Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Friday, August 21, 2015

From Russia with Luck

The Russians have a proverb, “Na lovtsa I zver’ bezhit.” It translates, “Speak of the devil and he appears.”

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Enroute to St. Petersburg last week, we detour through Estonia, a former Soviet republic. Evidence of that failed era remains visible. We arrange a tour, “Back to the USSR” to get a ‘feel’ what living under post-war Soviet control was like. Such adventures are often ill-advised.

We walk through the gray, early smog of a parking lot to the point of departure. Our guide stands there to greet us. Beside him is a left-over Soviet-era bus, the kind you see littered along the countryside in rural Georgia.

He stands there in a rigid formation and eyes our small group with cold eyes and a slight Elvis sneer. He wears a gray KGB uniform with a colonel’s insignia. The metals pinned to his jacket are tarnished. They appear to have been purchased form a yard sale in Alabama.

I am Colonel Boris,” he says. He is not a cheerful type. He means business. We don’t know what to expect.

Line up behind this white line,” he demands. We do, obediently. He looks at me. “You are a spy, no?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’m a capitalist pig," I say. He’s not amused. He spits.

Now, march around the bus three times, in formation, and get in.” We march. Nobody speaks.

The bus driver sits there mute, like a robot. We sit. Boris pulls out a used cardboard box, takes out a jar of pickles and a bottle of clear liquid. Vodka.

He pours stiff slugs of it into cheap plastic cups, passes them around. Steam rises from them, reminiscent of elixirs from fraternity parties of the past. “Bottoms up,” he shouts, and begins to sing something in Russian. We clap in unison.

He distributes pickles, smallish cucumbers that appear to have been cured in formaldehyde. “Russian snacks,” he says. “Drink, eat. Russian health food.” Immediately our day begins to look up.

The robot fires up the bus. It lurches forward about three feet, then chokes down. Colonel Boris grunts and say to three hefty men, “You, beefsteaks, out, push.” Nobody demurs. They get out and push. The engine catches fire, the tour begins.

We visit a closed Soviet prison. Its walls are dank with mildew; its windows appear as black, hollow eyes of skeletons that reveal the horror that must have occurred there. The devil still lives here along with the rusted hulks of machinery.

He says it was a transition impoundment, a temporary ‘evaluation’ facility to decide who lives and who goes to Siberia. We decline an inside visit after the warning. The bus moves on.

Throughout the city of Tallinn we see remnants of leftover obsolescence, buildings without maintenance for years, desperately in need of demolition. Detroit redux.

We pass green parks of people sunning, picnicking, perhaps escaping from some lingering fear of confinement. Apparently remembrances of Soviet eavesdropping are fresh in memory. We end at a closed Soviet meeting hall, now a historical monument filled with murals of Soviet propaganda.

Outside is a grown-over field of tall grasses. An unkempt cemetery of sorts. Littered throughout the tall grass are decapitated copper bodies. They lie oxidizing slowly in the chill Estonia air. Their heads are iconic replicas of Lenin, Marx and Stalin. They lay in strange juxtaposition to their former bodies. One is reminded of the tenuous nature of ideology.

The tour ends in the village market area, a bustling row of mainly flower shops. The ancient buildings in the town square appear unchanged for hundreds of years. They exude a quaint charm of a peaceful time.

Colonel Boris, we discover, is actually a comedian, an actor. He arranges these comedic tours as a reminder of what the old USSR was like, and what it may again become. As he said, they are now a NATO nation, but remind us that the acronym could translate, ‘No Action, Talk Only.’

Russia produces great musical composers. Much of their music is written in minor keys. I am told that while the big Russian sky is blue, there is always a cloud on the horizon. Their music conveys this.

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If you plan to visit Russia, I have only one suggestion for you: Ne puha, ne pera…good luck.


Bud Hearn
August 21, 2015

Friday, August 7, 2015

Russia at First Glance


Revolutions explode overnight. Change crawls piecemeal. Russians seem to be breathing air of complacency.

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One George Washington will buy 63 Russian rubles? What a deal. What better time to put a shoe on Russian soil.

We stowed aboard a cruise ship heading up the Baltic Sea, a floating city, having ignored the news that Putin and Clinton had reached agreement to control the world. Friends held a wake prior to our departure. They must have read the same news.

What little I knew about Russia could be summed up in one aphorism: "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Churchill wrote those words. So I decided to peer into the enigma for a metaphor of the Russian Bear.

Enigmas are giant jigsaw puzzles. Hard to see the whole mosaic one piece at a time. Understanding them requires patience, the sport of truly chastened things.

Russians have painted a pretty face in St. Petersburg, our destination. But the post-Soviet era cannot be hidden. Sailing through the ship canal, the Neva River, one is reminded of rough dry docks of New Jersey or the industrial decay of Detroit. Glory is fickle. It comes, it goes. Here it has departed, leaving in its wake rusted-out steel hulks of yesterday's glory. Now a giant junk yard of detritus.

Russians are a paranoid people. To see the sites, we are shuttled off the ship, through Immigration populated by grim-faced agents. Smiles are not allowed. (The ship promises a free tour to anyone who could make them smile. It proved to be a safe bet.)

Once off, we're herded into a bus with a Russian tour guide who is obviously instructed to control our movement. We walk, as do other tours, in a tight mosh pit of people, following like first graders a sign on a stick with our tour number.

Russians control everything it seems. But one thing they can't control is the appearance of buildings along the way. Think Havana for a good comparison. Post USSR is everywhere, seen in the decay of buildings.

Cranes dot the skyline, giving the appearance of progress. In spite of their ubiquity, none seemed to be active. Lessons observed from North Korea.

Unlike the US, people walk. Teeming throngs are in constant movement late in the afternoon. I ask about these masses. "Going home from work" was the answer.

We roll through the countryside outside the city. New construction is everywhere, so is traffic. Some things never change...like America, cars dominate exurbs.

The palaces, gardens, parks and monuments are abundant. They speak of the extravagant Czarist history. But after a while, retention of sights and details are impossible. It all runs together. The mind, like a sponge, can absorb only so much. The enigma remains.

The closest I got after 3 days of putting pieces in the puzzle had to do with a scene from the balcony of my room. It seemed to offer a clue to the mystery.

Late in the afternoon a man dressed in black emerges from a derelict industrial building. He walks along the top of a steel bulkhead. He's in no hurry. He stops, looks at the water, slowly walks more.

The sun plays with him. He follows his shadow for a while. He turns around, walks back. His shadow follows. Suddenly a small black dog appears from nowhere. It sees the man, runs. The man watches with disinterest.

The man walks on. He passes what appears to be a silver pipe. Smoke pours from it. He stops, looks at it, continues. He seems to have no purpose. He stops again, has a smoke, then moves on.
He walks over to a concrete wall, stands there with his back to it. Life is passing him by without incident. He flips his cigarette into the canal, watches it wash away. Then strolls back past the smoking pipe. He looks at it, pauses, then disappears around the corner of a metal building.

Who is this man, I wonder? A guard, a laborer? What is his purpose? What is he thinking? Each answer another piece of the puzzle.

But the constantly smoking pipe, what metaphoric cornerstone does it occupy in the riddle? It reminds one of the words of Emile Zola, “When truth is buried underground, it grows and builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it.”

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We left St. Petersburg as Churchill described it, the enigmatic mystery unresolved. But every culture may be defined thusly, though others may be less opaque.

As I look over the over-fed lunch crowd on the ship, what metaphor would one of another culture use to unravel the American character?

The pipe smokes for all of us.


Bud Hearn
From Russia with Luck
August 7, 2015