Crisis 22

Dream Vacation 2005

St. Petersburg, Moscow, & Environs

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My wife and I visited Russia in April, 2005. We had a great time — a mind-boggling, fascinating time in fact. Yet now the memory of that trip is coloured by the recent war. It’s the memory of a month now tinged with a sad surrealism. A dream-like time now out of joint.

I get a similar feeling when I listen to “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions, a 1991 song about the fall of the Berlin Wall … “I follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park … did you ever think / That we could be so close / Like brothers? / The future's in the air / I can feel it everywhere / Blowing with the wind of change.”

Although we spent most of our time in St Petersburg, I too wandered around Moscow, although it was 14 years after the Scorpions’ hit. Russia had just slogged through a decade of hard Yeltsin recovery, and was still a bit discombobulated by the shock waves of capitalism, an open media, oligarchs seizing companies, Western culture with all its anarchy and contradiction, etc.

But in April 2005 a sense of “Winds of Change” wonder possessed me as we walked from our rented apartment on Tverskaya Street down to Red Square. I also remember taking a train from Moscow’s Kazansky station (to Vladímir and Suzdal) and thinking that this was the station where young men left to fight in Chechnya (the Moscow theatre incident was in 2002 and the Beslan massacre in 2004). So it’s not that I wasn’t aware that there were big problems, or that Putin was taking a very hard line in Chechnya. But still all this was overwhelmed by the tourist in me, and also by the literary maniac in me — since I was then (as I am now) a big fan of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov.

So mostly things seemed to be getting better, one way or another. Footloose in Moscow, I was less concerned about finding a crystal ball to see into Russia’s future than I was about finding Patriarch’s Pond, the location where the Devil descends in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. For some reason I couldn’t find it — although I see it now so clearly on the map (I think I mistook Tverskoy Boulevard for Bolshaya Sadovya Ulitsa!). Nor could I find Bulgakov’s home, as if it too had vanished, like a trick played by the Devil in the novel. Like the ghosts of the Cold War.

On Sunday April 24 my wife and I had coffee on an arched walkway in the centre of the GUM department store, which is across from Red Square. My wife took this shot of me, my notebook, and my set of Putin & Bush matryoshka dolls:

Like Putin, I was deeply bothered by Bush’s actions in Iraq (in 2003), and yet I was also wary of Putin himself. I looked at the dolls with a sense of unease.

The very next day — April 25 — Putin gave a speech in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” An April 25 report by Associated Press (on the NBC site) reflects the wariness many felt about the gap between Putin’s rhetoric about democracy and the creeping authoritarianism of his actions:

In an apparent response to foreign allegations that Russia has been backtracking on democracy, Putin said Russia’s main political task was to develop as a free, democratic nation with European ideals. He stressed that individual freedoms would not be compromised by strengthening the state.

“We are a free nation and our place in the modern world will be defined only by how successful and strong we are,” Putin said. […]

Putin’s popularity has been dented over the past year by street protests over painful social reforms in Russia and unsuccessful attempts to head off a popular uprising in the ex-Soviet republic of Ukraine. Putin is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, but many Russians assume the Kremlin will ensure that a Putin loyalist wins the balloting in 2008.

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But all of this largely went over my head, busy as we were trying to take in the diversity of a country that had been closed for so long.

The following are photos of some of the things we saw in St Petersburg, where we spent most of our time, and also in Moscow, Vladímir, and Suzdal.

In Petersburg we went to three concerts, cheering to Mark Knoffler, Robert Plant (who played mostly Led Zeppelin songs, with a great guitarist, although Jimmy Page was sadly missed), and a Russian folk-rock band called Akvarium. I remember going to a hockey rink and watching a young girl do circles around the other skaters as if they were statues. We also spent time with a friend and her son.

The Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

I read that the St Petersburg subway tunnels are so deep that they could double as fallout shelters. In 2005 it seemed like such a quaint fact…

I was particularly impressed by the churches — their colourful interiors and their Arabian Nights exteriors… The two above photos are of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, in Suzdal.

Above: Cathedral of the Nativity, Suzdal

Below: We found many excellent cafés — great places to escape the cold weather!

Is it stereotypical to note their contentment — the Russian friend looking down at her plate of blinies and the Chinese wife about to dig into her Beijing duck?

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Next: ⛱ Rip Van Winkle

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