{"id":1003,"date":"2020-04-14T18:09:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T17:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2020-04-07T00:17:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-06T23:17:34","slug":"slavfile-lite-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/slavfile-lite-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging into the SlavFile Lite Archives (Part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SlavFile<\/p>\n

This is the third in a series of posts reprinting Lydia Razran Stone\u2019s editorial columns from past years. You can find the first two posts here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fall 2007<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

We have recently returned from a trip to St. Petersburg, Moscow and points in between on the inland waterway and I seem to be suffering from a case of severe, if intermittent, culture shock. It is not the differences between today\u2019s Russia and the United States that have me reaching for my inhaler, but the sharp contrast between the Russia of today and what I experienced during the other two periods I spent in that country\u2014the early to mid-1960\u2019s (several trips with my father who was investigating Soviet psychophysiology) and the early to mid-1990s (several trips to work in Moscow on a joint book sponsored by NASA). Of course, I know that my first-hand acquaintance with my family\u2019s erstwhile homeland and thus my impressions have been laughably short-lived and superficial. Perhaps on each visit I have managed to see through only a very few chinks in the Potemkin fa\u00e7ade presented to foreigners. I am also painfully aware that many, if not most, of my readers have a vastly more extensive and profound knowledge of the changes in Russia over this period. Nevertheless, with your indulgence, I will attempt to share some of my impressions here. Who knows? Every once in a while, the view through a chink may provide a new perspective.<\/p>\n

The Moscow relative of a friend of mine visited New York and Washington about a decade ago and reported that one of the things that most struck her here were the ubiquitous delicious odors of cooking in urban streets. This does not seem to be true of the Russian capitals\u2014perhaps, surprisingly, this is one advertising secret the new Russians have not yet learned. Or perhaps the smell of food is simply overpowered, especially in Moscow, by the smell of money, bargeloads of new, fresh (if not necessarily clean) money. Everything in the center of the city is well-tended (when I was last there in 1996, the grass around the Kremlin appeared not to have been mowed in at least a year). The stores (if that is not too plebeian a name for them) on central city streets are at least as forbiddingly pricey and elegant as those of any city I am familiar with. Our old friend GUM looks now like Georgetown Park (the most upscale of upscale malls in DC), filled with stores that are so elegant that they have only one item in the window, and only a couple more in the shop, and a like number of customers if that. Indeed, a Russian-born friend suggests that GUM may primarily be a money laundering operation. (Why carry more than three pairs of shoes, when what you are doing is selling the same $600 pair over and over?)<\/p>\n

The new houses we saw built and being built in the dacha region on the banks of the waterway we traveled are not the picturesque cottages the word evokes but McDachas\u2014\u043a\u043e\u0442\u0442\u0435\u0434\u0436\u0438, whose opulence overshadows vacation homes in Palm Springs, to pick a U.S. example. The boats and recreational water sports equipment to be seen are worthy of Nantucket. It can still be reported that in the cities (especially the far outskirts of the capitals and smaller cities such as Yaroslavl) there are still Soviet-style exurban apartment complexes, crumbling masonry, balconies that look like they are in imminent danger of falling, and apartment houses where \u201cnormal people\u201d live that have front entrances resembling the back doors of slum dwellings. On the other hand, upscale, modern and Western new construction and reconstruction is everywhere\u2014stretching far, far beyond the tourist-oriented center of the cities. In the capitals at least, infrastructure, especially main roads, seems also to have been given at least a fraction of the attention it much needed the last time I visited here. The most striking infrastructure innovation we noted was a double-, or maybe even triple- or quadruple-, length toilet bus, parked outside the Hermitage and judging by appearances hooked up to the local sewer system.<\/p>\n

At the risk of sounding downright un-American\u2014and even though in general people seemed more cheerful than I had ever seen them in these climes and I saw many fewer signs of real poverty\u2014I must admit that the sight of all this money being poured into the capitals made me uneasy. Where is it all coming from? Yes, I do know about petrorubles, but is that really all? We have learned that the Communists beggared the rest of the country for their own personal benefits and that of the capitals. But the benefits accruing to the capitals and the public and personal lives of at least some of their inhabitants is so much more startling now! Is the rest of the country becoming commensurately more impoverished? The only non-capital city not depen\u00addent on the tourist trade that we visited was Yaroslavl and, while it was in no way as opulent as Moscow or Petersburg, it seemed to me considerably more prosperous than the Moscow of 1996.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, if someone had asked Marie Antoinette how to make a city look more beautiful and prosperous, she would have replied, \u201cGet rid of all the ugly and poor people.\u201d One can ask not only what has been added to the capitals to change them so much, but also what has been taken away. Here is a list of things I saw less of than I had before or would have expected.<\/p>\n