Only in Russia: Better to have 100 friends than 100 rubles

Quarantine has come to town. In Moscow and many parts of Russia you can now only move around when you have a special permit. You can get such a special permit for work, to seek medical care and twice a week for personal reasons.

For 26 years I have lived right in the center of Moscow, in the Khamovnikiy district. The Khamovnikiy district, literally bordering the fortified red brick walls of the Kremlin, is as central as it gets in Moscow. Living in the center of a megacity like Moscow is a special experience. Moscow is the 11th biggest city in the world and the 4th biggest city in the world if we include the greater metropolitan area. It is a beautiful city while at the same time it never gets dark at night, it is never quiet, the air is filled with dust and sooth and the buzz of traffic and people never stops. From where I live, it is asphalt, bricks, concrete and cars for approximately 20 kilometers in whatever direction my eye reaches.

Quarantine in the confinement of a Moscow apartment feels like solitary confinement in a big megapolitan prison. Surprisingly, I woke up with the call of a rooster this morning. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes I heard some frogs croaking and the wind rustling though the leaves of the trees. Yes, last night I was so lucky to escape the urban prison and continue my solitary confinement in a beautiful log cabin in the woods twenty-five kilometers outside of Moscow. For the coming months, I will live a hermit’s life surrounded by nature instead of a prisoner’s life surrounded by walls.

Sitting outside in the sun, on the porch of the log cabin, I count my blessings. The blessings I count do not relate to financial riches. They relate to the friendships I made in the last 26 years in Russia. Russians say it is better to have 100 friends than a hundred rubles. The log cabin in which I hide from the corona virus is a proof of that Russian saying. My dearest friend, who is the owner of the log cabin, invited me to stay there for as long as I want.

Friendship in Russia is unconditional and infinite. There is no calculation between friends. Friends become like family after some years. Russians use the term ‘rodnoi’ for this. ‘Rodnoi’ can apply to someone who is related by birth but also to a friend who became very close. The meaning of the word ‘Rodnoi’ is hard to directly translate into any other language. You could translate it as ‘being of the same blood’.

Russia opened my eyes and my heart to friendships like this. Unconditional friendships that are not questioned and that do not need to be proven. Friendships that simply are there, like the blue sky I now see over the tops of the pine trees around my log cabin. Learning about friendship from Russians taught me to be a better friend myself. In addition to my own family in Holland, my friends in Moscow, Irkutsk, Lisbon and Haifa turned into ‘rodnije ludiy’, people of ‘my own flesh and blood’. Family that is no birth-family but chosen family. There is a special value in that.

When someone recently asked me: “Jeroen, why aren’t you staying in your own dacha (country house)?”, I answered that my own dacha is occupied by a friend who has been living there since he lost his apartment six years ago. While giving this answer, I realized that Russia changed me in a positive way. I learned that giving and receiving feels natural in real friendships. That sometimes, you don’t even notice the exchange at all. The friendship simply is, and everything that happens inside the friendship is an inseparable part of it. In the same way as I didn’t think about my friend living in my dacha, causing me to live in the log cabin of my friend until a third friend asked me about it.

Da, ‘lutshe sto druzey, tjem sto rubley’. Yes, better to have 100 friends than 100 rubles. 

by Jeroen Ketting