Template:The Toast

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Za vashe zdorovye (To your health). —A short Russian toast Visitors should be prepared to raise their glasses in a toast, as toasting in Russia is serious business. Toasts are usually made at the beginning of a meal when vodka is consumed with the first course, or at the end of the meal after the sweet wine or champagne that is served with dessert, and often throughout the meal as well. Hosts toast first, and the ranking guest is expected to follow with a return toast. With each toast, glasses are clinked with those of other guests while looking at each guest directly and making eye contact. The person being toasted also drinks. In contrast to the laconic American or British “cheers” or “bottoms up,” a toast in Russia is a short speech. For starters, there are the obligatory thanks to the hosts for their hospitality. This may be followed by references to the purpose of the visit, to international cooperation, peace and friendship, and the better world we hope to leave to our children as a result of our cooperation. Be poetic and dramatic when making a toast, and let your “soul” show. Russians appreciate a show of emotion and imagination. Make the most of your toast and don’t hesitate to exaggerate. Humor may be used, but the substance of the toast should be serious. Russians will judge a toast as an indication of the seriousness of a visitor’s purpose. Prudent travelers will have a few toasts prepared in advance; they will surely be needed. Women, by tradition, do not toast in Russia, but more and more Russian women are now doing so, and Russians will not be surprised if a foreign woman raises her glass and gives a toast. And if a hostess is present, she gets a separate toast, complimenting her on her home, food, and hospitality, but never on her looks, as pretty as she may be. Mir i druzhba (peace and friendship) is a toast—as well as slogan—that visitors will often hear in Russia; so often, in fact, that it begins to sound more and more like the political catchphrase it once was throughout the communist bloc. Of the misuse of the word peace, Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright who became his country’s democratically elected president in 1990, has written: For forty years now I have read it on the front of every building and in every shop window in my country. For forty years, an allergy to that beautiful word has been engendered in me as in every one of my fellow citizens because I know what the word has meant here for the past forty years: ever mightier armies ostensibly to defend peace.148 Political slogans aside, the Russian yearning for peace and friendship should not be seen as an attempt to delude the West but as a reflection of their traditional yearning for harmony, cooperation, and community. Russians have good reason to want peace and friendship with other countries. The death and destruction of World War II is still a part of every Russian’s life, experienced either directly or through older family members. More than 20 million Soviet citizens died in the war, and much of European Russia was overrun by German armies before their advance was halted and reversed at Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged for 900 days, and more than a million of its people died there of hunger alone—more than 10 times the deaths at Hiroshima. The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it, was truly one of the epic events of Russian history, one that threatened the very existence of the state. More recently, another generation has known war, in Afghanistan and Chechnya. When Russians toast “peace and friendship” with Americans, they really mean it.