June 5th, 1994 -- Prologue
I like to think I love adventures in life, but until just a few
years ago, overseas travel had never been one of them. It wasn't until
the summer of 1990 that I made my first trans-Atlantic trip; until
then, my idea of an adventuresome trip had been going north to New
England, or west to the wilds of southern California. I haven't been
trans-Pacific yet, but I've been back to Europe every year since then,
getting as far north as central Finland and as far east as Poland. But
now, now, there was a chance to take a real adventuresome trip --
10,000 miles from here, all the way out to the Siberian cities of
central Asia, with stopovers in Moscow on the way out and the way back.
Was I interested in going? Of course! But circumstances didn't really
allow me to savor the anticipation. I wasn't entirely sure the trip
would happened at all, in fact, until the very last week before I left
-- plans and schedules kept changing that much, that often. And so,
even when the day of departure finally arrived, it still didn't seem
quite real to me...
My flight out of Washington National Airport up to JFK was on a
34-seat Saab-Fairchild, a sort-of mini-DC-3-type airplane. I usually
dislike small airplanes because they get buffeted around a lot more
than jets, but the weather was nice and the ride was mostly smooth.
The flight attendant (I made the mistake of referring to her as a
"stewardess", which I quickly corrected) was a pleasant young woman
with a Kathy Ireland-type squeaky voice who actually liked working in
small airplanes, in preference to the larger jets.
Things did not get off to a good start, though. The airplane had
taxied about halfway out toward the main runway, when the pilot
suddenly came on the intercom and announced we had to return to the
gate. Visions of delays and missing my trans-Atlantic flight swirled
through my head, but it turned out that they had only forgotten the
coffee. Then, halfway to New York, there was a small problem with the
airplane -- an electrical blip that caused the exit lights to come on.
The flight attendant unobtrusively called the pilot on the intercom
phone and was told, "We know... we'll get back to you on it." Turns
out it was only a circuit breaker trip, nothing worse. The whole
incident was subtle enough that only I and she had noticed (I was in
the first row of seating). The fix didn't take too long and the exit
lighting soon went back off; there was never any changes in the sound
of the engines or anything else that caused people farther back in the
cabin to be aware of the problem. I wonder how many other flights that
I've been on have experienced in-flight problems that I've been unaware
of, simply because I've been seated in the wrong part of the airplane.
Soon after, we landed at JFK Airport, with a spectacular sunset
beyond the New York skyline in the distance -- my last North American
sunset for quite some time. Russia with all its wonders was still
about 14 hours in my future, but the first step in getting there, at
least, was behind me...
# # #
June 6th, 1994 -- Arriving Moscow
I should mention at this point that the purpose of this trip was
business, not pleasure! I was part of a fact-finding delegation,
sponsored by the U.S. Government, to look into ways of finding new
alternate energy sources for the populations around the Siberian cities
of Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk. Presently, some of the power and heat in
those regions are provided by nuclear reactors which make weapons-grade
plutonium as a by-product. There has been an international agreement
to shut down these reactors before the end of the decade, but the local
authorities are understandably concerned that when that happens, there
won't be enough heat and electricity available, especially during the
cold winter months.
There were ten of us on the trip, including two translators. We
were supposed to have two others besides, but they dropped out less
than a week before we left. One of them was the logistics person -- he
was pulled from the trip to help in the planning for a trip to India by
a cabinet-level official, and as it turned out, we felt his loss almost
at once. When we finally arrived at the Moscow airport, the van that
we thought the U.S. Embassy had sent to pick us up never arrived. We
sat and waited... and waited... and waited... and pondered what to do
next. Finally, one of the translators figured out a way to hire a bus
to come and get us. The total expense was only about $100 -- not bad
for 10 people plus luggage for a 10-mile trip in from the airport!
We arrived Russia on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, which was
being remembered most everywhere in Europe. In Moscow, however, there
was no apparent celebration or remembrance. On the way in to the city
from the airport, we passed a historical area on the side of the
highway, where three huge steel frameworks -- each in the shape of a
three-dimensional 'X', like a giant children's 'jack' toy -- stood in
silent sentinel just outside the city limits. We were told this was
the spot where the German advance on Moscow during World War II was
repelled, which was maybe the true turning point of that war. The
Russians apparently think that the D-Day invasion of France was a
relatively small skirmish, in terms of significance and in lives cost,
in comparison to the titanic Eastern front sieges.
# # #
June 6th-9th, 1994 -- in Moscow
Boy, Moscow is an expensive city! The place I stayed in, the Club
27, cost me $190 per night, and that's for a slightly above-average
room in a slightly above-average hotel! We got to the hotel in the
early evening, so we just decided to go down to the hotel restaurant
for dinner instead of trying to find someplace else to eat. The prices
there were enough to cause a double-take -- a bowl of soup cost $13,
fruit with whipping cream set you back $10, a salad with shrimp was
$24, and a main course of beef filet with sweet/sour sauce and
vegetable was $32. I finally settled on a plate of something that
resembled meatballs wrapped in dough (the Russian equivalent of dim
sum?) and a Perrier, for $25, including tip. Believe me, I savored
every bite...
We had picked the hotel because of its proximity to the U.S.
Embassy. Some of our meetings and many of our work sessions were at
the Embassy, and the cafeteria there was much cheaper than the hotel
restaurant. The commissary there provided us with lots of essentials,
not the least of which was bottled drinking water. We'd been told not
to drink the local water, even in Moscow, unless you wanted a case of
"Brezhnev's Revenge". This advice proved hard to follow (vegetables in
restaurants, for instance, were washed with the local water), and the
very first night I found myself getting up about 5:30am for an urgent
trip to the commode. Somebody with marketing sense should bottle some
of that Russian water and ship the stuff to the States; it would make a
great medicine to relieve constipation...
The U.S. Embassy seemed like a walled fortress to me. It was more
than just diplomatic offices -- it was an enclosed, self-contained
community. Just in the small area I was able to explore, I found that
there were recreation facilities (a pool and an indoor basketball
court), the commissary store, the cafeteria (which doubled as an
inexpensive restaurant for dinner a couple of times), and a library.
There were streets inside the embassy, complete with rowhouses. It
would be possible to live your entire Russia existence in there during
a tour-of-duty, if you wanted, without ever having to contend with the
outside world.
The U.S. Embassy is situated out on one of the perimeter ring
roads that circle Moscow, about a mile or so from Red Square at the
center of the city. Even that far out, however, there are other
embassies and Russian government buildings. Just a short distance down
the street from the Embassy, in fact, is the so-called Russian White
House -- a tall, narrow white building that I remember seeing on the
nightly news several months earlier. It's the building that was taken
over in an attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin, and that was shelled
by tanks in the ensuing melee. A bit closer, across the street
actually, is a tall-steepled old church that I first noticed when
someone was up in the steeple hand-ringing the bells there. From that
vantage point, it's possible to look right down into the U.S. Embassy
compound, which KGB observers routinely did during the years of the
cold war. For that reason it was lovingly referred to by Embassy
people, I was told, as 'Our Lady of Perpetual Surveillance'...
There were many wonderful old churches in Moscow. The one by the
U.S. Embassy fades into obscurity if compared to some of the onion-domed cathedrals located near Red Square. Unlike OLPS, all of those
have been lovingly preserved (though not always as functional places of
worship). Many have domes finished in shiny gold leaf, which makes
them spectacular to see on a sunny day; if placed in a different
setting, in a different city, any of them would be rightfully hailed as
an architectural wonder. But even these wonderful old cathedrals pale
in comparison to the most marvelous building that I have ever seen: St.
Basil's.
It'd hard to find words to adequately describe St. Basil's
Cathedral. It sits like an architectural kaleidoscope, a fairy castle
that's an island right in the middle of Red Square. The six multi-color candycane-striped domes are all different from each other, so the
view from the west, for instance, presents an entirely different
picture than the view from a different direction. It's the one image
that visitors to Moscow come away with, even though the rest of Red
Square and the adjacent Kremlin are picturesque in their own right.
The Kremlin itself is a walled fortress, the largest in the world
(we were told). The Kremlin wall forms the western boundary of Red
Square, and just about the midpoint of that stretch of the wall is a
small, nondescript black structure -- Lenin's tomb, which no longer is
a tourist attraction since Lenin's body had been removed (we had been told, erroneously as it turned out). Each place the
Kremlin wall turns a corner, there is a tall conical tower topped with
a five-pointed star. At night, these stars glow an eerie, surreal red,
a sight most people did not see that time of year because the nights
were so short.
By the way, those short nights took some getting used to! In
Moscow, in June, it doesn't get dark until after 10 pm local time. In
Siberia, the next week, nightfall came even later. [One late afternoon
in Tomsk, we left a restaurant after a long dinner engagement with our
hosts just as it was just starting to get dark; I looked at my watch
and was startled to see it was nearly midnight!]
Luckily, the restaurants all seemed to be open very late at night.
Quite often we didn't finish work for the day until about 8 or 9 pm,
and by the time we found someplace to eat, it was 10 pm or later. But
even at that hour, there were lots of people in the restaurants we went
to. One of them, an out-of-the-way Italian restaurant, was obviously a
popular place for a drink or dinner, but surprisingly, there didn't
seem to be any other foreigners there besides us. And yet, all the
various menu items were priced not in Russian rubles, but in American
dollars instead. We had noticed this earlier, in the hotel restaurant,
and thought it was done there just for the convenience of the business
traffic, but here it was too, in a place that catered mostly to locals.
Turns out that inflation in Russia is still so out-of-control that
rather than re-doing the menu every day or two, it's easier just to
price items in some relatively stable currency and then assume the
patrons will be able to convert to rubles with whatever the exchange
rate is for that day. To be able to dine out in Russia, you not only
had to have an appetite but a pocket calculator too!
Our experience in that Italian restaurant showed us, as we were
pleased to find out, that it was possible to get a good meal for much
less than hotel restaurant prices. Lower than comparable American
restaurant prices, in fact. You just had to know where to go, that's
all. On the way back to the hotel, we rode the Moscow subway system,
mostly just to say we had done it. Each ride on it costs the princely
sum of 100 rubles -- about five cents. Who says Moscow is an expensive
city??