Remembering Russia..."We have to trust people"

PART 2,  2006 TRIP TO RUSSIA/UKRAINE:   ST PETERSBURG AND VLADIMIR

St Isaac's Cathedral, St Petersburg

June 19:  I’m back on the streets of St Petersburg, but with a new guide.  Tonya is filling in for our helper Katya who is busy giving oral exams at the University today and tomorrow.  Bill and the boys have opted to take it easier today.  ”It’s like a day off school,” says John.  Owen wants to skateboard; he's met some interesting people in his forays around the neighborhood.

"You can't go off with anyone," said Bill.

"I know, Dad."

“It’s girls' day out,” I say to Tonya.  She takes me to find a teapot like Olga’s, and then to a couple grand churches.  The most interesting part of the day, however, is our conversation during afternoon tea on a terrace overlooking Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main boulevard--a place of "feverish activity," wrote one historian.

“There are many beautifully dressed young women around St Petersburg.  Are they all well-to-do?" I ask.

“No,” Tonya replies, looking both ways and then, in semi-whisper: “Let me tell you...most of these young women buy their clothes off the street.  They come from Turkey and are cheap and not well made.  But if you search, you can find nice things and the summer is short, so they will last.”

"There are so many women; where are the men?”

“That’s what I wonder...I mean, really!  There are nice young men, educated, but they don’t want to work.  They are wimplike.  I don’t know why.  I’m 24 and I can’t meet anyone here I would want to marry.”

“Why is there so much corruption?”

“Our systems have never really worked right.  Russian people take advantage of freedom.  They don’t know what to do, and so go to extremes...like in eating and drinking, for example.”

John Lawrence, in A History of Russia, wrote of “...an uneasy freedom limited by the shackles of debt and poverty.”

Tonya will be coming to the US in the fall, to study Teaching English as a Second Language at the University of Northern Iowa.  She expresses delight when I invite her to visit us in Colorado (we’ll keep in touch by email for awhile, but she’ll be unable to visit).

A university student said this:  “If you want a life, you have to get out of here.  Out of Russia altogether.  Otherwise, you’re caught in this bureaucracy.  If you can’t make use of it, or understand its way of thinking, you sink.  Young people don’t feel connected with this country, because its system isn’t ours.  It’s an old people’s system.  It comes from another time, so we’ll go to America, or anywhere that will free us.  It’s not that we don’t love Russia, it’s just that we have to live properly.  We’re young men born into an old man’s world.”  Quoted by Colin Thubron, In Siberia (1999)

June 20:  The Winter Palace of the Tsars, with its ornate, gold-gilded rooms and famous Hermitage Museum is nothing short of magnificent.  We spend 3 hours viewing works by Michelangelo, Rodin, Rembrandt, Goya, Rafael, and the largest collection of French Impressionist paintings outside France.  Owen is intrigued by the jewel-encrusted crowns, John the armor.  Thousands from all over the world mingle with us, along with guides speaking German, French, Chinese, and English.  On the way out, Tonya notes the steps by which revolutionaries entered the palace in 1917 to arrest the governing official.  Nicholas II had already abdicated and was at Tsarskoye Selo, where he and his family would be executed the coming year.  

Bill has succumbed to a miserable cold/cough, so Tonya is my date for a 6 pm concert at the Mariinsky Theater.  Opened in 1860, it will close for repairs soon after tonight’s concert--dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Shostakovich.  His 7th Symphony, “majestic music about mankind’s resistance to violence and tyranny” reads the program note, was famously performed in this city in 1942, during the Nazi siege of Leningrad.  I’d read The 900 Days just prior to our trip. Starving people extended their meagre flour rations with sawdust and glue scraped from wallpaper.  A million and a half died here, among the estimated 26-27 million Russian deaths during WWII.

June 21:  A sleeper cabin on a Russian train is a great way to travel.  It’s clean and comfortable, with a fresh white linen cloth on the little table by the window and crisp bed linens and towels ($10 for four packs).  Each car has a hostess who looks after your needs.  Oriental carpets cover the floors, with linen runners protecting the main corridor rugs.  Vendors come by with drinks, magazines, and toys.  

The boys are watching the movie Crash on John’s Play Station.  Bill sacked out on a upper berth about an hour ago, at 9 pm.  Faithful Katya saw us off at the station.  We’d shared much/talked of many things: she and Bill--literature and languages; she and I--family and poverty.  We invited her to visit us in Colorado.  She has a boyfriend and would like to marry, but is challenged financially.  Her most immediate desire is “to move to a greener, less polluted place...a suburb of St Petersburg.”

Golden Gate at Vladimir

June 22:  Our Vladimir guide is Marina, a short, middle-aged piano teacher, with a crew cut and a big smile.  She picks us up in a minivan with a driver, tells us she speaks Russian and Italian.  Bill will translate for me and the boys.  “Vladimir was the first capital of Russia,” she says, pointing out the Golden Gate (it’s mostly white) built in 1164--similar to gates in the holiest cities of Eastern Orthodoxy: Jerusalem, Constantinople and Kiev.  We visit an 11th century monastery and enter a small church whose walls are covered with frescoes in earthy colors.  Soon a quartet of men enters and begins singing, their voices amplified in the cavernous interior.  I close my eyes; my spirit is lifted.  All too soon it’s over and we leave the sacred space for an adjacent gift/antique shop.

Vladimir is full of skilled musicians and artisans and we purchase a CD (above) and some small souvenirs.  I can’t resist a beautifully crafted, wide-brimmed hat made of local flax (linen), and wear it gratefully as we spend time outdoors in the mid-day sun, walking around a village depicting peasant life (85% of the population at the time of the revolution).  

Still wearing my flax hat!

For lunch Marina takes us down a shaded side street, where sit two old ladies wearing traditional babushka scarves.  They pull bright green pickled cucumbers from a bucket of brine and herbs, and extract warm piroshkis--savory with onions, potatoes and eggs-- from their small pushcarts. Yum.  Marina says there will be a cucumber festival in July.

A less cheerful claim to fame:  this city was home to the main prison for those who disagreed with Soviet leadership.  Other dissenters were essentially imprisoned in the 30 “psychiatric” hospitals around the area, often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.”   At one point on our drive, we come to a big T-junction and Marina says: “A left turn takes you to Moscow, and a right turn to Siberia.”  I think of the hundreds of thousands who were sent down that road to forced labor/prison camps.

Our hotel room is stifling (“This is the hottest it’s ever been in Vladimir!” said someone), so we sit at an outdoor cafe after a disappointing meal at a local restaurant.  We’re feeling used after handing over $200 requested by Marina for what we thought was an agreed upon $100.  Bill questioned, but she was persistent:  “You got a private tour.”  

"She should have spilt it with you--you served as translator."

"That would have been a good response," chuckled Bill.

Marina is the friend of our Pueblo friend Katya’s mother, so we did not want to push the issue.  Adding to the small miseries of the moment, Bill wonders why he was asked to translate for an American guest who complained to the hotel management about being ripped off in Vladimir...by taxi drivers, a prior hotel, etc.  A military policeman at Checkpoint Charlie a few years before Bill’s army intelligence stint in Berlin, the "other" American at our hotel now tracks bank fraud.  

“He didn’t need a translator,” says Bill.

“Probably the management just didn’t know what to make of him,” I suggest, “but I suppose for someone with your background...it must be easy to be a bit paranoid.”  

As we sip cold drinks, I notice several brutish looking men busy on their cell phones on the sidewalk nearby.  Perhaps it’s all perfectly innocent, but Russian organized crime is the biggest crime network in the world...

June 23:  Bill wakes me up at 8 am by pulling a damp towel down my arm (cooling method we employed last night in our sweltering room):  “We have to check out in an hour, honey.” 

Nina's gift

We meet Katya’s mother Nina in the hotel lobby.  Trim, 40 something, she greets us with a sweet smile.  We hand over gifts sent along from Pueblo.  Nina gives the boys a box of chocolates, and Bill and me a small, framed cross-stitching of a church.  Then she says, “William, a secret,” and takes him aside.  Pulling out a white envelop, she removes a $100 bill;  she and Marina decided $100 was enough for yesterday’s tour.  After a visit over coffee, Nina takes us across the street to catch a local bus to the big bus station.  When we arrive, ready to board for Moscow, she tells us where to sit to avoid the sun, and kisses us goodbye. 

In Moscow, Bill easily gets us from the bus station to the train that takes us to the other side of the city, where we’ll board a train to Ukraine at 9:30 pm.  I sit with the luggage at the connecting station while the guys explore the possibility of storing our bags so we can wander unencumbered and find dinner.  There’s a storage area nearby, but Bill and I are both wary about leaving the luggage.

“Is it guarded by older ladies?” I ask, believing that no one messes with the military-like babushkas who monitor many of the check stations and public bathrooms.

“No, by 3 big guys in blue jumpsuits,” says Bill.

“Come on,” says Owen: “We have to trust people.”

“Right, let’s do it,” I say.

The luggage guys--aged 50 or 60--look like the kind of men who might have roughed up people for the KGB.  While we wait to deposit our bags, one of the men approaches me and says: “Austrian?”

“American,” I reply, with a smile.

He claps his hands and grins widely.

“Spasiba!” (thank you), I say, patting his hefty shoulder.