notes on russia

Notes on Russia

The massive bronze statue of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, dominated the square on Nevsky Prospekt in the center of St. Petersburg. All I could remember about her was the high school playground rumor that she died making love to a horse. As horse-crazy teenage girls, we knew a thing or two about horses and this was hard to visualize. Surely she was one of the most powerful women in the world, and two centuries after her death, her story was reduced to that crazy myth about her voracious sexuality. Catherine never tried to hide her several significant lovers. On the other end of the spectrum, the Virgin Queen defined Elizabeth I.
I’d found a precious empty space on a park bench in the shade and pulled out my guidebook. I knew so little about Russia and was annoyed with myself for not reading much before I arrived. I was traveling with my friend Susan and had let her make most of the arrangements. She’d come to visit while I was living in Sweden, so I’d planned our adventures in Stockholm, Uppsala, and Helsinki, leaving Saint Petersburg to her. The huge attraction for anyone in our profession of art history is the State Hermitage Museum, known for its enormous collection of over three million works of art. Difficult to visit until the thaw in East-West relations in the 1990s, its well-known but mostly unseen masterpieces in the Winter Palace had the additional appeal of formerly forbidden fruit not exactly on the usual museum circuit.
And yet, I had fled after an hour in the galleries, eager to get out in the June sunshine and look around the city.

The Repin
The old-fashioned compartment on the Russian train Repin was hot and stuffy. The walls were plastic paneling and the seats were upholstered with a worn brown fabric with dark green swirls in the ugliest, most unnatural configuration possible. Outside the sliding door to the compartment, militaristic versions of folk music were playing at an uncomfortably high volume in the corridor. Shortly after the train pulled out of Helsinki, a porter came around, offering a stick of something resembling salami, a packet of crackers, and a watery beer, apparently part of the service. At Vyborg, the border crossing into Russia, three police in elaborate military uniforms took away our passports for about a half hour, making sure our visas were in order. Then two presumably Russian businessmen entered the compartment without a word or a nod to us or each other.
When we rolled into the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg at almost 11 p.m, the “White Nights” sky of early June was still partially light. Guidebooks had warned that taxi drivers lurk to take advantage of arriving tourists. Taxis have no meters and no fixed prices, so you must always bargain hard for a price in advance, and several drivers may be competing for your business. Some may be regular taxi drivers, but many are ordinary car owners making a little extra money. This sounded dicey, especially as darkness was coming on.
As we rolled our bags off the train, a tall man with a baby strapped to his back asked in almost perfect American English, “Do you know what you’re doing?”
We didn’t, in spite of the fact that we were both experienced travelers.
He asked where we were staying and then gestured to his wife and a small child. “Come with us, we’ll share a taxi. We can be dropped off first, then he’ll take you to your hotels. Our apartment is on the way.”
He was Finnish; his wife Russian. He’d worked for a while in L.A. She went outside the station and several cars immediately pulled up, but we were four adults, a small child, a baby, and plenty of luggage, so she waved them away, waiting until a battered Lada station wagon with a roof rack appeared. Somehow, we all squeezed in. The price would be about twelve dollars. We were very grateful and offered to pay it all at the end.
“No tip, remember,” our hero said. “He’ll ask for one, but don’t give him a thing extra. Three hundred roubles is already more than enough.”

The Corinthia Nevsky Palace and the Oktiabryskaya
Susan’s colleagues in the museum world had highly recommended a five-star hotel: the Corinthia Nevsky Palace, suitable for a self-described Jewish princess. She had found a decent price on line and booked a nonrefundable reservation for five nights. When the total bill appeared on her credit card, it had escalated wildly with the addition of service fees, taxes, and extra White Nights occupancy charges. I was retired a retired cheapskate, and the pretensions of fancy hotels turn me off. With the help of a bemused Swedish travel agent, who questioned why I wanted to go to Russia, I’d found a more reasonably priced hotel nearby, the three-star Oktiabryskaya. It was a few long blocks away from the Corinthia, near a large busy square where several big streets converged. The driver took us first to my hotel, and Susan insisted that she would walk from there; she wanted to stretch her legs; it wasn’t very far. She set off and walked a long way before she realized she might be on the wrong street. We had both learned the Cyrillic alphabet for this trip, and when she finally came upon a street sign legible in the dim light, she knew she was lost. Someone pointed her back towards Nevsky Prospekt (перевода. Перспектива).
My room at the large Soviet-era Oktiabryskaya was large, clean, old-fashioned in decor, and perfectly acceptable, though swarms of mosquitoes came through the thin curtains when I opened the window. Ladies of the night sat quietly in several small armchairs near the elevators. The buffet breakfast consisted of strange unidentified hot and cold foods. Ahead of me were a group of French ladies who laughed at the offering, repeating to each other “Mais, qu’esque c’est?”
Susan’s sixth-floor room at the Corinthia was smaller, attractively decorated in international upscale hotel style, and with a view over the six lanes of traffic on Nevsky Prospekt including a view of the broken timbers of the roof of a rundown building opposite. Night and day, two inscrutable beefy security guards sat outside one particular door on her floor. The buffet was excellent by any standard, and Susan invited me to be her guest. They never asked for her room number, and she didn’t feel guilty, given what she was paying.

At the State Hermitage Museum: a private tour
Mr XX met us at the staff entrance of the vast museum, which sprawls over six buildings. The curator of modern art was polite, but not overly effusive. Susan had met him when editing a catalogue of paintings loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago. He headed immediately to the modern art galleries. We walked fast up the enormous white marble staircase, under gilded and painted ceilings and enormous crystal chandeliers, past huge malachite and lapis lazuli basins, vast mirrored chambers and others hung with tapestries, until we finally reached the top floor. Here in plain, white-walled galleries were the famous Matisses, Gauguins, and Picassos and a very important large painting by Degas that was looted from Germany during World War II. It was a hot, sunny day and the windows stood open; no fancy climate control for these masterpieces.
The curator and Susan chatted, exchanging museum gossip; I looked at the famous paintings seen in every art history textbook. After teaching art history for seven years, and working as an editor at the Detroit Institute of Arts for twenty years, my enthusiasm for great masterworks had worn down. I knew that these artists had changed the direction of Western art; Matisse’s Red Room was a favorite of students. Certainly I would enjoy any one of the paintings at home if offered the chance, but, as one of my friends says, are they so important? They are just paint on canvas. Mr. XX told a few stories about the visionary Russian collectors who had purchased these great works from the young artists in Paris. He mentioned that he hadn’t been allowed out of Russia until the late 1990s. These were the only original French works that he’d seen first-hand until that time, although that was his specialty.
After a half hour, he was gone, pleading an important meeting. Susan was a little miffed; she and her colleagues had gone out of their way to be hospitable in Chicago, wining and dining their impoverished Russian colleague.
“He knows I’ll retire soon; I’m no longer of use to him,” she said, and headed for the dozens of Rembrandts.
I looked out at the sun warming up the day and decided to take a walk. We’d bought three-day passes to the Hermitage; there would be plenty of time. I wanted to get my bearings in the city.

By the Sea: Primorskaya
The warm hospitality we were shown one evening more than compensated. Again through her museum connections, Susan had met a Russian couple who had invited us to dinner at their apartment. Mikhail Karrasik was an artist, a printmaker, and also a dealer in fine antiquarian illustrated books. We took a packed subway to the end of its line, where his partner met us. Marina was slim, pleasant looking, slightly intellectual, wearing fashionable glasses. She hailed one of the little battered yellow minibuses that run fixed routes all over the city, and we rode about five minutes to an enormous complex of tall Soviet-era apartment blocks.
Next to the pot-holed street, dirt paths were worn through a field with scrub trees here and there; between the buildings weeds grew up in a sandbox and vines covered a metal climbing structure. Litter was everywhere: all sorts of trash and rubble, the skeletons of discarded strollers and umbrellas, plastic bags and bottles. This was a warm summer evening and quite a few people were walking here and there, but there was no sense of pleasure in the scene. If all this looked grim in June, how would it look in January?
And then I was surprised to see the sun gleaming on an expanse of open sea. This was prime real estate. But apparently there was no access to the water, not even a sidewalk or path that ran along the sea wall made of chunks of concrete.
“I am sorry for you to see the condition of our building,” Marina said.
The door was a windowless, rusted slab of steel with graffiti all over it, requiring two keys to open. We stepped into a dark, dank concrete entrance hall. On one wall was an array of narrow metal mailboxes, some filled with dirt and trash, others bashed in and all hanging at crazy angles.
Marina called her husband to say that we were getting on the elevator. Often, she explained, it breaks down, so if she doesn’t arrive soon, he will know to try to fix it. The elevator’s interior walls were of plywood, showing extensive burn marks, gouges, graffiti. The numbers on buttons indicating the floors were punched in or defaced beyond recognition. All that was missing were bullet holes.
“I apologize,” Marina said. “This is very embarrassing. But there is no point to clean things up; they just get destroyed again. People do not yet understand private property.”
Out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, down a grim corridor lit only by a tiny bulb, and Marina again used two keys to unlock another formidable steel door.
And we walked into a bright, sunny, clean, high ceilinged artist’s studio, with framed prints on the walls, large work tables, and a lithography press. A loft held shelves crammed with books, and there was modern furniture; all was as sophisticated as any loft in New York or Paris. A gaunt, dark man in his sixties rose to greet us warmly, kissing Susan on both cheeks, and shaking my hand.
Mikael explained that this ‘70s apartment building was designed by the government with studios for artists on the corners of some of the floors. A member of the artist’s union, he had waited on a list for years to be granted this. The tall windows let in plenty of light and there was a small balcony that looked west out to the sea. From there you could see what a wreck the entire waterfront was, with rotting wooden jetties and the shells of abandoned warehouses and the rusting hulls of ships, with waves full of flotsam and jetsam breaking over every kind of junk.
Marina opened a bottle of Prosecco and put out some peanuts and we settled down on a comfortable leather sofa. Most of the conversation went on between Mikael and Susan. I sat in stunned silence, trying to make sense of it all. We’d moved so quickly from one world to another.
Marina spread a stylish tablecloth on the worktable next to the lithography press. The modern porcelain was plain white; the cutlery from famous German manufacturer. A puree of asparagus soup, garnished with small shrimp; then a slab of salmon and a salad; a pretty little fruit tart for dessert. We’d brought two bottles of wine, a California red and an Austrian white, bought duty-free on the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. Susan doesn’t drink much, so the three of us had plenty of wine.
After dinner Mikael brought out some of his most precious Russian illustrated books to show Susan, who collects such things, though principally Western European and American ones.
Marina hovered about, occasionally mentioning a price, and Susan was very polite but not interested.
When it was time to leave, Marina accompanied us. Again, she called Mikael on her cell phone to let him know we’d made it down. I asked to buy a bottle of water if there was a shop open anywhere nearby. She’d warned us not to even brush our teeth with tap water.
There was a small structure on the sidewalk that looked like a construction children had made out of a large cardboard box covered with advertising signs. It had only a small opening at eye level. Marina said something to the person invisible within, offered a few rubles, and a bottle of water was handed out. She said a few words to the minibus driver and gave us a handful of subway tokens, and we were off to the Metro.