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