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Karen Hewitt

UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN TODAY

Introduction

From the Author to the Reader

This book is an account of Britain and British life specially written for the Russian reader. In 1991 I wrote the first version of Understanding Britain for readers in the Soviet Union who were, as was clear at the time, on the brink of jumping into a very different world from the one that they had known. That book was intended to help them understand the very strangeness of 'the West' about which there were so many myths in Russia, and to explain to them some characteristics of British life in particular. It was revised in 1994 and again in 1995, but much of the ex-Soviet flavour remained.

Much has changed in both our countries since then. My responses to Russia in the early nineteen-nineties have been out-of-date for years, and even stable Britain is preoccupied with an unexpectedly different range of problems from those that were discussed so avidly nearly twenty years ago. Consequently, Understanding Britain has not been reprinted since 2004 during which time I have been searching for ways of revising it for a new edition. In the event I found that about four-fifths of the text had to be completely rewritten. Basically this is a new book, although it has many echoes and reminders of Understanding Britain for those who are familiar with that text.

I have therefore decided to call it Understanding Britain Today. 'Today' is 2009 but most of the material I expect to remain valid for many years. No doubt my version will be inadequate by 2020, but by that time someone else can take over the task.

In 1991 I was acutely aware of the differences in the attitudes of Soviet citizens towards economic transactions and work habits as compared with people in the West. You (or your parents) also had an image of an England in their minds which had disappeared decades ago or which had never existed.

So my book concentrated on discussions of money, markets, choices and the class system. Since those days Russia has been through turbulent times and emerged with an understanding of the market as an institution which is not so very far from our understanding of it. Your debates about money and choice are almost familiar to us. And nobody now asks me questions about the workers as though we were living inside a Marxist diagram because you, too, have discovered that structures of work in a developed society are diverse and changeable. So I have abandoned the chapters on shopping in a market economy, on small businesses and on the class system in Britain - although I cannot help noticing that the postcard business in Russia is still hopelessly behind that in other countries. My British friends have too little sense of the beauties of particular places in Russia because of the lack of those postcards which I recommended!

I then had to ask myself whether a new book was needed at all. Russian teachers of English have mostly been able to buy English language textbooks published by major British publishers. These textbooks will tell you a fair amount about Britain with accompanying pictures and helpful charts. Unfortunately, because they are addressed to learners of English, the text and the ideas are simplified to a point where the information has little context and no density. If Russians, especially Russian students, are to think about the issues facing any modern society and especially to compare their own with a foreign society, they need more information, more explanation and more attempts to make comparisons. Somewhat reluctantly I decided to rewrite my book - and have found intellectual stimulation in doing so.