The University in St. Petersburg Invited Me to Teach a Class Again
Although I accepted, admittedly, it was a difficult decision for me, both morally and politically.
I have been teaching students in some capacity at the local university in St. Petersburg, Russia for roughly 20 years. It began with a box of mangos in 2005 and took off from there.
The mango was my prop, and I had volunteers from an audience of 200 to create marketing and communications strategies for the mangos. It was a big hit, and after initial confusion and uncertainty, the kids did a great job because I told them, “Anything goes!” Those are two words that most Russian students will never hear from a teacher, and when told that there was no wrong answer — also something they would never hear from a teacher — they had a ball. In 2017, I was invited back not as a guest lecturer but as an adjunct professor. I had as many as four lectures a week before COVID, then it dropped to two weekly.
The war has whittled my class schedule down to once a week and only during the spring semester. My big head now floats above the 70-plus students, which in June will be 50, and I do my best to share my madness for using creativity to develop marketing and communication strategies with these poor kids.
Having learned everything I know about marketing from running marketing departments in big and small companies in a developing market for nearly 30 years, I have never applied any of the theoretical stuff that MBAs from Wharton, Columbia, and other places use to garner huge salaries —life experience never gets you big salaries unless you get in some shares.
My expertise in Russia has also never been “good enough” to warrant an invitation to be a guest lecturer at Columbia despite a career path that few of my fellow grads had. I attempted to get an invite from Columbia about ten years ago when I was annually organizing the Russia House at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A dean rudely asked me, “What have you published? You need to have a book to show your expertise.” I invited him to “our house” in Davos and while he was impressed that I was doing that, he maintained that that wasn’t a “teachable moment.” This conversation is one of many that pretty much explains why the West is so clueless about Russia.
Nonetheless, many of my fellow grads, without having ever published anything, are back there “teaching” about Russia as “experts,” despite barely knowing Russian, and so that is why I decided again to set aside my moral and political hesitations and take on another semester with the Russian students.
To begin with, these 18 and 19-year-olds are not guilty of any of this Putin stuff. These kids are victims. Some, and maybe even many of them, out of necessity, feel like they have to support Putin, but they are kids — they are ignorant of the reality. Middle-aged Russians have almost no accurate understanding of world history, and that’s why so many of them believe Putin. How can we expect kids who have only known a world in which Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s president to believe anything else? Maybe some are against the war, but most likely, they aren’t even sure why.
I recoiled when the university reached out last week with the invitation to teach again. Navalny had just died, and my anger was palpable. I didn’t think I could do it again. I wasn’t sure I would be able to sit for a three-hour lecture and not mention the politics of Russia, which clearly dominate so much of my thoughts daily. Then, I tried to imagine if I could somehow weave into my lectures my protest of the fascist revolution taking place in Russia so that subconsciously, the kids would hear my cries of disgust for Putin without ever mentioning his name. If Putin could hate Navalny without mentioning his name, I could figure out how to deliver a coded message, right?
This is the tact I have taken. I started my class today with many of the same exercises for waking up one’s inner, creative voice. This semester, however, I will do my best to build inside of these students a hunger for knowledge. I will push them to be creatively curious.
The beauty of creativity is that when you have solved a problem or imagined a response using creative tools, it awakens parts of the brain that want more creativity. The brain begins to crave, much in the way that the brain of an addict craves, the stimuli that led to the initial creative solution. I get a sick feeling if I go a day without creating something. Long flights on planes disbalance me because I am sitting there for hours doing nothing. If I can instill this hunger, this craving inside of these kids, then they will find their way to hate Putin, too.
As much as I wanted to scream, “There is no way in hell I will work with this university again” — a university that puts out annual letters of support for Putin and the war of genocide — I decided that it would be selfish of me not to try to lead these 70 kids out of the woods and into the clearing by dawn.
After my class today, a friend reached out and asked where I was located, and on automatic pilot, I said, “I am in St. Pete.” I realized at that moment how much part of me needed to be back there, again part of the melting snow, which freezes again by dusk and back under the St. Petersburg sky. It was nice being relevant again, even if just for a few hours, again in a Russian context that has nothing to do with fascism, genocide, or war.
Who needs Columbia and the title of guest lecturer, anyway? Few in American universities still have the slightest clue of how to “read” Russia.
I am an adjunct professor at one of the most prestigious universities in St. Petersburg, Russia. It’s time to start working on next week’s lecture.