Why a mild climate produces soft faces – and Russia doesn’t
For several months now, people around the world have been trying to imitate what social media has dubbed the “Slavic gaze.” The results are usually disappointing. Instead of a calm, inward look, we see squinting or exaggerated menace, often extremely theatrical. Kind, open people pull faces that look like bad acting. Americans, in particular, seem fascinated by the idea, but they rarely get it right. This is not a makeup tutorial or a filter. It is a cultural code.
So far, only one American public figure consistently manages it: Melania Trump. She is Slovenian. She looks out from under her hat the right way.
At the end of January, the Slavic stare made an unexpected appearance in American newspapers. A snowstorm hit several US states, and the headlines were dramatic: “People buried under rubble.”“The elderly stranded without food.”“Railway tracks cracking from frost.”“Engines destroyed by cold.” Alongside these stories were photographs of people staring at the camera with a familiar, unmistakable expression.
I recognized it immediately.
How much snow had they actually received? Frankly, not that much. Certainly not by central Russian standards. I grew up in Siberia. I have never seen snowdrifts as tall as those sometimes produced by neural networks pretending to depict Kamchatka, but I remember winters when the first person leaving the building in the morning simply could not open the door. Ground-floor doors in Russia almost never open inward for a reason: snow piles up overnight and presses against them, pushing cold into the stairwell. In remote villages, doors still open inward – to keep bears out.
Yes, bears. Bears are strangely reluctant to push doors; they try to pull them toward themselves. This is not folklore. Life teaches you such things when you visit villages where bears roam freely.
What kind of face do you expect a person to have if they know this?
What kind of expression develops when you have dug out the entrance to your building more than once, only to watch fresh snow fall immediately onto the path you just cleared?
For hundreds of generations, survival here has required physical effort simply to remain alive. From the outside, it looks like a hopeless struggle: you shovel snow, more falls; you clear a path, it disappears again. This cycle repeated for centuries, until tractors and chemicals finally intervened. What kind of gaze emerges from that?
Our people have only recently stopped planning their lives around stoves and snow. In Russia, the planning horizon has always been long. Ideally, firewood should dry for three years. Our ancestors cut birch and alder, chopped and stacked it, knowing they would burn it years later. If they lived that long, of course. Imagine looking at neatly stacked firewood every day while knowing you might not survive to use it, in a world without antibiotics or modern medicine.
Gloom is not a personality flaw. It is an inheritance.
I often hear that Russians are lazy. We used to say this about ourselves. In the 1990s it was fashionable to joke about our supposed clumsiness compared to industrious Americans. I laughed too, until I began traveling. Then I saw how people live in mild climates. You do not cut trees in the taiga in freezing temperatures. You do not build cinemas on permafrost. You do not grow seedlings on windowsills or maintain heated greenhouses for crops. Your houses are made of cardboard, so insulation is minimal. You barely pay for heating. You do not need serious winter clothing.
You have time. You have money. So why do you live so poorly?
In Italy one autumn, I developed an ear infection. There was no ENT doctor on duty for the entire region over the weekend. Heating the hospital was apparently too expensive. The temperature outside was 12 C.
Even within Russia, people from warmer regions misunderstand this reality. I have often heard southerners say that Siberians look stern. When I was in school, I visited St. Petersburg and met girls from Sochi in a museum. “I’ve been to Tyumen,” one said. “I didn’t like it. Your faces are stern, like hammers.”
You are 40 now, dear girl, but you probably still don’t know what four real seasons are.
In a sharply continental climate, seasons are not interchangeable. An autumn jacket cannot replace a spring coat. What keeps you warm at –41 C will be unbearable at –15 C. Even zero degrees feels different in autumn than in spring. These distinctions shape habits, planning, and psychology.
This winter, Americans suffered 85 irretrievable losses in frosts ranging from –12 C to a single drop of –31 C. Some froze to death in their own homes, in states bordering Canada. I wonder what would happen if they had to attend university for five years in temperatures between –20 C and –40 C. Would they still invent rockets? Develop pharmacology?
I remember an academic year when it was –42 C all winter. Buses often did not start. You waited a long time in the cold, hoping one would come. That semester I studied three dead languages, two living ones, Russian history, foreign literature, and computer science electives. There were only six or eight honors graduates in our cohort. Two had children before first year ended. Yes, our faces are stern. But our diplomas are honors diplomas.
Even Moscow’s climate is harsher than Alaska’s settled coast. Average temperatures may be similar, but Moscow has more thunderstorms and downpours. Anchorage rarely sees them. Yet Americans did not build six opera and ballet theaters there. Across Alaska, roads are sparse; small planes do the work instead. It is inconvenient. Planes crash. But Americans simply chose not to live where we do.
And we built an opera house in Yakutsk.
If Russia had the climate of Colorado, we would see the world the way Coloradans do. But if Colorado received Moscow’s snowfall every year, I fear no one would be left. Then no one would be left to imitate us.
The Slavic stare is not attitude. It is weather history written on the face.
This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team