Faith in Progress

with fewer than a dozen permanent residents remaining in our village, our village of Chukhrai would not seem to be high on the list of priorities for politicians seeking electoral support. However, when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched a national project to put a phone in every Russian village, clearly he meant every village.

It appeared one day without warning: a small, plastic, blue oval with a bright red payphone under its protruding crown. The whole apparatus, about the size of a one-mirror medicine cabinet, was perched on a short pole planted right where the forest road opened onto the village. A small antenna entwined with electric wire rose skyward. The bare end of the wire hung lifelessly, a good six feet from the electric pole to which it was destined to be connected. The new installation stood out like a sore thumb against the grey and brown backdrop of the familiarly dilapidated fronts of the village houses.

Passing by one day while out walking with my boys, I did a double take. “What the heck is that?” I thought. Surely I wasn’t the only one in the village harboring the same thought. At least I had seen payphones in my lifetime, albeit far from here, while likely some of the villagers had not. Further hindering comprehension was the fact that I couldn’t figure out why in the world the village needed such a bequest. First, most of the villagers have no one to call. Even the concept of a phone call is foreign to them, a contingency reserved only for dire emergencies – someone is gravely ill, or dead, or has been robbed by roving gypsies.

Igor and I certainly didn’t need it. Cell phone coverage now reaches our village spottily, and we rely on our mobile phones, although we have to sit with our ear plastered to the window or climb on the roof to get a connection. A couple others have cell phones, presents given to them by sons or nieces. I have watched them clamber atop piles of firewood to get a signal. More than once, our Postlady had brought me her phone in a plastic bag and asked me to dial a number for her, as she didn’t know how to use it.

Puzzled, I studied the blue and red thing from afar. Then I mustered up the courage to approach. My boys ran ahead and quickly found a use for it, climbing the pole and pushing the buttons. “Cool!” they cried. I picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone. How could there be? The wires were not hooked up to the electric pole. Then I noticed something else that struck me as peculiar. The payphone does not accept coins. Instead of the usual coin slot, the phone has a place to insert a special phone card, the kind that one purchases at a post office or kiosk. The nearest post office or kiosk that might carry such cards is the district center of Suzemka – 40 miles away. Even so, in a day and age when most people have cell phones, I doubt that even a large town has a surplus of such cards. To add insult to injury, anyone desperate enough to make a local phone call on this new apparatus would most likely be calling someone in Suzemka. Yet, one would first have to go there to get a phone card.

It seemed absurd. I laughed heartily and thought, “Russia!” It was the excuse that anyone who had lived here long enough (Russians, first and foremost) gave for all the absurdity that could not be otherwise explained. As 19th century poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:

Умом Россию не понять

Аршином общим не измерить

У ней особенная стать

В Россию можно только верить

You cannot understand Russia with your mind.

You can’t measure it with universal dimensions.

Russia has something special.

In Russia you must simply believe.

Then I noticed something that seemed to offer an explanation. In small letters above the card slot were printed the words “In case of emergency, dial 001 – Fire, 002 – Police, 003 – Ambulance.”

Suddenly, I grasped its purpose. Villagers in extreme need could call for help for free. Presumably, help would be dispatched and eventually arrive, if the road was dry enough to be passable or the emergency services had an off-road vehicle.

Well, that was worth something, I supposed. It was true that I could never remember how to dial emergency services from a cell phone. There was some strange combination of numbers that had to be used that I had yet to commit to memory. Here was an answer, then, in case of an emergency.

Then I remembered that when our neighbor Trofimova died, we managed to get through to the authorities, but they never came. And there was the time when gypsies robbed a villager. After many fruitless calls to the police, Igor finally jumped on our mare, galloped down the lane, and caught the perpetrators himself. If villagers got very sick and required medical assistance, usually we had to drive them to the hospital, as no ambulance could make it down our treacherous road. The time my son cut his wrist open on a wire fence, we jumped in the jeep and raced down the road to the hospital to get stitches, not even stopping to think about calling ahead for help. And if a fire were to break out, God forbid, surely the old wooden timbers of a cabin would burn to the ground before one could even run to the phone.

Yet, progress is progress. After a 300-year history without a single landline, the village finally had one to showcase. All that remained was for one to have faith that the electricians would eventually make it to the village to hook it up, and that, once connected, it would work, and that, if one did need to call for help, help would indeed arrive. Faith is a wonderful thing. It has seen generations of Russians through good times and bad.

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, but did not arrive in Russia until July 1882, when the first telephone stations were opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The first subscribers were wealthy merchants. By 1917, Russia has 232,000 phone lines, half of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg.