Russian Diary: European Students’ Meeting

by Ante Pettersson, IPPNW European Student Representative

The European student meeting of IPPNW-students was organized in St. Petersburg, Russia from 22 - 26 of April. The weekend proved a welcome break in the spring schedules of about 90 medical students from around Europe, and a chance to meet like minded (as well as not) people involved with IPPNW.

On Friday morning, the first priority was getting accommodated, finding breakfast, and getting hold of some toilet paper from the reception. All this was made quite a bit more interesting by the language barrier. Luckily, Ann-Polin and Vera were available as interpreters, and when they weren’t around non-verbal communication (and some French) helped solve any problems. Before registration, there was panel discussion about young people’s chances of participating in Russian politics. Attendance was a bit scarce since most delegations hadn’t arrived yet, but as the discussion evolved, it became quite clear that the problems experienced among Russian youth were very similar to those seen in many other countries – young people aren’t interested in political issues, and voting percentages stay low. Different reasons for this and ways of getting young people interested about politics were discussed with the help of Ann-Polin’s interpretation, and it was agreed that information about political issues aimed at young people was essential.

After the discussion and registration, there was time for a little afternoon nap to augment the hour of bumpy sleep in a bus we had managed the previous night, after which the conference proper started with the opening ceremony. We heard talks by Boris Bondarenko and Igor Korneev, representatives of IPPNW in St. Petersburg, and Vera Brovkina from the Council for Peace and Conciliation. An impressive flashback from the past of IPPNW was the old casualty prediction chart for St. Petersburg, shown by Mr. Bondarenko, which showed that if a nuclear weapon was detonated over the center of the city, the technical school we were staying in would be in a zone spared from the worst destruction, leaving us responsible for taking care of wounded from the other zones. The visits to downtown St. Petersburg in the following days were given a whole new perspective by the display. After the ceremony, the activities in different countries were presented in a project fair

On Saturday we had the opportunity to see some of the sights of the city with the help of the guides, after which the day was continued by workshops. The first workshops were led by different Russian lecturers, while the second round was led by IPPNW lecturers and student activists. Some lecturers had trouble coming to the venue and for example the “peaceful nuclear energy”-workshop was replaced by a spontaneous discussion between Finnish and German students about whether nuclear energy had any future (and the finer points of Kaurismäki movies).

“How to resist the manipulators” by psychologist Vilena Dyakovan aimed at teaching different methods of reacting to provocations and insults causing psychic suffering in a way that did not give the “manipulator” pleasure or accomplishment. The methods presented included partial or full acknowledgment of the critique (for instance, “you are ugly”) given (“that’s true, I’m ugly”), appealing to personality (“This is the way I look and it makes me who I am”), asking for motives behind the attack (“why do you say such a thing?”) and exceptionally odd behavior. It turned out that ‘manipulators’ were actually what we’d recognize as bullies. A third workshop held by Russian organizers was “Stress caused by threat of nuclear accident or terrorism”, held by Elena Shatalova and Tatiana Alferova.

Roman Dolgov’s “Small Arms”-workshop concentrated on antipersonnel mines. We received basic information about different types of mines and their usage, the treaties regulating mines, and the politics dealing with the issue. Antipersonnel blast mines are an unnecessarily cruel weapon (though for some reason not prohibited as such), since they are designed to maim and cripple rather than kill and 90% of landmine victims tend to be non-combatants.

The NWIP (Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project) workshop was held by student activists from IPPNW. The workshop on Saturday gave basic information about nuclear weapons, the project, and how people’s attitudes can be changed, while on Sunday the theory was put into practice as we role-played Dialogue-meetings between groups playing NWIP activists and groups playing nuclear weapon-state youth. It turned out that convincing the “Pakistani” or “Russian” youth that their nukes were harmful for them and the world in general wasn’t an easy task, and that there were a lot of pitfalls where the discussions might get stuck which should be avoided in a real situation. The role-play taught many important things about the Dialogue-method and was also a very fun experience, which would ideally had been repeated with a chance to avoid the mistakes made and some more facts about weapons, if not for a lack of time. Overall, the NWIP-workshop recruited a lot of interested students from many countries into the project.

On Sunday morning, the workshops continued with the aforementioned second NWIP-workshop, information about the MedEx-project by Alex Rosen, and “Health, Development and Conflict/Peace through Health”, which concerned the UN millennium goals and how their effects were intertwined, by Caecilie Buhmann. The afternoon was spent with workshops dealing with basic skills needed in running an organization, namely fundraising, planning, teambuilding and spreading information.

On Monday, the planned program was a visit to the nuclear power station in Sosnovyj Bor, but sadly the trip was cancelled due to a complex situation involving changed policies and translocated leading boards. Instead, we were to go on a trip to the Nuclear Physics institute in Gatchina, but in the end, we spent the morning gridlocked in traffic, and eventually decided to split up and spend the day in the city. A larger group visited the Museum of Military Medicine, ate filled pancakes, and went on a search for souvenirs and the famed Russian ice-cream (which lived up to it’s reputation). People had started dropping off during the morning, and eventually, it was time for our group too to thank the hosts for an interesting stay and begin our journey back to our home country.

Among the sleep deprived memories of the conference, I can also place a Russian cultural night and an international night, neither of which my images are very clear of, an elevator incident or two which made some people choose the stairs for the rest of the conference, writing down the number of one’s room on the hand (though I eventually learned mine was pjat-tri-tjitiri), learning to dance to drum ’n’ bass the Russian way, and faint recollections of being elected European Student Representative for the next 1-2 years to come. In addition to the information gained from the workshops, it was very interesting to see how different the activities of IPPNW-affiliates in different countries are, and perhaps steal or borrow an idea or too from other chapters.

Last, I’d like to thank the organizers for the conference and all the participants for the homely atmosphere. Next year in Napoli, not to mention Helsinki…!

Ante Pettersson

European Student Representative, IPPNW