cleaners to the Internet); health care (from major vaccines to routine drugs);
food (from sausage and candy to beer and wine); fashion design; leisure and
entertainment activities; and patterns of land-use and beautification (from
landscape architecture to principles of industrial aesthetics). Added to the
above list should also be: major ideologies (from Karl Marx adapted by
Lenin to Milton Friedman adapted by Gaidar), architectural styles (classi-
cism, baroque, etc.), and institutions of power. In most cases, however,
borrowing neither resulted from nor led to blind or mindless imitation. All
the above appropriations were substantially altered or adjusted by the
adoptive country. One may say they were "Russified." "The patriots who
preach that Russia is losing its original ways and its historical peculiarities
are worrying in vain," writes a Russian political scientist. "No matter what
is going on in the country and what innovations are being introduced from
abroad, they are being transformed so completely on our soil that, not
infrequently, an original source or a foreign model, from which these inno-
vations were copied, is hard to recognize." ⁷ And as an historian of Soviet
architecture once pointedly stated, there is an intimate connection between
the questions "Is Russian communism really Russian?" and "What does the
so-called Naryshkin baroque have to do with 17th century Italian baroque?" ⁸
To comprehend the culture of any historic Russian period it is more
essential to explore the nature of the transformation the borrowed ideology,
organization, or style has undergone than to focus on the primordial nature
of what was borrowed.

This assertion is related to the first of the two major research premises:
to truly understand Russia we must understand it on its own terms. If our
first premise concerns the subject of our research, the second one concerns
our research perspective. Andrew Gilg, one of the few Western authorities
in rural geography, once lamented that "general texts on population geog-
raphy tend to devote only a few pages to rural population...which may show
how rural population is inferior to and dependent on an urban civilization." ⁹
The second part of this observation strikes a familiar chord. In the 1980s the
Russian rural research community experienced a split, the forerunner of a
deeper ideological rift yet to come. Certain scholars maintained that the
wretchedness and the overall "idiocy of rural life" in Russia results entirely
from an urbocentric investment policy: countryside was deemed inferior by
the investment planners and so given only the leftovers of urban spending.
Strange as it may seem, the opponents of this view did not discard its
presumption about investment strategy. They simply downplayed the con-
sequences of this presumption by arguing that the root cause of rural back-
wardness lay elsewhere. Namely, many urban areas themselves were too
weak to become sustaining focal points for rural hinterlands, which naturally
depend upon those urban entities in many ways. If a town is itself a god-
forsaken place, what, if anything, could one expect of surrounding villages?

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