By Stephen Wilson
(Moscow, Russia) - 'We are all murderers and prostitutes ' theatrically declared R.D. Laing in his work 'The Politics of Experience'. It sounds almost like a platitude, but we all compromise ourselves with evil in one way or another. As soon as you pay money for goods in a supermarket, you are already compromising with the capitalist system. It is irrelevant whether you claim to be an anarchist or socialist. A teacher, in a sense, sells his brains in exchange for money. Perhaps his main motive is to genuinely serve the community, but it is difficult if not impossible to deny that the need to bring in bread is at least one factor in motivating his work. Therefore, it makes sense not to be too self-righteous about certain cases, especially if we don't fully understand the full details of a person's predicament!
It is all to easy for a teacher to inadvertently stumble into ridiculous situations where they look as if they are colluding or compromising with something such as, say prostitution. Some recent cases of Russian teachers alleged to 'be on the game' may well be more complex than we assume.
I will offer two stories from my life to illustrate the point. When I was a young man I visited the city of Frankfurt for the first time. I unwittingly was walking along a pleasant street when a cheerful and friendly man rushed out of a pub and invited me into his place for a drink. They thrust a bottle of Champagne on me and wavered me to a corner of the pub. I presumed it was just hospitality. The next minute an obese prostitute turned up to sit next to me. It dawned on me that I had dropped into a brothel.
'What will you have? What will you pay for her services?,' the pimp asked me.
'Nothing. I thought this was just a pub.'
A typical mean Englishman 'angrily retorted, a German prostitute.
'I'm not English, but Scottish. I'm sorry but I don't have any money. I have to leave.'
I rushed out, but the pimp who followed me pursued me and even assaulted me.
'Don't come back you cheap skate.'
It was too late. I had lost a lot of my money and got stuck in Paris without a penny for the return fare home.
The second problem I encountered was in Moscow where I was asked to teach a particular woman who did not know any English. I came to her twice to instruct her. She was quite kind and caring and paid me. I realised there was something odd about how the place was decorated. And then from all the translating I was doing, I realised that this woman was most likely a prostitute. Not only that. She was in the process of packing her suitcase and going abroad. Was she quitting the apartment soon? Doing a bunk?
When I left I went down the stairway (l don't trust the lifts) and on my way, I met an angry courtyard caretaker who eyed me suspiciously.
'Where have you been? What are you up to? Let me see your passport!'
I answered, 'You have no legal right to examine my passport. You don't have any authority to do this'.
This only made him incensed. I rushed out. He pursued me, cursing me, shouting, 'I will call the militia.' Later, it occurred to me that me might have presumed I was the client of this prostitute. My student, who had not paid me, insisted I return to get paid. She did not have change at the time. I never returned. Given the troubles this poor student was experiencing, I thought she needed the money more than me.
What if such a silly situation arose for some Russian teachers? After all, it is sometimes difficult to discern who is and is not a prostitute. I noticed that a lot of young Russians were wearing very sexy high heeled boots, which are traditionally favoured by prostitutes in Europe. I thought, maybe the rise in prostitution has exploded. An American came to the same conclusion. We later learned that those women were not prostitutes, but it was one of the new fashions which had hit Moscow!
In a school in the Volgogonsky region, the students were doing an exam. The supervising teacher made the mistake of leaving the classroom, as well as his electronic notebook, on his desk. The students crept up to the desk to examine his notebook to see if they could find the exam answers. Instead of finding the answers, they found some titillating photos showing his partner apparently advertising her services. The woman in question turned out to be a current teacher! A student recorded all this on a flashcard and revealed it to the media. The result was a scandal, and a school angrily accusing the students of 'hooliganism.' Whether the school students were disciplined for cheating remains unclear.
This is not all. In recent months, the media have focused on some cases of young school teachers supplementing their meagre income by prostitution.
Prostitution is not even concealed in Moscow. A magazine by the name 'Flirt' is openly handed out to anyone passing by. It is free of charge! The magazine openly provides the phone numbers and photos of agencies which provide the services of prostitutes.
However, it is a huge indictment of the Russian government that they can 't provide teachers with a decent living income and that some are resorting to extreme cases to just get by! It is almost a rarity to come across a young school teacher in a Russian state school. The vast majority of teachers are either middle-aged or elderly. Of a class of Russian English teachers, I was supposed to lecture, I came across only one or two young students out of a class of forty! If there are young school teachers, they are almost always doing another job, such as private tuition, business, or Lord preserve us, moonlighting in one of the oldest professions; prostitution.
Interestingly, whether those teachers can carry on working in the schools, this remains an open question. Russia is not quite America, and can work in different ways.
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