1. During the Soviet era, people addressed one another as “Comrade” (товарищ, pronounced tovarishch, accent on the last syllable — as usual, we get it wrong intuitively). In contemporary Russia, this form of address survives in only one context: the military. So the private addresses the general as “Comrade General”. Probably not very often, but when he does, that’s how.
2. The question of how one civilian addresses another is apparently still somewhat of an open question. There is no Mr. or Mrs. that isn’t irrevocably connected with the pre-Revolutionary class system. During the Soviet era, someone who you didn’t like well enough to call “Comrade”, you called “Citizen” (граждянин or граждянка). If you know someone, of course, you can address them by their name and patronymic (Ivan Borisovich meaning Ivan, son of Boris, or Nadya Borisovna, Nadya, daughter of Boris), which always sounds intimate to me, but is actually a formal mode of address. But what do you call a stranger whose attention you need to attract? To yell “Hey, you” at a man, the preferred form is “Young man” (молодой человек) and doesn’t seem to be limited to actually young male persons, though I’d imagine it wouldn’t work too well for someone in his 70s. Similarly for women, it’s девушка (young woman), probably until it becomes бабушка (grandmother), which is not considered an insult here. I have not been hailed as babushka, possibly because babushkas don’t wear jeans and T-shirts, at least not in public.
3. Something amazing. I’m watching a movie in Russian, and I understand it. Not just obvious plot points, but entire series of spoken sentences. For all the excitement of this trip, I have been feeling like I didn’t really improve much in my understanding of the Russian language. But maybe there’s a latency effect such that my brain needs to work undisturbed for a while to integrate what I’ve done. Not that the dialogue I’m hearing is any challenge to Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but I’m understanding it.
4. Plot twists one would not see in Hollywood movies of the same era (post WW II): the handsome hero whom the beautiful young heroine loves is actually a Nazi spy plotting to blow up the log flues through which brave Soviet lumbermen navigate long rafts of fresh-cut timber (some great footage of lumbermen standing on the logs of the rafts splashing through the flues navigating from the front of the raft with long oars). The not-so-handsome guy who is hopelessly in love with the heroine uncovers the plot, and the heroine’s mother, who discovers that the handsome guy is actually an impostor and that the man her daughter was in love with before he went off to war has died, gets shot by the handsome guy. In American movies, no one ever shoots anyone’s mother. And at the end, the pretty girl is mourning the death of her first love, the not-so-handsome guy and the pretty girl’s mother are recovering from having been shot by the handsome bad guy. No one is happy, but the logs can continue to flow down the river to support Soviet industry. Very Russian.
I somehow like the term “babushka” for an old woman. It has a kind and grandmotherly sound. I wouldn’t mind at all being called “babushka”.
Hmm… Hey You! Seems like what I would do!
But then I probably wouldn’t address a mature woman in Spanish as senorita either!
Babuskla has a nice ring to it. Maybe that should become your pseudo-name. You could at least use it as a password and have a chuckle every time you login somewhere!
I love that idea Tony! I may use a slight derivitave of that starting with my TIP login.