Dear fellow human beings,
I intend to write to you about the first ten days of my summer trip through Russia and Europe, but I am in a bit of a bind, as I am snowed in with all sorts of other work, and, since I never ended up updating my travel blog last summer, I am going to spend much of the coming week putting up photos and old emails rather than posting new material. The long and the short of this might be more of a gain for you than a loss: rather than writing blow-by-blow descriptions of each day of my trip, I will limit myself to general impressions from each leg of it.
My main impressions of Saint Petersburg, since I spent most of my time in nearby historic towns (Gatchina, Pavlovsk, and Pushkin), was that palace grounds look pretty much the same the whole world round. They vary in style a little bit, but the basic principle is the same: those in power have lots of money, giant palaces, and huge swaths of woods for hunting and taking promenades, while the disenfranchised live in wooden huts without, alas, forests for hunting and promenades. Whole teams of museum curators and art specialists have done an admirable job of restoring the palaces in the aforementioned towns, all of which were razed to the ground in World War II. Saint Petersburg itself was largely trashed during the war. Perhaps my main lasting impression of it is that I would like to one day return to see the Menshikov Palace in town and Mr. Menshikov's, the first-ever city mayor's (if my memory holds), summer home in Lomonosov. Every time I go to Saint Petersburg and think that I have seen it all, I discover something further worth visiting. This, in itself, is worth something.
My escape from Saint Petersburg was exciting, in part because it involved travelling a long distance, and in part because it involved leaving Russia. I opted to take a bus from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki (for 1000 roubles, or $20) and a ferry to Tallinn, partly to save money, and partly to be able to say that I had seen Helsinki. I saw, reading over someone's shoulder while lining up to use the bathroom partway there, that the British voting public had elected to secede from the European Union, which disappointed me. Most of the views that I caught of Finland itself, once we entered it (not without my being questioned at the border, but not for long; the Russians were happy to let me go), were of evergreens. I fell asleep over my book and kept rereading the same one or two sentences until we were pretty much there.
When we reached the ferry terminal, the driver cordially shook my hand, and I was informed, when I had walked inside, by someone who spoke nearly fluent English that I needed to get to another terminal, across the harbour; he gave me a map and wished me a good day. On the way there, I was struck by all of the qualities that I had missed while in Russia: law and order, cleanliness, and basic human decency. The streets and sidewalks were even, people did not drive like kamikaze pilots, and pedestrians shared the sidewalk instead of trying to shove one another off of it. There were lots of European-looking buildings, trees, and statues; since Helsinki mostly started to develop in the 19th century, most of its fancier buildings were, if I have my architecture right, neoclassical. When I got lost, someone whipped out his phone and gave me further directions, even saying, "Thank you," when I bid him a good day, and, when I got lost a second time, a shipyard hand directed me the right way around the harbour and even produced a tourist map for me (this man was over fifty years old but still spoke serviceable English), after which someone out walking said that he had seen me going the wrong way and that I should take a shuttle bus back. The ferry terminal, once I got there, was clean and well-staffed, with free bathrooms and clear signage. The ferry ride itself was fine and gave me a good view, naturally, of the strait separating Finland from mainland Europe. (Note: this is, apparently, called the Gulf of Finland.)
Tallinn is a part of fairytale Europe. Large sections of its medieval wall, including guard towers, are intact; it is full of churches and 17th-century houses (none of which, regrettably, has been turned into a museum showing what a 17th-century house would look like on the inside); it is full of little parks and green spaces. I learned, during my visit to the open air museum at the edge of town, that Tallinn had good soil, was largely agrarian right up until the early 20th century, and was not particularly Christian until, if my memory holds, the early 18th century, when the Bible and related writings were finally translated into Estonian. Tallinn grew rich as a sea port, much like Riga, Stockholm, and Gdansk (though it did not, I do not think, have, unlike Gdansk, large stores of amber). The Soviets beat up on the Estonians and sent their intelligentsia to labour camps following the end of World War II. It was not heavily bombed during the war. Its people--mostly tourists, admittedly--seem generally happy, and it seems to be moving quickly away from its Soviet past. Buses have little screens on them, like Austrian trains, that show the next few stops in advance, and there are recycling bins, which people use, everywhere. There are lots of Russians still living in Tallinn, and they are easy to spot: they wear six-inch high heels, skin-tight dresses, and several layers of make-up or white tee-shirts and jeans, lean close together when talking, and complain constantly about the way in which other people treat them and the cost of groceries. The rest of the society seems to correct for them: even the dogs here, sociable and energetic, are different.
Riga is a much different pot of beans (I do not think that such an idiom exists, but I cannot remember its correct analogue. So be it.). (Edit: I meant "a whole different kettle of fish.") It was, like any self-respecting European city, reduced to rubble during World War II, and, since it fell behind the Iron Curtain, nobody did much to restore it until the 1990s. So many Latvians were deported and killed during the years of Soviet reign that the percentage of Latvians in the country fell to something like 52% before it regained its independence. As such, it suffered much more than Estonia and is still struggling to recover. While Riga's buses are almost as good as Tallinn's (minus the little TV screens showing which stops are coming up), and they are a huge step up from their Russian counterparts, in which the drivers are protected from passengers by closed-off booths that appear to have bullet-proof glass, the population seems somewhat more downtrodden, and it is hard to imagine that the country's national identity is quite as well-formed given how many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were sent here to work once the natives of the region had been killed off. One hears as much Russian spoken here as Latvian, and one can spot Russians from a ways off based on the sour disdain imprinted in their features, their tasteless dress, and, in the case of women of over 50 years of age, their dyed hair. Bus drivers here are plenty friendly, as in Tallinn. The employees of grocery stores do not seem to want to say a word.
While Tallinn was full of quaint museums about its city walls, its country's history, the art of the Russian icon, and so forth, Riga mostly seems to feature museums about World War II, the Holocaust, partisan movements to regain independence, and the public demonstrations that helped the country to finally do so in 1991. Here I encountered something that I had not come across during all of my time in Moscow: open discussion of the past. When I read, on one of the information plaques in a museum about the barricades set up in Riga in 1991, of the Soviet propaganda machine's having claimed that Europe was crumbling, everything in the West was terrible, and everyone in the Soviet Union was happy and productive, it occurred to me that Russia had not bothered to hire new copywriters since before the fall of the Soviet Union. Essentially everyone whom I met in Moscow claimed that the Soviet Union did more good than bad, that Russia helped its satellite states (or colonies, in simpler terms), that Ukraine's statehood was a fiction, and that the Soviet army had "won" World War II. When I mention Joseph Stalin's having killed some 20-30 million people, many Russians counter that he could not have acted otherwise, as there was a war, and that we in the West blow everything out of proportion. Based on my experience, they tend to pretend that none of the bad stuff in the Soviet Union happened and to eschew all dialogue about their collective past, as though by wishing it away, they can erase it.
Latvians are not like that (yes, I am generalising). They know that their country was conquered many times and that they have had to fight to get it back. They know that whole populations, such as that of the Jews, have been wiped out here, and, based on their museums, they are determined to remember the past and predicate their current identity on it. A museum employee here told me an interesting story: he met a young woman from Belarus who had bought the party line about the Soviet Union's having freed and supported the pre-Baltic countries (and Eastern Europe in general) until she visited Poland, Lithuania, Riga, and Estonia. If the people of every one of those countries claimed that the Soviet Union had ravaged their lands, stolen their farms and grain, and deported, jailed, tortured, and killed their citizens, and only one country, that of her home, claimed the opposite, how was she to believe the one country? Many Russians visit, when they travel, isolated resort towns in, say, Bulgaria or Turkey, where they interact with other Russian holidaymakers intent on carousing and overeating, and, while there are now increasingly more young people visiting other countries independently and encountering new ideas, they are still relatively few in number—in part, admittedly, because of Russia’s geographic and political isolation, but in part, too, because of a lack of willingness, I should think, to view history and culture from another point of view.
Riga has just the kind of old house that I complained of Tallinn’s lacking, and visiting it is, like everything else here, dirt cheap. In fact, it has both a merchant’s house and an old house from the Jewish ghetto, which sucked almost as much as the ghettos in Vilnius, Lodz, and Warsaw. The architecture here was, before the war, much like that of Lubeck (with a double-dot above the 'u') and Konigsburg (also double-dotted), naturally, as they were, for a time, all part of the same kingdom, though the few old buildings that have remained here reminded me more of Baden-Wurtemberg's architecture, oddly, than of that of northern Germany. Something like two million Latvians formed a human chain from Riga to Vilnius (an unbroken human chain) in 1991 to protest communism (Like the Hungarian and Czech revolutions, this was never discussed, in my presence, while I was in Russia). Food here is so cheap that I bought a week's worth out of over-excitement and have been furiously eating it since then. Perhaps my most interesting excursion, to more or less finish off my notes, has been to Riga's open air museum, where I found so many wild strawberries and blueberries that I could have spent my whole time there collecting them. The woods there smell of pine, which made me realise, once I had again encountered it, how miserable one's life is in its absence, and the birdsong is fabulous. The mosquitoes of the pre-Baltic are industrial-sized and leave welts almost as big as those of horse flies. The other wildlife here has so far proven banal.
My final note, besides that I will be stuck overnight in the Warsaw airport due to an arbitrary change in my flight times, is that I met a great many interesting people in Tallinn. One of them posited that one meets more independent, experienced travellers in Tallinn than in more popular places like Rome or Paris, while my tour guide through Tallinn's Patarei prison claimed that part of the reason for the insurgency of ethnically Russian people living in the east of Ukraine is that the closer peasants were to Moscow during Ukrainian's famine, the more of them died. I met someone who said that the world was chock full of problems but that we could make it better by focusing on our own little corner of it, while another traveller said that we needed to fight for some right related to the privacy of our data and that a major reason for the migration of so many Muslims to Europe today is that the West gave the developing world the medical revolution with no industrial revolution: give people the tools to make their population skyrocket without giving them the tools to develop an economy, and you end up with an overcrowded country bereft of skilled workers, a service sector, any sort of industry or manufacturing, and the potential for self-governance. This young man claimed that we would do better to give Syria roads, factories, and basic job training than to let the Syrians abandon their country, as those coming into Europe have, on the whole, no useful job skills anyway, and they will continue to leave until their own country is fixed. I read a fascinating article in the Atlantic several months ago about the problem of giving aid to so-called third-world countries; the issue is much more complex than any single fix could address.
That more or less sums up my thoughts for now. I expect to be write at the end of my trips to Budapest, Prague, Gottingen (with a double-dot), Leiden, and London, and I hope to have loaded enough photos onto my blog over the coming week to have finished posting musings about Russia by around mid-July and to have finished posting photos from the current trip by the time I finish it. I am overloaded with work and overanxious, and I am put out at LOT Polish Air's having decided to push my flight to Budapest back a day, just as some other European company pushed my flight to Paris forward a day last year. I think a lot about future travels and, to a lesser degree, the mistakes of my past that I would like to be able to correct. I think a lot in general and am sure not to be able to record all of my thoughts in this chronicle, but I hope to at least get the majority of them.
Have a good summer! Enjoy life wherever you are. I made a note to myself querying whether Russians' apparent unwillingness to discuss the past is due to collective guilt or straight ignorance. It is probably unfair to stick them all in the same bucket (again, I have got my idioms confused). Perhaps travelling should encourage one to judge less and to observe more. It should also encourage brevity, which remains, alas, a quality elusive to my writing.
Sincerely,
Max
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