I spent six weeks in the summer of 2007 in Moscow under the auspices of a program for post-secondary teachers of Russian sponsored by the American Council for Teachers of Russian, ACTR. Here is a letter I sent out to my family and friends about the experience.
I am a ten minute walk from Red Square. The first day I was here, I walked to Red Square, and when I caught site of St. Basil's for the first time in fifteen years, my eyes welled up with tears. Gazing at St. Basil's and Red Square just one last time was the very last thing I did before I left the country in 1992.
We've had excursions to Mosfilm and The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which is very beautiful and from which you get the best view of Moscow, the Kremlin and the Moskva River. Stalin had the original cathedral raised, wanted to build the tallest skyscraper in the world in its place, but the ground kept sinking, so he finally had an enormous swimming pool built there. Andrei used to swim in it.
Andrei lives near Kolomenskaya Park. I don't know if you ever made it there when we were here, but I didn't. Legend has it that Peter the Great was born there. The foundation of his father's summer home is still there. There's a beautiful church there and a great view of the Moscow River with the city off in the distance. Andrei said it used to be far removed from Moscow, hence a retreat. Anyway, it is a large urban park and very beautiful. I can't imagine it was kept up so well under the communists. I am sure it was a dump. Now the grounds are beautiful. There are charming little restaurants and the shashlik (shish kabob) is wonderful.
Andrei has been very generous with me. His third wife, Oksana is 31, cute and nice. He just turned 50. She has an eight year old daughter who is at the dacha with her grandmother. I guess she'll be there all summer. We were just told in class today that it is the Russian way for the grandmother to raise the kids. Classes are OK. Better than at Pushkin but I could still do without them. We go from 9-3:00 with a forty-five minute break for lunch and a ten minute break between the two morning classes and afternoon classes.
So many things are better. The young people in our group complain the public toilets. They are still not state of the art, but compared to what we had, they are wonderful!
The university must have a computer lab, but we don't have access to it. I guess it's just for students who are taking computer courses. There's an Internet cafe on campus, and the everyone else seems use that. I just bought two hours of time for 5.00. Andrei has a computer, but I am not always over there, and when I am, I can't be rude and excuse myself long enough to write any real letters.
So far, so good, although life here is still an adventure and still calls for adjustment and patience. They still turn off the hot water for a couple of weeks in different parts of Moscow at different times. They turned it off at my host's apartment the day before I arrived. No hot water means that my host, Zinaida, heats two tea kettles of hot water for me every morning. I pour them into a big basin and then add enough cold water to sponge bath every morning. Of course, you have to rinse yourself off with the dirty water in the basin, unless you want to freeze with the cold water. I've taken two hot showers since I arrived. One at Andrei's and one at a friend of his. Andrei lost his hot water a week ago. Zinaida gets hers back on the 9th, so I'll have it most of the time I am here. Although you can get anything here now that's available in any big city in the West, there are still things like no hot water for a couple of weeks in the summer that remind you that you are in Moscow.
Things still happen that remind you of Churchill's statement that Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. On Monday there was a big crowd of people in front of the university. Things moved very slowly, because there was no kind of order. People were pushing their way through. So we pushed our way through too. When we got to the entrance, we were told that exams were going on and only students taking their finals would be admitted. So, how do we get in for our classes, we asked? The guy just pointed vaguely to the left. We figured that meant there was another entrance somewhere else so we followed our noses around the building until we found the entrance. We were let in, we all have a student ID. But no one told us that we had to access our classes from the third floor elevator. We found out by trial and error. Yes, in many ways, it's the old Soviet Union I became so familiar with in 1987-88!
Other things, too, are just like they always were. There was always a shortage of paper, which meant you couldn't always find toilet paper. Most families had it most of the time, because they would hoard it. If they ran out, they cut up newspapers or propaganda posters, which were big and only cost 20 cents or so. You almost never found it at most public toilets. Then it made sense. But it is still the case. The toilets in the university do not have toilet paper. You can find as much as you want of it in the stores but not in toilets in most public buildings. The sinks still have two faucets, but they still only run cold water. The toilets still don't have seats. There soap dispensers still never have any soap. Today there was a bar of soap on one of the sinks. I guess some thoughtful person brought it for general use. I rejoiced.
In some ways, things have gotten worse. We were told that xenophobia has gotten really bad in the last two years. The police, who make next to nothing, regularly stop foreigners to check their documents, passport and immigration card. If they are not in order, you have to pay a "fine," i.e., bribe. We were told never to carry more than about twenty bucks on us at a time, but that's hard. Andrei says I don't have to worry, because I am a middle-aged white man. Darker skinned young people in the group have been here before and been stopped. We were told not to give cops any money, because our papers are all in order, but I wouldn't want to get into an argument with a cop here. Still, I think I'll be OK. (I was OK. I rather often saw dark skinned people from former republics of the Soviet Union stopped by the police but that was it. No one in our group was ever bothered.)
Three different Russians have told me that Zinaida's apartment is worth a million dollars, maybe more. It is about the size of mine. Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, and she has a large apartment in the center of two a ten minute walk from the Kremlin. But whoever buys it after she dies will have to spend about a hundred thousand dollars on it to totally renovate it. It hasn't been touched, I am sure, since her father got it in the 1939. The furniture is all primitive communist stuff. I sleep on a sofa that breaks down like a futon. The mattress couldn't be any harder, but that's OK. Sometimes one half of it becomes unhinged from the ancient wood and falls onto the floor. It literally breaks down. I have to be careful how I lay down on it. It hasn't happened yet in the middle of night, but I am waiting.
Zinaida's husband is deceased, and she has no children. She has a niece who is estranged from Zinaida's sister, who is very ill. The niece leaves Zinaida to care for her sister. There is also a thirty year old granddaughter who is just as worthless. Zinaida is 75. She can leave the apartment to someone who must claim it within six months. They have to pay an inheritance tax and some other fees, but then they are grand fathered in and need pay a minimal rent. If the apartment is not left to anyone, the government gets it. The niece has a great deal. Zinaida told me she's just waiting for her mother to die so that she can inherit the apartment, which is also ideally located.
I really did luck out with my location. She and I are becoming friendly. She likes using me as a sounding board for problems with her sister. Last week, she told me to call her Zinaida. You only use first names with family members and close friends. Other wise, you have to use the first name and patronymic. Andrei joked that maybe I will get her apartment!! :-) The only new appliance is a washing machine from Germany. It takes two hours just like in Italy. I had to weigh my clothes with a hand held scale because the machine can only hold five pounds, and Zinaida is paranoid it will break down. There is no dryer. I have to climb up on a ladder to hang the clothes on a line over the bathtub. I am always scared half to death I will fall and break my neck. She washes a little at a time and hangs her things on exposed pipes. She'd kill herself up there on that ladder.
This weekend I went out into the country with Andrei and his wife. They bought some land. Russian country houses, called dachas, are very primitive. There is usually electricity but no indoor plumbing. You have to use a nasty out house to go to the bathroom. The land is about three acres, lots of it. There is an ancient house with planks in the kitchen that you have to be careful when you step on because they are not nailed down and you can fall through to the ground. It was built after the war and had been abandoned for years. They're going to raze it and build a new, modern home, but that will take lots of money. We spent several hours clearing all this growth away from the house with a cycle. I felt like the Prince hacking his way through the thicket to get to Sleeping Beauty, but there was no beauty waiting for me! I can't remember the last time I did such "butch" work. It was probably college!
The women, his wife and a girlfriend, worked as hard as we did. We had to make a path with cycles so you could even get into the damn house. Then we had to chop wood to use in a primitive grill he brought from Moscow to make shish kabob and then to sit by the fire drinking vodka and talking. There are couches that pull out, and they were comfortable, because they brought bedding from Moscow. It rained and the roof only leaked in a couple of places, fortunately not over me.
Sitting around the fire Andrei told me that he had never believed his father when he said he was in a German prisoner of war camp in Austria. Well, a few years ago, the German government paid the father reparations. I don't know how much it was, but there was enough for Andrei to buy a Volkswagen. It must have been a lot. I guess he'll use that money to build a new dacha. Russian soldiers who spent time in a prisoner of war camp were sent immediately to another prison camp when they returned, because a good Russian soldier would die before being taken prisoner of war. Stalin was a paranoid maniac. But Andrei's father got a tip that this would happened, so he took two years off his age when he got home and signed up for another four year stint in the army. I don't know the details of how he got away with it, but he did. Thousands and thousands of Russian soldiers went from the hell of battle for their country to another kind of hell. They weren't freed until 1953 when Khrushchev declared a general amnesty and freed all Stalin's prisoners, among them criminals.
We are in Kazan for a long weekend. We took a night train from Moscow and arrived on Friday morning. We met with the administration and teachers of Kazan University, where such luminaries as young Lenin and Tolstoy studied. We were told that Tolstoy didn't get one answer right on his law exam but that the teacher gave him a 2, a D, because "he had such penetrating eyes" that he knew he was a genius and would be famous someday. I sat at his place on the back bench of the classroom and, better yet, sat in the chair reserved from the Czar during royal visits to Kazan.
Kazan is a charming city of just over a million people on the mighty Volga River. Tomorrow, we'll take a cruise on it. Our guide took us to a sort of K-mart store for clothes, because it's gotten chilly here (mid-fifties with wind) the last few days and he didn't want us to freeze on the cruise. I dropped 20.00 on a sweater that I may even wear this season when I get home. Today we visited its leading mosque and two cathedrals. The city is about half Muslim and half Christian. We were treated to a lunch fit for a king, four courses and vodka with each one but dessert. Our guide got drunk with the rest of us! There's a wonderful pedestrian zone that I am sure wasn't there under the communists. I just got back from a cruise up and down the zone, taking time to listen to a rock band and check out the locals singing along and dancing up a storm. In a mall right next to the hotel, I got my hair cut this evening and learned the word for buzz cut, a "hedge hog" I am still amazed by the malls, four and five story malls just as glitzy and with the same sensory overkill as ours. I bet old people still feel the same way I do, even though they've had over a decade to get used to them. It's still surreal to me. GUM still sells the plain vanilla bars of ice cream which used to be the only thing worth buying in a shopping mall nearly the length of a football field and with two floors. But you can also get Hermes scarves, Rolex watches, Prada handbags and all kinds of upscale wares I can't afford. The head of the Language Department at Moscow States makes 300.00 a month. Just imagine what the Chair of the Language Department at Harvard or Yale makes! People supplement their incomes here in many ways, teachers and professors tutor, but, still, I really can't figure out how they do it.
Andrei has treated me like a king. When he visited me, I took him all over New York, Philadelphia and we went to Disney World. He told me that now he realizes just what things cost and wants to treat me as generously I did him. I go over there every weekend beginning on Thursday, because we don't have class on Fridays. He takes me out to buy groceries for dinner and told me once that his mother spends as much money for food in an entire month as he drops for the weekend! His parents make less than 300 a month with their combined pension income. He helps them out, but there must still be plenty of places where Russians can shop for food and other basic needs without paying Western prices.
Unfortunately, this trip to Kazan fell on the weekend of his fiftieth birthday. He was upset and wanted me to get out of going, I know, but he never said directly that I should not go. He kept saying what do you need to go to that hole in the ground when I can take you to St. Petersburg and show you the time of your life? It's very hard to say No to him, but in the end, he realized that I will never see Kazan again and that it is worth seeing in terms of its rich history and culture.
By the time we left on Thursday evening he was reconciled to it and that afternoon orchestrated one of the best afternoons of my life. It started at a lovely out door Georgian restaurant, where he ordered us several kinds of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres, soup, the main dish, and dessert, which we washed down with beer and a bottle of vodka. Then he took us to the hotel where we met on July 4, 1979. It has been completely renovated and is one of the nicest hotels in Moscow. We sat in the amazing lobby and remembered what it looked like in 1979. It was plain and cavernous. In that lobby twenty-eight years ago, the woman behind the desk, with whom I had become friendly because she not only spoke German but told me on the first day I arrived that she thought German was more beautiful than Russian, told me on the eve of my departure three weeks later for Leningrad, that the reason she said what she did is because her government tells so many lies so often that the words in Russian have become meaningless. Even though it was late at night and we were the only two people in that enormous lobby, her voice dropped to a whisper and she was afraid, I could tell. Today, the lobby is just as big as it was then but no longer cavernous and overwhelmingly totalitarian but beautifully appointed. You feel comfortable in it, not intimidated by it. The hotel is as nice as any five star hotel in the West. We reminisced about how we met as we nibbled on walnuts seasoned with Wasabi, cashews, pretzel sticks and sipped two rounds of gins and tonic. Andrei said the bill would cost just about as much as dinner did. The drinks turned out to be 20.00 each, prices even higher than in Manhattan, so he was right. Again, he spent on four cocktails about what his mother spends in an entire month for food for two people.
After that we walked over to Red Square, which was visible from our rooms in that hotel twenty-eight years ago. We remembered walking on Red Square on July 4, after a party our group threw for Andrei and the other Soviet water polo players living next door to me, singing the Soviet and American national anthems and risking the wrath of the police for public rowdiness. Then we went into GUM, he bought me a vanilla ice cream a tradition they still keep, and, finally, we sat down at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Museum of Russian History and had another beer as he told me about the state of his current, and third marriage, not good, and I told him about the last week of my mother's life. Finally, we parted, and I walked the ten minute walk back to my apartment, and got ready to leave for Kazan.
My last couple of weeks in Russia played themselves out exactly as they should have. The next to last weekend, Andrei and I drove eight hours to St. Petersburg. He told me that Gogol said a couple of centuries ago that Russia has two curses, fools and roads. Only about half of the road between Russia's two most important cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, is what you would call a modern high way. The rest of it, while never degenerating into a one lane dirt road, is not much better. Much of it, I swear, looks exactly like they just poured pitch over the ancient dirt road that Gogol knew and then didn't really maintain it that well. It's awful! Consequently, a couple of miles from every little town you hit, there is a traffic jam to contend with. Many Russians, including Andrei, just drive past as many cars as they can on the right shoulder of the road. It's a little scary, but I kept my mouth shut. I think you could make the trip is six hours on a typical American interstate.
We spent three days in his beautiful home town. Much of the buildings have been completely restored. Often you see what were once gorgeous facades, but are now in decay, right next to fully restored facades. They make great photos of contrast. Twenty years ago, they were all in decay. The main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg, Nevski Prospect, celebrated in Russian literature and art, is being gradually restored to its pre-Revolutionary splendor. So are St. Petersburg's parks. One is especially beautiful. Under the communists, it had deteriorated into a dump of a wasteland.
The Rolling Stones were playing in the plaza in front of the Winter Palace. I offered to get Andrei tickets for his fiftieth birthday, but he wasn't particularly interested. It turned out that I was in the spill over crowd the night of the concert. Andrei had gone to visit a friend and left me to walk around Nevski Prospect, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I couldn't see the Stones, but I could hear them in a park adjacent to Palace Square. It was kind of cool just to be in the spill over crowd, a party atmosphere with fast food booths and a kids selling kvas, which is less sweet and pungent than the kvas you get in bottles or cans. It's very refreshing.
I also got to see Andrei's parents, both in their early eighties, perhaps for the last time. His Mom put out a nice spread which included red caviar, salads, pirozhki and Russian chocolates. She's still pretty spry but her hearing is bad, although Andrei says she hears what she wants to hear. His Dad has diabetes and cataracts. He's half blind from them. Here, he would have had them operated on and see just fine. He could have surgery there, too, of course, but he's one of these people who's afraid of doctors and hospitals.
We stayed at a friend of Andrei's to spare his parents the aggravation of guests in their small apartment. The guy, Max, is the St. Petersburg editor of the magazine, Sport, for which Andrei is the photo layout editor. Max is a great guy. Andrei says he's the best sports journalist in Russia. He seems to know everyone and has interviewed celebrities in film and the arts, too. He wants to write a screen play. We hit it off. I told him I'd translate it for him and that I had contacts in California who might even be able to get it produced. We'll see!
The last week of class was excruciating! But we survived it. On the last Friday we had a Good-bye dinner at a Georgian restaurant. Georgian food is wonderful, and the vodka and wine flowed like mad. So did the food. You start off with several courses of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres and three different kinds of hachipori, a Georgian cheese bread which is out of this world. Then hot soap and then the main course, which was shish kabob. Our teachers were there, there was a band, and we proposed toast after toast until the vodka was all gone. That's the custom at a big dinner like that. Somebody taps his glass with a knife to get everybody's attention. Then you stand up and propose a toast. Whoever goes first is kind of like a MC and gets to pick the person who follows. In the old Soviet days, the toasts were for "world peace" or "international friendship." Now, they would sound too "Soviet" and probably evoke chuckles. We all toasted our teachers and the different experiences Russia had afforded us. They really do know how to orchestrate a Farewell Dinner. It's easier to keep up with a German, after all it's just beer, than it is with a Russian drinking shot after shot of vodka. I had more beer and vodka in six weeks than I drink all year in America. Andrei is a big fan of both.
On Saturday, Andrei took me to a Russian bath house, a banya. Going there with a friend(s) is a wonderful, ancient Russian ritual that takes up an entire afternoon. Like in ancient Rome, the Russian bath is not just a place to keep clean but to socialize and bond. Men use bundles of birch leaf branches, called venaki, to beat themselves, and each other, with. I bought one and got it through customs just to show my students what they're like. The wooden floors of the sauna room are filled with birch leaves that have become dislodged from the branches. You take in the steam, then either beat yourself or let a friend beat you, with these bundles of birch leaves, jump into a cold pool, shower with soap, then go get a beer (people also drink hot tea, which the Russians love almost as much as vodka) and some dried herring, (these days they snack on bagels and potato chips), and bond socially. Then you repeat the process two times.
The branches don't hurt. Your friends don't beat you senseless. They're just very invigorating. I am sure there's some kind of health ordinance against them here. There are four levels of benches in the sauna, and a real man gets up as high as he can. After you get out of the steam room, which is scented by eucalyptus leaves just has it's been for centuries, you can either jump in the cold pool or pull a chord so that a big wooden bucket of ice cold water, which is filled continuously, dumps over onto you. I do both. After three or for hours, you walk out of there on a cloud. It's an amazing feeling from an amazing ritual as ancient as the country and nothing at all like going to an American health club, where people hardly even make eye contact, let alone bond socially. Andrei said his father used to take him and his brother there once a week, because keeping clean in the Fifties and Sixties in Russia, even in a city like Leningrad, was hard. People had indoor plumbing and tubs, but hot water was iffy.
There is definitely is a homo-erotic element to the Russian bath experience, but I have never brought that up to Andrei. He would think I meant homosexual and not understand what I was trying to say. You don't talk "homo" anything around Russian men!
After the banya, we went back to his place and he made me dinner. We watched Crash in Russian. He had never heard of it and loved it. I also bought him Good Fellows, but I wasn't quite up for that much violence after the relaxing banya, and The Talented Mr. Ripely, for his 50th birthday. The only thing is that the Russian synchronize everything, and the actors just don't cut it like the original ones. I much prefer subtitles, so you can hear the voices of the original actors, even if you can't understand the language.
A street vendor, sporting the mother of all mullets, selling kvac in St. Petersburg. In the background is Palace Square, and the Rolling Stones are singing Honky Tonk Woman. I wanted to get Andrei tickets for his 50th birthday, but he wasn't interested in seeing them. So, this is the closest I got.
I am a ten minute walk from Red Square. The first day I was here, I walked to Red Square, and when I caught site of St. Basil's for the first time in fifteen years, my eyes welled up with tears. Gazing at St. Basil's and Red Square just one last time was the very last thing I did before I left the country in 1992.
We've had excursions to Mosfilm and The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which is very beautiful and from which you get the best view of Moscow, the Kremlin and the Moskva River. Stalin had the original cathedral raised, wanted to build the tallest skyscraper in the world in its place, but the ground kept sinking, so he finally had an enormous swimming pool built there. Andrei used to swim in it.
Andrei lives near Kolomenskaya Park. I don't know if you ever made it there when we were here, but I didn't. Legend has it that Peter the Great was born there. The foundation of his father's summer home is still there. There's a beautiful church there and a great view of the Moscow River with the city off in the distance. Andrei said it used to be far removed from Moscow, hence a retreat. Anyway, it is a large urban park and very beautiful. I can't imagine it was kept up so well under the communists. I am sure it was a dump. Now the grounds are beautiful. There are charming little restaurants and the shashlik (shish kabob) is wonderful.
Andrei has been very generous with me. His third wife, Oksana is 31, cute and nice. He just turned 50. She has an eight year old daughter who is at the dacha with her grandmother. I guess she'll be there all summer. We were just told in class today that it is the Russian way for the grandmother to raise the kids. Classes are OK. Better than at Pushkin but I could still do without them. We go from 9-3:00 with a forty-five minute break for lunch and a ten minute break between the two morning classes and afternoon classes.
So many things are better. The young people in our group complain the public toilets. They are still not state of the art, but compared to what we had, they are wonderful!
The university must have a computer lab, but we don't have access to it. I guess it's just for students who are taking computer courses. There's an Internet cafe on campus, and the everyone else seems use that. I just bought two hours of time for 5.00. Andrei has a computer, but I am not always over there, and when I am, I can't be rude and excuse myself long enough to write any real letters.
So far, so good, although life here is still an adventure and still calls for adjustment and patience. They still turn off the hot water for a couple of weeks in different parts of Moscow at different times. They turned it off at my host's apartment the day before I arrived. No hot water means that my host, Zinaida, heats two tea kettles of hot water for me every morning. I pour them into a big basin and then add enough cold water to sponge bath every morning. Of course, you have to rinse yourself off with the dirty water in the basin, unless you want to freeze with the cold water. I've taken two hot showers since I arrived. One at Andrei's and one at a friend of his. Andrei lost his hot water a week ago. Zinaida gets hers back on the 9th, so I'll have it most of the time I am here. Although you can get anything here now that's available in any big city in the West, there are still things like no hot water for a couple of weeks in the summer that remind you that you are in Moscow.
Things still happen that remind you of Churchill's statement that Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. On Monday there was a big crowd of people in front of the university. Things moved very slowly, because there was no kind of order. People were pushing their way through. So we pushed our way through too. When we got to the entrance, we were told that exams were going on and only students taking their finals would be admitted. So, how do we get in for our classes, we asked? The guy just pointed vaguely to the left. We figured that meant there was another entrance somewhere else so we followed our noses around the building until we found the entrance. We were let in, we all have a student ID. But no one told us that we had to access our classes from the third floor elevator. We found out by trial and error. Yes, in many ways, it's the old Soviet Union I became so familiar with in 1987-88!
Other things, too, are just like they always were. There was always a shortage of paper, which meant you couldn't always find toilet paper. Most families had it most of the time, because they would hoard it. If they ran out, they cut up newspapers or propaganda posters, which were big and only cost 20 cents or so. You almost never found it at most public toilets. Then it made sense. But it is still the case. The toilets in the university do not have toilet paper. You can find as much as you want of it in the stores but not in toilets in most public buildings. The sinks still have two faucets, but they still only run cold water. The toilets still don't have seats. There soap dispensers still never have any soap. Today there was a bar of soap on one of the sinks. I guess some thoughtful person brought it for general use. I rejoiced.
In some ways, things have gotten worse. We were told that xenophobia has gotten really bad in the last two years. The police, who make next to nothing, regularly stop foreigners to check their documents, passport and immigration card. If they are not in order, you have to pay a "fine," i.e., bribe. We were told never to carry more than about twenty bucks on us at a time, but that's hard. Andrei says I don't have to worry, because I am a middle-aged white man. Darker skinned young people in the group have been here before and been stopped. We were told not to give cops any money, because our papers are all in order, but I wouldn't want to get into an argument with a cop here. Still, I think I'll be OK. (I was OK. I rather often saw dark skinned people from former republics of the Soviet Union stopped by the police but that was it. No one in our group was ever bothered.)
Three different Russians have told me that Zinaida's apartment is worth a million dollars, maybe more. It is about the size of mine. Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, and she has a large apartment in the center of two a ten minute walk from the Kremlin. But whoever buys it after she dies will have to spend about a hundred thousand dollars on it to totally renovate it. It hasn't been touched, I am sure, since her father got it in the 1939. The furniture is all primitive communist stuff. I sleep on a sofa that breaks down like a futon. The mattress couldn't be any harder, but that's OK. Sometimes one half of it becomes unhinged from the ancient wood and falls onto the floor. It literally breaks down. I have to be careful how I lay down on it. It hasn't happened yet in the middle of night, but I am waiting.
Zinaida's husband is deceased, and she has no children. She has a niece who is estranged from Zinaida's sister, who is very ill. The niece leaves Zinaida to care for her sister. There is also a thirty year old granddaughter who is just as worthless. Zinaida is 75. She can leave the apartment to someone who must claim it within six months. They have to pay an inheritance tax and some other fees, but then they are grand fathered in and need pay a minimal rent. If the apartment is not left to anyone, the government gets it. The niece has a great deal. Zinaida told me she's just waiting for her mother to die so that she can inherit the apartment, which is also ideally located.
I really did luck out with my location. She and I are becoming friendly. She likes using me as a sounding board for problems with her sister. Last week, she told me to call her Zinaida. You only use first names with family members and close friends. Other wise, you have to use the first name and patronymic. Andrei joked that maybe I will get her apartment!! :-) The only new appliance is a washing machine from Germany. It takes two hours just like in Italy. I had to weigh my clothes with a hand held scale because the machine can only hold five pounds, and Zinaida is paranoid it will break down. There is no dryer. I have to climb up on a ladder to hang the clothes on a line over the bathtub. I am always scared half to death I will fall and break my neck. She washes a little at a time and hangs her things on exposed pipes. She'd kill herself up there on that ladder.
This weekend I went out into the country with Andrei and his wife. They bought some land. Russian country houses, called dachas, are very primitive. There is usually electricity but no indoor plumbing. You have to use a nasty out house to go to the bathroom. The land is about three acres, lots of it. There is an ancient house with planks in the kitchen that you have to be careful when you step on because they are not nailed down and you can fall through to the ground. It was built after the war and had been abandoned for years. They're going to raze it and build a new, modern home, but that will take lots of money. We spent several hours clearing all this growth away from the house with a cycle. I felt like the Prince hacking his way through the thicket to get to Sleeping Beauty, but there was no beauty waiting for me! I can't remember the last time I did such "butch" work. It was probably college!
The women, his wife and a girlfriend, worked as hard as we did. We had to make a path with cycles so you could even get into the damn house. Then we had to chop wood to use in a primitive grill he brought from Moscow to make shish kabob and then to sit by the fire drinking vodka and talking. There are couches that pull out, and they were comfortable, because they brought bedding from Moscow. It rained and the roof only leaked in a couple of places, fortunately not over me.
Sitting around the fire Andrei told me that he had never believed his father when he said he was in a German prisoner of war camp in Austria. Well, a few years ago, the German government paid the father reparations. I don't know how much it was, but there was enough for Andrei to buy a Volkswagen. It must have been a lot. I guess he'll use that money to build a new dacha. Russian soldiers who spent time in a prisoner of war camp were sent immediately to another prison camp when they returned, because a good Russian soldier would die before being taken prisoner of war. Stalin was a paranoid maniac. But Andrei's father got a tip that this would happened, so he took two years off his age when he got home and signed up for another four year stint in the army. I don't know the details of how he got away with it, but he did. Thousands and thousands of Russian soldiers went from the hell of battle for their country to another kind of hell. They weren't freed until 1953 when Khrushchev declared a general amnesty and freed all Stalin's prisoners, among them criminals.
We are in Kazan for a long weekend. We took a night train from Moscow and arrived on Friday morning. We met with the administration and teachers of Kazan University, where such luminaries as young Lenin and Tolstoy studied. We were told that Tolstoy didn't get one answer right on his law exam but that the teacher gave him a 2, a D, because "he had such penetrating eyes" that he knew he was a genius and would be famous someday. I sat at his place on the back bench of the classroom and, better yet, sat in the chair reserved from the Czar during royal visits to Kazan.
Kazan is a charming city of just over a million people on the mighty Volga River. Tomorrow, we'll take a cruise on it. Our guide took us to a sort of K-mart store for clothes, because it's gotten chilly here (mid-fifties with wind) the last few days and he didn't want us to freeze on the cruise. I dropped 20.00 on a sweater that I may even wear this season when I get home. Today we visited its leading mosque and two cathedrals. The city is about half Muslim and half Christian. We were treated to a lunch fit for a king, four courses and vodka with each one but dessert. Our guide got drunk with the rest of us! There's a wonderful pedestrian zone that I am sure wasn't there under the communists. I just got back from a cruise up and down the zone, taking time to listen to a rock band and check out the locals singing along and dancing up a storm. In a mall right next to the hotel, I got my hair cut this evening and learned the word for buzz cut, a "hedge hog" I am still amazed by the malls, four and five story malls just as glitzy and with the same sensory overkill as ours. I bet old people still feel the same way I do, even though they've had over a decade to get used to them. It's still surreal to me. GUM still sells the plain vanilla bars of ice cream which used to be the only thing worth buying in a shopping mall nearly the length of a football field and with two floors. But you can also get Hermes scarves, Rolex watches, Prada handbags and all kinds of upscale wares I can't afford. The head of the Language Department at Moscow States makes 300.00 a month. Just imagine what the Chair of the Language Department at Harvard or Yale makes! People supplement their incomes here in many ways, teachers and professors tutor, but, still, I really can't figure out how they do it.
Andrei has treated me like a king. When he visited me, I took him all over New York, Philadelphia and we went to Disney World. He told me that now he realizes just what things cost and wants to treat me as generously I did him. I go over there every weekend beginning on Thursday, because we don't have class on Fridays. He takes me out to buy groceries for dinner and told me once that his mother spends as much money for food in an entire month as he drops for the weekend! His parents make less than 300 a month with their combined pension income. He helps them out, but there must still be plenty of places where Russians can shop for food and other basic needs without paying Western prices.
Unfortunately, this trip to Kazan fell on the weekend of his fiftieth birthday. He was upset and wanted me to get out of going, I know, but he never said directly that I should not go. He kept saying what do you need to go to that hole in the ground when I can take you to St. Petersburg and show you the time of your life? It's very hard to say No to him, but in the end, he realized that I will never see Kazan again and that it is worth seeing in terms of its rich history and culture.
By the time we left on Thursday evening he was reconciled to it and that afternoon orchestrated one of the best afternoons of my life. It started at a lovely out door Georgian restaurant, where he ordered us several kinds of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres, soup, the main dish, and dessert, which we washed down with beer and a bottle of vodka. Then he took us to the hotel where we met on July 4, 1979. It has been completely renovated and is one of the nicest hotels in Moscow. We sat in the amazing lobby and remembered what it looked like in 1979. It was plain and cavernous. In that lobby twenty-eight years ago, the woman behind the desk, with whom I had become friendly because she not only spoke German but told me on the first day I arrived that she thought German was more beautiful than Russian, told me on the eve of my departure three weeks later for Leningrad, that the reason she said what she did is because her government tells so many lies so often that the words in Russian have become meaningless. Even though it was late at night and we were the only two people in that enormous lobby, her voice dropped to a whisper and she was afraid, I could tell. Today, the lobby is just as big as it was then but no longer cavernous and overwhelmingly totalitarian but beautifully appointed. You feel comfortable in it, not intimidated by it. The hotel is as nice as any five star hotel in the West. We reminisced about how we met as we nibbled on walnuts seasoned with Wasabi, cashews, pretzel sticks and sipped two rounds of gins and tonic. Andrei said the bill would cost just about as much as dinner did. The drinks turned out to be 20.00 each, prices even higher than in Manhattan, so he was right. Again, he spent on four cocktails about what his mother spends in an entire month for food for two people.
After that we walked over to Red Square, which was visible from our rooms in that hotel twenty-eight years ago. We remembered walking on Red Square on July 4, after a party our group threw for Andrei and the other Soviet water polo players living next door to me, singing the Soviet and American national anthems and risking the wrath of the police for public rowdiness. Then we went into GUM, he bought me a vanilla ice cream a tradition they still keep, and, finally, we sat down at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Museum of Russian History and had another beer as he told me about the state of his current, and third marriage, not good, and I told him about the last week of my mother's life. Finally, we parted, and I walked the ten minute walk back to my apartment, and got ready to leave for Kazan.
My last couple of weeks in Russia played themselves out exactly as they should have. The next to last weekend, Andrei and I drove eight hours to St. Petersburg. He told me that Gogol said a couple of centuries ago that Russia has two curses, fools and roads. Only about half of the road between Russia's two most important cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, is what you would call a modern high way. The rest of it, while never degenerating into a one lane dirt road, is not much better. Much of it, I swear, looks exactly like they just poured pitch over the ancient dirt road that Gogol knew and then didn't really maintain it that well. It's awful! Consequently, a couple of miles from every little town you hit, there is a traffic jam to contend with. Many Russians, including Andrei, just drive past as many cars as they can on the right shoulder of the road. It's a little scary, but I kept my mouth shut. I think you could make the trip is six hours on a typical American interstate.
We spent three days in his beautiful home town. Much of the buildings have been completely restored. Often you see what were once gorgeous facades, but are now in decay, right next to fully restored facades. They make great photos of contrast. Twenty years ago, they were all in decay. The main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg, Nevski Prospect, celebrated in Russian literature and art, is being gradually restored to its pre-Revolutionary splendor. So are St. Petersburg's parks. One is especially beautiful. Under the communists, it had deteriorated into a dump of a wasteland.
The Rolling Stones were playing in the plaza in front of the Winter Palace. I offered to get Andrei tickets for his fiftieth birthday, but he wasn't particularly interested. It turned out that I was in the spill over crowd the night of the concert. Andrei had gone to visit a friend and left me to walk around Nevski Prospect, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I couldn't see the Stones, but I could hear them in a park adjacent to Palace Square. It was kind of cool just to be in the spill over crowd, a party atmosphere with fast food booths and a kids selling kvas, which is less sweet and pungent than the kvas you get in bottles or cans. It's very refreshing.
I also got to see Andrei's parents, both in their early eighties, perhaps for the last time. His Mom put out a nice spread which included red caviar, salads, pirozhki and Russian chocolates. She's still pretty spry but her hearing is bad, although Andrei says she hears what she wants to hear. His Dad has diabetes and cataracts. He's half blind from them. Here, he would have had them operated on and see just fine. He could have surgery there, too, of course, but he's one of these people who's afraid of doctors and hospitals.
We stayed at a friend of Andrei's to spare his parents the aggravation of guests in their small apartment. The guy, Max, is the St. Petersburg editor of the magazine, Sport, for which Andrei is the photo layout editor. Max is a great guy. Andrei says he's the best sports journalist in Russia. He seems to know everyone and has interviewed celebrities in film and the arts, too. He wants to write a screen play. We hit it off. I told him I'd translate it for him and that I had contacts in California who might even be able to get it produced. We'll see!
The last week of class was excruciating! But we survived it. On the last Friday we had a Good-bye dinner at a Georgian restaurant. Georgian food is wonderful, and the vodka and wine flowed like mad. So did the food. You start off with several courses of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres and three different kinds of hachipori, a Georgian cheese bread which is out of this world. Then hot soap and then the main course, which was shish kabob. Our teachers were there, there was a band, and we proposed toast after toast until the vodka was all gone. That's the custom at a big dinner like that. Somebody taps his glass with a knife to get everybody's attention. Then you stand up and propose a toast. Whoever goes first is kind of like a MC and gets to pick the person who follows. In the old Soviet days, the toasts were for "world peace" or "international friendship." Now, they would sound too "Soviet" and probably evoke chuckles. We all toasted our teachers and the different experiences Russia had afforded us. They really do know how to orchestrate a Farewell Dinner. It's easier to keep up with a German, after all it's just beer, than it is with a Russian drinking shot after shot of vodka. I had more beer and vodka in six weeks than I drink all year in America. Andrei is a big fan of both.
On Saturday, Andrei took me to a Russian bath house, a banya. Going there with a friend(s) is a wonderful, ancient Russian ritual that takes up an entire afternoon. Like in ancient Rome, the Russian bath is not just a place to keep clean but to socialize and bond. Men use bundles of birch leaf branches, called venaki, to beat themselves, and each other, with. I bought one and got it through customs just to show my students what they're like. The wooden floors of the sauna room are filled with birch leaves that have become dislodged from the branches. You take in the steam, then either beat yourself or let a friend beat you, with these bundles of birch leaves, jump into a cold pool, shower with soap, then go get a beer (people also drink hot tea, which the Russians love almost as much as vodka) and some dried herring, (these days they snack on bagels and potato chips), and bond socially. Then you repeat the process two times.
The branches don't hurt. Your friends don't beat you senseless. They're just very invigorating. I am sure there's some kind of health ordinance against them here. There are four levels of benches in the sauna, and a real man gets up as high as he can. After you get out of the steam room, which is scented by eucalyptus leaves just has it's been for centuries, you can either jump in the cold pool or pull a chord so that a big wooden bucket of ice cold water, which is filled continuously, dumps over onto you. I do both. After three or for hours, you walk out of there on a cloud. It's an amazing feeling from an amazing ritual as ancient as the country and nothing at all like going to an American health club, where people hardly even make eye contact, let alone bond socially. Andrei said his father used to take him and his brother there once a week, because keeping clean in the Fifties and Sixties in Russia, even in a city like Leningrad, was hard. People had indoor plumbing and tubs, but hot water was iffy.
There is definitely is a homo-erotic element to the Russian bath experience, but I have never brought that up to Andrei. He would think I meant homosexual and not understand what I was trying to say. You don't talk "homo" anything around Russian men!
After the banya, we went back to his place and he made me dinner. We watched Crash in Russian. He had never heard of it and loved it. I also bought him Good Fellows, but I wasn't quite up for that much violence after the relaxing banya, and The Talented Mr. Ripely, for his 50th birthday. The only thing is that the Russian synchronize everything, and the actors just don't cut it like the original ones. I much prefer subtitles, so you can hear the voices of the original actors, even if you can't understand the language.
A street vendor, sporting the mother of all mullets, selling kvac in St. Petersburg. In the background is Palace Square, and the Rolling Stones are singing Honky Tonk Woman. I wanted to get Andrei tickets for his 50th birthday, but he wasn't interested in seeing them. So, this is the closest I got.
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