Russia

My Russian Romance

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The Infamous Stray Dog Café where I read with Anna Akhmatova and others (not at the same time or in the same century)
I had just given this carnation to the WW2 vet on Victory Day
3 am at The Shack, my hang out for years where I met locals and played music in the woods on the beach of the Gulf of Finland

I’ve traveled all over the world with friends and family: To Ireland, Prague, France and Spain, Norway and Amsterdam. But Russia has been on my mind the past few days as it and the war in Ukraine seems to have been drowned out by the noise coming from the Middle East. For quite some time I had quite some time there. I dined in palaces while quartets played for our private group, and I’ve paid off people guarding graveyard gates so we could explore the backstreets of St Petersburg. I’ve brought friends to apartments of artist and writer friends of mine, sat backstage during rehearsals at the Conservatory, had private concerts at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov, and read my work at the famous, dissident occupied Stray Dog Café as well as Dostoevsky’s flat. I know the streets of that city better than any other place in the world, including places I’ve lived. It has something to do with that heightened, acute awareness we experience when we travel. It also has something to do with going back dozens of times.

The city today in this post-Ukraine-invasion world, I fear, more closely resembles the city it was when I first arrived just after the coup. I thought those times were dead and buried, covered by the fresh grass of several new generations who know little else but freedom and capitalism. But it took one sick man to throw it all back thirty-five years.

In 1994, the streets of St Petersburg were dank, a monotone of browns absent of advertising, neon, or anything other than some Soviet style atmosphere. The only placards placed in random spots on Nevsky Prospect—the city’s Fifth Avenue—were Marlboro signs, the only western clothing of note worn by the suddenly displaced masses was Adidas warm-up suits. It appeared a parody of itself as presented in 1970’s and ‘80’s anti-Soviet movies. For seventy-five years the country, and Leningrad, moved in darkness under the Soviet leadership, and for centuries before that under the long reach of the Czars.

When I first arrived to teach American culture to faculty at Baltic State University, the first of what would end up being more than twenty-five trips in thirty years, democracy had found the streets of Leningrad, which had just changed its name back to the Imperial “St. Petersburg,” and Russians struggled to figure it out. The first week there, I stood in line for two hours at a bakery, and when I pointed this out at the college, my colleagues shrugged and said, “Da. Canushna.” Yes, of course. I explained that in the States, a new bakery would open across the street and be faster, charge less, offer discounts. Then I had to explain discounts and why, explain that the cashier who stood outside smoking while twenty people were in line would be fired. This led to a conversation about capitalism, and everyone was suddenly enthralled to hear about businesses and learn how to make money, the advantages of choices, the value of options. The men of the previous generation on through to the college students present when I first taught in the city, simply understood service to their country as paramount; it involved time away from family, but also provided pensions and a chance to protect their living conditions.

But after the coup, and certainly in the few years which followed leading up to 1994, it was a brand-new way of existence, and the long, cold winter of communism had finally ended. Things changed—and this is where it got tricky. At first everything was different overnight, like their currency, living conditions, international relationships, and availability of goods. But then the changes slowed to an immeasurable pace. People couldn’t find jobs or food, or they had to work for some organized crime group. Old folks lined the metro begging for money or selling items—shoes, loose cigarettes, empty bottles. But within a few years they figured it out.  One afternoon that first year I went to the market behind a cathedral in the arts district. It was a park area with tables covered in tourist items: matryoshka dolls, the famous Russian wooden bowls known as khokloma, pins, small wooden toys bears. Scarfs, shawls, icons, amber jewelry. The following year the market built small booths in long rows instead of random tables. A year or two later, the booths had roofs over them, then lighting was put in for night shopping, and by the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003, the entire market was covered, gates out front, a veritable mall filled with all the previous items, but also fine art, expensive purses, technology, and food were added to the shelves. The Russians were figuring it all out, and many made more money in a month than they had in a year under the Soviet regime. Organized crime groups took over and took a cut, and the city streets once filled with just Russian-made Ladas were now lined with black SUVs.

A friend of mine in the marketplace, photographer and artist Valentine, remained my source of all things business, and the changes almost became too much for him to handle. In 1995, I went in the Catholic Church nearby to find piles of rubble where an altar used to stand eighty years earlier, and the walls had been painted black, on the floor lay statues without heads. The priest, Fr. Frank Sutman, explained it had been used as a storage facility for motorcycles since the Great Patriotic War, World War Two, but the church took it over for the first time since 1917. By the turn of the millennium, the grandeur of the marble floors and beautiful walls had been restored. Across the street was a small shop. In the early years, I had to point to the item I wanted on the shelf behind a counter or in a glass case, and if I liked it, I took a handwritten receipt to the cashier who figured out the total on an abacus (no kidding), gave me a new receipt which I took back to the first worker to retrieve the items. This is how it was in the few grocers, the pharmacies, the bakeries. Only in the tourist market did one deal directly with one person.

Years pass.

A supermarket opened with cashiers at the end of conveyor belts who rang up your items, bagged them, and you walked out like you just left Walmart. The discovered calculators, paper bags, and the shelves were stocked with European goods. And on the streets, neon signs dominated the avenue: KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, clothing brands, cigarettes, alcohol, appliances, cars. Except for the language I could have been in my native New York. The once empty streets were filled with people, all on their new phones, all taking pictures, all donning expensive jackets and shoes.

These were the years of tourism, of an entire generation and the next growing up without memory of Gorbachev, even of Yeltsin. Today no one under forty-five would remember communism. For thirty-years we went on canal rides and took videos, wandered through neighborhoods and graveyards. I went to Victory Day a dozen times, talked to Vets of the Great Patriotic War, who loved to share their experiences, and I talked to the women—St Petersburg became known as a city of old women since the men mostly died in the war and children starved to death—about the changes, often as they swept the streets with brooms made from birch branches. I played guitar with a gypsy band in the woods and danced on stage with a folk group with no inhibitions at all. I have absolutely successfully embarrassed myself behind the former Iron Curtain.

We went to the Kirov Ballet, the opera, folk shows, and soccer games. We dined in restaurants from Germany, Italy, China, and played music, danced and drink at The Liverpool, a Beatles bar.

Peter the Great’s dream of a city of culture, his “Window to the West” as he called it, had come to fruition. Over those decades I have written three books and dozens of articles about my experiences there, and the experiences of the World War Two veterans.

By 2014, after twenty-years of going to Russia, anyone thirty or thirty-five years old and younger only new this new way of life. By 2025, the Soviet system was foreign to anyone under fifty. The very notion that the government would dictate what they could and could not do was as foreign to them as it is to us in the west. Students graduated from college and set up businesses, tech companies, they traveled freely and often to Portugal, the United States, Hong Kong, Sicily, everywhere. After almost a century of needing to walk everywhere and live with two other families in small communal apartments, they now owned cars and nice apartments. The once common practice of tourists bringing Levis or other western brands to trade for Russian trinkets was not only over, but laughable, with malls opening up with shoe stores, clothing stores, phone, sporting goods, and music stores, all filled with western brands.

Again, it’s crazy to realize that the “old country” of Russia had so modified over the course of just two decades, one had to be in their forties to remember the Soviet system. What the average Russian citizen could not know, of course, was that the modifications made in palaces throughout the country, but in particular St Petersburg, was paid for by organized crime to increase tourism and international trade. The city where I could in those early years buy items for a few dollars, quickly figured it out and charged twenty or thirty dollars for the same items. Restaurants appeared everywhere with prices for those driving the SUVs, not for the Lada crowd.

My friends from Russia adjusted. A tour operator learned business well and built a company that dealt with tourists from all over the world. My artist and writer friends found new freedom in being able to take pictures of anything and anyone they wanted without recourse. They criticized the Yeltsin administration without worry of harm. For seventy-five years, the notion of dissidence, which not only included those who wrote against the government, but those who simply didn’t always write positive things about the government; particularly Stalin, had in just a few shaky years, slipped into history. Going to St Petersburg became simple. There was even talk for a while of dropping all the VISA requirements. I wouldn’t call it democracy, as such, but communism was dead. Gone. Lenin’s statues which had been everywhere in the early ‘90s were much more difficult to find. It became simple for a Russian to leave home and travel to the United States. And the did, gladly, relishing in being a part of the world, finally. This wasn’t simply détente; this was the start of a beautiful relationship.

In 2013, my son and I rode the trans-Siberian railway from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, across more than six-thousand miles, and seemingly across decades as we retreated into the previous century the further east we traveled. In Yekaterinburg the western influence was still obvious, but in Irkutsk, another few days east, Soviet style practices still appeared common. The one fortunate thread remained the people, all deeply rooted in new democratic, even capitalistic practices. They drove Kias and Toyotas, they wore Levis and Ray-Ban sunglasses, and they spoke of their vacations in Australia, the Canary Islands, Florida. If I had not been already in my fifties, there would be no basis of comparison to the old, Soviet ways I grew up learning about, fearing, hating. Nothing I had learned about these people was true, even in the early nineties. The propaganda machine, practiced just as efficiently in the west, had turned out to be shallow, and that was with a generation of Russians whose experience had only ever been Soviet or Czarist. This new generation, those already well into their careers, families, homeownership, and substantial investments, just two decades old, was the dominant population across the country, and they knew less about living under a fascist regime than I did.

Until Vladimir Putin.

He came in early and soft, almost friendly, certainly acceptable. He was a man with a vision for this new country who followed the floundering Boris Yeltsin, and as Putin’s power and wealth increased, he rebuilt his native St. Petersburg. He saved the former Soviet Union from ruin and the economic disaster of the Yeltsin years, which left a rampant homeless and starving population to fend for themselves. Right after the coup to end communism, the nationalization of all businesses and housing ended, but so did the pensions. Housing privatized and if the residents couldn’t afford the new rent they were kicked out. Hospitals quite literally rolled patients out the door and left them near churches to fend for themselves. Putin moved from the city’s Vice Mayor up the ladder to President on the promise he would “clean up” the homeless problem, “employ” people willing to work for anyone, and made business deals that brought unprecedented wealth to the nation. Russians welcomed him; so did western leaders. And the population which benefited the most were under forty, tech-savvy millennials who worked their way up, drove expensive cars, and lived in large sweeping apartments on Nevsky Prospect with beautiful dachas in the countryside or Ekaterinburg. Tourists who visited St Petersburg discovered open palaces with gourmet dining rooms, clean hotels with five-star service, shops with icons, malachite and amber jewels, and all-things-fashion. Russians, too, became tourists able to see more than the dachas they shared with other families. They traveled to Italy, to Portugal, France, and the United States. Satellite television common in the nineties became fast internet service enabling partnerships and communication with anyone anywhere.

Then Ukraine happened.

Those same students just out of communism and thrust into capitalism are now in their late forties, at least, and their children, raised in nothing but a mostly free-capital society with all the advantages and freedoms we understand here in the States, are being drafted into an army to attack a country they spent their entire lives visiting on vacation. When the news speaks of “Russian military,” this is who they’re talking about; men and women whose only reference and background was freedom of choice, of employment, of wandering, of economic wealth. Their only requirement was the possibility of two years mandatory service before they turned twenty-seven. Piece of cake; their billets ranged from one end of the earth to the other. So while their parents may not have been surprised to have been called to service in Afghanistan in the seventies for the Soviet government, these men and women dreading duty in neighboring Ukraine had anticipated their best-laid plans to pursue personal ambitions, and went to schools which had been teaching them international relations and economics, until the hope they had for life was disturbingly aborted for reasons beyond their comprehension or desire.

Then western sanctions hit and the country shut down, banks stopped all business outside the borders, foreign companies which lined Nevsky Prospect with signs and tables and parties were suddenly gone. The streets once again seemed grey, empty of life. Employment disappeared and no pension waited by to save them, so the army promised to pay their bills, which they did for a short while, and when word spread that the truth is they could barely feed their soldiers, let alone pay them wagers a fraction of what they had been used to, many fled.

Back in the mid-nineties, a friend of mine would write complaining about Yeltsin, about the lack of support from the United States, about the homelessness and difficulties dealing with “Old Russians,” who knew Soviet Ways, and how the “New Russians,” assume they have a right to whatever they can get. The anecdote which circulated then was how a New Russian in a Mercedes SUV waited at a stoplight when an Old Russian in a Lada with no brakes hit him from behind. The Old Russian got out of his car terrified, but the New Russian simply said, “Aren’t you glad I’m here to stop you? Otherwise you would have run out of control and killed yourself.” That was the propaganda which took hold and brought this nation to life; this nation now isolated and quite possibly on life support.

In the last few months, after a year of no word from friends who still live behind this new Putin Curtain, I heard from the friend who twenty years ago spoke openly of the problems in the city, back when the place was starting to shine. This time he speaks only of pleasantries, of how beautiful the weather is, and how he loves his city. No word of Putin; my friend remains uncharacteristically quiet about all things governmental. Another friend in Europe tells me his own family in St. Petersburg reports the lines are back for the purchase of many goods, like before the coup thirty-five years ago, and families are once again forced to move in together to save money, and he cried knowing his family whom he could visit whenever he wanted and who came to see him often, no longer has the ability to travel anywhere, nor the means even if they could leave. And he spoke as if this was the early fifties and Stalin was still in charge, that “to speak negatively about President Putin is to be thrown in jail.” And today come reports that anyone with dual citizenship with the US and Russia who had been contemplating going back to Russia should not do so lest they be detained indefinitely in Russian “holding” areas.

Maintaining control over the population of the Russian Empire after the Civil War following World War One was not difficult; the people had never truly known freedom as we understand it; Czarist Russia ruled for nearly a millennium. Russians appreciated the promises made by the Bolsheviks, and despite many of those promises never coming to fruition, most people abided by the Soviet system, even out of fear. And following the fall of communism in the late eighties and early nineties, Russians welcomed the opportunity to break free of the limitations of their previous government, but when almost a decade passed and things got worse, not better, it was not difficult for someone like Putin to convince them a little more government control, “like it used to be,” was a good thing. For a while, he maintained a perfect balance of top-heavy government—albeit one on the take to the tune of billions of dollars—and the personal freedom to come and go, grow and expand, as one pleased. This lasted until February 24th, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

But something is different this time. One hundred years ago the people had only known an oppressive government, as was the case thirty-five years ago, so leading them down the path the new leaders desired was not difficult. But now, two generations into a country used to most of the freedoms we have in the west, the population, despite the Russian propaganda to the contrary, is displeased with their government’s bombing of an innocent nation, ending the freedoms of the people of both countries. When the war began, Russia had 360,000 active troops. In the past years, well more than 315,000 of them have been killed or badly wounded, only to be replaced by new “recruits.” According to the UN, that amounts to 87% of their numbers at the start of the war. In the Ukraine since the world changed two years ago, more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded. When the communists took over from the Czars, the people only knew submission, but this time they need to be threatened to fight. Things are different indeed. Like Weimar Germany, Russia between Gorbachev and Putin was a fine place to travel, to live, and to have hope. It’s gone, at least until Putin is gone, and the people who remain remember that time of peace and prosperity and can on with their lives.

The Russia I knew is dead. I miss my friends, Valentine, Igor, Sasha the guitar player, and Dima the violin player. I miss the atmosphere, the storied example of perseverance that was the St Petersburg I knew, filled with veterans who miraculously survived the siege of their city for nine hundred days in World War Two; a siege and destruction of people which one of the city’s own, Vladimir Putin, once exclaimed must never be allowed to happen again, until he did just that. The promise and beauty of the Russian artists, the teachers, and the children, are simply gone. And in Ukraine with a history deeper, older, and more beautiful than even Russia’s, a civilization has been annihilated. Historians will not point to a myriad of reasons for this incomprehensible tragedy; studies will not have to be undertaken to better comprehend the causes of the invasion. The brunt of this brutality falls squarely on the shoulders of Vladimir Putin.

Valentine

Valentine loved Ukraine and took many pictures there

Pravda

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Eleven years ago I read a not-so-subversive piece called “Driving Under the Influence” at St Petersburg, Russia’s, infamous Stray Dog Café, where in earlier years Pasternak had read, and before him Mandelstam, who died in a gulag near Vladivostok for his threatening words, and also Anna Akhmatova, and a string of dissidents who risked their lives so their prose and poetry might be read and heard.

We sat at a long table, and while everyone listened to my innocent story of teaching my son to drive, I imagined the whispers and quiet conversations in those same corners about the Czar, who walked the hallways of the Winter Palace a few hundred yards away. What a world it must have been, I thought, but also, how good those days of revolution and dissidence were in the past. The city in 2013 was alive with artists, writers, photographers, musicians, and mostly legal political opposition to everything, with St Petersburg University students free to protest, complain, object, and support whatever they desired. As a result, no one needed to so much. It’s the greatest value of freedom; when people are free to choose, fighting and uprising recede. The horror of seventy-five years of Soviet oppression, preceded by three centuries of Czarist rule, was finally over.

My Russian friend and photographer Valentine shot pictures of old women, survivors of the siege, and of his children, his “Butterflies,” and laughed through a cloud of vodka, ever ecstatic at being able to express himself in marketplaces, newspapers, and galleries. Full of life and hope, these artists pushed their mediums to the max and shared stories of “darker” times when pointing a camera at anyone meant a possible sentence in Siberia, just east of Irkutsk, not far from the archipelago of dead poets. Not any longer, Valentine told me again and again over shots of Russian Standard and tables of photographs that just a few years earlier he had to hide those photographs inside the lining of books. “You should write here, Bob,” he told me. “You’d be free to write here,” he said. “Those dark days of Soviet Russia are dead.”

That was then.

The truth has once again folded up her tables and left the marketplace; transparency has turned away in shame. The Russia that Valentine came to love for three decades, and the only one I ever knew firsthand, is gone. It is gone. The citizens still attempt to navigate the streets of Peter the Great, the backroads of their “Window to the West,” but they are once again driving under the influence of a Neo-Stalinism, Vladimir Putin’s Fascist Regime.

Russia needs dissidents again. It is a time for poets. The Stray Dog should be crowded again with college students and artists listening to new poets risk everything for a few stanzas of truth. A contemporary Mandelstam, a modern-day Pasternak, should come out of the corners of the university classrooms and set ablaze a bonfire of observations and digressions. Because nothing ignites writers more than the attempt to extinguish truth.

The Russian Arc

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Trinity Cathedral inside the Nevsky Monastery

The following is the longest blog post to date at A View. It is the result of news today that going to Russia is dangerous even for Russians with dual-American citizenship. I miss the place, the people, the endless laughter and outrageous stories from decades of travel. The country has come full circle in that time. For anyone wondering what the hell happened, here’s what happened:

The Russian Arc

In 1994, the streets of St Petersburg were dank, a monotone of browns absent of advertising, neon, or anything other than some Soviet style atmosphere. The only placards placed in random spots on Nevsky Prospect—the city’s Fifth Avenue—were Marlboro signs, the only western clothing of note worn by the suddenly displaced masses was Adidas warm-up suits. It appeared a parody of itself as presented in 1970’s and ‘80’s anti-Soviet movies. For seventy-five years the country, and Leningrad, moved in darkness under the Soviet leadership, and for centuries before that under the long reach of the Czars.

But in 1994 when I first arrived to teach American culture to faculty at Baltic State University, the first of what would end up being more than twenty-five trips in thirty years, democracy had found the streets of Leningrad, which had just changed its name back to the Imperial “St. Petersburg,” and Russians struggled to figure it out. The first week there, I stood in line for two hours at a bakery, and when I pointed this out at the college, my colleagues shrugged and said, “Da. Canushna.” Yes, of course. I explained that in the States, a new bakery would open across the street and be faster, charge less, offer discounts. Then I had to explain discounts and why, explain that the cashier who stood outside smoking while twenty people were in line would be fired. This led to a conversation about capitalism, and everyone was suddenly enthralled to hear about businesses and learn how to make money, the advantages of choices, the value of options. The men of the previous generation on through to the college students present when I first taught in the city, simply understood service to their country as paramount; it involved time away from family, but also provided pensions and a chance to protect their living conditions.

But after the coup, and certainly in the few years which followed leading up to 1994, it was a brand-new way of existence, and the long, cold winter of communism had finally ended. Things changed—and this is where it got tricky. At first everything was different overnight, like their currency, living conditions, international relationships, and availability of goods. But then the changes slowed to an immeasurable pace. People couldn’t find jobs or food, or they had to work for some organized crime group. Old folks lined the metro begging for money or selling items—shoes, loose cigarettes, empty bottles. But within a few years they figured it out.  One afternoon that first year I went to the market behind a cathedral in the arts district. It was a park area with tables covered in tourist items: matryoshka dolls, the famous Russian wooden bowls known as khokloma, pins, small wooden toys bears. Scarfs, shawls, icons, amber jewelry. The following year the market built small booths in long rows instead of random tables. A year or two later, the booths had roofs over them, then lighting was put in for night shopping, and by the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003, the entire market was covered, gates out front, a veritable mall filled with all the previous items, but also fine art, expensive purses, technology, and food were added to the shelves. The Russians were figuring it all out, and many made more money in a month than they had in a year under the Soviet regime. Organized crime groups took over and took a cut, and the city streets once filled with just Russian-made Ladas were now lined with black SUVs.

A friend of mine in the marketplace, photographer and artist Valentine, remained my source of all things business, and the changes almost became too much for him to handle. In 1995, I went in the Catholic Church nearby to find piles of rubble where an altar used to stand eighty years earlier, and the walls had been painted black, on the floor lay statues without heads. The priest, Fr. Frank Sutman, explained it had been used as a storage facility for motorcycles since the Great Patriotic War, World War Two, but the church took it over for the first time since 1917. By the turn of the millennium, the grandeur of the marble floors and beautiful walls had been restored. Across the street was a small shop. In the early years, I had to point to the item I wanted on the shelf behind a counter or in a glass case, and if I liked it, I took a handwritten receipt to the cashier who figured out the total on an abacus (no kidding), gave me a new receipt which I took back to the first worker to retrieve the items. This is how it was in the few grocers, the pharmacies, the bakeries. Only in the tourist market did one deal directly with one person.

Years pass.

A supermarket opened with cashiers at the end of conveyor belts who rang up your items, bagged them, and you walked out like you just left Walmart. The discovered calculators, paper bags, and the shelves were stocked with European goods. And on the streets, neon signs dominated the avenue: KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, clothing brands, cigarettes, alcohol, appliances, cars. Except for the language I could have been in my native New York. The once empty streets were filled with people, all on their new phones, all taking pictures, all donning expensive jackets and shoes.

These were the years of tourism, of an entire generation and the next growing up without memory of Gorbachev, even of Yeltsin. We went on canal rides and took videos, wandered through neighborhoods and graveyards. I went to Victory Day a dozen times, talked to Vets of the Great Patriotic War, who loved to share their experiences, and I talked to the women—St Petersburg became known as a city of old women since the men mostly died in the war and children starved to death—about the changes, often as they swept the streets with brooms made from birch branches.

We went to the Kirov Ballet, the opera, folk shows, and soccer games. We dined in restaurants from Germany, Italy, China, and played music, danced and drink at The Liverpool, a Beatles bar.

Peter the Great’s dream of a city of culture, his “Window to the West” as he called it, had come to fruition.

By 2014, after twenty-years of going to Russia, anyone thirty or thirty-five years old and younger only new this new way of life. The very notion that the government would dictate what they could and could not do was as foreign to them as it is to us in the west. Students graduated from college and set up businesses, tech companies, they traveled freely and often to Portugal, the United States, Hong Kong, Sicily, everywhere. After almost a century of needing to walk everywhere and live with two other families in small communal apartments, they now owned cars and nice apartments. The once common practice of tourists bringing Levis or other western brands to trade for Russian trinkets was not only over, but laughable, with malls opening up with shoe stores, clothing stores, phone, sporting goods, and music stores, all filled with western brands.

The “old country” of Russia had so modified over the course of just two decades, one had to be in their forties to remember the Soviet system. What the average Russian citizen could not know, of course, was that the modifications made in palaces throughout the country, but in particular St Petersburg, was paid for by organized crime to increase tourism and international trade. The city where I could in those early years buy items for a few dollars, quickly figured it out and charged twenty or thirty dollars for the same items. Restaurants appeared everywhere with prices for those driving the SUVs, not for the Lada crowd.

My friends from Russia adjusted. A tour operator learned business well and built a company that dealt with tourists from all over the world. My artist and writer friends found new freedom in being able to take pictures of anything and anyone they wanted without recourse. They criticized the Yeltsin administration without worry of harm. For seventy-five years, the notion of dissidence, which not only included those who wrote against the government, but those who simply didn’t always write positive things about the government; particularly Stalin, had in just a few shaky years, slipped into history. Going to St Petersburg became simple. There was even talk for a while of dropping all the VISA requirements. I wouldn’t call it democracy, as such, but communism was dead. Gone. Lenin’s statues which had been everywhere in the early ‘90s were much more difficult to find. It became simple for a Russian to leave home and travel to the United States. And the did, gladly, relishing in being a part of the world, finally. This wasn’t simply détente; this was the start of a beautiful relationship.

In 2013, my son and I rode the trans-Siberian railway from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, across more than six-thousand miles, and seemingly across decades as we retreated into the previous century the further east we traveled. In Yekaterinburg the western influence was still obvious, but in Irkutsk, another few days east, Soviet style practices still appeared common. The one fortunate thread remained the people, all deeply rooted in new democratic, even capitalistic practices. They drove Kias and Toyotas, they wore Levis and Ray-Ban sunglasses, and they spoke of their vacations in Australia, the Canary Islands, Florida. If I had not been already in my fifties, there would be no basis of comparison to the old, Soviet ways I grew up learning about, fearing, hating. Nothing I had learned about these people was true, even in the early nineties. The propaganda machine, practiced just as efficiently in the west, had turned out to be shallow, and that was with a generation of Russians whose experience had only ever been Soviet or Czarist. This new generation, those already well into their careers, families, homeownership, and substantial investments, just two decades old, was the dominant population across the country, and they knew less about living under a fascist regime than I did.

Until Putin.

He came in early and soft, almost friendly, certainly acceptable. He was a man with a vision for this new country who followed the floundering Boris Yeltsin, and as Putin’s power and wealth increased, he rebuilt his native St. Petersburg. He saved the former Soviet Union from ruin and the economic disaster of the Yeltsin years, which left a rampant homeless and starving population to fend for themselves. Right after the coup to end communism, the nationalization of all businesses and housing ended, but so did the pensions. Housing privatized and if the residents couldn’t afford the new rent they were kicked out. Hospitals quite literally rolled patients out the door and left them near churches to fend for themselves. Putin moved from the city’s Vice Mayor up the ladder to President on the promise he would “clean up” the homeless problem, “employ” people willing to work for anyone, and made business deals that brought unprecedented wealth to the nation. Russians welcomed him; so did western leaders. And the population which benefited the most were under forty, tech-savvy millennials who worked their way up, drove expensive cars, and lived in large sweeping apartments on Nevsky Prospect with beautiful dachas in the countryside or Ekaterinburg. Tourists who visited St Petersburg discovered open palaces with gourmet dining rooms, clean hotels with five-star service, shops with icons, malachite and amber jewels, and all-things-fashion. Russians, too, became tourists able to see more than the dachas they shared with other families. They traveled to Italy, to Portugal, France, and the United States. Satellite television common in the nineties became fast internet service enabling partnerships and communication with anyone anywhere.

Then Ukraine happened.

Those same students just out of communism and thrust into capitalism are now in their late forties, at least, and their children, raised in nothing but a mostly free-capital society with all the advantages and freedoms we understand here in the States, are being drafted into an army to attack a country they spent their entire lives visiting on vacation. When the news speaks of “Russian military,” this is who they’re talking about; men and women whose only reference and background was freedom of choice, of employment, of wandering, of economic wealth. Their only requirement was the possibility of two years mandatory service before they turned twenty-seven. Piece of cake; their billets ranged from one end of the earth to the other. So while their parents may not have been surprised to have been called to service in Afghanistan in the seventies for the Soviet government, these men and women dreading duty in neighboring Ukraine had anticipated their best-laid plans to pursue personal ambitions, and went to schools which had been teaching them international relations and economics, until the hope they had for life was disturbingly aborted for reasons beyond their comprehension or desire.

Then western sanctions hit and the country shut down, banks stopped all business outside the borders, foreign companies which lined Nevsky Prospect with signs and tables and parties were suddenly gone. The streets once again seemed grey, empty of life. Employment disappeared and no pension waited by to save them, so the army promised to pay their bills, which they did for a short while, and when word spread that the truth is they could barely feed their soldiers, let alone pay them wagers a fraction of what they had been used to, many fled.

Back in the mid-nineties, a friend of mine would write complaining about Yeltsin, about the lack of support from the United States, about the homelessness and difficulties dealing with “Old Russians,” who knew Soviet Ways, and how the “New Russians,” assume they have a right to whatever they can get. The anecdote which circulated then was how a New Russian in a Mercedes SUV waited at a stoplight when an Old Russian in a Lada with no brakes hit him from behind. The Old Russian got out of his car terrified, but the New Russian simply said, “Aren’t you glad I’m here to stop you? Otherwise you would have run out of control and killed yourself.” That was the propaganda which took hold and brought this nation to life; this nation now isolated and quite possibly on life support.

In the last few months, after a year of no word from friends who still live behind this new Putin Curtain, I heard from the friend who twenty years ago spoke openly of the problems in the city, back when the place was starting to shine. This time he speaks only of pleasantries, of how beautiful the weather is, and how he loves his city. No word of Putin; my friend remains uncharacteristically quiet about all things governmental. Another friend in Europe tells me his own family in St. Petersburg reports the lines are back for the purchase of many goods, like before the coup thirty-five years ago, and families are once again forced to move in together to save money, and he cried knowing his family whom he could visit whenever he wanted and who came to see him often, no longer has the ability to travel anywhere, nor the means even if they could leave. And he spoke as if this was the early fifties and Stalin was still in charge, that “to speak negatively about President Putin is to be thrown in jail.” And today come reports that anyone with dual citizenship with the US and Russia who had been contemplating going back to Russia should not do so lest they be detained indefinitely in Russian “holding” areas.

Maintaining control over the population of the Russian Empire after the Civil War following World War One was not difficult; the people had never truly known freedom as we understand it; Czarist Russia ruled for nearly a millennium. Russians appreciated the promises made by the Bolsheviks, and despite many of those promises never coming to fruition, most people abided by the Soviet system, even out of fear. And following the fall of communism in the late eighties and early nineties, Russians welcomed the opportunity to break free of the limitations of their previous government, but when almost a decade passed and things got worse, not better, it was not difficult for someone like Putin to convince them a little more government control, “like it used to be,” was a good thing. For a while, he maintained a perfect balance of top-heavy government—albeit one on the take to the tune of billions of dollars—and the personal freedom to come and go, grow and expand, as one pleased. This lasted until February 24th, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

But something is different this time. One hundred years ago the people had only known an oppressive government, as was the case thirty-five years ago, so leading them down the path the new leaders desired was not difficult. But now, two generations into a country used to most of the freedoms we have in the west, the population, despite the Russian propaganda to the contrary, is displeased with their government’s bombing of an innocent nation, ending the freedoms of the people of both countries. When the war began, Russia had 360,000 active troops. In the past two years, 315,000 of them have been killed or badly wounded, only to be replaced by new “recruits.” According to the UN, that amounts to 87% of their numbers at the start of the war. In the Ukraine since the world changed two years ago, more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded.   

The Russia I knew is dead. I miss my friends, Valentine, Igor, Sasha, and Dima the violin player. I miss the atmosphere, the storied example of perseverance that was the St Petersburg I knew, filled with veterans who miraculously survived the siege of their city for nine hundred days in World War Two; a siege and destruction of people which one of the city’s own, Vladimir Putin, once exclaimed must never be allowed to happen again, until he did just that. The promise and beauty of the Russian artists, the teachers, and the children, are simply gone. And in Ukraine with a history deeper, older, and more beautiful than even Russia’s, a civilization has been annihilated. Historians will not point to a myriad of reasons for this incomprehensible tragedy; studies will not have to be undertaken to better comprehend the causes of the invasion. The brunt of this brutality falls squarely on the shoulders of Vladimir Putin.

Valentine
Me and Valentine

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Poshel Na Khuy, Vladimir Putin

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St Nicholas Cathedral (one of the rare churches to never close during Soviet days)

Over the course of more than twenty years, I came to know the backroads and alleys of St. Petersburg, Russia. I found the coolest little cafes and late night jazz joints, made friends in shacks serving Georgian wine and shashleek—a kind of shish kabob—in a small room with low ceilings and dirt floors, the Gulf of Finland pounding at the sand outside. I returned again and again to long embraces from friends like Igor and Dima and Valentine the crazy man and brilliant artist.

I taught American culture at the college, endured endless people wanting to practice their English, celebrated Victory Day on Palace Bridge year after year, mourned the losses of people during the siege with veterans who sat telling me their stories all the while holding my arm, connecting to me through touch.

I prayed with old nuns in shrines, climbed the rubble of the ruined St Catherine of Alexandria Catholic Church with American priest Frank Sutman who raised enough money to rebuild this first Catholic Church in all of Russia back to its glory from the ruins of the storage facility it had become during the Soviet Era. I met musicians in old bars—Gypsies—and played music until the sun came up, read my own work at the famed Stray Dog Café surrounded by the ghosts of Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky.

What a time it was.

With friends I toured palace after palace, attended private concerts by quintets from the Kirov who played before dinner at the Nikolaevsky, walked the halls of the Summer Palace and wondered about the infamous Amber Room, learned every crevice of the Winter Palace and its five building complex that is the Hermitage Museum. Had drinks in the basement of the Yusopov Palace where Rasputin had drinks just before he was killed for the fifth time. Walked the grounds of Galinka Palace, the Church of Spilled Blood, St Isaacs, St Nicholas, Trinity, and more. I climbed to the top of the tower of Smolney from which St Seraphim supposedly fell the ninety feet to the ground when he was ten but landed softly and got up and ran toward canonization.

I learned where to buy vodka and where not to sip it at all. I found the best places for authentic borsch and had Beef Stroganoff at the Stroganoff Palace.

I ate at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and more western joints filled to the gills with Russians loving the taste of America, drinking in the swell of western culture, surrounding my friends and me trying to fit more English into their Cyrillic mouths.

We took canal rides and saw folk shows where more than a few times I was dragged on stage to dance with the Russian women and men as balalaika music filled the packed arena. I’ve seen Swan Lake at the Marinksy Theatre more than a dozen times and have seen Hamlet in Russian.

I’ve made friends with former Soviet Naval Captains, countless professors, writers, and artists. I’ve become friends with translators and more than a few vets of the Chechnya War who would have rather stayed home and continued their studies in Engineering at St Petersburg University than return with no legs, one arm, half a face blown away, leaning against the Metro Walls, cap in hand—handicapped, hopeless.

I’ve sat on the rocks of the Gulf of Finland drinking champagne during the White Nights while one of Russia’s finest flautists performed privately for us, laughing, making us cry with Tchaikovsky and Bach. I’ve sat backstage at the St Petersburg Conservatory with a dear friend who is a choreographer, and his teacher, who used to dance with Baryshnikov, and watched them practice.

We’ve had food from an Uzbekistan Restaurant, and I came to understand the plight of the refugees from Azerbaijan after the slaughter by Armenians. I’ve read at the flat of Dostoevsky with an original volume of Pushkin on the table next to me and one of Fyodor’s own manuscripts two feet away. We have wandered through the massive marketplace next door and carried home to our apartment bags of fresh vegetables and chunks of meat cut before my eyes off of a carcass.

I’ve battled with border patrol over textbooks, bribed cemetery guards to let us wander sacred grounds, sat in the cell that held Dostoevsky and other dissidents, and watched the ruble gain strength, take a beating, then recover, then fall. I’ve sat on benches with women who were survivors of the siege during the Great Patriotic War and talked about family, talked about poppyseed rolls, talked about the flowers that grow in the dirt.

I was there when they reinterned the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family, including Anastasia and Alexi. I was there for the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the city that Peter the Great called the Window to the West.

I watched as Marlboro came to town, then Clairol and every Russian woman suddenly had bright red hair. Adidas showed up and all the men wore warmup suits. I’ve walked past too many men in cheap three piece suits holding semi-automatic rifles guarding some boss’ SUV as money exchanged hands—all cash, USD, in suitcases.

I had just turned thirty-one when Communism fell and I went to St Petersburg. The city streets were dank and barren, not a single neon sign, not a single advertisement, nothing to see or do. I toured the lab of Pavlov where dogs are still used, and I stood next to the eternal flame commemorating those lost during the siege on the Field of Mars. I met Putin. I met Ambassadors. I met Sophia, who was a young teen when the Czar was still in charge, who lost her husband and son during the siege, and who sat in the shadow of the Smolensky Shrine and told me they can take anything they want from her, but they’ll never take her faith from her again. She blessed herself in the large Orthodox way and held my arm with her ninety-something year old transparent hands. She could tell me whatever she wanted. I could talk about anything I wished. I watched this county I was raised to fear fixate on all things west, becoming a strong and welcome presence in world culture and exchange. Every person I brought returned home amazed at the life that was Russia, hoping to return, knowing they had friends there.

I’ve brought dozens of US faculty, hundreds of college students, a dozen cousins, pilots, performers, writers, and an Army General.

Now, exactly half a lifetime since my first trip, I’ve watched it all go full circle. The western influence is there and that can’t be changed, but the presence has faded away—no more McDonalds, Pizza Hut, or KFC. No more Starbucks. Open readings are tolerated only if no one, no one, absolutely no one uses the word “War” in reference to the Ukraine.

I sat by hopelessly as friends wished me well and hoped we’d someday meet again. I told them, my friends, including those now in Germany and France, a few in Norway, that I cannot wait to see them again, perhaps in New York, or Paris. Maybe Oslo. Not Russia.

I have taken a train from one end of that massive empire to the other with my son, creating memories to last all our lives, spent late nights drinking shots of vodka with Siberian businessmen. I’ve sat in the home of tour operators and laughed and became brothers with them. I have mementos on bookshelves, on walls. I’ve written three books about my times in Russia, and more than fifty articles. I’ve developed three college courses about Russian Culture and mentored more than two hundred students who received Study Abroad credit. I miss the beauty of the architecture, the beauty of the people, and the mystical way history bathes me when I walk the streets at night. I miss my friends. I miss laughing with Valentine and talking about butterflies and angels. I miss sitting alone at this one café I love and drinking tea, making notes, listening to contemporary folk music and enjoying this magical life I’ve had the chance to live that brought me more than two dozen times to a place that until I was in my thirties, I never thought I’d ever see. I miss the people very much.

But I’m not going back until Vladimir Putin is dead.







on Nevsky Prospect 


			

	


				
					


	

			
May 9th
		

				

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The Dining Car (photo by Michael Kunzinger)






Author’s note:





For two decades I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach, to write, and to lead Study Abroad groups. In that time I had the privilege of celebrating Victory Day a dozen times in the city on May 9th. During the day I would attend memorial services at the Priskarevskoe Cemetery, where three quarters of a million people–mostly women and children–are buried. I was there when Bill Clinton was in attendance, and George W. Bush, and Vladimir Putin. It is a somber place, and Shostakovich and Pachelbel play on the speakers while thousands walk around and pay respects to the vets in attendance. Then that night a million people fill the streets and drink and watch fireworks and remember that Hitler, despite his demands to wipe the city from the face of the map, could not defeat the “Defenders of Leningrad.” 





This is their story as related in a chapter from my new book. Thank you for reading.   –BK 





*********





Persistence





(from The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia)





Bob Kunzinger





This evening I sit in the dining car somewhere in eastern Siberia, writing, drinking tea, and the only other passengers are an elderly man and his son, also drinking tea. They’re quiet and both glance at me from time to time. Eventually, I walk to their booth and ask if I can join them—the younger of the two speaks broken English and he waves to the empty spot next to his father.  He introduces himself as Dima; and the elderly man, Sergei, wears two or three medals on his green shirt, and I ask if one particular medal is the same as another I had seen in St. Petersburg, given for bravery during the siege of Leningrad. It is.





The dining car on the trans-Siberian railroad looks much like old Airstream-style diners in America, with booths along both sides, full size windows at each one with small curtains, and all are kept clean, with flowers, a napkin holder and place mats. At one end of the car is a bar with well drinks as well as a small variety of more expensive liquor on a higher shelf, and a generous selection of domestic and imported beers and soft drinks. The menu rivals the most common pub at home. Grilled chicken, hamburgers with French fries and other sides are available, as well as more complete dinners and some appetizers. Caviar, too, and salmon slices with toast, borsch, and traditional fare such as cabbage and sausages for tourists like us who wish to feel part of the landscape, and for locals whose daily diet includes such items anyway.





The prices are about the same as they would be at stateside diners, but Russians for the most part can’t afford that and usually buy their food from the babushkas at the stops along the way. Seeing as how there are so few tourists, the booths are always available, so Michael and I spend much of our time here, playing chess, eating, and working.





Paying attention to this sudden mixture of cultures is the tender. This always smiling woman sits at her own booth near the bar with several pads spread about which apparently need her attention. From time to time she looks up, partly to see if we need anything and partly, it seems, to catch what she can of our conversation. She normally likes to play traditional music on the player whenever I sit down, but when she sees me join this veteran and his son, she puts on Shostakovich. We all recognize it immediately and the old man smiles. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, in the forties and performed it for the first time to a packed theater in his besieged city of Leningrad. Despite the rattle of Nazi bombs exploding in the background, no one left the performance. Today in the memorial cemetery in that city where nearly 700,000 people are buried, Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, it is still played while thousands of people pay their respects. I have spent many Victory Days there, meeting veterans, offering them a carnation in thanks for their work in the war, so it is an honor to share tea with this veteran.





It would be negligent of any traveler, foreign or domestic, to make this journey without learning about and acknowledging the Blockade in Leningrad, the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, and the incomprehensible courage displayed by the citizens of what is now St. Petersburg, which was bombarded by the Nazi’s for 900 days in an effort to complete Hitler’s desire to “wipe Leningrad from the map.” That history is this old man’s youth; and the fact he survived and went on to raise a son is nothing short of miraculous.





This is where this great railway and Russian history collide.





Some background: 





The original name in Russia for the railway was the “Great Siberian Way,” and it was only in the west we called it the trans-Siberian railway. At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, the railway was an exhibit with the most extravagant interior cars on display and promoted as the ride of Czars. While it was true the line from St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg was indeed the rail for Czar Nicholas II and his family to seek refuge in their palace on the Iset River, the promotion at the Fair was misleading since from the start this railway mostly carried people to war. When Czar Alexander put his son Nicholas on the project, he did so with the assistance of Sergei Witte, a minister in the Russian government and confidant of the Czar. The heart of the empire was, indeed, in the western third of the country. St. Petersburg and Moscow were, and still are for that matter, the center of the Russian universe, and from the time of Peter the Great’s ambition to create a “Window to the West,” the powers-that-be focused their attentions there. But in the late 1800’s, the government noted the potential resources available in the east, thinking Siberia might be an economic boon instead of simply a destiny for dissidents. At the same time, St. Petersburg had its eye on parts of Manchuria and moved forward with the rail to that destination under the pretense of trade; the truth is they eventually occupied the territory, a move which aggravated Japan who also wanted control of the area. Japan saw the TSRR as a tool of expansion and eventual invasion, which, of course, it was. Hence, the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. But the tracks weren’t finished yet, and troop movement in the area where roads even today are poor, meant ultimate defeat for Russia.





Still, they had their rail, which a few years later was completed to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. But Japan had its day, and instead of Russia using the railway to dominate the eastern Asian region, Japan did just that by defeating Russia’s Pacific fleet and controlling territory they long wanted. Their rise to power anticipated the conflict in the Pacific which would be that part of the globe’s World War Two.





During World War One, the United States had many economic interests in the region, not the least of which was a ton of weapons strewn north from Vladivostok along the rail. To protect those interests, President Wilson sent eight thousand US troops to the region—the only time US soldiers were stationed in Russia. The War in Europe would not be over for another three months, but in Russia, change was constant. The Mensheviks had ousted Czar Nicholas and replaced him with Kerensky, who the Bolsheviks quickly ousted, so the allies had no one with whom to work in eastern Asia. But it was during that short and welcome reign of Kerensky that the US took over the operation of the trans-Siberian railway, a move supported by the allies in Europe and seen as the spread of democracy the western world had hoped for. At the same time, however, the Bolshevik Revolution swept east literally following the tracks all the way to Vladivostok. The United States withdrew their interests and in a few short years the noble ambitions of the entire empire would quickly derail.





Josef Stalin took over the Soviet Union in 1922, a post he would hold for thirty-one years. He longed for a railway across the polar region of Russia to expedite travel to the Far East. This “Dead Road” was built by “enemies of the people” of Russia. It is estimated that 300,000 prisoners worked on this project with a third of them dying in the brutal northern winters. The entire project proved short-lived, however, when the short part of the line which had been completed sank into the ice and snow. But Stalin understood the value of rail transport, and the pogroms started by the Czar to relocate Jews to eastern Russia were continued under his rule with the aid of the Trans-Siberian railway further south. It was no possible to purge entire towns, exile anyone who so much as spoke about him without praise, as well as those who outwardly opposed the oppressive government. In fact, not many people during those years rode the railway by choice. It was a means for guards to get to work or to send prisoners east. The rail between St. Petersburg and Moscow remained a crucial route between what is considered the cultural capital in the north and the political capital an eight-hour ride south. And the cross-continental railway in post-coup Russia became a means of transport for workers heading to and from a job, families going to a dacha, and the rare and idealistic tourist heading to Beijing or Vladivostok.





Aside from so much death associated with this transport, there is one glaring and essential exception when rail travel was, in fact, a lifeline in Russia: The Great Patriotic War. World War Two. A separate rail from the trans-Siberian route was built by hand every single winter during the war across the frozen Lake Ladoga just to the east of Leningrad to try and bring in supplies and bring out citizens of the city, which was besieged from September 8th, 1941, until January 27th, 1944. During that time nearly one and a half million people in the city—mostly women and children—died of starvation. The people of the city to this day are most proud of the fact that, despite nine-hundred days of bombardment, the Nazi’s still couldn’t defeat the “defenders of Leningrad.” And because of the invading Germans, factories were moved from the western part of the country to the most eastern reaches of European Russia, in the Ural Mountains, where more than three hundred plants were rebuilt close to the railway, mostly by the prisoner population.





Before me now, however, is a man who refused to leave Leningrad. I mention my understanding of his courage and struggle, and the old man smiles. He places his hand on my wrist and says, yes, he could have ridden the rail across the lake during that first winter—he was just a young teenager, and no one would have questioned it. But he chose to stay and help transport whatever food he could to the front line, which during the blockade was in every direction.





The tender brings a plate of salmon and bread which they share with me, and we drink more tea. Sergei dips some bread in his tea, and his son offers me salmon.





We speak for quite some time about the trail, about Michael and I and our wild idea to see Siberia, and about their present journey to a Dacha to spend August. Eventually, I ask about his medal, about the war, and how much he remembers. Sergei takes a long bite of his bread and nods toward the plate of salmon. “Food was the most significant issue,” Dima translates as he looks in despair at his father, clearly knowing what comes next. “Leningrad’s population of dogs, cats, horses, rats, and crows disappeared as they became the main courses on many dinner tables. Nothing was off limits. People ate dirt, paper, and wood. The vast majority of casualties were not soldiers, but women and children.”





This much I know already: The siege of Leningrad is political history as well as military history, yet it is also personal. It is the story of a child living on a few grams of bread, his mother making sure he only takes small bites throughout the day for fear if he eats it all at once he will surely starve to death. He will anyway, and the history of the siege of Leningrad must include the story of these women who survived, these sorrowful mothers, who had to grasp whatever sliver of hope they could that they would win in the end so to save their beloved Mother Russia.





The siege is one of the chapters in books about 20th-century atrocities; yet it is also the conversation over beers in a corner pub, where as late as the nineties when I first started coming here, most veterans still held back their emotions against the questions of the curious’. Some allowed others to cross the line into their world, allowed them to suffer the starvation through stories and tears because they knew it might be the only way these great heroes, the defenders of Leningrad, will be remembered. 






Author on right after giving the carnation to the veteran (photo by Kay Debow)






I recall a conversation I had once with a woman in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. She was fifteen during the siege when she had to pull a sleigh carrying the body of her sister, who had died of starvation. She made it to the graveyard and left her sister on the pile of bodies. Another there, Alexander, remembered how he would cut up a piece of bread once a day for his brothers. His parents had died of starvation some time earlier.





Nearly three million civilians, including nearly half a million children, refused to surrender despite having to deal with extreme hardships in the encircled city. Food and fuel would last only about two months after the siege began, and by winter there was no heat, no water, almost no electricity, and little sustenance. These citizens still had two more years of this to endure. Leningrad is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. It gets cold.





During that first January and February, 200,000 people died of cold and starvation. Because disease was a problem, the bodies were carried to various locations in the city. Even so, people continued to work in the deplorable conditions to keep the war industries operating. When they were not working or looking for food and water, they were carrying the dead, dragging bodies on children’s sleighs or pulling them through the snow by their wrists to the cemetery.





One man said, “To take someone who has died to the cemetery is an affair of so much labor that it exhausts the last strength in the survivors. The living, having fulfilled their duty to the dead, are themselves brought to the brink of death.”





But the people of Leningrad would not surrender. I met a woman named Sophia in a graveyard on the north side of the city. She had been an adolescent during the reign of Czar Nicholas II and thirty years later lost her husband and son during the siege. We sat on a bench, and she told me of her life, of her family, as if time had turned it into a hazy event she had heard someone talk about years earlier. Her hands were transparent, and she spoke of Leningrad as being a prisoner of war, with no rations and no electricity and little hope. The city became a concentration camp, its citizens condemned to death by Hitler.





But thousands of people were evacuated across Lake Ladoga via the famous frozen Doroga Zhinzni, the Road of Life. During warm weather, some were boated across, but in winter they were carried on trucks across the frozen lake under German fire and moved via the railway. Heading north was pointless; the Finnish Army, allied with the Germans since the bitter Winter War with the Soviets in 1939-1940, held the line there. But once across the lake, this very train took people further east until the rails simply could not run. When we stand between the cars and rumble along, listening to the clashing of metal beneath us, it is hard for me not to think of the thousands of starving citizens transported east, listening to the same sounds.





“We simply had nothing to eat.” Yes, starvation was the Nazi’s objective. The blockade was a time during which one gauged success by being alive or not. Some survivors, however, tell of encounters with people who had such severe mental illness from disease and starvation that it had become unbearable. The accounts are sometimes spurious, but too many narratives contain too many parallel events to write them off as exaggerated. Several wrote of what became known as “blockade cannibalism,” including the story of a boy who was enticed to enter someone’s apartment to eat warm cereal





One woman used one of her dead children to feed the others.





For nearly three years, Leningrad was under attack night and day, and almost half its population, including 700,000 women and children, perished. The Germans left the city of Peter the Great, his “Window to the West,” in ruins. Still, the Nazis could not defeat Leningrad.





The likes of that bravery and sacrifice will never be seen again.





During those years as well as a decade before and past Stalin’s death in 1954, Soviet industrialization moved many citizens to the region stretching from Omsk to the Pacific, and the vast majority of these people worked in towns built for the sole purpose of some factory. But the most infamous use of the railroad during this dark period was to transport prisoners to the Gulag system. Prisoners in the penal system in Russia were tapped to exploit the natural resources in the mineral-rich east. It started officially in 1929, but just five years later, nearly half a million Soviet citizens with a prison term of three years or longer were loaded on these railcars and transported to the Gulags. Five years after that, the camp population totaled more than two million. Some eighteen to twenty million inmates, while suffering the most inhumane conditions, facilitated the exploitation of timber and minerals in remote areas in slightly more than two decades. They also laid railroads which branched off of this one, constructed roads, secured dams, and worked in the factories and on the farms,





The veteran looks around and says more quietly as his son again translates, “Every single person on this train is connected to the war; either a grandparent or parent was killed, or less likely, survived. Everyone on this train is fortunate to be alive because of citizens of Leningrad under the most horrific conditions. I played a very small part, but I am glad I survived to be able to raise my own family.” He smiles at his son, who places his own hand on his father’s sleeve.





Today, war monuments dot the landscape. Most of them honor veterans of the two World Wars, but many as well for those who served in Afghanistan, the most notable being the Black Tulip memorial in Yekaterinburg, named for the ship which carried home the Soviet deceased. The monuments to the Siege of Leningrad, or the “Blockade” as Russians refer to those dark nine-hundred days, are numerous in St. Petersburg, of course, but they also spread surprising far to the east, following the tracks taken by those souls who managed to get out of the city under cover of a cold, dark winter. The same chance Sergei turned down, as his medal clearly shows.





I grew up during the age of the Evil Empire, the Red Menace. Siberia and Irkutsk might as well have been on the moon—I was never going. All I knew of this land when I was young was from playing RISK with my older brother. He usually won but I had fun moving my armies around the board, sometimes skipping from Alaska to Kamchatka, proving to me capture of the Russian coast was key in controlling the outcome. When Michael was growing up we did the same thing. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned something valuable: that miserable game screwed up my sense of geography. Siberia is not a country or a state, it is a region, like the American West or heading out to the Plains. Ian Frazier wrote Siberia is more of an idea than a place. Irkutsk is not a country but a city, and Yakutsk is not east of Siberia it is in Siberia. The Ukraine does not take up most of map, doesn’t run from the Arctic to the Med, and doesn’t replace Russia, which that Soviet era game completely left off the planet. Still, those faraway places in beautiful colors with brightly colored armies became mythical. In the end, I didn’t have to move armies to travel to Siberia; no opponents waited across Parker Brother’s boundaries. I didn’t roll doubles. I didn’t pick the wild cards. I just came, and in doing so I wiped out decades of ignorance about these people over a cup of tea and some salmon slices.





The old man looks out the window into the dark evening, and I can sense his mind has recessed into some sharp and tortured memories. His son leaves his hand on his father’s and nods to me, indicating he sees I understand. We sit quietly like this for a long time, drinking tea, as the train rolls forward through history. 






photo by Michael Kunzinger






You can order The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia, by clicking here

			

	


				
					


	

			
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Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg, Russia






In the early ‘90s, I stood in line at a bakery in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was in the city for three weeks teaching American culture to the faculty at Baltic State University. The entire nation had just opened up after seventy-five years of communism and four hundred years of czarist rule. Things were a bit unorganized and haphazard. Yeltsin was in charge but not really; the Russian mafia was in charge. But that’s an entirely different story with a very bad ending for so many people.





But in the early ‘90s my colleague Joe and I had an apartment near the Gulf of Finland, not far from a family who we paid a great deal of money to host us for three meals a day plus tours. It was incredible to be part of all these changes with this family—him, a former Soviet Naval Captain whose job had been to search the arctic for American submarines, and her a translator and professor of English and languages at the university. We became family. More stories.





But mostly Joe and I discovered Russia on our own when not through the experiences of this family whose own changes were occurring daily. Understand, Russia never knew democracy, never knew capitalism.





So the bakery story:





I stood in line and Joe videotaped me waiting. But I waited forty minutes. Finally I arrived at the counter and pointed out a dozen or so pastries. She bagged them but put the bag behind her and handed me a piece of paper with the total price and pointed me to another line. I waited there. Ten minutes. Twenty. Finally when I was second in line, the cashier went outside to smoke, and we all waited another ten or fifteen minutes. Eventually she returned and rang up the sale, I paid, and I moved back to the first line where I waited as long to turn in my proof of payment for my bag of pastries.





Most of this is on tape somewhere.





That night at the college we talked about many things and answered many questions. That deserves a different story entirely, but not here. To the point: we had handed out US newspapers, and someone held up coupons and asked what they were. We explained, and he commented why in the world would you sell something for less than the price, that is dumb, no wonder capitalism doesn’t work. So I told them all the bakery story, and they nodded as if to say, “yeah, that sounds about right.”





And then he asked, “So how is it different in America.” I love a good setup.





I told them: In the states the cashier is fired; she sucks at her job and I’m losing business—you know why? Because Joe has a bakery across the street and his line is moving, and my customers are heading over there, and my income comes from customers, not the government, and while your income is guaranteed, it allows you commune apartments and mafia shakedowns. We offer coupons as incentive to try my pastries, and if you work hard and keep the line moving and don’t eat the pastries, you’ll get raises and promotions and eventually own your own store.





Yeah, they didn’t get it.





That is Soviet Russia; that is how Putin mistakenly sees Russia. That is how he was raised and was already part of that mafia/governmental system by the time we arrived thirty years ago. His Russia was a population paid by the government no matter what, and no where on Nevsky Prospect (Fifth Avenue) was a single billboard, a single neon sign, few restaurants, no advertising save Marlboro. You bought sour cream and milk from the back of trucks, or you went to the stores set up exactly like the bakery with long lines, and that was how it was since the Romanov’s came to power in the 1600s. Putin gained control by gaining control over an economy and country that was shredded after the coup; and when the government gave everyone across the empire three days to trade in Soviet money for Russian money, and the vast majority of people live three days from a bank—Putin and his cronies scoured the countryside buying Soviet money at twenty cents on the dollar and making millions.





But the Russia he runs now is not the Russia he so quickly gained control over by the late ‘90s. That Russia was still filled with people used to the government telling them what to do and they complied so long as their pension was secure. Today’s Russia has had thirty years of absolute freedom to come and go, make money a la capitalism, set up and own businesses, travel the world, speak relatively freely, and families live all over the world without fear of repercussions. Anyone in Russia who was even ten at the time of the coup is now in their forties, so all Russians forty or so years old and younger know nothing but the freedoms listed, the opportunities experienced by the west, and they like it—a lot. Enter McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks, western music, movies, travel packages, tours of New York, London, and LA. Enter jobs with international corporations and BMW’s and HoHo’s. 





This is NOT their father’s Russia. 





So to keep them quiet and subdued, it is now illegal to indicate support of Ukraine, illegal to travel abroad, illegal to speak openly unless it is for the government.





People compare Putin to Hitler. That is not accurate.





Putin is Stalin.





But his narrative has a significant flaw which perhaps Stalin was able to avoid for some time—the population of Russia and Ukraine have a western mentality that simply didn’t exist there at all prior to the early 90’s. Sure, he keeps getting re-elected: At first simply for stability—no one liked Yeltsin or Zyuganov. Later he was re-elected because of fraud (the 2018 election found one of his two opponents dead and the other poisoned and later imprisoned). But the country he rules will quickly become unruly, much like the citizens of Czechoslovakia who knew democracy well when communism came in 48 and again in 68, and those who remembered how life was prior to communism refused to allow the suppression, hence the Velvet Revolution, led by those who remembered.





People have something now they didn’t in Stalin’s day—a basis of comparison. They’ve not had to stand in line for pastries for three decades, and they have family not just in Ukraine but throughout the world. The government, the military who act out of fear of Stalinesque punishment (like the Not One Step Backwards decrees which insured that any Soviet soldiers retreating or disobeying would be shot), cannot sustain the isolation required to continue the onslaught of other nations.





I’ve made more than two dozen trips to Russia, crossed it by train, traveled with more than 500 people including US Army generals, professors, writers, artists, lawyers, and others, and I kept journals, I wrote extensively to the tune of three books and countless editorials and essays.





There was so much more to write—about Valentine, my dear photographer friend, about a graveyard on the gulf, about the rebuilding of a church by another close friend, and the planned exodus of two other friends, artists, some years ago to avoid draft into the army to fight in Chechnya. Stories about old women in the Hermitage and a homeless man who became a companion.





And I could write an entire book about The Shack, about playing guitar with a gypsy band every night until five am, drinking outlawed Georgian wine and laughing, teaching them “American Pie,” learning their folk songs which made us all cry despite not knowing a single word.





For thirty years Russia was a fine combination of history and romance with hope and emergence, like a young child with an old soul. And I have full confidence when the dust settles, the that Russia I came to love will survive. The bell of freedom rang for those people years and years ago, the chimes of hope, the echoes of prosperity. 





The old truism is indeed true: You cannot unring that bell. 






Oh I have stories. Geez what a time it was. Nothing is what I was told it would be when I was young. Nothing. 





I’ll go back, but I don’t see a need to write about Russia anymore. My last piece of writing besides this short blog is my book in which my son and I travel from one end of the country to the other, and we see the world together, enjoying the fragile and beautiful passing of time. How can I possibly follow that?






at the shack 


			

	


				
					


	

			
Special Edition/The Iron Scar
		

				

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I’m excited to announce here on A View from this Wilderness, the release of my ninth book, this time a memoir; The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia. 





The official release date from Madville Publishing in Texas is April 22nd, though word on the street is it will be available in March at the Associated Writers Programs conference in Philadelphia. And I’ll be there for that. 





It is difficult to promote a book without sounding like one is bragging, but the reviews have been beyond my expectations. From Martin Sheen (actor, author of Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son, written with Emilio Estevez) to Tim O’Brien (writer, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato) to Sam Pickering and more, it has been a true journey that did not end in Vladivostok. 





Mostly, I’m excited and proud of this book because not only was my then-twenty-year-old son (now turning twenty-nine), Michael, along with me for the entire journey, venturing out, exploring the world, but as a professional photographer I used him and his talents for the brilliant Photo Gallery within the book. Talk about proud. 





This is about traveling across Europe and Asia by train, of course, but it is also about fathers and sons, about feeling like you’re starting brand new whether you’re in your twenties or your fifties. My father is very present in these pages, and the book is dedicated to him and Michael. 





You can order right now and for the next few days by clicking here:  inscribed copies directly from me for $20 each, which includes shipping, and when the books arrive on my doorstop I will sign them and send them right off to you (or wherever you’d like them to go); or you can order directly through the publisher at Madville Publishing once the site is ready to accept pre-orders. 










I’ve made many trips to Russia–nearly thirty–but that trip, that summer, meeting new friends, playing chess, sharing meals and drinks, walking the streets of Irkutsk and Yekaterinburg, of Vladivostok and St Petersburg, walking the hills near Chersky Rock high above Lake Baikal, nearly getting completely stranded on the edge of Siberia, inching over a once-in-a-100 year flood in tiger-saturated taiga region of eastern Siberia, living for several days in a cramped cabin with a large, mostly drunk, boisterous Russia, playing chess against a gang of four chessmen, negotiating for food on platforms, talking about movies, about music, about the rain all those countless times just the two of us stood between train cars, and on and on





I hope you take this ride with us. It is an exciting place to be. If you wish to support the arts, writers, photographers, all in one shot, head up to that link above and order some copies for you and your friends. 





Here are some reviews:





From National Book Award Winner, Tim O’Brien: 





I just finished again– it’s wonderful.  I wish every book and manuscript I’ve read over the past two months had been as moving, gripping, and/or loaded with fascinating information about a huge swath of our planet.  Your relationship with Michael leads the way, of course, and binds the journey into an emotional and thematic whole that transcends the standard “look what I saw” travel book.  The chess, the harp, the photography, and the desire to take a 7-time-zone journey with his dad — wow, what a son to have.  And bravo to you for risking it, especially the whole language problem, which would’ve stopped me in my tracks, pun intended.  So many things stick with me.  The czar and Alexi and their fate.  I’ve read a book — read it twice — about the ending days, execution, disposal, and eventual recovery of the Romanovs, or what little was left of them, so I didn’t go into it blind with your book, but I felt the father-son, sharing-death connection much more powerfully.  Boris (Alexander Ivanovich, that is) was a memorable character portrait in all kinds of ways, and your descriptions (along with the photo of him) certainly match my memories of the cartoon character!  Moscow time.  What a nightmare.  What a miraculous ending to the nightmare.  The royal blue station shacks, the birches with no tops, the meat and potato  pastries — if pastry is the correct word — the smell of onions, the vodka, the wheel tapping, the once-in-hundred-year flooding, the vast vacancies of human presence, the moving village of the train, the Leningrad hero, the Leningrad ghosts, the ungraspable Leningrad numbers . . . Just so much. Well done, Bob.  My congratulations.  And thank you for a pleasurable few hours.





From Actor and Author, Martin Sheen: 





The Iron Scar brought me on a journey that unexpectedly and artfully had me thinking about my own father and my sons throughout the book, as well as introducing me to the wild, warm, and colorful world of Siberia. Thank you for bringing me onboard with you and your son.





In Vladivostok at the end of the line (photo by some French guy) 

			

	


				
					


	

			
The Literary Journey of The Iron Scar
		

				

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cover photo by Michael Kunzinger/Cover design by Jacqui Davis





The actual journey took about a month in 2013. We left Williamsburg, Virginia, by train to New York, spent precious and never-enough time with my late dear friend Fr. Patrick Brennen Fitzgerald, and laughed all night with my cousin Roy and his wife Patty, two of my favorite people. We ate our way through Manhattan, and the next day flew to St. Petersburg where we boarded the famous trans-Siberian railway. Actual travel time on the train was about a week, but we disembarked for exploration several times, ending about three weeks later in Vladivostok.





I knew from the inception this was a writing project, and my son, Michael, was along to take thousands of photographs. They would be our primary souvenir, of course, and used to trigger memories and tell stories. But they would also go on to be used in solo art shows he displayed as well as for use in a myriad of articles for print and online journals. The book has a healthy selection of Michael’s photographs.





While the text has just over a dozen chapters, various versions have been printed in different combinations of content, style, format, and with or without artwork. Usually with. I knew I didn’t have the authority or expertise to write historically or with any accurate social commentary about Russia or the rail, and others had already done so with more skill than I could have anyway, including one of my favorites, Ian Frazier (Travels in Siberia). David Green, too, of NPR, wrote specifically about the ride in Midnight in Siberia. I had no intention of duplicating these men.





Being the son of a father who was almost ninety years old at the time, and the father of a son who was about to venture out into his own life at the time, I found myself deep in the narrative of middle-age, of letting go, of contemplating what’s next, and of trying to balance planning ahead with my natural tendency toward spontaneity.





So to include my father on the journey, the early stories were framed as letters to my father from the dining car of the railway. I like them; I like personal approaches to writing so long as the reader recognizes herself in the piece as much as the characters on the train. This was going along swimmingly and a handful of journals published the pieces with this format.





Then I went to Ireland and participated in a workshop with the deeply talented Jacki Lyden and Elizabeth Rosner. It was Liz who casually asked when reading a story of mine about floods along the Amur River, “Why the hell is this a letter? Who would possibly, during a once-in-a-century flood sit in a dining car and write a letter?”





Damn. She’s good.





So I took all the pieces published that way and rewrote in standard narrative form and discovered how much more I can do that way, and still include my father in the content without the reader mirroring Liz’s sentiment.





So I republished them all, some in various forms including other essays wrapped into them and some abbreviated and some much longer than other versions. In fact, a few anecdotes ended up in nearly all the stories published. In the end, there are about fifteen chapters rewritten and combined nineteen different ways published in twenty-one magazines and journals. But that’s not the book. The book is not a collection of essays, and I never intended it to be published as such. The Iron Scar is a narrative, one long story from New York to Vladivostok, covering more than ten thousand miles, seventeen times zones, and about two hundred pages. 





I must, however, give thanks to those publishers who found something worth sharing in my stories.





Including:





The Maine Review   “On the Occasion of that Inevitable Conversation with my Son”               





Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art   “Tracks” “Checkmate” “Off-Track”





A View from This Wilderness   





Blue Planet Journal





Warfare Journal   





Ilanot Review        





Connotation Press         





Olive Press “Dissidents” 





Foliate Oak Journal       





World War Two History Magazine  “Meanwhile in Leningrad”





Columbia Journal   “Tiger, Taiga”





Southern Humanities Review  “Leningrad Story”





Nowhere Magazine   “Exiles and Dissidents”               





Litterateur Magazine





Wanderlust Journal       





All Nations Press            





Silver Birch Press





Foreign Literary Journal                





Adirondack Literary Review





The Alabama Literary Review  (December 2021)          





The Virginian Pilot  “It’s Not Their Fault”





My last book, A Third Place: Notes in Nature, was published by Kim Davis of Madville Press in Lake Dallas, Texas. She did a beautiful job and I enjoyed working with her and her team. An editor at a significant publishing house in New York read several of the pieces above and asked to see a more complete manuscript, which I promptly sent to her. Her editorial staff enjoyed the work, loved that it is more about fathers and sons and moving on than it is about Russia or Siberia or trains, but the marketing department said they simply cannot market this book—it is much too niche, and it isn’t worth it unless I had a reach like Frazier or Green. I don’t. I can’t even reach them.





I knew I would be in great hands at Madville, and Kim had shown interest in it before, so I signed a contract. I actually don’t think it has a niche audience, and I believe it can, with the proper marketing and publicity, touch anyone who is a parent, has an aging parent, wonders what the hell to do with their lives.





But for me, this book is a diary, a journal, a remembrance of a time when my son and I rode the railway across two continents one summer, on a journey that continues still.





The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia is scheduled for release in April 2022.










At the station in Vladivostok