Pulling Back The Curtain With The Cold War Just A Memory, Russia Is Welcoming Tourists — And The Dollars They Leave Behind

I wanted to pay my respects to John Reed.

Reed wrote “Ten Days That Shook the World,” the great history of the Russian revolution, one of the first books that interested me in writing and reporting. He’s the only American buried in the Kremlin, and was the focus of the quite good Warren Beatty movie “Reds.”

But the dozens of headstones behind Lenin’s Tomb are all in Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and I wasn’t sure of Reed’s dates. There were a couple of soldiers 20 feet away, not in the rigid formation of the Soviet years, but just some young men in uniform chatting. I walked over.

“John Reed?” I asked. One of the soldiers pointed to the general area.

I commenced looking, but Reed’s grave could have been any one of six or eight. I was clearly lost. The soldier broke away from his friend, walked over, took me gently by the arm and walked me over to a grave.

“John Reed,” he said.

“Sposeyba,” I said. Thank you.

Much has changed in Russia in the last decade, some of it visible to the naked eye. Friendly soldiers, for one thing. For another, the amazing reappearance of the intimate, stunningly beautiful Church of Our Lady of Kazan. Torn down 60 years ago so the tanks could roll into Red Square for the May Day celebration, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov recently rebuilt it on its original site. Here, with a six-person choir softly singing Russian Orthodox hymns, old women with rapturous faces light candles and pray to a God that was forbidden for 70 years.

Then there is the old GUM department store on Red Square, now the equivalent of the Gardens Mall, or Bal Harbour — a series of pricey, upscale designer shops: Lancome, Estee Lauder, you name it.

The merchandise tends to be priced 10 to 15 percent higher than in America, but that’s understandable. Besides, the customers aren’t complaining, for it’s Shopping Central for the New Russians 20-and 30-something trophy wives with cell phones and expensive baby carriages.

But other things remain the same. Magnificent, ornate 16th century St. Basil’s cathedral remains untouched, its vast, gorgeous Byzantine exterior oddly unrelated to its small, crowded series of interior rooms.

And across the Square, the body of Lenin is still on view, although nobody expects that to be the case for much longer. (To answer the obvious question: He looks pretty good, considering, but his shriveled hands betray both the corpse’s age and the probability that it’s really Lenin and not a wax figure.)

Under communism, there was always a line of hundreds of people waiting to get into Lenin’s Tomb, but no more. The tomb is only open a couple of days a week, for a few hours a day. No waiting.

It’s probably good that way, because standing in line in Russia is very different from standing in line in America, with an element of pushing and shoving that would be impossible here - here, that guy you’re jostling might be packing.

But in Russia, only the Mafia and the police carry guns, so it’s every man for himself, one more product of hundreds of years of bread-line conditioning.

And yet, it doesn’t really matter, for the ultimate glory of Russia is its people - funny, passionate, endearing, wise.

For most Americans raised on the pervasive Cold War paranoia, this is a surprise. So is the beauty of Russian women. The streets of the cities are full of stunning girls of 18, but very few stunning women of 40.

“They marry early,” explains an American friend on a fellowship in Moscow. “Then they turn out four or five children before they’re 30, then they stop, because it’s considered unhealthy to have children after 30. And because many of the women have to work and support the family single-handedly, they let themselves go; they give up.”

But when things go beyond the personal to the social, there is a perceptible stolidity in the Russian spirit.

As my American friend puts it, “If a Russian comes across an obstacle, he will go around it, or over it, or sleep at its base. But it will never occur to him to remove it.”

Nobody in Russia goes by the book, because there is no book. During two weeks in Russia, I came to experience the place as, in every sense, another country. Not in a threatening, chaotic way, but rather in a transitional sense - away from the totalitarian conventions of the past, well on its way toward … something else, something even the Russians can’t quite define, because they don’t really know.

The difference between our two cultures can be gauged by one anecdote: In Russia, it is considered unhealthy for a woman to sit on the ground. Russians think her ovaries will freeze and she won’t ever be able to bear children - the primary female function. A friend was doing just that, when she was told to stand up by a Russian woman, who immediately slid some newspaper beneath her so her ovaries could remain healthy.

A sense of the frayed nature of the Russian state can be gauged by two simple statistics:

1. The average income is about $7,500 a year.

2. Life expectancy for Russian men is 58.

Americans in Russia on business or who are working for the government, consider it a given that their health insurance cover airlifts to London or Helsinki in case of serious illness. As one diplomat told us, “Russian health care is fine as long as you don’t get sick.”

A Rhodes scholar from Youngstown, Ohio, living in St. Petersburg is passionate about this new, emerging country, and he eagerly expounded on his feelings.

“Most Russians want to be more like Americans, but we’ve gotten so anal-retentive; we have so much we’re afraid someone will take it away. Yet Russians don’t have anything and will give you the little they do have.”

Another American, a journalist who’s been in Moscow for several years, says, “I don’t miss the constant heroin rush of the media. I don’t miss the constant rush for the hot thing right now. I don’t miss the constant emphasis on money. But I do miss cleanliness, nice bathrooms, and the confidence that things will work.”

We visited three cities - Moscow, Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg.

Moscow, of course, is a vast city, rich in history, art and architecture, one of those cities that no single lifetime can encompass.

It betrays the ragged feeling that dogs so much of Russia: Incredible traffic congestion and crumbling public buildings. During visits to several prestigious colleges and schools, the rough equivalent of UCLA and USC, roofs leaked, wiring hung down from ceilings, and the general physical environment was that of an impoverished American inner city high school.

Contrasting that were the students - bright, intellectual, culturally sophisticated, far more artistic than their counterparts in America, proud of being Russian but fascinated by America, and very, very sensitive to their image.

“First we were the evil empire,” said one student, “now we are a nation of bandits.”

Moscow is the place where the divisions between old and new Russia are most obvious. In a classroom at the Moscow Film School, the conversation turned from movies to politics. A teacher in his early 40s volunteered that he preferred life under Communist rule to the free-market economy that has left so much of the population struggling for purchase.

“Before, you knew what you were supposed to do,” he said. “Everything was clear. Now, we don’t know, and there are so many choices. We have to choose everything we do. Too many choices.”

The students reacted scornfully, forcefully asserting that, for all the problems of the present, they could never countenance a return to the past. They were speaking to me - to have addressed him directly would have been rude, not to mention impolitic, and Russians are quite polite, verbally - but their real target was clear.

Yekaterinburg is the hometown of Boris Yeltsin, a thriving mining city of almost 2 million on the edge of the Ural mountains and home of more Constructivist architecture per block than you can find anywhere outside of Stalinist recruiting posters.

Yekaterinburg is best-known as the place where Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered. The house where the Romanovs were first interned, then killed, was torn down in the early ‘70s, but the site is now marked by a makeshift, rather plaintive chapel; the town is trying to get the money to build a church on the site.

That Yekaterinburg could have been the final resting spot for the Romanovs - their bones still reside in the local police station, though they’re likely to be moved to St. Petersburg this summer - is ironic; imperial splendor lost amidst blue-collar reality.

Yet, beneath the unprepossessing architecture, beats the firm heartbeat of a passionately cultural people. My wife and I went to the opening night of the Yekaterinburg opera - Tschaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin, just one of the dozen or so shows that the city supports for a full eight-month season. The opera house dates from a few years before the Revolution; gorgeous Imperial splendor in cream and gold.

The theater was full, not with society swells, but with ordinary people, and especially with children of varying ages. They weren’t there to blow spitballs and be bored, but to partake of a central part of national folklore. Six-year-olds sat fascinated at the story of the arrogant fool Onegin, who brings disaster and desolation to himself and everyone else.

Tickets cost $4. Since subsidies are a thing of the past, much of the work that supports the opera is bartered - costumes are sewn by locals, the musicians have day jobs of one kind or another.

Knowing all this, I was prepared to make allowances, but none were necessary. If not on the level of the Met, it was as good as anything to be found in regional U.S. opera companies. The orchestra was splendid, the sets were beautiful, and the chorus scenes were populated by upwards of 80 people.

Moscow is overwhelming, Yekaterinburg is surprising, but St. Petersburg is simply stunning. If Moscow is New York or Chicago, then St. Petersburg is San Francisco: the most European city in a very non-European country.

It’s a splendid Imperial city with a plethora of airy art-nouveau accents. Unlike Moscow, a city nearly as old as Rome, St. Petersburg, the private passion of Peter the Great, is younger than Boston.

St. Petersburg has wide, Parisian-style boulevards, and it’s suffused with trees and culture - 200 museums, with The Hermitage taking pride of place amongst them all.

The Hermitage is a beautiful museum that happens to be housed in a stunning series of interlocking palaces, with an art collection superior to the Louvre, if not the Musee D’Orsay. It trumps the Louvre, however, by being a work of architectural art in its own right.

Here is the staircase the revolutionaries charged up at the beginning of the 10 days that truly shook the world; here is the room where the hapless democrat Alexander Kerensky and his cabinet were sitting as his interim government collapsed, the clock still set to the time of his arrest; here a room made entirely of the gorgeous green of malachite; here a ballroom that for size and splendor dwarfs anything in War and Peace.

St. Petersburg is an immensely cosmopolitan place, with gay bars and Irish pubs. For the growing expatriate and business community, a planned development has just opened 7 miles from downtown that looks like any one of hundreds of planned Florida developments. “Full Western Management” proclaim the blurbs as a primary selling point.

St. Petersburg - Leningrad at the time - was decimated during World War II, with nearly a third of the buildings destroyed and a million people dead from starvation. In an unusually sensible decision, the Communists rebuilt the city as it had been, and avoided the monolithic architecture that was de rigeur at the time - interiors of dark stone and ugly linoleum that are the norm in other parts of the country. The city remains the crown jewel of its country.

We made friends with Tatyna, a vivacious St. Petersburg woman of middle years. She speaks indirectly of the wrenching sense of dislocation that afflicts most Russians, especially in her native city.

First it was St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, and now it’s St. Petersburg again. Once they were Communists, with all the certainty that brought with it, and now they are adrift in an open market, with free elections and myriad choices. It all happened so suddenly.

“Our history has been snatched away from our own people,” she says quietly, then talks of going to visit the mass graves from World War II, where members of her family died. It was a different city, in a different country, in a different world.

As she talks about it, she begins to cry - for her beloved dead, and, perhaps, for the Russia that was.

Map of area.