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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

I have a Russian friend who is adamant that I would really enjoy and have a great time in Russia. IIRC he tells me to go to St Pete more than Moscow.

But I cannot imagine doing that as an American. It kind of makes me wonder if he's messing with me but he hates Russia and Putin and I don't know why he would. I feel like I would be so unsafe. I'm a very "American" looking person and I only know a handful of Russian words. Well, I guess I look more German, blonde/blue eyed.

Maybe just very different apprehensions when it comes to travel. He seems to be willing to go to literally anywhere.

Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.

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If you go to russia there is a chance of you being arrested on made-up charge just to be used as exchange fund for russian spies or arm dealers arrested in the west. Look up Paul Whelan, Brittney Griner, Michael Calvey, Trevor Reed, and most recently Travis Leake.

or Evan Gershkovich. St Pete was a wonderful city to visit before the 2014 invasion, now I think it's too risky

Oh yeah I know all about our people over there. Not a chance I'd go post 2014 unless a revolution happens.

They're all sad stories but there's a ballerina who lived in California for decades and was a US citizen (If you were ever Russian, Russia doesn't recognize your new state, you're always Russian) who was arrested last year when visiting I believe a grandma. Her charge was that she donated $25 to a Ukranian refugee fund. She had a few articles last year but not much keeping her in the news. She's going to have a tough time being an immigrant from Russia who donated to Ukraine. I don't think she has a chance of getting out and the women penal colonies like IK-14 are essentially slave factories.

The Ukraine war has taught me a lot about how Russia treats peope, especially women. Field Wives, et al. Now they're releasing female prisoners to Storm Z groups to go to the front line.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/04/world-news/ksenia-karelinas-le...

https://www.rferl.org/a/notorious-russian-women-s-prison-hel...

I imagine your friend is genuine. During undergrad/before 2014 I attended a summer school (https://www.jass.school) in St. Peterburg. I found the city to be welcoming, almost European in ambiance, with friendly university students. It never felt too foreign or unsafe. In my experience, St. Peterburg is as distinct from how I imagine Moscow as San Francisco is from Dallas, Texas.

(edit: I have no idea how it’d feel nowadays, and won’t visit Russia atm either.)

    > almost European in ambiance

It should. SPB is in the European part of Russia.

So is Moscow. So is the vast majority of the population of Russia.

I'd skip Russia and Ukraine right now for obvious reasons. But I have a friend who managed to visit St. Peterburg before the current war and was quite impressed.

> He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.

Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?

I live near a Russian Orthodox church. People complain about the congregants, but mostly about their parking. A house opposite the church as a Ukrainian flag prominently hung; on the other hand one of the congregants has a sticker of the Ukrainian flag with the don't-tread-on-me rattlesnake. I don't think most Americans care enough to be rude to Russians.

We visited St. Petersburg some years ago, probably 2012. I very much enjoyed the visit. Everyone seemed to be much too preoccupied to give a damn where we came from. The cases of Griner, Gershkovich, and the NCO in Vladivostok do make one wonder about the prospects of American tourists.

> Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?

There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic language most Americans know about.

Unfortunately it's just due to the number of people. It's unlikely a random person could tell a difference between Polish and Russian, much less Ukrainian and Russian.

I doubt many Russians can tell the difference between Ukrainian and Polish either. I unironically think that some of them convinced themselves they were fighting Polish mercenaries just because they heard western Ukrainian accents.

Not true.

Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close.

Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.

There is a bigger lexical distance between UA and RU than between UA and PL: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances...

Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course.

For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc).

In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this.

Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days.

But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).

As a Pole I have a similar reaction to Czech and Slovak. Except it feels less like a strange accent (because we don’t have these as much) and more like baby talk. We get the words, just how they’re used feels unusual, and often funny.

From the other side, my Czech friends told me that Polish sounded to them like something from deep antiquity. Like reading an ancient manuscript where again you get the words but no sane person these days would use them like this.

Yup - Polish is in a different family (Western Slavic), with lots of unknown words and a different phoneme density that immediately lights up as "foreign".

I doubt most of Ukrainians knows Ukrainian language.

Not a Ukrainian but I know a good few. The language is taught at schools so you if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it. Whether you choose to use it is a different matter. And data would suggest that the usage is on the rise.

I've been in Ukraine last year and one thing I noticed that while people speak in Russian or in a dialect in private, they instantly switch to Ukrainian in public, like when ordering an ice cream from the street stall. They then switch back among them. It's fascinating how things changed in a few years.

That what I mean above, most people don't speak "modern Ukrainian". Even the language itself drastically changed on TV just in years.

> if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it

My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.

Ukrainians should pray to USSR because of active Stalin times ukrainization.

If only there were some way of fact checking such a claim . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine

This is meant in jest, of course.

I'm Norwegian. For my first few years living in the UK people regularly asked if I was Polish when they heard my accent. It seems a lot of people just try to map an accent to one of a very few stereotypes whether or not it fits, and if it doesn't they assume [nationality they've recently read about]. It changed to Romanian - which notably sounds nothing like Polish - after the papers moved on to worrying about Romanian immigrants.

They won't know you're American until you open your mouth. There is such a wide variety of phenotypes in SPB that people will just assume you are a Russian. Russians these days mostly have friendly excited reactions to foreigners speaking English in public.

I'm OP you're replying to. I've lived all over Europe, mainly Germany. You can absolutely tell Americans from other crowds by clothes/style and mannerisms.

Just like I can easily tell if someone is British or Australian (not that they look the same, but easy to discern which is which usually).

An Italian once; "Americans walk confidently in the wrong direction."

> Russians these days mostly have friendly excited reactions to foreigners speaking English in public.

That does not need to be a good thing, though. :D

It's a shame. I'd love to visit St. Petersburg, but the window of history where I could do that in relative ease and safety is closed.

Many years ago a friend went to Syria in its brief window of peace, and visited some of the incredibly well preserved Roman sites. I hope they're still OK.

I went, too. Unfortunately at least some sites are not okay: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-is... (2015).

St Petersburg is beautiful and quite lovely. Or well, I don't know now, but it was before the war.

To be honest I've watched a ton of Russian YouTube content and on these videos the Russian cities doesn't seem affected. Just forget your visa/mastercard

> St Petersburg is beautiful and quite lovely.

You've been to the city center. The outskirts are dull even by Russian standards. Because of the soil there, they tend to build high-rise residential buildings spaced by 500m to 1km. Streets run in-between, there are occasional malls and that's it.

Russia is a lot like west if you stick to the big cities. Sometimes it's "more western than the west", some people just eat in fast-food chains. Well, at least when I was there before the war.

> But I cannot imagine doing that as an American. It kind of makes me wonder if he's messing with me but he hates Russia and Putin and I don't know why he would. I feel like I would be so unsafe. I'm a very "American" looking person and I only know a handful of Russian words. Well, I guess I look more German, blonde/blue eyed.

Now I’m imagining a flat with some Russian friends where they take turns throwing darts at pictures of Biden. Or Obama.

I don’t know why you think that Russians or whatever else would make an American unsafe. I mean what would they even care/have against you.

> Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.

Well talking about your country of origin is the most natural thing to do in those contexts.

> Well talking about your country of origin is the most natural thing to do in those contexts.

Someone out enjoying their night with friends doesn't want to constantly have to explain that they're from Russia, where in Russia, no not Moscow, 3 hours from Moscow, no I don't like Putin, no I don't support the war, etc etc over and over to random drunks.

I am glad that most (if not all) of the people we encounter aren't rude and assume he supports Putin/war, etc. That's usually what I expect to come out of someones mouth once they find out he's Russian.

It's funny but personally I'd feel less safe traveling to the USA. The chance of finding myself in the midst of a mass shooting terrifies me. Also being robbed, being involved in a road rage accident. If I was black I'd add to that the possibility of being subjected to police abuse. Without considering the chance I'm for some reason snatched and imprisoned in Guantanamo for the rest of my life without any legal process.

Yeah it's like Mad Max over here. I'm sure Russia doesn't have tons of road rage (wait, didn't the dashcam trend start there?), may have less guns but rape and domestic violence is absolutely insane (and dv is legal now), and Russia absolutely treats black people with respect (oh wait now the battlefield is full of dead minority conscripts hmm).

Maybe the USA just has a lot more news outlets. We don't have Oblasts or little shanty towns full of drunk war criminals committing rapes and crimes that don't get reported because the Oblast/town has no local news agency and everything they learn on the news is filtered through VK. There is a university on the border of Ukraine (30mins or so in I believe) where they kicked out ALL of the students living there and filled it up with village evacuees and men who are in between going to the front line. They basically took over an entire college and were sexually assaulting/harassing the young students. There is one news article about it off of telegram and it's never been updated, happened a year ago.

Not a single American thinks about Guantanamo Bay in their day to day life that isn't a public defender.

I'm on a LOT of Russian telegram channels since they started the war. Nearly all Russians get their news off of Telegram or vk and it's basically all community sourced news. If the gov doesn't want you to hear about it you won't. A LOT of stuff goes on that you only hear about if you go to that specific telegrams news channel (often for an Oblast/city/town). A LOT of people don't report any news at all because they don't want to get harassed by the government.

Funny comment though. Curious where you're from.

Do share a few links to stories about the border town rampage and any other particularly notable incidents, if you can.

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