Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold and With Some Assembly Required

Let us take a walk through history. Imagine yourself in a simpler time. A time when men were men, women were women, and children were cheap farm labor. A time when Russia’s strategic war planning included at least three words that weren’t “big and cold” and, using this deep reserve of military cunning, they managed to fight a war and win it without actually, you know, losing at the same time (as based on any reasonable calculus that refuses to recognize as “winning” any victory gained at the price of the death of over 10% percent of your citizenry, the razing of your entire economic infrastructure, the total desolation of your territory, and the thorough and long-lasting suck of your relationship with all other countries not ruled by mad Latin American dictators).

Yes, Russia won the Great Northern War of 1721, according what is quite probably the worst written and least informative Wikipedia article ever, save the interesting observation that “Peter the Great tried to enhance his army’s morale to Swedish levels.” I’m not sure what this means, but it sure sounds like a lot more fun than the Russian army has ever had, before or since. Anyway, “I beat up Sweden and took its lunch money” was apparently the sort of thing that got you bragging rights on the international playground of 1721, as opposed to today, when you would probably not want to spread that around too freely unless you had managed to couple it with an invasion of Belgium or something else equally difficult. But this was impressive enough in 1721 that Peter the Great felt compelled to construct an entire palatial estate centered on a monument to his victory. It was as classy and restrained as all the other monuments the tsars had built to themselves had been. The representation of Sweden as a lion with its jaws being pried open by a very muscly Pete was, in the end, really very tasteful.

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As you can see from the gushing fountain coming out of the lion's mouth, Peter the Great’s morale levels were very Swedish indeed.

So the Swedes have had a good long time to seethe about this indignity and, due to the happy convergence of remote geography, bizarre weather, and total international irrelevance, no one has paid the slightest attention to them for the last 250 years while they have plotted revenge. And revenge they have plotted. Here is the Swedish response, a monument planted on Russian soil, on the outskirts of the very city founded to protect the territory that Russia wrested away from them:

Touche, Pussycat. Touche.

Inspired by Obama’s message of freedom to the oppressed corners of the world, this last weekend I made my pilgrimage out to Ikea, all in the name of supporting the still fledging capitalist economy of the former Second World, of course, and also to get some pillows and a duvet. I joined with undisguised glee in the universal human experience of pondering questions like “Do I want the Melbu or the Mongstad?” and “What the hell do these words mean?” And I don’t care that I had to walk to the metro through a snowstorm, take a 30 minute ride to the end of the line and stand up in a packed shuttle for 20 minutes, and then do the same on the way back but with two enormous shopping bags. It was entirely worth it.

I’ve never actually been to an Ikea in America, but there’s probably nothing particularly Russian about the Ikea in St. Petersburg, except perhaps that the suggested route through the store eerily mirrors the USSR’s roadmap to communism:

I believe if you look more closely at Lenin’s writings, you will see that he indeed laid out a path to the socialist utopia that began with dishes (посуда) and culminated in houseplants (растения).

But really, what makes going to the Ikea in Russia so worthwhile isn’t that it’s Russian, but quite the opposite. It’s just so unexpected. Russia obviously isn’t the Soviet Union anymore, so there are plenty of stores, and plenty of them are international chains, and plenty of those chains don’t exactly blend in with the landscape. (The KFC on Nevsky Prospekt throws me for a loop every time. Quick, name one place on the planet that is less like Kentucky. The bottom of the ocean doesn’t count.) But almost all home goods in Russia are sold in kassa stores that are cramped, sort of flea-market feeling affairs, with everything jumbled together and slightly dented at the edges. You just never expect to walk into a huge open space in which are sold thousands of polished home products, all of them with umlauts on their labels, and none of them behind a counter manned by an evolved Neanderthal.

Everyone who lives abroad, I’m sure, feels at least some (much?) of the time like they’re existing in a weird planet outside of space time, and in certain cases, populated exclusively by people who hate them. What I am trying to say is that there are times when living in Russia can feel isolating. Which is why I am happy to write to you now cozily wrapped in my very own Mysa Strå and reclining against two puffy Löktravs, just like thousands of other 22-year-olds on a budget around the world. Tomorrow I will probably try and fail once more to find salad dressing; I will astound my Russian professor with my inability to form imperatives; and I will incur the wrath of the cashier at my grocery store when I can’t make change. But now I know that when it becomes too much, there is a place where I can return and wander lost among the aisles of bedspreads and cabinets, secure in the knowledge that no one else knows around me knows what Löktrav means, either. And that’s enough for me.