• travel stories

• siberiaChastie_Kurgany_Expedition_2001

feature articles published in The Moscow Times on July 22, 2000

Amazing Travels Through a Land the World Knows Far Too Little About; by Erik Flesch
Land of the Shamans; by Erik Flesch 

• the russia logs  

letters to family during early months abroad

Safe and Sound; Jan. 7, 2000; by Erik Flesch
Sara's Version of Our January in Moscow (by Sara Lomasz); Feb. 8, 2000; by Sara Lomasz
Figuring it Out; Feb. 10, 2000; by Erik Flesch
Trip to St.Petersburg was a Real Releif; March 24, 2000; by Erik Flesch 

• siberia

Amazing Travels Through a Land the World Knows Far Too Little About; by Erik Flesch 

Land of the Shamans; by Erik Flesch

Amazing Travels Through a Land the World Knows Far Too Little AboutSayan Mtns. near Nizhny Suztuk, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

The Moscow Times; Saturday, July 22, 2000

By Erik Flesch 

Bring salt, matches, canned goods and vodka, a Muscovite acquaintance warned me. Another told me "Russians all want to come to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Why should anyone want to leave just to find suffering and hardship?"

But what I experienced in summery Siberia transcended every possible stereotype or difficulty, and I returned suntanned and spiritually refueled.
Road-tripping through Krasnoyarsk, Tuva and Khakassia, over the land of the Yenisei River and the Great Ring of the Sayan Mountains, I found that beyond the Kremlin and its obsession with vertical power structure, there is beauty and pride to be found in Russia's varied natural landscape and its diverse regional cultures.

Although it is the only airline to Krasnoyarsk, when we arrived the pilot thanked us for choosing Kras Air, and as hundreds of passengers shoved for the door, its theme song played over the speakers like a battle hymn. With 5,000 kilometers of Russia to the east and to the west, I was deep in the center of the country.

It was morning on the runway and there were low green hills in every direction. Nearby were still the familiar pocked mess of patched pavement and bathroom-tiled administrative buildings, but they weren't enough to kill the sense of an open horizon and the feeling that in Siberia, life answers first to nature and only second to Moscow.

I was met by a man in a suit who introduced me to Ira, my Russian interpreter, and Luna, our Khakassian guide, and showed me to a giant white Mercedes coach, our transportation for the rest of the journey. At our hotel, the Yakhunt, we met Andrei and Natasha Katayev, the founders of the Paradise Travel Agency who had invited a group of 20 on their maiden voyage through "new" Siberia.

Founded by Cossacks in 1628 and developed by exiles in the 19th and 20th centuries, Krasnoyarsk is easy to like. Downtown, log-cabins, intricately trimmed wooden mansions, and Siberian Baroque cathedrals are still peppered among the concrete cereal-box monoliths of a more recent era. The downtown area glows with the neon lights of restaurants, clubs and stores selling Western products.

As we moved from site to site, Luna constructed a picture of Krasnoyarsk's turbulent history and how its pioneering spirit and tradition of scientific achievement have always defined it.
The treacherously steep and curvy road southwest out of Krasnoyarsk called Mother-in-law's Tongue was closed to foreigners until perestroika but it now carries visitors to Divnagorsk to witness the Krasnoyarsk Dam and the reservoir it creates. Driving 90 meters over the Yenisei across the mighty dam with its awesome capacity of 50 million kilowatts per hour was a dramatic experience.

In the low Sayans, groves of Siberian stone pine, birch, flowering apple, cedar, larch and fir alternate with vast expanses of grassy fields as fertile as any U.S. prairie. Driving past the Yenisei villages of Slezneva and Ovsyanka, Ust-Mana, Biryusa and others founded by Cossacks as far back as the 1760s, Luna talked with pride about the independent Siberian spirit. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Siberian peasants owned their own land, unlike in European Russia.

Now, though, curvy-horned cows walk freely down the road and the few houses exist only in back-to-back clusters. The rare plowed fields on the outskirts of the villages are small and still farmed collectively.

After about four hours, the road turned downhill, and suddenly the taiga ended, and a flat expanse of long shiny grass opened in front of us. We had crossed the natural border into the territory of Khakassia.

We stopped for a picnic beside the Black River, where there were soft grassy mountains on the horizon and scores of stones, 1 or 2 meters high, set in rectangular patterns. Even in the eighth century B.C. it was dramatically evident that this was a sacred place, and the Scythians built hundreds of burial sites here.

Among the purple Siberian irises, wild strawberries and little yellow and blue flowers, our chef and wait staff in tall white hats were waiting for us with a grill full of chicken and a table full of vegetables, salads, exotic condiments, drinks and three giant Oriental carpets spread on the soft ground. Two hours in this enchanting setting was the most sensually rich experience I have yet found in all of Russia.

As we followed the Yenisei south, it was hard to stay awake. We drove past depressed sparsely populated coal-mining villages. These dilapidated towns are dismal looking with their collapsing wooden fences, clapboard and concrete shacks and gray asbestos corrugated roofs.

Shushenskoye

Eight and a half hours from the city of Krasnoyarsk, we reached the village where Lenin was exiled for publishing revolutionary material. Although Shushenskoye was part of Khakassia until 1996, it now marks the border back into Krasnoyarsk territory. Before spotting a single house, we drove by "Thinking Mountain," where Lenin came to develop his ideas.

Our hotel, Tourist, was the fancier of the two in town, and in front of its defunct, crumbling fountain and concrete facade there were cows grazing on the grass between the cracks in the pavement.

My room offered some amusing amenities, including a tub more than a meter tall and a toilet that sat centimeters from the floor. Luckily, we stayed only one night and our own cooks prepared the tables (complete with wild flowers) and meals in the hotel restaurant.

Our excursion to the History and Culture Museum was eye-opening. A Lenin museum was established in Shushenskoye in 1937, but in 1975, to preserve and restore the old village where Lenin spent three years, the last residents were relocated to apartments and now costumed actors and historians welcome as many as 200,000 visitors per year.

In Shushenskoye, people grew flax, raised sheep for wool and had a thriving textiles industry. They revered the living spirit of nature, and developed a whole system of nature-inspired symbols to ornament their clothes and domestic objects to bring them good fortune. Swastikas, other geometric patterns and representational pictures were stitched, printed or painted in every color of the rainbow.

Red was considered the most sacred and powerful color because it represented the energy of the sun, and women produced 33 shades of red dye, all home brewed from plants. Red also was believed to combat the "evil eye." Lenin's use of the color red as a political symbol later appealed to many people's deepest spiritual feelings.

Lenin arrived in Shushenskoye in May 1897. Soon thereafter he was joined by his fiancïe, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and they married in 1898. Exiles were prohibited from earning money, but were provided with an allowance of 8 rubles per month, and an additional 8 rubles for their spouse.
With their combined allowances, Lenin, his wife and her mother moved to a larger house with a study, and because the landlady only charged him 4 rubles in rent, they could afford to hire a maid.

Besides enjoying excursions on the river, hunting and walking in the forest, Lenin used his three-year sentence to read a vast amount of economic, philosophical and historical literature, and compiled his fateful "The Development of Capitalism in Russia." Russia hasn't been the same since.

Nizhny Suztuk

Forty-five minutes from Shushenskoye the women of the farming village Nizhny Suztuk met us on the edge of town singing and dancing in their colorful traditional dresses. The town leader, a strong, welcoming woman in her 50s with freshly dyed purple hair, held out the tasty symbol of friendship for each of us to tear into f a fresh round loaf of bread with a cup of salt baked in the top. Nearby, a little, energetic mustachioed man in a captain's hat and a navy blue uniform stomped and danced the jig around his rubber-tired horse-drawn wagon.

We hopped in the wagon, and the strong chestnut plow horse trotted down the road toward a house where some more goodies were being baked in a brick oven. While most of the group climbed out to look around, the old wagon driver invited Luna and me over to his place and on the way stopped to give his young girlfriend a kiss. When we got to his three-room home, his wrinkly wife called us in and was so pleased at my taking off my shoes that she invited us to the kitchen for a snack. There was a big bowl full of ladushki (thick pancakes) on the table, and, having no refrigerator, they pulled a jar of homemade sour cream and bowl of berry jam out of their cupboard, and we started dunking the pancakes into them.

Since I'd never had a raw milk product before, I was still busy getting up the nerve to swallow when our host produced a greasy plastic bottle of his own murky home-distilled samogon, poured full cups for me and himself and started drinking. Not wanting to offend him, I swallowed the moonshine along with my mouthful of ladushki. Arm-in-arm, we headed back out onto the street, and when the purple-haired woman learned what we'd been up to she scolded him and said he had already been drinking before we arrived and didn't wear his nice boots like she had told him.

Later we went to visit out hostess' older sister who lived in the prettiest cottage in town with freshly painted blue and green trim. The interior was absolutely covered with brightly colored, intricately flowered wool carpets of her own design f at least 15 on the walls and floors. She showed us a picture of her husband, who died 16 years ago, and started to cry as she told us what a good man he was and how hard it has been to buy coal and to keep the house by herself. I gave her a little hug, which cheered her up, and she offered me a cup of pale yellow extra-tart homemade kvas and a pair of black, yellow and pink mittens for my girlfriend, which she had knitted herself.

When we reached the baker's house and our purple-haired hostess told her that I had drunk samogon with the driver, the baker said, "Mine is much better," and pulled out a bottle, which was definitely much clearer than the driver's. So after toasting to their kindness and generosity, we all ate fresh bread and braided rolls and fruit tarts in her powder-blue kitchen.

Blue Tuva

Over white uninhabited peaks, we crossed the Yergaki range of the Sayans on the road into Tuva.

Just hours before our arrival at the newly constructed yurt camp where we were to spend two days, a small tornado had given our awaiting Tuvan staff quite a fright. No one was injured, but it blew open some of the circular wool-covered yurts and took out the electricity. But the power was up and running again by evening, and despite a glitch or two, there were warm showers in the morning.

During the day, we visited a nomad's camp nearby, where his wife served salted milky tea called sñttñg shai; barley flakes called volgan with sugar and ÿreme, sour cream; araka, clear fermented mare's milk; and fermented curds that tasted like parmesan cheese, called aarzhi.

After sundown, three shamans met us at the fire ring back at camp to perform a ritual blessing for health and happiness. These women stirred our spirits with their drum, wood block and maraca, and after we cleansed our faces with milk, one made a sacrifice of grain and milk to the fire, kneeling and singing to the earth.

On our last evening at the yurt camp, we enjoyed a concert of khoomei, or throat-singing. Its earthy and enchanting effect is produced by a single singer's ability to simultaneously produce a low sustained drone like a bagpipe's and a series of high-pitched woodwind-like harmonics.

Driving west through central Tuva we eventually reached Kyzyl-Mozhalik, the home of a deserted gargantuan open-pit asbestos mine where ancient tribes, knowing of the mountain's fire-resisting properties, once rubbed their bodies with its dust.

Just outside of town the corner is a stone monument to Genghis Khan. He gave the Tuvans a simple choice: surrender and be enslaved or die. Some time after his death in 1227, locals began paying tribute to his statue and as a result his forehead is streaked with the petrified white residues of milk, fat and sour cream.

Camp Snow Leopard

Heading north toward Khakassia we crossed some of the Sayans' tallest peaks, as high as 2,200 meters above sea level. As we crossed the border and continued to descend, moss and lichen of oranges, yellows and greens overtook every surface and covered it with a soft living skin. Cedar, fir and dwarf birch grew more dense as we slipped deep into the taiga and to camp Snow Leopard, where we spent two glorious days.

Between cabins of white cedar linked by boardwalks and decks was the lodge and the dining cabin. Our hosts and guides welcomed us in colorful Siberian costume and sang to the balalaika and danced in traditional character. The guitarist was to join us on every gathering and excursion and serenade us with the old songs my Russian traveling companions all knew by heart.

Meals that included borshch, venison and fresh fish served from Siberian lacquer ware were familiar Russian comfort foods. My cabin was warmed by a fireplace and a soft brown bearskin rug.

The next day, Sasha, our new guide and friend, taught us how to tear open cedar cones to find the sweet nuts inside as we hiked 7 kilometers to the spring-fed Lake Marankul. Diving from round boulders into this icy lake for the first time was mind-blowing; the second time it permanently warmed my blood. On the bank above the lake, we air-dried around the fire, while an Old Believer cooked a cauldron of okha, a fish soup.

Exhausted back at the camp, we were all looking forward to a hot shower, but what I got was my first banya. Michael, the other American on the trip, and Thomas, a multilingual German, were steaming with me and enjoying the experience became a sort of competition. We haggled over who would lay closer to the steam and for how long. When Sasha started whipping us with the softened fragrant birch and fir branches, we'd tell him to do it harder, not wanting to be out-flagellated by the other. Then to cool down we jumped in a freezing stream and lay in the soft moss until our bodies stopped steaming and our heads stopped spinning.

Three times we repeated this sweating, beating, running to the icy water and recovering on the moss, until I felt an overwhelming sense of euphoria and smelled like a bottle of cologne. The only soap involved in the whole procedure was in washing off the evergreen sap.

The Valley of Joy

Below the shelter of the dense taiga are the green steppes of another world f Khakassia. In its glory years of the sixth to 12th centuries, Khakassia's civilization spanned all Central Asia. Conquered by Mongols and Huns, many of its horsemen joined the hordes and went west.

Since being absorbed by Russia in the 19th century, its people have suffered further, and the capital of Abakan is now the only area where they prevail, about 20,000 people speaking many dialects.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Khakassia's people have been trying to revive their independent spirit, calling themselves Tatars and rejecting the Russian-invented name Khakassians. Khakassia's abundance of fantastic burial mounds, cult stones and stone carvings dating back at least 4,000 years are serving as the foundation of their new national pride.

Our guide was archeologist Leonid Yeryomin, director of the National Museum Reserve of Khakassia. His museum is an 18,000-hectare ethnographical and archeological reserve that includes 2,000 monuments, including stone pictures and carvings, cult places and springs lined with ancient ceramics. Some 90 percent is unexcavated and not described in any textbook.

Within this explorer's paradise is Camp Askiz, or Joy, where we spent two days exploring the surrounding Joy Valley and Blue Mountains.
Within walking distance of the new wood yurts there are 72 burial places from the third and fourth centuries B.C. undisturbed by grave robbers.
Nearby was an aal of local herders, so we stopped over to visit. The patriarch was a friendly old man in black boots, who was happy to talk to me despite our inability to understand each other's languages. In front of the log house, his sons were saddle-breaking a compact Mongolian horse the old-fashioned way. They tied it to a post, hobbled it and slapped a saddle on its back.

His wife invited us inside the separate wooden kitchen for tall cups of salty, fizzy ayran f fermented cow's milk not strained of its little curdy chunks.
Down the road is the remarkable Anchulchon burial site from the 11th and 12th centuries B.C., excavated with all its artifacts intact. The woman's burial compartment is surrounded by children's chambers and an 8-meter circle of vertically set flag stones with openings to the north, east, south and west. Adjacent is a man's circle 9 meters across with stones set horizontally and no sun slots.

Artifacts being restored in St. Petersburg are to be returned next June when a team of archeologists is to complete the excavations and create a museum that could make Anchulchon famous.

The Valley of the Kings beyond Abakan is one of the most significant wonders of Russian archeology, yet besides our white bus the land was deserted; there was hardly even a road. Its massive mounds of earth framed with 60-ton and 70-ton rectangular boulders are Tagar burial sites dating at least as far back as the third century B.C.

Valery Balakhchin, head of the Khakassian state archeological department, guided us to the largest mound, measuring 70 by 70 square meters with entry stones 4 meters high.

After excavating, archeologists found a house inside constructed of larch with a birch-bark floor and artifacts such as fur clothing and ceramic ware, which are being restored in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Local people say there is an intense energy here and a connection with the cosmos.

Optimistic future

Though forgotten by Russians and unknown by the rest of the world, the industrialized descendants of Cossack pioneers and political exiles, the Russian villagers of the dense taiga forests and the Turkic nomadic horsemen of the vast grassy steppes are as diverse as the Siberian landscape. But they share a feeling of independent identity, an intimate and spiritual relationship with the land and a frank optimism about their role in New Russia's future.

For more information about this Siberian bus tour, contact Paradise Travel Agency at 24 Ulitsa Lenina, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Tel. (3912) 652-651 or fax 652-649. Or visit their web site at www.siberiaparadise.com. The 11-day journey costs $1,398 per person, which includes round-trip transportation from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, meals and double-occupancy accommodations.

back to top

Ghengis Khan streaked with dairy offering

Land of the Shamans

The Moscow Times; Saturday, July 22, 2000

By Erik Flesch

Part legend, part mystery and part ancient ritual, the Republic of Tuva eludes many a cartographer. But this all but forgotten corner of Siberia steeped in physical contrasts, natural beauty and living history is starting to gain international attention. Erik Flesch spent several impressionable days in this native land of shamanism, throat-singing and Hunnic, Scythian and Turkic burial mounds. 

Tucked away in a remote corner of Siberia, Tuva—in spite of its size—was one of those nations that tended to escape notice. Indeed, it wasn't until 1913, when an intrepid English traveler marched in to declare this remote wilderness to be the very center of the Asian continent, that Tuva, larger than England and Wales, first caught the world's notice.

Similarly, Tuva's ongoing struggle for independence has, until recently, found little notice from the rest of the world. For 300 years its people had been ruled by Mongolians, Chinese or both. But today, Tuva, a country of nomadic livestock herders in the steppes north of Mongolia, is attempting to recover from 47 years of Soviet occupation. Despite the Kremlin's advice to give up the romantic dream of freedom, Tuva, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation, has already taken its first steps toward psychological and political healing.

Tuva is fast becoming a Mecca for the independent traveler seeking to blaze new trails. For many Tuvans, tourism has proven a welcome, though unexpected, source of optimism.

"It's curious. We didn't expect that anyone would be interested in our culture," said Khovalig Maadir Bartishtaanov, director of the Republic of Tuva's Tourism Department. "Tourism used to belong to the state. Tourists came from Krasnoyarsk or other nearby regions. Only Russians, no foreigners." For these tourists, activities typically centered around the capital city of Kyzyl. Named Belotsarsk by Russians who settled at the junction of the two main Yenisei tributaries — Kaa-Khem and Bii-Khem — in 1914, Kyzyl's main draws were its famous smoked fish and sanatoriums.
Since perestroika, however, when Tuva could open its borders to foreigners, travelers have been seeking the beauty outside Kyzyl. "The nature of tourism in Tuva is changing," says Bartishtaanov. He lists the top three interests of international tourists as Tuva's unique music called khoomei, or throat-singing, its shaman religion and cultural rites and finally, Tuva's incredibly diverse natural landscape. He was unaware that there are thousands of armchair enthusiasts abroad who diligently study these aspects of Tuva as a hobby.

The Birth of Tannu-Touva

The interest of these foreign "experts" can be traced back to the brief time when Tuva existed as an independent state. Amid the chaos after the Bolshevik Revolution, not long after Tsar Nicholas II peacefully liberated Tuva (known by its Mongol name of Uriankhai) from Mongolian rule in 1914 by proclaiming Tuva a protectorate of Russia, the "People's Republic of Tannu-Touva" declared itself an independent socialist republic in 1921 (the "Tannu," meaning "taiga surrounded by high mountain," was dropped in 1926, and the "o" in "Touva," disappeared later). During the 1920s and 1930s, in a display of exuberant national pride, Tuva did something that caught the attention of the world for the first time: They issued an unprecedented number of postage stamps — more than the United States and Britain combined. Their unusual diamond and triangular shapes and their exotic themes such as men astride camels racing a train, captured the interest of the philatelic world and left a positive impression on young collectors.

However, like many fledgling states trying to survive in the shadow of the increasingly powerful Soviet Union, the independent Tuva never had a chance. Before long the country seemed to disappear from the earth.

It was not until a dinner party in 1977 that Richard Feynman, the legendary Nobel prize-winning physicist, made history by asking: "Whatever happened to Tannu-Touva?"

The scientist's innocent question marked the starting point of an adventure in search of the lost nation. Along with his friend and traveling companion, Ralph Leighton, Feynman tried to cross the Tuvan border. His attempts were persistently thwarted by Soviet authorities until his death in 1988, but "Tuva or Bust," written later by Leighton, along with the Friends of Tuva association (www.fotuva.org) Leighton founded in honor of his late friend, continues to revive international interest in the Tuvan landscape and culture.

Inside Tuva, however, the value of its own indigenous culture was long suppressed. Although Tuva was not annexed by the Soviets until 1944, its Moscow-educated authorities fell increasingly under the influence of their Communist brothers in the Kremlin. In 1929, Tuva's "most tragic year," shamans and Buddhist monks who didn't flee to the mountains were either killed, imprisoned, exiled, or deprived of property.

Lost Heritage

Even after becoming an independent republic within the Soviet Union in 1962, the intellectual tyranny of Soviet collectivism forced Tuvans to deny their independent identity. Forced to farm collectively, Tuvan nomads abandoned their circular, felt-covered yurts on the open steppe and moved to villages, where they lived under asbestos roofs and learned to eat vegetables. Forced to work in industry, they abandoned their herds of yaks, cattle and reindeer, accepted their boxy apartments in concrete high-rises and traded ration coupons. Their native language, dress and religion banned, their independent identity nearly succumbed to extinction.

Finally in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tuva declared itself an independent republic and, according to its Constitution adopted in 1993, "a sovereign democratic state within the Russian Federation." Now its newly revived independent spirit is assertively nurturing a grassroots movement to teach its own Tuvan language in schools, encourage a revival of its shamanic and lamaist religions and restore its nature-revering traditions.

In particular, khoomei — dubbed by some Western musicians as overtone singing, harmonic singing or harmonic chant — has proved to be a wildfire phenomenon. Its earthy and enchanting effect is produced by a single singer simultaneously emitting a low sustained drone like a bagpipe's and a series of high-pitched flutelike harmonics. Musical ethnographers study khoomei as an artifact of the human voice, others call this nature-inspired sound modern. Tuva's most famous throat-singer, Kongar-ool Ondar, has recorded with Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead's Micky Hart, The Chieftains and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. In 1994, his friendship with San Francisco's blind blues artist Paul "Earthquake" Pena inspired a groundbreaking album and a 1999 Oscar-nominated film, both titled "Genghis Blues." Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin named him a National Artist of Russia. "Now our heroes are our singers," Bartishtaanov says.

Outsiders are also attracted to what some scientists have called "the native land of Shamanism," where everything in nature possesses a spirit. By listening to these spirits and offering supplications and sacrifices to them, Tuvans believe they can achieve health and happiness.

"We are pagans. We love our nature. Stars, moon, trees ... these are the most valuable things for us. We like animals; they are our companions. We like people ... all people regardless of nationality. We keep this culture in our hearts," says Mongush B. Kenin-Lopsan, the man credited with saving shamanism from Soviet extermination.

While Buddhism — a religion introduced by the neighboring Mongols —  is enjoying a healthy revival, Kenin-Lopsan has had to struggle to revive shamanism. His underground efforts to document its sacred rites, music and folklore in five formerly banned books, as well his work with the National Museum of Tuva in Kyzyl and the Shaman Society of Tuva, which he co-founded, has earned Kenin-Lopsan the title "Tuva's Man of the Century."

The shamans and scholars from America, Africa, Japan and Europe who have come to witness the shaman "renaissance" at its source have provided much appreciated support. "People of the world are very thankful to our country ... they respect our experience and resemble us very much," says Kenin-Lopsan.

Riding through Tuva's vast and varied landscape, it is easy to imagine how its people developed an intimate relationship with nature. "Here you find steppes, mountains, taiga and desert. This is the only place in the world that can offer you all these things in a day," says Bartishtaanov. In this "Land of Contrasts," where there are reindeer in the north and camels in the south, temperatures can vary from 40 degrees Celsius in the desert to minus 50 degrees C in the Arctic-like permafrost-tundra. Its healing medicinal mud and therapeutic thermal, carbonic and salt springs rival those found anywhere in Europe.

Living History

Tuva's natural treasures have not gone unnoticed. UNESCO has included Tuva's Uvs Nuur Biosphere Reserve, a unique mountain basin stretching 640 kilometers from east to west and 160 kilometers from north to south, in the Man and the Biosphere World Network of Biosphere Reserves, which includes 352 biosphere reserves in 82 countries. Uvs Nuur Hollow is home to a number of endangered or endemic animals, among them the snow leopard, mountain goat, big horn sheep, eagle and at least 44 endemic plant species.

Alive with ancient history, Tuva's archeological records span at least 2,000 years. Many locals believe that Genghis Kahn himself — whose mother was believed to be Tuvan — may be buried here. The thousands of burial sites and cliff drawings of the Khemchik Valley and valleys of the Mongun Taiga range from the fantastic "stone men" of the Turkic period to the kurgans, or burial mounds, of Scythian and Hunnic civilizations dating as far back as the eighth century B.C. These treasures are still largely unexplored by archeologists.

A recent study by Ilya Zakharov, deputy director of Moscow's Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, has created new international interest in Tuva. According to Zakharov's preliminary research, Tuvans are more closely genetically linked to Native American peoples like the Eskimo, Navajo and Apache than any other group.

<> Bartishtaanov's job is to take all of Tuva's cultural, natural and scientific attractions and parlay them into a viable tourist industry. "My department's aim is to attract as many international tourists as possible," says Bartishtaanov. He has already made some headway by establishing legislation enabling private travel companies open, but his efforts are often met with skepticism. "Officials don't believe tourism is possible here," says Bartishtaanov.

But besides the lingering self-doubt of some of its own people, there are physical barriers as well. With no railroad and only two roads leading out of the republic, traveling to Tuva is not for the squeamish. The closest big city is Abakan — some 800 kilometers away in the Republic of Khakassia. Limited air service is available by one small Yak aircraft a week connecting Kyzyl to Moscow.

And while Bartishtaanov's goal is to build up a modern infrastructure, finding public funds to do so will not be easy.

Dubious Distinction

Since workers have abandoned the Soviet mines and factories for their herds, Tuva is financially worse off than ever. In Kyzyl-Mozhalik, home of the Ak-Dovorak open-pit asbestos mine (one of the largest in the world), the mountain lays torn open, overflowing with white asbestos. Locals are plagued by emphysema, lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Given the scarcity of available medicines and accessible medical care over the vast areas of the steppe, many have no access to traditional health care.

Tuva also has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest levels of sexually transmitted diseases in a country that is already reaching epidemic proportions. In recent years, 2.5 percent of the republic's population of 200,000 has been infected with syphilis, making Tuvans among the most likely in the world to be infected with a STD.

Despite these obstacles, Bartishtaanov is determined to make Tuva a welcoming destination, greeting arriving guests of a new bus tour at the border in native costume.

"Despite 50 years of collectivism, we are an independent, ancient culture," says Bartishtaanov. "We are free now. We show foreign people our culture and it helps us feel strong, independent, free."

back to top

• the russia logs


After having moved to Moscow early January, 2000,  I spent the first few months organizing my thoughts about the strange environment in these letters to family and friends.

Safe and Sound, Jan. 7, 2000; by Erik Flesch
Sara's Version of Our January in Moscow, Feb. 8, 2000; by Sara Lomasz
Figuring it Out, Feb. 10, 2000; by Erik Flesch
Trip to St. Petersburg was a Real Releif, Mar. 24, 2000; by Erik Flesch

Safe and Sound; Jan. 7, 2000

Sara and I arrived in Moscow Wednesday late afternoon. Bad weather in New York delayed our flight out of Tampa several hours, so that we missed our connecting flight. Delta said they'd put us up in a New York hotel overnight, which would have given us a day in the city, but instead we opted to take a later flight to Moscow, via Munich. We arrived in Russia thirty hours after we left Bradenton, a little haggard, but excited. Contacting our rides in Moscow by airphone on the plane, and by payphone in Germany proved to be a challenge. Between the time difference (nine hours later in Moscow than Chicago), people not home, and busy signals, we walked past the Russian customs check-point not knowing whether or not we'd have to hire a taxi. But Yuri was there with his"Gilette" sign (the company Nitin, Gayatri's husband, works for), and Dima was there, too, with a sign reading "Sara Lomasz," arranged by the Moscow Times. One car was for the baggage, the other for us.

It took about forty-five minutes for Yuri's little black Audi to haul us to Gayatri's apartment on Novospassky pereulok. Gayatri and Nitin have invited us to stay in their very comfortable, very modern apartment while we look for our own place. Except for the dense forests of birch and   snow-covered pine on the outskirts of town, and the promenade of billboard after billboard of backward letters and unfamiliar product pictures, I'd swear we were driving home from Midway airport in Chicago. Though four inches of snow had fallen the day before, most had already absorbed the gray of the pavement and still needed to be shoveled and plowed. We passed little green dump trucks filled with the stuff, but Yuri seemed not to notice. As we approached the center of town, it was remarkable to see most buildings illuminated by floodlights, and little white or colored lights strung around for Christmas decoration. Sara was great about pointing out buildings she recognized from her earlier visits, like the upscale shops along Tverskaya street, reminiscent of the "Magnificent Mile" of Michigan Avenue, Bolshoi theater, the Kremlin, and Lubianka, the former KGB jail. After fishing around for the button, I cracked the window a couple of times for fresh air.

Yuri and Dima hopped the cars up next to each other onto the curb outside the apartment builiding, and we began to unload our bags, which someone had marked with orange stickers that read "heavy." They filled one elevator, we crowded the other, and we made it up to the eighth floor. Since Gayatri and Nitin are in Texas for the week they arranged for Yulya, their housekeeper, to let us in. I think she winced as we covered the wood floors of the entryway with our black bags and black slush from our boots. Sara said "Sbasibo, do svidanya" (thank you, goodbye) to our drivers as they turned to go, and wishing to thank them, too, I accidentally said "pozhalyusta," (please) but I think they got the jist. Yulya gave us all the information we needed about getting in and out of the building, the location of nearby metro stations, and made us at home in the apartment. She was very cute and seemed a little embarrased that I didn't understand a word she said. She'll be coming to check up on us and clean up after us about three times per week.

Since we arrived, Sara and I have been recovering from our travels, mosly sleeping long hours. Last night, we ventured out for the first time, though. Without a particular destination, we rode the metro downtown and took a long walk. Past the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, the Bolshoi, Lenin's mosoleum, GUM (the largest and most elegant shopping mall in Russia), the Moscow river. We watched children sledding. Couples kissing. Babushkas begging or selling cigarettes in the Metro. We bought some groceries from a little kiosk. It will take a little time for this place to seem real. It's Christmas in Moscow today; the Russian Orthodox church still follows an ancient calendar. There are gold turban domes of a cathedral right outside the window of our apartment. We tried to go inside last night to look around, but a monk told us that since it's a monestary, Sara couldn't enter without a skirt.

back to top

Sara's Version of Our January in Moscow (by Sara Lomasz); Feb 8, 2000  

the past month has truly been a wild ride. it’s hard to believe erik and i’ve already been in moscow a month, but in many ways it feels like we’ve been here years —  and russian years at that. that’s the way russia has always felt to me, trapped in some twisted time warp, racing to be modern, longing to be traditional, never quite true to what it is. but i digress.

what i wanted to tell you was what we’ve been up to since we got here. we initially were staying with my friend gayatri, and her husband, nitin, who are indian nationals who’ve lived in russia for the past four years as gillette employees. i hired gayatri as a freelancer for the st. petersburg (russia) times’ art section in 1997 and we’ve kept in touch ever since. she and nitin were truly generous with their time and their beautiful apartment, which looked out on the novospassky monastery. but as lucky as we were to have such good friends accommodate us, we were ready to have our own place once i started my job, only five days after our arrival. that’s when things got really crazy.

the apartment hunt was much more intense than we’d, or at least i’d expected. before we left for russia i’d collected about a dozen leads on places, but they were all taken by the time we got to moscow. i was really hoping we wouldn’t have to go through a real estate agent, who would want a hefty commission, but we arrived right in the thick of the russian holidays (new year’s eve weekend and then russian orthodox christmas weekend) so no one was working when we had oodles of time to hunt for apartments. once i started work, it made more sense to work with an agent who could research various places and show them to us before i had to go to work or on weekends. it made sense in theory, anyway.

but it was a disaster from the start. we went to see our first apartments before my second day of work and before we even got to the building to meet the real estate agent i got bit by a dog. we were (of course) running about 10 minutes late and as we were racing to the first building we were to look at a babushka (grandmother-type) with two dogs NOT on leashes was coming toward us. i remember thinking, oh, cute puppies, as one went around erik and the other went around me. i guess the one that went around me decided i smelled too foreigner-ish and he went for my right leg. the babushka seemed to be yelling at me rather than the dog for some reason, and erik had no idea what was happening because i kept my mouth shut about this dog nipping at my limbs. but then the dog took a bite out of my left leg and i let out a cry i will never forget. the babushka and the dogs were long gone by the time erik consoled me out of my hysterical fit, rubbing snow on my wound and promising to patch the hole in my pants, and we found lena, the real estate agent. the worst part of it all was that we hated the building she wanted to show us the minute we saw it and we refused to step foot inside, so i got bit by a dog in a neighborhood i would never have chosen to visit anyway.

(a side note on the dog bite: we weren’t worried about the possibility of rabies until gayatri heard about this incident and called me at work to insist on sending her driver to get me to take me to some russian clinic for six shots in the arm. no, thanks, i said. erik and i did go to the european medical center where i pitched an absolute fit upon being told that rabies shots, if i need them, would cost $600. we were about to storm out when this french doctor in a bad three-piece suit said, “mizzzzzz lomaszzzzz, i am ze docTOR, you must let me do my job.” so he lectured us on rabies —  “zere is no rabies in moscow;” “always think: fox, fox, fox” —  and then gave me a tetanus shot —  “are you going to cry like ze little children?” —  and let me off the hook for $40 since i, as he put it, “screamed” about the price.)

dogs, babushkas and crazy french physicians aside, this was a problem we encountered with every step on the path to apartments: no matter how many times we told real estate agents which parts of moscow we wanted to live in —  and which ones we categorically refused to see —  not to mention having to explain that we didn’t want to live in apartments with rugs hung on walls as decorations, we were constantly told that “foreigners” loved this neighborhood, or that building. we were typecast as typical foreigners rather than two people looking for an apartment to call home. it was definitely an exercise in futility, one that erik bore the brunt of.

after that first disastrous day of the dog bite in which we crammed in four apartment viewings before i had to race to work, erik took on the apartment hunt, seeing as many places as possible once i went to work. he called some agencies listed in the moscow times’ classifieds and went with about three that had agents who spoke english. soon he was filling up his daytimer with hourly appointments, and going from metro to metro to meet agent after agent, seeing some of the tackiest apartments on earth. i would come home from work at night and laugh my head off listening to his tales of the absurd course of events of his day, like the one relatively new agent who dragged him out into the middle of moscow by metro AND bus and proceeded to ask him to find the apartment. he humored the agents and their “but foreigners LOVE this region” for about a day and then got extremely aggressive. i woke up one day to the sound of him telling off one of the pushier agents who had been told his services were no longer required but who insisted on calling to pursue the commission. erik: “boris, do you know the word ‘pushy’? P-U-S-H-Y, pushy. look it up.” my hero!

it must have been after two dozen apartments that erik finally saw something he liked, and made an appointment for us to see it together on my first weekend off from work. in the end it was the apartment we settled on, but it was a long, difficult road between liking it and signing the contract for it. we saw the apartment on a saturday and it wasn’t until the following wednesday that we signed the paperwork. and in the interim, we hired two more agents, which meant erik was seeing up to 12 apartments a day for a week straight. one night we met an agent at a metro station and walked with her to an apartment she wanted to show us. to cross the street we had to go through an underground tunnel, which was jammed with 20-something girls lined up on either side of the tunnel in their fur or leather coats. when we asked the agent what they were all doing down there, she said, “waiting to be bought.” she further explained that since the police starting cracking down on prostitution, pimps keep them in these tunnels and send up one at a time to stand by the side of the road rather than have all of them on the street in the bad old days. when we brought up the sight we’d seen with the agent representing the landlord, she hardly flinched as she called it “one of the charms of the neighborhood.”

in negotiating for our apartment, first we haggled over the rent, then we haggled over getting the landlords to buy us a dryer to go with the washing machine already in the apartment, as well as a hot water heater for the shower for those nice summer weeks when the city shuts off the water for yearly repairs. what made the negotiations that much more frustrating was that our respective agents wouldn’t let us communicate directly with each other; they insisted on relaying information back and forth between themselves, which we later realized was their way of playing us off each other to try and secure their commissions. in a word: ugly.

we thought we’d finally reached an agreement with the landlords that we would pay them three months’ rent and they would buy the water heater. we decided to let the issue of the dryer go because a girl at work was selling a combo washer/dryer that i planned to inquire about. on the day of the signing, i had to work late so erik went to the contract signing by himself, with our agent and her manager, both of whom spoke english (the landlords did not). what we thought would be a relatively quick signing turned into a 4-1/2 hour disaster with the landlords screaming at their agent about their commission (in the end they would only pay her 20%) and then everyone fuming at each other about the water heater and dryer, which again reared its ugly head. the landlords consisted of a father-mother-daughter combination, and we’re still not really clear on whose place this is. regardless, in the course of the negotiations over the water heater, the landlords claimed they never agreed to buy the water heater, but instead offered to split the cost of it with us. this was infuriating, as we’d only agreed to the negotiations thinking they’d agreed to buy the water heater. yury, the father, kept trying to tell erik (in russian, of course) that we didn’t need a water heater, because the city only turns the water off for a month at the most and besides, the best water heater is a pot on the stove. he also insisted no one uses dryers in russia because everyone knows a clothesline tied across the kitchen works just fine. needless to say, erik wasn’t convinced. when i was leaving work at 11:30 p.m. and still hadn’t heard from him that the place was ours, i called the apartment and learned they were still negotiating. erik told me he was about to put his coat on and leave when i called but they agreed to wait for me to see if any kind of consensus could be reached.

everyone was really nice to me when i arrived, which erik said was a real contrast with the thick tension that had filled the room for the better part of the evening. earlier when erik had told the landlords our plan to get our own washer/dryer combo, they told him that they would want to keep it when we leave, as in, we buy them a dryer. that didn’t quite compute, nor did them telling us they didn’t have a place to put the washer so even if we weren’t going to use it they still wanted to leave it here. we finally got them to understand that if we bought our own machine, we would do with it what we wanted when we left, whether it was sell it, ship it home, or throw it in the river. but there was still the issue of what to do with their washer, which we initially weren’t planning on using. i was hoping we could find some place to stash it, or at least resolve that issue once we’d signed the contract, but erik was insistent, and rightfully so, that we get everything squared away up front. we were all tired and frustrated, there were eight people trying to fit a square in a circle, and in the end i did what my mom has always said works best when avoiding traffic tickets and trying to get your way: i cried. it was unintentional, but not only did that soften erik up on the dryer issue, which we decided to abandon, but it softened up the landlords on the water heater issue, with them offering to split the cost with us and pay for the installation. so finally, at 1 a.m. we signed a contract and got the keys to our moscow pad.

this is by far the nicest apartment i have ever lived in. it’s in one of the seven “wedding-cake” skyscrapers stalin had built in the city between the 1930s and 1950s. our building is the agriculture ministry and has red stars on the top of its spires. the apartment has nice wooden floors and plain walls as opposed to the hideous wallpaper we saw in the other places. we have three rooms —  bedroom, living room, and guest bedroom/study —  as well as a nice-sized kitchen with new countertops and cabinetry. there’s a balcony off the living room, as well as one shared by the kitchen and guest room. all our windows face the northeast, so we get pretty decent light, and i’d call our view fairly stunning. from where i’m sitting at our desk in the guest room i can see another of the stalin skyscrapers, which is the leningrad hotel, as well as the clock tower at the leningrad train station about five miles away. most of the buildings in moscow are floodlit at night, which i would wager is a contributing factor to a lack of heating east of the ural mountains, but it’s gorgeous nonetheless. for daytime viewing there’s a side street at the entrance to our building and a small park with lots of trees. we’re on the fourth floor just above the tree tops so spring should bring a lot of green into view. we’re already feeding the local sparrow population our bread crumbs so hopefully they’ll build their nests in trees in front of our windows. the apartment is completely furnished, and most of the furniture is antique. in addition to a nice wooden bed in the bedroom there’s a gorgeous wardrobe as well as a mirror stand with drawers. there’s a massive buffet in the living room that currently stands empty as we have nothing to fill it with, as well as this sort of chaise-lounge thing that serves as a couch. there’s a twin bed in the guest room, bookshelves and the aforementioned desk, and a nice-sized table with stools in the kitchen. the only things we’ve had to buy are pillows, glasses, a toaster, an iron and ironing board. our box of linens has yet to arrive so we’re borrowing from friends, but other than that we’re pretty set. the only thing on our wish list right now is a radio/cd player but the cd-rom in computer works well for now.

oh, did i mention the metro is in the basement of our building?! not only does this place have the look we wanted, it takes the cake in terms of commuter convenience. every metro station is outfitted with what i call kiosklands, where people set up shop in little boxes and sell everything from food to pharmaceutical products to flowers to household goods to tapes and cds. there’s a little bread kiosk on the side street in front of our building, and there’s a grocery store at the corner that keeps extremely erratic hours (when in russia...). when that’s not open, there’s a 24-hour grocery store on a nearby corner, oh, and we’re 3 stops from red square!

regardless of how close we live to the metro, it still takes a good 45 minutes to get to work. erik brings me to work every day, riding the metro and walking the 10 minutes it takes from the nearest metro to work. the week we moved in to the apartment he came down with a nasty cold that it took a good two weeks to get rid of, so he’s mostly been homebound so far. he’s been faxing resumes around to potential employers and looking into russian lessons. the company arranges for drivers to take us home and if it’s a good night i get home around 12:30 a.m. erik usually has dinner waiting for me. breakfast, the commute to work and dinner are really the only times we see each other during the week, so we really look forward to the weekends. last weekend we had some of my work friends over so erik could get to know them, and then on sunday we went to a performance of young musicians. today we went to the tretyakov gallery, the premiere russian art museum in the country (it cost us about 80 cents each to get in), and then went to a cafe for borsch, bliny (crepes with meat), pelmeni (meat-filled ravioli) and baltika beer (no. 7). next weekend we hope to get to the theater for ballet or opera.

i won’t waste much space on work; let’s just say i’m earning my money. i started going in early once a week this week to break up the 2:30 p.m.-12 a.m. routine. it was nice to have dinner with erik before 1 a.m. for once. the people at this paper don’t seem to grasp the concept of “deadline” too well, but i instituted a new production schedule this week that i hope will give them some structure.

i don’t know how much you’re hearing about putin, the war in chechnya, or a radio liberty journalist named andrei babitsky, but those three things are getting a lot of space in our paper these days. it’s looking more and more like putin will walk a clear path to the presidency in march, a prospect that becomes scarier with each day. from where i sit he looks worse than yeltsin, and more capable than the communists of undoing the progress yeltsin made toward democracy (i never thought i’d credit yeltsin with strides toward democracy; that tells you what i think of putin). journalists in particular are alarmed by the idea of a president putin after what happened this week with babitsky, a respected journalist who went missing in january and was thought to have been kidnapped by the chechens. it turns out, however, that the russian federal security service, or fsb, (the successor agency to the kgb, which was most recently headed by, you guessed it, putin) had babitsky the whole time but let everyone wonder about his fate. the fsb finally admitted they had babitsky on wednesday and promised to release him, but on thursday they traded him to the chechens in exchange for two russian prisoners of war. that’s right: they handed over a russian journalist to the people they call terrorists and bandits. meanwhile back in moscow, another journalist, less respected yet nonetheless deserving of his rights, is being summoned for a psychiatric exam because the government doesn’t like what he’s writing. while none of this makes me concerned for my safety, it does make some of us wonder whether we’ll have a newspaper to work for after march 26. our publisher has told our editors to increase their vigilance against mistakes that could get us in legal hot water, because as the cases of babitsky and this moscow journalist show, the government doesn’t seem to need justification to silence the rights of the press.

about two weeks ago, both the russian government and the chechen leadership were predicting more terrorism in moscow and supposedly the police are working 12-hour days with no days off until mid-february. but i have to tell you, more and more people believe that the russians (read: putin), not the chechens or any other ethnic group, were responsible for the apartment block bombings last fall. that may sound like conspiracy theory, but that’s the mood around here right now. for someone who wants to study the cause and effect of the stalinist purges of the 1930s, i think i came to the right place at the right time.

so that’s been january and the first week of february. i hope this finds you all well and keeping warm in your respective locales. more personal notes soon, i promise!

love, sara

back to top

Figuring it Out; Feb. 10, 2000

We are now officially settled in our apartment, and the computer is up and running. Besides about two weeks of -15° to -20° Celcius (about 0° F), it has been pretty bearable, closer to 0°C (30°F). The locals don't like it; they keep saying that winter should be cold. It snows, though, very frequently, recently every day, which leaves the streets and sidewalks either icy, slushy, puddly, or just plain slippery with snow. When the sun is out, we can see blue sky from the windows of our apartment, but every day, starting about 2:00 it goes white or gray, and turns night by 5:00 or 5:30.

After intensive apartment searching and moving in, I promptly got sick. Good timing, anyway. It wasn't that bad, but my voice was shot for about a week, and I didn't leave the apartment except to drop Sara off at work or to get some essential groceries. After trudging through the snow the other day, though, I got the internet service set up, and was able to scout the expatriate web circles for a job. I went to my first interview earlier today for a sales position with a British company called OfficeScape that does interior construction for office and retail spaces. I would contact foreign companies (i.e. American, Australian, etc.) who are opening an office in Moscow, and convince them to hire us as their contractor or subcontractor to outfit it. OfficeScape has an architect, owns construction materials, has a former tank factory making desks and stuff, and has a fleet of Russian laborers. Might work out, but I’m still looking at other options, too. Interesting how as soon as I arrived, I realized that teaching kids English is not what I want to do here.

Speaking of language, I am also waiting for a response from some people I emailed who want to trade English/Russian lessons. I have picked up the Russian words for certain necessary situations like xleb (bread), kapusta (cabbage), voda (water), vodka (vodka), skolka (how much), xot dog (hot dog), borsch (borsch), kartoo taxophone (payphone card), gdye twalet (where's the bathroom), pazhalusta (please), spacibo (thank you), pivo (beer), and I can read the secret code of an alphabet enough to go anywhere on the metro (which I quickly mastered). But I'm still working on my numbers, and I don't know many verbs yet. I'm working on it. At first, I was intimidated to go to the store by myself because all the items are kept behind a counter, and you have to actually ask the sales girl for everything by name (and lord help me if she asks how much I want), but now I've got all the simple vocab and complex sign language it takes to speak good pidgin po-Russkie.

One thing that is a constant source of stimulation and wonder is simply the look of the place. There seems to be a feeling for art indiginous to this culture that is different from any other place I've ever seen. It is extremely common to find the exteriors of buildings brightly floodlit along the streets, and interiors of public spaces (especially the metros) ornately ornamented with fancy light fixtures, colorful marble and granite, and unusually bold achitectural details. Everything gilded to the hilt. Self- conscious Soviet status-symbols are everywhere. The Soviets loved promoting the illusion of wealth, and ostentation in art and architecture was legislated by Stalin himself and others who followed. He wanted to give the proletariate things that looked rich and powerful; he called it Socialist Realism. The building we live in at Krasnie Vorota (Red Gateway), for example, was one of seven neo- gothic art deco skyscrapers commissioned by Stalin in the early 50's   ("The Seven Sisters") to create a skyline that would rival New York's. You can see one of them from Poland.

There are also many modern-looking masonry or concrete skyscapers, though a glass and steel one is rare. Typical of the mass- housing apatment buildings built in the fifties are the yellow brick monstrosities with brown glazed tiles mortared all around the bottom level. Often one will take up a third of a block, and then you’ll see two or three more with the same exact design around the corner. Looking at many of them, I can see how the architect was trying to integrate some aesthetic that may have been considered modern in America in the fifties or sixties, but watered it down and left out innovations like open floor plans or air conditioning or closets or parking, and ended up with something that just seems ancient and uninhabitable. I’ve seen some odd brick work patterns like I’ve never seen before, and beautiful parquet floor patterns that are amazingly complex. This love of pattern, though, is often displayed to the point of excess. While apartment-hunting I saw the interiors of about fifty apartments, all of them wallpapered with a different pattern in every room. I’m talking everywhere, brown and yellow floral, or brown and green swirls, or red striped silk. Often, the achitecture in these apartments was pre-revolutionary, meaning it had some attention to beauty like interesting woodwork or plaster releifs, with oak parquet floors and high ceilings; but, inevitably, it would be ruined by the hideous wallpaper and loud carpet, the velveteen floral sofas, the glitzy veneer entertainment centers, the mirrored headboards with matching bureaus, and the bad fake marble tiles all over the bathroom that some well-meaning landlord/decorator had brought in. Many people also had red vinyl corner booths in their kitchens (though I didn’t necessarily mind those).

Then there are the churches. The onion dome is to the Russian Orthodox what the steeple is to the Catholic or Protestant. They are still very exotic looking to me, and many are very beautiful, often bright blue or gold. Since Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Moscow has been called the Third Rome. The influence of the Byzantine Empire here is very strong still in religious customs, architecture (the pattern thing), and politics, and is just one more factor that makes this place so intriguing. Then there is the way the people dress. Lots of the women wear hats and coats like I've never imagined out of fur or fur- trimmed leather that look like stuff I've seen in paintings that the Mongols wore (Genghis Kahn established a two and a half century occupation of the region), or else they wear wool coats in the style of the Victorian era. Many of the young women wear skirts shorter than any I’ve seen with black leather boots and spiked heels (they don’t seem to mind the winter draft). The men all wear shapkas (those fur hats with the fold-up ear flaps) and overcoats buttoned down the front, or else fur- trimmed leather coats. Everybody's black leather shoes are neatly cleaned and shined everywhere we go, despite the sidewalks. Besides the influx of more Western styles recently (like puffy parkas in bright colors), variey comes in the form of minor variations from the norm: trim square black shapka vs. puffy brown shapka; black boots that zip up the side vs. black boots with a square toe. Of the people over 40, a third of the men wear the same fuzzy red plaid scarf, and many women have dresses with the same print; in the Soviet days, there wen’t many options, though that is definitely changing now. Lots of the female metro employees wear red felt hats in the shape of the ones from WW2. Peoples face- types are even different from what I’m familiar with,   many having slightly narrow eyes harking back to their history with the Mongol Hordes. Sara describes the feel of the place as being inside a "living museum."

The only thing I can't get used to is how disquietingly silent people are in public places; I noticed it immediately in the airport upon arrival, and every day on the metro escalators and on the trains. And despite the varied costumes, there is always an old witch in a red hat sitting in a glass booth at the end of the escalators watching passengers, and shouting on her bullhorn when someone isn't holding on to their children or is out of line and blocking the left lane (for passing only). In the productys (food stores) and magazines (other shops), besides making you ask for everything you want, you often have to pay a cashier and bring the reciept to the counter before being allowed to touch the items you are buying. Often even before entering a building, you have to tell some security goon where you want to go (which has been a successful deterrent for me many times). It seems that order has been the standard of law and culture for so long that although the semi-free market has brought some new things, the idea of freedom is still new territory to be explored.

To many, Vladimir Putin brings new hope of democracy to this unsure place. In a place starved for spirit, he has shown an unusual tolerance for religion by buddying up with the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (like the pope). However, it is looking like intellectual freedom is not part of his agenda. In response to some people’s concern that he may be the next Stalin, Putin has stated “The only dictatorship will be the dictatorship of law.” That statement, and others, is foreshadowing to many. The Byzantine Empire, whose crest was the two-headed eagle Russia brandishes as its own symbol, was a perfect marriage of state and orthodox religion. The people of this country have a long history of being terrorized by one ruling power or another. Unlike ours, their new constitution does not defend individual rights on principle. Putin stated Monday that a “strong state” acts as “an instrument to guarantee the rights and liberties of the individual.” Everyone is waiting to see exactly what that means.

back to top

Trip to St. Petersburg was a Real Releif; March 24, 2000


Sara and I took the train to St. Petersburg a couple of weeks ago, and we absolutely loved it. That city really breathed the life back into us. Peter the Great built the city on a swamp, like Venice; but miscalculations of sea level scrapped the hope of navigation by canal, and left the paved streets narrower than usual. The old plaster construction weathers beautifully in the moist environment, making the texture mottled and soft, and the colors so muted and pacifying that the result is human scale. On the way to the Hermitage museum of art located in the Winter Palace of the czar, I hung out with a bear cub on the curb. We saw an adaptation of a Chekhov play called The Happy Little Cemetery at the Comedian’s Refuge theater on Haymarket Square, which Raskolnikov crossed to get to the pawnbroker’s apartment in Dostoevsy's Crime and Punishment; watched the ballet “La Sylphide” at the Mussorgsky Theater; and heard sacred a Capella music in Smolny Cathedral, part of a monastery first built by Peter the Great, all painted Smurf blue and white.

Next door is the Smolny Institute, a girls’ school that was nationalized by Lenin during the Bolshevic revolution and used to house the Communist government before moving the capital to Moscow. The mantres “Dictatorship of the Proletariot (Workers)” and “Proletariot of the World Unite” were sculpted in relief on the yellow and white neoclassical entry gates.

I couldn’t help but think that although the idea of communism was born in Petersburg, it was not the philosophy that built it. On the other hand, the “Dictatorship of the Proletariot” did build modern Moscow. It was the dictatorship of the thug and the militantly ignorant that produced the cheat in politics and human relations which still so characterizes life in Moscow, and the garrish status symbol and propoganda in its art and architecture. And while Petersburg is the birthplace of that morality, it feels very different. Even in Passazh, the state owned shopping mall, we were awed by the unexpected variety and quality, compared to the Moscow equivalent, GUM, on Red Square, which offers nothing but grim repetition and disturbingly limited variety.

It seems that Petersburg is different-- and it is. When Peter the Great built it, and made it the new capital in 1712, he singlehandedly broke with Russian tradition. The only tsar to have experienced life outside the Fatherland, as a young man he disguised himself and traveled throughout Europe, even working in a Dutch shipyard. Intent on modernizing Russia, he forced old men to shave their traditional beards, commissioned western-trained architects, artists and scholars to establish a new, more secular, humanistic, reason-based culture. He attempted to undo the Russian Orthodox culture of Byzantine mysticism and institutionalize Enlightenment ideas of the West with the force of absolute power. So while in the West, especially America, reason continued to evolve at the grassroots level independent of the monarchy (and eventually overthrew it), in Russia, the monarchy dominated for a couple more centuries, and reason and old Russian religious mysticism kind of evolved together, producing “modern” thought-- a kind of sick hybrid with a build-in contradiction. St. Petersburg personifies the interesting intellectual consequences of this deep-rooted conflict. In politics: the overthrowing of the tsar in March, 1917, and the subsequent Bolshevik (Majority) Revolution in November 1917 which instituted communism. In art: the romantic fantasy of the 19th century, and then the passionate naturalism, and psychological angst of the 20th. In architecture: the geometric rhythm and regularity of the Western formula, built right alongside the gold and blue onion domes and mosaic patterns of the Russian Orthodox churches (as a side-note, I think Organic Architecture, the architecture, I intend to study, resolves this dichotomy of reason and spirit).

In Moscow, it sometimes seems that people go to the theater to display wealth, while in St. Petersburg, they go to nourish and remedy their soul. Television culture hasn’t quite stuck yet. Plus the tickets are cheap.

We also have friends there. I met Katya, Sara's good friend from college, and her mother, who were really great, had dinner with Barnaby, the British editor of the St. Petersburg Times, and his Russian wife Anya, who is a pianist, and I got to see all the places where Sara had lived and worked and spent so much time when she lived there in college.

back to top

• home