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Giving talks in seven cities in seven days this week, I’ve met countless travelers with fun stories to tell. At a Chicago bookstore, I was ambushed by a man who asked me, “So which is considered the better ballet company — the Kirov or the Bolshoi?”
I vaguely remembered that, while Moscow’s Bolshoi was most famous, many contend that the St. Petersburg-based Kirov is better. The man pressed me for as assessment of the Kirov Ballet. I was starting to wonder what was with him.
Then he asked me, “Good as the Kirov is, is it still enjoyable when sitting behind a big pillar?” Then I put it together and laughed. The only person who would know that is Kurt — the guy I palled around with on my Russia trip back in 1993. We bought tickets from a scalper on the street, which got us seats behind a pillar in the nosebleed section of the St. Petersburg concert hall. Even with a seriously obstructed view, we were blown away by the Kirov Ballet.
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Kurt and I chatted, dredging up fun memories of traveling through Russia in those fitful years just after the break-up of the USSR. At the ballet, the big, heavy, red curtains still had their faint hammer-and-sickle embroidery. I remember thinking that while the communists were out of power, the entire society seemed to be keeping its hammers and sickles handy, as if communism might just rekindle.
We met at the St. Petersburg youth hostel which was (and is) run by a great guy, American expat Steve Carron. Back then, Steve was paying bribes to be left alone by the mafia and doing his banking an overnight train ride away in Tallinn (Estonia).
In 1993, expats in Russia were more into the Internet than we in the West were because, given the lousy communication infrastructure in Russia, it was the best way to keep in touch. The book I was working on that year (covering Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the three Baltic capitals) was the first manuscript I ever emailed home.
The St. Petersburg hostel was a refuge for Western travelers — a humble “Green Zone” where we could meet, eat food that was both affordable and palatable, and be unthreatened by thugs and thieves that seemed to be everywhere.
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Kurt was like a mountain man, vagabonding around the world for six months — really tough and really hairy. He had just rendezvoused with his power-dressing girlfriend who flew, it seemed, right out of a corporate board meeting in Chicago to join up with him. It was like Green Acres, Russki-style.
Together we took the night train to Moscow — booking four berths for the three of us to have the compartment all to ourselves. The buzz was that train personnel were working with thieves to gas travelers and then steal them blind while they slept — taking even the rings off their fingers.
On the train, we nervously jammed the door latch with a film canister, put a towel along the bottom of the door, left the window open for ventilation, and even put out a photo I took at a St. Petersburg amusement-park fun booth that made me look grotesquely muscular.
A conductor knocked on the door. We let him poke his head in, and he lifted up the lower bunk revealing a tin box the size of a small coffin under the mattress. He said, “You must put all of your valuables in this box for safety. And then you must sleep on it. All of your valuables.” When he was gone, we all thought, “Yeah, right…we’ll wake up with nothing.” And we searched for a hidden door in the tin coffin.
Apparently the thieves picked on some other tourists that night, and we made it safely to Moscow…just in time to see flames coming from the windows of the Russian parliament building. Communist hardliners where holed up in there, in a thrilling standoff with Boris Yeltsin and the Russian army.
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Pathetic and impoverished senior citizens were demonstrating against democracy and free enterprise, knowing that they would be the ones who suffered most in the transition period. (As it turned out, they — later nicknamed “the Lost Generation” — were right.) When people ask me about the scariest situation I’ve ever been in, I think of the taxi ride out to the Moscow airport. A no-neck guy who looked like a classic Russian mafia thug picked me up in a beat-up old car, and we drove down puddle-filled alleys for an hour past derelict apartments buildings…and all I could think about was movie scenes where the good guy is taken down to the river bank in the tough side of town to be shot.
This guy knew I had a passport, lots of money, and credit cards. And he knew I was completely alone. No one knew me, where I was, or where I was going. It would have been easy for him to just finish me off.
My imagination went wild. I even thought that if I were in his shoes, I’d be seriously considering doing the dirty deed. It would be so easy.
Then the no-neck finally pulled up to the airport, shook my hand, and said, “Have a good fly.”
