On Monday friends invited me to the “Stray Dog Basement” bar. It’s an interesting place in St. Petersburg. You can seat and drink but you can also attend a theatre performance there.

Vladimir Borisov (Владимир Борисов) performed 5 short novels by Shukshin, renowned Russian (Soviet) author. He wrote many books about lives of ordinary people, mainly from rural areas whose lives moved them to the city. With total paradigm shift many of them couldn’t adopt themselves to a new way of life, new values of urban society.

With the only way to relieve their stresses, drink vodka with new acquaintances, many of them ended up in despair and loneliness. Nobody taught them how to adjust themselves to a new reality and  find new goals.

But the most interesting consequence of this process is how family values deteriorated in our time. Independent women don’t want to play a submissive role in a modern family. This contradicts with how males see these relationships. It raises many questions in modern Russia as well.