as he lays out the not-so-great results of the all-essay exams. Sliding on his reading glasses, the numbers start spewing out that make nineteen and twenty year olds squirm in their seats. At no other time in their lives would they care one iota about old Leninist or Stalinist regimes. But right now, a small fraction of their collegiate careers hang in the balance as they awaited the returns of their Russian Politics tests.
Don’t let the stern voice that permeates the room announcing the mediocre results from the exam fool you. Dr. William Clark has a great sense of humor and some very interesting stories to tell. Today as he was giving tests back, students were nervous. Anxious to see the results of their coffee binges and studying till three o’clock in the morning. Usually though, they sit in the tightly compacted classroom with the white walls that reflect light on to the filthy brown floor enjoying Dr. Clark’s tales of his visits to Russia.
Dr. Clark has been there pre and post Communist era. But there he was, his first couple of times going there, feeling intimidated. As he walked around the streets he couldn’t help but to feel a little weary of authority under the Communist rule. “They could do with me what they wanted to. In the United States, you don’t have to walk around and constantly look over your shoulder for authority. It’s almost like you were there naked.”
Clark walks around the streets near Red Square feeling like he’s on another planet. Native Russians pass him by and give him odd looks. Long blank stares. It’s almost romantic in a way. Like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story.
As he passes the church there are women dressed in black, sitting slouched-like on the front steps. Their heads hang and the hoods of their shrouds hide their eyes. A passer-by will only catch a glimpse of one of their faces every once in a while. They are begging for money. Hoping for a few coins, or “roubles,” as they are called in Russia. This is a strange sight for such an atheistic and state-ownership driven society. During the Soviet rule, money meant barely anything, and the church was state owned so they could force their preference of religion on people.
The contrast, however, between attitudes of native Russians on the street and when they were in the confines of their own homes is as stark as any. Dr. Clark had friends who traveled with him to Russia, as well as friends who lived there. They walked into the house which was dimly lit and very stoic. He remembers how the change in personality was palpable once they got inside walls and under a roof. “On the street, there was no communication whatsoever. Just people looking at you. But once we got inside their homes, we were received quite well by them. They were very friendly.” As Dr. Clark and his friends were sitting at the table, enjoying the sudden sharp rise in hospitality, he was noticing the Russians asking more and more about life in America. In a time when the Cold War was still ongoing, Clark noticed something as they sat in the old Russian house with bad lighting. He thought to himself, these people are not getting the truth about America. Here they are, stuck in this propaganda laden society getting fed all this stuff about how bad and evil Americans are. His Russian friends kept inquiring him. One question after another. They were starved for the truth, and Clark was eager to give it to them. This was not the last time nights like this one rich with conversation about life in the United States occurred. Clark walked in the door, sat down and the conversation started again. After a few minutes, the Russian alcohol was brought out. He remembers there were many drunken nights conversing about life and recalls that at the same time, it was an “oddity.”



As he stepped onto the ship, the pattering of shoes and clanging of Russian geologist instruments against the hard steel of the boat resonated through the cold Siberian air. The voices of crew members as they gave instructions and a few spare laughs were heard in the background. Dr. Clark was boarding on a huge Russian vessel and they were headed to Lake Baikal. As he was almost to the point of mastering the Russian language, a group of geologists were planning on doing research on Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. They told Clark they needed something similar to a translator; someone familiar with Russian culture. They called on him and he agreed to go. Clark recalls how easy he had it on the trip. “Here we are on this big Russian boat with a whole bunch of scientists, and me! Like what the hell am I going to do? All I had to do was ride on this ship and stop at these places. I got to sight-see.” The ship sailed. The waves were rolling. All of a sudden Clark hears an uproar as he sees one of the crew members vomiting over the side of the boat. From that point on, the Dramamine was flowing. Vomit started to become the theme of the trip as the waves crashed into the boat throwing the men around and doing something awful to their stomachs. “There’s vomit all over the place!” Clark says with a sly smirk on his face as if he was thinking “this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” There were forty people on the ship, mostly scientists. It seemed like every one of them puked at one point during the excursion.
After performing their geology experiments, the scientists and Clark reached land. They walked off the ship onto the barren tundra. There were a few houses, maybe a village here and there. “We were way off the beaten path,” claimed Dr. Clark. As the boots of the crew members crunched the ice below them, kids came out to greet the men. They looked at Dr. Clark strangely like he came to life straight out of an alien comic book. The children had never seen an American before. Dazed looks of curiosity and awe swept across their faces. This was a place where few people outside of Russia itself visited. They wondered what he would be like. How would he treat them? Dr. Clark reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a stick of bubble gum. He handed it to the children. They thought it was gold. They ran inside to show their families what they had just been given. It could have been a one hundred dollar bill for all they cared, it was just something different. Right then and there is when Clark realized how different children in Russia had it than children in the United States. As the kids returned outside, they played tag, ran around, and were acting like, well, kids. “I guess wherever you go kids are going to be kids,” he recalled.
As they returned to the ship, it was dinner time. The smell was amazing. There was an old stocky Russian woman cooking for the crew. She looked as if she enjoyed a few of her own recipes in her day. She brought out the meal. It was a Russian treat. Dumplings. They were meat, stuffing or sometimes fish covered in dough and deep fried. “Oh these are so damn good,” exclaimed Clark. “That was definitely my favorite trip to Russia. The sight-seeing, the food and being able to relax was great. Well, except for all the damn throwing up.”



The sly looking woman walked hastily as the sweat poured off her brow. Her hands were holding her trench overcoat closed tightly. Her feet kicked up rocks and dirt from the ground while her head swayed back and forth as if it was on a swivel. She was keeping a keen eye out for anyone noticing her actions. She passed strangers and approached others. “Where is the state duma?” “Where is the duma?” she asked. Onlookers and passers-by began to grow suspicious. As the broad daylight gleamed down on Red Square where this was happening, the hotel where Dr. Clark was staying sat across the busy street. He noticed all this from his room. “You could see people were starting to get really suspicious of this lady. What the hell was she doing?” The woman kept inquiring where the state duma, the Russian “house of representatives” if-you-will, was. She asked to no avail. Dr. Clark noticed her walk into a building across the street. That was when the blast happened. The woman was a Chechen rebel. She was looking for the Russian government building to commit a suicide bombing. She ended up blowing up a lobby of some random Moscow hotel, killing twelve people.
Clark vividly recalls experiences like the suicide bomber because they are residue from the dreadful Communist rule which ended in the early 1990’s. He’s seen first hand what happened during the era of the iron fist and what remained when it dissolved.
He recalls another story that illustrates the leftover fear and impact on society that the Communist rule cast. An African American exchange student was visiting Russia. The girl who he was staying with decided to take him and some of her other friends to her mother’s home and let her cook dinner for them. As the meal was being prepared and served, the girl’s mother called her to the kitchen. The people sitting at the dining room table only saw the arm and hand of the cook reaching out from the doorway. She handed the dishes and food to her daughter to bring back to the table. That was the last of the girl’s mother the guests saw. Well, of her arm at least. She grew up during Joseph Stalin’s regime, when he oppressed civilians like it was a hobby and terrorized natives like it was a sport. The fear stayed with her even though Stalin was long gone. Contact with foreigners or even looking at them was punishable by law. The old woman did not want to be accused of espionage. She did not want to even lay her eyes on the African man. Dr. Clark found this to be very strange yet interesting. “This just illustrates the oppression that Stalin hung over the head of native Russians. He really was ruthless. Here it was some twenty-five years after Stalin, and the woman is still petrified of him and obeys by his oppressive rules.”
There is also evidence of leftover poverty from the Communist rule. “If someone of importance came to Russia, there was a carefully choreographed itinerary of where they would go and what they would see. They orchestrated a trip. There would be a “spontaneous” stop at a grocery store that was stocked full of food. There would be shoppers and everything seemed great. But the whole thing was completely staged and fabricated. The shoppers were hired as actors, and if you’d go down the street to another store, the shelves would be barren and there was no one in the building. It was like a movie set. No authority wanted a visitor to know that the Communist rule and state ownership left the Russian economy crippled and in shambles,” explains Clark.



“I started as an electrical engineering major in college. I was good at math. But I was miserable,” Clark exclaimed. He wasn’t always an expert on Russian society and politics. “There was no reason for me to be interested in Russia. I had no family there, no connections. I just thought it was cool stuff. I actually just kind of fell into it.”
It was 1979. Clark and his buddies were excited about a student trip to Russia. When they were there, they had a good time and Dr. Clark realized he wanted to return. He wanted to return in a professional manner, which meant he’d have to learn the language. “What better way to learn the Russian language than to be there?” He now travels to Russia on sponsored trips every one or two years.
The students in Williams Clark’s Russian Politics class can thank Lady Luck for him just “falling into it” as he did. They enjoy hearing the experiences of the man who lives his work so often. That is, on the days that they are not nervous about getting graded tests back.

[Roman529]

As a poli sci major/graduate who took many courses in east european politics, the soviet union, and politics of the kremlin, I give your piece two thumbs up. I remember my favorite teacher getting us to memorize the names and locations of every one of the former soviet republics and telling us (back in the early 1980's) that every one of the regions would become independent in a matter of years....Democracy won out!!