Of course, this complex process of land division became more and more ridiculous. Villagers might have had plots of land in three or more entirely different areas of the village, arranged that way for the sake of keeping the good soil/ bad soil ratio. And as the population grew, the soil gerrymandering got more intricate, and the increasingly small plots became difficult to till. With the redivision of the land also came resowing, and discouraged crop rotation, making the soil deteriorate further.

This system may have eventually declined because of its increasing size, but its attitudes have been carried down, through tradition, politics, and necessity. Even when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1860, he failed to help them raise their economic status, and thus they found unity in their poverty. And even today, as Russia struggles with its new political identity, its citizens prefer to rely on and help their neighbors to have enough money to eat, feeling that the government is too far away to have much relevance to their lives.

Even though I'd heard before of the famous "Russian hospitality," it made little impact on me before I experienced it firsthand. When I and two acquaintances, Laurie and Kris, planned on doing some traveling to the bigger cities from our temporary base of Kazan, we had no idea where we would stay. The Russians we knew were amazed we would even consider a motel.

"No! What for?" they asked."Well, we don't know anyone there," we stammered.But they did or they knew people who knew people. And in Russia, that's more than enough. In St. Petersburg, we spent five nights at the home of Laurie's fiancee's mother's sister's apartment. In Moscow it was with Olga, a woman whom Laurie's best friend had met a year earlier at a conference, her mother, and her five-year-old grandson. At first, Olga said she only had enough room for Laurie. Then, when Kris and I couldn't find anywhere else to stay, she insisted that we stay with her. She had been hesitant to take us all in, not because she feared we would be troublesome, but because she was ashamed of her "small" apartment and "meager" meals. Her apartment, in actuality, rivaled the size of a city apartment in America, and she always made us eat until we were past full. She even spent her days off guiding us around the city.

Since we knew how much our hosts were giving us, we tried to give back, bringing home food and other gifts every night, and doing chores. They were usually one step ahead of us, though. If we brought home bread one night, they'd serve it to us the next morning. As a man I met once at a dinner party once said, "If I had a bottle of the best vodka in the world, and my worst enemy was standing right next to me, I'd invite him to share it with me."

Whoever came up with that cutesy "practice random kindness" idea, anyway? Not only does its annoying rhetorical quality make the message lose its effectiveness, its thinking is still inherently "what have you done for me lately?" American. Whose idea was it that kindness should be practiced randomly?

In Russia, kindness is not doing a favor for someone, or being nice when you feel like it. It's just what you do. If they had a cutesy rhetorical phrase, it'd be: "give." Not randomly, and not when it's something they don't care about anyway. By randomly being kind to people, we ensure that we're going to keep score of whom we need to pay back, as well as who needs to pay us back.

And for many Americans right now, the score is: one point for personal freedom, but also one against everyone else, our community, our humanity.