33 Years Later: Todd's Reflections on Changes in Russia

I left the Soviet Union in June 1977 after three years at the US Embassy in Moscow and did not return until May 18, 2010, when Georgia and I began a 12-day custom tour of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The program was organized through the Mir Corporation of Seattle and designed by myself and Bill Lieser, a fellow Russian student and good friend who had served in Leningrad from 1974 to 1976. To our very great regret, however, a health problem prevented Bill and his wife Mary Lee from making the trip.

The following narrative includes observations that will be unsurprising to anyone who follows developments in Russia. Nonetheless, I wanted to record my personal impressions of the changes that occurred during the 33 years since I left the USSR. I knew, of course, that much would be dramatically different, and I had seen analogous developments first-hand during our service in Moldova in 1995-1998 and several visits to Moldova and Ukraine thereafter. Nonetheless, I was impressed by changes in the following areas. (Please note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.)

Traffic

When I lived in Moscow, there were so few cars that we could drive in 10 minutes from the Embassy to an opera performance at the Bolshoy (about 1.5 km) and park in front of the theater. Now an hour would be required, and a vacant parking place would be a miracle. A car trip from Vladimir to Moscow (190 km) took some two hours in the 1970s, but in May Georgia and I were still underway after four hours, and our expert driver made several false starts before finding a route through stalled traffic to our hotel near the Kremlin. When we recounted this experience to Ambassador Beyrle, he assured us that we had made very good time. [For a "New Yorker" take on Moscow traffic, visit http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2010/07/back-issues-traffic.html.]


Moscow traffic on the Kremlin Embankment

Restaurants and Coffee Houses

In the 1970s restaurants were rare, restaurant fare was mediocre at best and literally sickening at worst, and restaurant service was an oxymoron. Boy, how things have changed! Restaurants with western-quality food, decent service, and reasonable prices now can be found throughout Moscow and St. Petersburg. We particularly enjoyed more exotic regional dishes from the former Soviet republics (e.g., Azeri in Moscow and Georgian in St. Pete), but we found good Russian-Ukrainian food at attractive prices in the Yolki-Palki restaurants, a chain with many establishments in both cities.

Amazingly, the most popular cuisine for urban Russian diners appears to be Japanese sushi, as evidenced by the number of sushi restaurants in Moscow and St. Pete. According to our guide, supermarkets now sell raw fish for DIY aficionados. But somehow or other, while Georgia and I both enjoy sushi, we gave it a pass in Russia.

Coffee houses were, perhaps, my biggest surprise. In the 1970s Russians drank tea as their non-alcoholic beverage, and Soviet coffee, when available, was an unpalatable liquid made from “instant” powder. Today coffee houses are almost as ubiquitous in Moscow and St. Petersburg as they are in the US Pacific Northwest, with prices slightly lower. Almost all offer free wi-fi so we fell into the routine of following our hotel breakfast with a cappuccino at a neighboring coffee house and checking our e-mails.

Another interesting development in Russia is the advent of boutique restaurants, frequently in the chef’s home. We dined in one such establishment in Suzdal’, about 200 kilometers from Moscow, where the proprietors were a husband-and-wife team, both veterans of the Soviet merchant marine. They cater to small groups (we and our driver were the only guests that evening), serving them excellent food with ingredients from their own kitchen garden. A similar establishment outside St. Petersburg mushroomed into “Podvorye,” reputedly Putin’s favorite restaurant, where we lunched on Russian food in a large log building.


Starbucks were few and far between, but


There were three “Kofe Hauz” shops close to our St. Petersburg hotel


Our guide Masha at “Podvorye” (no, that isn’t water in the flask)

Accommodations

Soviet hotels for foreigners, all operated by Intourist, made travel a trial in the 1970s with disinterested staff, archaic plumbing (the tap in my Khabarovsk hotel ran brown in 1975), and dreadful food. I was anxious to see how times had changed. To keep our costs down (international-class hotels are outlandishly expensive), we had opted for three-star establishments, which offered a fair comparison to their Soviet predecessors.

Our centrally located Moscow hotel, the “Budapest,” was in certain ways a stroll down memory sewer, for it had been an Intourist hotel in Soviet times. Built in the late 19th century, it had sheltered Lenin—as an old plaque at the entrance still proudly proclaimed--and it still featured the large rooms, high ceilings, and broad corridors I remembered from the 1970s. However, the plumbing had been updated to late 20th century standards, the management had replaced the green-and-red hall carpeting common to all Intourist hotels, and the buffet breakfast was first-class. Best of all, the elevator was always in service—a condition virtually unknown in Soviet times.


Hotel Budapest

Our St. Petersburg hotel, the “Agni,” located right off Nevskiy Prospekt, was an interesting contrast to the Budapest, for it had opened a few years ago after an entrepreneur had purchased interior portions of a 19th Century building and remodeled them into guest rooms, plus a reception desk, breakfast room, and kitchen. The rooms were small—equivalent to those in a Paris commercial-class hotel—and the single window opened out into an air shaft, but the plumbing was quite modern and the breakfast was adequate. Since the entry and lobby were so small, the security man with his bulging pockets was more in evidence than were his counterparts at the Budapest.


Hotel Agni

The biggest departure from Soviet hotels came in Suzdal’ outside of Moscow, where we stayed one night at “Pushkarskaya Sloboda,” a complex designed for conferences. Because conference business was apparently slack, the management welcomed tour groups, and we found ourselves at a generous buffet breakfast in a sea of Brits. We were quartered in our own recently constructed log cabin and could have enjoyed the complex’s spa facilities, had our schedule permitted.


Our cabin at Pushkarskaya Sloboda

Dealing with the Past

As my college history professor told us, “The history of a country isn’t really very important. But what the country’s people think their history is—that’s extremely important.” That’s why I was interested in present-day Russian historiography—how the Soviet era and earlier times were portrayed.

There was a fascinating mixture of themes in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Much had not changed in Moscow: Lenin’s tomb, the tomb of the unknown soldier of the Great Patriotic War (which, as you will recall, began in 1941 since the USSR had partnered with Nazi Germany in the early years of World War II), the posters left over from the 65th anniversary in May of the Soviet victory in that war, the triumphal arch on Kutuzovskiy Prospekt marking the Russian victory over Napoleon, and the Metro, Moscow’s beautiful subway, still named in honor of V.I. Lenin.


Guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier by the Kremlin Wall


Poster commemorating the 65th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War


Moscow Metro station


Triumphal arch on Kutuzovskiy Prospekt

However, much had been added since my departure in 1977:

-- Art Park Muzeon, called the Park of Dead Ogres by our guide, a sculpture garden filled with statues of defunct Soviet leaders like Stalin, Lenin, and Dzerzhinskiy (founder of the Soviet secret police), all removed from other locations. Most touching was a giant cage/wall filled with the sculpted heads of Soviet victims.


Art Park Muzeon


Victims wall in Art Park Muzeon

-- Novodevichiy Convent cemetery, the resting place of prominent Russians who were not regarded as Communists in good standing. The cemetery could only be visited by special arrangement in the 1970s, but we were able to enter and wander among the graves, some of which were very evocative. Boris Yeltsin’s resting place is enshrouded with a Russian flag, and Mstislav Rostropovich was given a neighboring place of honor, presumably because of his musical and political contributions to Russia and the world.


Yeltsin grave


Rostropovich grave

-- The Kremlin itself, which Russian and foreign tourists can now wander through (for a fee, of course). Only a small portion, where the President’s offices are located, is closed to visitors.


Moscow Kremlin


Kremlin visitors

In St. Petersburg the new Russian authorities had to deal with a major challenge: Tsar Nicholas II. The Tsar’s remains, along with those of his family members and servants, had been discovered in 1979 near Yekaterinburg, where they had been murdered in 1918. In 1998 President Yeltsin was finally able to arrange for their interment, along with those of the Tsar’s family members and servants, in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg, the burial place of almost all tsars beginning with Peter the Great. As the remains were all intermingled, they are buried together below a separate alcove in the rear of the cathedral with the names of the deceased listed on the wall.


Burial place of Nicholas II, his family members, and servants

There is now also a memorial to Nicholas II and his family in the Alexander Palace outside St. Petersburg, the birthplace and primary residence of the Tsar. He and his family occupied a relatively modest suite of rooms in one wing of the palace, and these have been attractively restored to give visitors an idea of the Romanovs’ daily life.


Nicholas II’s office cum billiard room (Tsarina Alexandra used to sit in the balcony and listen as the Tsar talked with visitors.)

This relatively new memorial to Nicholas in the Alexander Palace is an interesting counterpart to the Lenin memorial that has long existed at the Morozov mansion in Gorki Leninskiye outside Moscow. Having visited in the 1970s, I found things little changed when Georgia and I toured the mansion in May. After the capital was moved to Moscow in 1918, Lenin sequestered the Morozov estate as a weekend retreat as it had good train and road connections to Moscow and—most important—a telephone line. When he began to suffer a series of strokes, the mansion became his convalescent home and ultimately his death place. Not one to eschew haut-bourgeois comforts, Lenin made few changes in the mansion. Thus, it captures Russian upper-class life before World War I with just a few pieces of Leniniana, including the Jack London novel he was reading in his last days. Interestingly, unlike the Alexander Palace, the Morozov estate is hard to reach, requiring a 25-minute walk from the parking lot. We were alone on our guided tour.


Morozov mansion in Gorki Leninskiye


Statue at Gorki Leninskiye of workers carrying Lenin’s body through the snow to the railroad station for his funeral in Moscow

Religion

The most prominent evidence of the reestablishment of Orthodox Christianity in Russia is Moscow’s huge Cathedral of Christ the Savior, built on the site of its predecessor, which Stalin had demolished and replaced with a large outdoor swimming pool, popular in the 1970s as the water was heated year-round.


Cathedral of Christ the Savior

However, I was much more interested in the changes in the historic monastery-seminary complex at Sergiyev Posad, known in Soviet times as Zagorsk, outside of Moscow. In the 1970s this complex had three working churches (any working church was a rarity in the USSR) and one of the USSR’s few seminaries to train priests. A group from the Embassy traveled to Zagorsk for the night-long Easter services in 1976 and found the complex crowded with old women determined to worship. Undaunted by Communist Youth members blocking an entrance, they surged forward, scattering the young men wearing red armbands. “The charge of the light babushky,” as one of my colleagues described the scene.

Today the many visitors have unrestricted access to the complex, formally known as St. Sergiyev Lavra, which is one of the most important centers—and pilgrimage sites--of Russian Orthodoxy. Our tourist admission fee included the services of a guide, in our case a young seminarian from the Urals already ordained as a deacon and now studying for the priesthood. His English was self-taught, he told us, but his command of ecclesiastical terminology was outstanding. Unfortunately, as he explained, tourists were not permitted to take pictures of clergymen in the complex, including seminarians like himself.


St. Sergiyev Lavra

The most intriguing religious institution we visited was the Nikolskiy Nunnery outside Moscow near Suzdal’, which looked brand-new. Our guide explained that the teaching order now occupying the site had conferred a powerful blessing on an important person, thought to be Mrs. Luzhkova, the extraordinarily wealthy wife of the mayor of Moscow. This person showed her gratitude by supporting the nuns’ work and rebuilding the complex with a richness reminiscent of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.


Church at Nikolskiy Nunnery

One of the most beautiful churches in Russia is the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, which I visited with my parents in 1976. Located near Vladimir near Moscow, it stands alone, a 25-minute walk from the highway. I found the exterior of the church little changed when Georgia and I visited in May, but it is now again functioning as a working church.


On the path to the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl


Church of the Intercession on the Nerl