(The journal of a trip to Russia I made with my wife Judy Jensen and SF writer Paul Park in 1991. Originally published in SF EYE.) VOYAGE TO THE RED CONTINENT by Terry Bisson 9/6/91 Friday. I am writing this on the side of a white paper bag from a gift shop, since in the last minute rush I forgot to get a notebook and it is impossible to find one here at Kennedy Airport. Tomorrow in Moscow I will borrow a schoolboy's exam book, which will serve me for two weeks. The car service brought us out Eastern Parkway, through Crown Heights; with bored cops on every corner it looks almost like Tompkins Square. There are few signs of the rage that lit up the papers and darkened the spirit last week. Our driver is from Trinidad where, he assures us, "everyone is friendly." After a quick and efficient Finnair check-in we drink two whiskeys and watch Seles and Capriati in a wild grunting match. Then through security. Another world lies ahead. We are going to Russia to an international science fiction conference, or "con." Paul Park and myself are writers; my wife Judy Jensen, who works for an AIDS agency in New York, is always ready for a new adventure. Paul has seen most of India and the far East, and Judy much of southern Africa and Europe. I have seen little but the US and parts of Mexico. Paul was invited last summer by the VOLGACON organizers, Igor Tolokonnikov and Boris Zavgorodny, who liked his Sugar Rain; he suggested they invite me. The big stars, Bruce Sterling, Bill Gibson, Fred Pohl, Lucius Shepard, Locus publisher Charles Brown, Brian Aldiss, have cancelled. It looks like few US or western European writers will be there. We ourselves, frustrated communicating with the organizers and unable to get a visa, wired our regrets the morning of the coup. Two days later we were called from Volgograd by a "Masha" who spoke good English and said the coup was over and the leaders had been arrested. (We knew before Peter Jennings!) The visa problem would be solved by an official cable from the Volgograd City Council re-inviting us. To make a long story short ... Here we are on a Finnair DC-10, at 36,000 feet, and our nineteen year old daughter will start college (CUNY) without us. JJ is asleep. Paul and I are drinking the Pride of Lapland (lager) and watching "The Marrying Man." Finnair is lox and cheese and chocolate and all the beer you can drink. The DC-10 is my favorite plane since the DC-3. I figure they worked all the bugs out in the crashes. That big fat acre of wing is reassuring, as substantial as real estate in the sky. There are hints of the Northern lights in the distance. 9/7/91 Saturday. Ahead it is dawn and through a hole in the clouds I see rumpled brown mountains dusted with snow--this can only be the 6,000 foot spine of Norway. Finland an hour later is all lakes and trees, spotted with brown fields where grain (barley? oats?) has been threshed. Landing we see that the trees cover rough ground with winding eskers of white stone. The Helsinki airport is clean, efficient, modern, and small. Indianapolis. Even though it's morning old men are drinking beer. The stores are very expensive. Elegant sweaters, furs, and a few bearskins with "Do Not Touch!" signs. We do not touch! On the tarmac I see my first Russian planes--three engine Tupelovs, configured like L-1011s. We meet a few Americans including a tour guide from LA who is heading in with her boy friend to check out the post-coup atmosphere. Our flight to Moscow leaves at noon. The Bay of Finland is a symphony in blue and white, like a Finnair ad. It must look the same from below as above. I hope to see Leningrad but I am disappointed. Russia is under thickening clouds. Our Moscow landing approach carries us over chaotic acres of dachas, with tiny gardens and rich black soil. The terminal is modern but dingy and almost empty. I get my first experience of a Russian bathroom, which is filthy and will get filthier as we head deeper into the country. We worry about the four boxes of books we are carrying, new paperbacks donated by New York publishers to give away at Volgacon. Will they be taxed or barred? But we are waved through customs by bored young men in military uniforms. At the gate we meet our guide, holding up a sing: VOLGACON GUESTS. This is Alexei Byzoogley, a 30-something young Muscovite in a black leather jacket with one eye cast. Alexei, who speaks good if occasionally stammering English, helps us to a counter where we change a fifty dollars apiece ($100 for JJ and me) into roubles at 30 to the dollar. It is to be all the money we will need in Russia for two weeks. My first delight (as an ex-auto mechanic) is the parking lot where all the cars look familiar yet strange. Most are Ladas, a 70s Fiat design with rear wheel drive. We start our long drive through Moscow, which far from depressed or dark looks busy if shabby. Lots of people on the streets, even on Saturday; long lines at the few stores; smiles and laughter everywhere. How we have been influenced by our image of a "prison state"! Gradually I notice the differences, though: There are no bodegas, no bars, no fast food joints, few newstands. The center of Moscow looks like Madrid--19th century, gloomy. Very European. We speed through with barely a glimpse of Red Square and St Basil's. Alexei lives in one of the "satellite cities" that ring Moscow--huge, grim housing projects that hide (surprisingly) warrens of scruffy woods and little paths, vacant lots and unfinished buildings. His first floor one bedroom apartment is dingy and messy. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum, one tap in the tiny bath for both sink and tub. Coats and books are piled everywhere. A giant TV sits beside a new Japanese VCR. We begin formally with a brandy toast to "more contacts and the new freedom." Then JJ and I take a walk around the complex. We find a big store with few goods but blaring video games; in front, entrepeneurs at card tables sell Winstons and Belgian beer at 35 roubles a can. On the weedy paths between the buildings there are kids playing, old folks carrying bags of plums and tiny apples. Back at the apartment we find Alex's wife, Olga, a precise and beautiful woman with dark hair and round glasses, and their 6 year old son, Denys--who immediatly pops in a cartoon video. Olga works teaching English and is not much of a homemaker. She refuses to stand in lines for meat or sugar. But since every family with a child gets a chicken, she cooks Denys's for us. Alexei has our RR tickets and is accompanying us to Volgograd. We head for the station on the metro. The trains are clean and swift, better than New York--but what subway in the world isn't? The people "look like they've had a hard life" (JJ), especially the older women. The younger women are well dressed, poised and beautiful; the young men dress down in leather jackets, jeans, "Turbo New York Yacht Club" T shirts and the like. Mixed with them are the old ladies with babushkas and the old men in soup-stained suits with medals on the lapels. There are a few uniformed soldiers. At the train station all is darkness and chaos. Paul, JJ and I are told not to speak since we are traveling as Russians (that is, on roubles, not dollars). Everyone in the milling crowd carries taped boxes and many pull wheeled carts. The trains are old fashioned, dark green with gold and red trim. Ours pulls in right on time and we claim a sleeping compartment with two bunk beds, a small folding table, and a dirty window. It's cold. We're tired after a long day. A few shots of brandy, and we pull down the bunks and hit the sack, as the train pulls out--right on time. 9/8/91 Sunday. The view from the car (through dirty windows) is of broad flat fields under a gray sky. "Typical Russian autumn," says Alexei. Small towns, wooden houses with blue-painted window frames, flocks of geese everywhere. Plowed ground as black and rich-looking as Illinois prairie. There are no deer; even in the mountains in Russia we will see no deer. A small town railroad yard looks like a museum: old locomotives with pantaloon smokestacks and cowcatchers, alongside the green, gold and red art deco diesels (like the one I assume is pulling our train). The villages with their muddy streets remind me of my early childhood on the Green River in western Kentucky: a rural world that still lives in the heart of Russia. I listen to Merle Haggard on my Walkman and watching the cloud-lidded landscape roll by. There is a samovar on every car and we fix tea, crackers and apple butter from a supply of treats JJ packed. At noon (after 15 hours on the train) we go to the dining car for our first Russian restaurant meal, and learn why our host Alexei couldn't get excited about the idea. A surly waitress slaps down tinned meat, dry bread, rice and bony chicken. The whole thing is 30 roubles ($1.00) for four. Coffee? "Nyet" Beer? "Nyet." There's nothing to drink but warm sugar water or weak tea. At nine that night we roll into Volgograd and are met by the Masha who called us in New York. She takes us in a cab to the Tourist Hotel, where dinner has been kept for us in our rooms--sausage and bread and warm beer. Then to a room on another floor for coffee with Yuri, our host from ATOM, a Volgograd consortium of business types who are financing Volgacon to build contacts with the West. (Igor and Boris's "Baziat" literary agency is part of ATOM.) Yuri serves us sweet Turkish coffee in silver salvers kept warm on a tray of sand. He is well dressed in a gray suit, and very formal, as opposed to our scruffier escort Alexei. We are beginning to get the picture of incipient entrepeneurs and dissident bohemians in an uneasy alliance. It is late, and we are tired, and so to bed. 9/8/91 Monday JJ and I awaken to see the Volga from our sixth floor terrace, broad and blue with white sandy banks. Big tankers and cruise ships ply up and down, amid barges and an occasional fast hydroplane. Volgograd stretches for 70 kilometers along the west bank (only) of the river, so perhaps these boats are a fast way from one end of town to the other. It is a bright, clear morning, colder than Moscow 600 miles to the north. Breakfast is in two tiers, literally. We foreigners eat in an upstairs restaurant, while the rank and file SF fans are seated in a giant downstairs cafeteria. Both have big windows overlooking the river. We get an egg souffle, tiny tomatoes, and thick bread somewhere between white and brown. At breakfast we meet Freidel and Eric, two German editors. Eric is a free lancer from the former East Germany who speaks good Russian; Freidel is from Heyne, "the world's largest publisher of SF" (if you go by title and not print run.) She is a small, precise woman from Munich. We also meet a quiet, dark Bulgarian, the editor of Orphia magazine. We missed the opening ceremonies yesterday but the conference proper starts today. The opening discussion in a small auditorium is kicked off by Boris Zavgorodny, the legendary "Forest Ackerman of Russia" (a famous American SF fan). Boris is a compact man in a T shirt and jeans, with pitted skin and thick glasses, who moves like a prize fighter and is always looking over your shoulder with bright fast eyes. Speaks no English whatsoever. JJ, Paul and I are seated on the front row with the other foreign guests: Ron Clark, an Australian customs man and fanzine editor who wears a wombat on his collar, and Larry McCaffrey, a California "post-modern" academic whose efforts to distance himself from his 60s roots fail. The discussion, which is about the future of Russian SF, becomes one about US SF, which McCaffrey characterizes correctly as more escapist and less political than Russian. The room is only half-filled with some one hundred fans and writers. Many wear Russian and Ukranian flag lapel pins. Clark is asked to list the greatest Australian SF writers and puts A Bertram Chandler first. McCaffrey names Disch and Butler along with Sterling and Gibson. Paul and I are impressed by the interest and sincerity and feel we should participate, but decide there will be plenty of time later to put in our two cents worth. (We're wrong.) After the discussion JJ and I go for a walk. The hotel is a quarter mile off a main boulevard that parallels the river. Across the boulevard atop a hill, there is a giant statue of "The Motherland" defending Stalingrad (now Volgograd) with a sword--a woman in Greek robes, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and in the same French romantic style. Tens of thousands died at this battle in the winter of 1942-43, and the German defeat was a turning point in the war. Beneath the statue there is a circular hall with an eternal flame, walls covered with the names of thse who died, and two young soldiers at attention. Outside, speakers hidden in huge wall frescoes play martial music and battle sounds. It is a spectacle, but a tender and moving spectacle. It is touching how the Russians respect their dead, in contrast to the general funkiness of their daily lives. At lunch we try to sit in the downstairs cafeteria with the Russian fans and writers, but Masha, our guide and interpreter, herds us upstairs. It is not possible! Masha is thirty, nervously talking or smoking continually. Blue jean jacket, jean vest, short black hair--American suburban style as opposed to many Russian women who look almost Parisian. Masha has spent time in the states visiting her family in Chicago, and speaks with a slight midwestern accent. She dotes on her cigarettes like a crackhead over a pipe. She is a worrier, a mother hen with a ready laugh who everyone loves to tease. At lunch there is beer--a warm, yeasty brew that makes me realize why Russians don't drink beer. After lunch, Paul and I go for a walk down by the river. The hotel sits atop high clay banks crisscrossed with paths and studded with shaley cliffs, reed jungles and wrecked barges. Immediately to the north (upriver) is the Red October Steel Mill where barges are continually unloading sand. To the south are wooden piers with battered aluminum boats and mysterious shanties. The beach is pebbles and sand. Every hundred yards or so a waste pipe empties into the river, creating little forests of willows and strangely colored waterfalls. There's another panel back at the hotel. James Hogan, the Irish/American/British "hard" SF writer, has joined the group. The talk meanders and has the fans drifting out. Someone in the audience asks "what is the Tiptree award?" and Christopher Stasheff answers. James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon) was an SF great who, like George Elliot, found it easier to publish with a male pseudonym. The award, promoted by SF's feminists, is for a work that deals with sexual politics. Stasheff is a Burl Ives looking writer of fantasies with a political undertone--popular enough in Russia to have been laboriously typed into "samizdat" editions. He is presented one by Boris. Boris gathers JJ and me for a visit to his apartment, along with Igor and Boris's star-struck 17-year-old girl friend. It is a shabby single room in someone else's apartment on the first floor of a dingy building overlooking dirt courtyards where children play and old men wander disconsolately. Boris's landlady is a tall Russian woman who relates to him as another child underfoot. In the kitchen there are two giant fish tanks connected by a chuffing pump, overlooked by a portrait of Hemingway. His single room is filled with books. Boris gives us an icon of Jesus and some pictures of himself. Igor, his rail thin partner with a dracula voice, translates. We have brandy and are off, back to the hotel. JJ tells Boris he is a "stand-up comic" which of course doesn't translate. There is no after-dinner program (happily) and we give away books in our room. Alex takes a box for his club friends back in Moscow. Leonid and Viktor from Odessa take a few. Yevgeny and others from Minsk come by, including Serge who worked for a year in Turin and loves all things Italian. Yevgeny wears a Romanov pin. Is this for real or just to be outrageous? The three of us decide to have lunch tomorrow. It's almost midnight. JJ goes to bed. I look for a party and find Larry McCaffrey showing Bruce Sterling and punk rock videos. I find Paul entertaining Irene, an editor from Minsk. Dark eyes and hair, pale skin, elegant clothes; she would look perfectly at home in New York publishing except that she speaks not a word of English; unusual in a Russian. Perhaps it's a political statement. They are sharing brandy and red caviar and cake. I take a nip and off to bed. 9/10/91 Tuesday. Up early to take a walk along the littered beach at the bottom of the bluff below the hotel. The bomb-twisted WWII hulks here serve as a supplemental war memorial to the one at the top of the hill across the boulevard. After the usual breakfast we have "Meetings with Writers." I am apprehensive but some twenty people turn up for mine. How to deal with these well-meaning fans who have never heard of me? I tell them the plots of my novels. The translator, Misha (Gakov) read an article about me in Locus magazine and mentions that for a brief time I was a political prisoner in the US, for refusing to give information to a Grand Jury investiging the radical underground. The Russians are very interested in this and want details about prisoners in the US. I tell them about the ex-Black Panthers, AIM, and the Puerto Rican FALN, all of interest to a country torn with rising nationalist movements. They want to know about US publishing: is it hard or easy to get published? I tell them it is fairly easy these days, but hard to make an impact or stay on the shelves with so much SF coming out. Then I question them. They are all political dissidents; mostly computer programmers, students, fans. Few are writers. Most know only older (pre-60s) SF since that is all that has been available here. With all the talk about "cyberpunk" few have read it. Downstairs I meet with Sasha, a Russian agent/translator/publisher, who wants to represent me. I am inclined to go with Igor and Boris, even though (or because?) they're such lunatics. Off to lunch with the "Minsk Mafia" of Eridan. We go to a seafood restaurant downtown. Typically, there is no seafood, only beef stew, and only six beers left; we order them all. Irene, Yevgeny and Serge, Eridan's chief, a redhead in a Porsche jacket who looks like a Southern stock car driver; a writer who looks like a bear (another Boris). Toasts all around! Vodka, never mind the beer! Back at the hotel, Paul and I attempt Larry McCaffrey's lecture on post-modernism, but are too drunk and give it up. We will never understand Madonna. JJ's entertaining Eric and Freidel in our room. I sleep through dinner and afterward we all pile into cars for the ATOM party. It is in another building two miles away along the riverbank. A somewhat formal affair, with caviar, wine, brandy, cake, coffee. Atom is definitely post-modern--there is a fax machine and a 286 computer in the office. Only the pros are invited, which brings the average age up to 35 or so. Paul is fascinated by a writer from Novisibirsk, a Russian literary light. There are Russian folk songs. Yuri, the ATOM leader, makes a beautiful toast "to those who choose to endeavor to become fully human." Much vodka and brandy are consumed in this endeavor! We return the back way, along dirt roads, to the hotel and find a drunk, teary-eyed Alexei who was excluded from the party. There are intricate fan politics here that we don't understand. Igor had bought circus tickets for us all but only McCaffrey, not wanting to hurt his feelings, had gone. Time for bed. 9/11/91 Wednesday. This morning we call our 19-year old daughter who was left with the apartment in New York. This is a job taking several hours but worth it, as any parent will understand. Our children are grown and capable, but in terms of communications going to Russia is like going to Mars. Actually a little worse. Anyway, all is well. We leave for an excursion to see "The Cossacks of the Don." ATOM arranges all this, and it includes fans as well as guests, in two buses. I finally get a look at Volgograd, a drab concrete city totally rebuilt since it was destroyed in WWII. The climate seems southwestern, with arroyos and vacant lots filled with sagebrush. A long bus ride on a three lane highway, across cropland, mostly of dryland wheat, just threshed. Christopher Stasheff (of Illinois) and I remark on how well tended it is. If there is a famine its roots are not in the local collectives. We pull up at a little tourist park where costumed Cossacks welcome us, then dance and sing. There are three log houses filled with old millstones, plows, wagons, sleighs. It is like a US hillbilly theme park complete with singing, as sad and humiliating to watch as it must be to perform. Lunch at a big restaurant nearby. JJ, Paul and I share a table with Jean, a literary critic and student from an institute in Moscow. A fashionably dressed young woman with the bright eyes and quick smile of a Russian beauty. We are joined by a British fanzine writer and dour critic of all things Russian. There will, unfortunately, always be an England. We are served beef wrapped around garlic. Drunken fans and writers across the room start singing "Yellow Submarine" and I join them. Beatle songs seem to well up out of the Russian soul at a certain level of vodka saturation. (There will always be an England.) Outside the restaurant, cropland has given way to range; we are at the edge of the steppes, and standing by the highway I feel like I'm in eastern Colorado or western Kansas, watching the big trucks roll by. Relatively few cars. Many motorcycles with sidecars; an ancient and sturdy looking BMW clone is the most popular. Dinner back at the hotel is--surprise!--stringy chicken plus clotted cheese with sugar on it. We meet an editor of Ikarie from Czechoslovakia. Then there are several small parties for JJ and I. (Paul is at others). The first is a group from Odessa. Leonid, their leader, is a quiet and amiable guy who stays in the background pouring vodka for his younger and better dressed employees. Then there is Viktor, a tough wiry man in his 50s, who has climbed in the Pamirs, hitchhiked across Siberia, and was a beatnik during the brief thaw in Russia that ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in '68. There is brandy and watermelon and talk of hosting us in Odessa, where they also wish to publish my books. Then JJ and I go next door to meet with a group from Kiev, the editors of Chernobylization, an English language fanzine. All Ukrainian nationalists here (the Odessa crowd couldn't care less). Sasha, a redhead who speaks very good English, says he has corresponded with Gene Wolfe. They asked him a year or so ago which new American writers to watch and he had mentioned both me and Paul Park. We drink to Gene Wolfe. Afterward, JJ and I take a walk on the bluff. Such ceremonies as those we had this evening are very Russian, exhausting, and exotic to me. I am less good at it than JJ, who has traveled through Africa with diplomats and revolutionaries and even spoken before the UN. Formalities grind me down, particularly with the Russians who combine formality with the most alarming intimacy. It is all quite lovely but exhausting. 9/12/91 Thursday. Still trying to decide where we are going after Volgograd. We allowed for a week of travel after the con, and our hosts are scrambling to find a place to send us. The Russians are accomodating but vague; it is frustrating since nothing is ever certain. We originally wanted to go to the Black Sea, but without a visa extension we would have to go and return by train. JJ and I insist we would be happy just go back to Moscow. While all this is being mulled over, Paul and I take a long walk along the river. The half urban, half wild junkscape reminds us both of the shores of Brooklyn's Jamaica Bay (which we both love). After lunch, the boat cruise. JJ craps out; she doesn't like boats and it's supposed to last 12 hours. The boat loads downtown. It's the size of the Block Island ferry, closed on the bottom, with an open upper deck. After prodigious quantities of beer and watermelons are loaded on by hand, a la "Old Man River," we head up the Volga and pull ashore at a sandy island covered with flood-marked willows. Everyone gets off the boat and wanders amid the trees carrying a watermelon; a scene from an Italian movie. Soon people clump in groups around little fires. Paul and I wander down to a lagoon where the younger and wilder fans are skinny dipping. We jump in and as quickly back out; the water is cold. We join Leonid's Odessa clump and share chicken and watermelon, then Russian songs. I try an Everly Brothers tune ("Bye Bye Love") but it meets with stares--nothing penetrated the Iron Curtain before the Beatles. At dark and we drift back onto the boat for the Miss Volgacocon contest. Five young women in various interesting states of undress. Each tells the MC why she chose her costume; identifies quotes from Russian literary classics; names as many SF writers as she can in 20 seconds. The Strugatskys and Asimov make every list. Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard and Chris Stasheff make a few. Paul and I appear on none, but I am chosen for the dance contest. The dancing goes on for hours: un-paired and wild at heart. The Russians love to disco as well as drink. There is more sexuality here than in the USA, and several former candidates are dancing in only scarves and underwear. Home by midnight, and to bed ... 9/13/91 (Friday the Thirteenth). Volgacon officially ends today. We are trying to get visas for travel to the Caucasus, so we can fly back to Moscow. We are supposed to get visas for Stavropol but "It isn't clear yet... It is difficult to say." The Russians who complain how their government runs them around, do the same with us, with the best of intentions. It is just the Russian way. We meet our potential Stavropol hosts. Yevgeny is an ex party official, a suave and amiable man in his mid 40s. Igor was a Soviet advisor in Anglola who speaks Portuguese and Spanish. He tells me (laughing) that my Spanish sounds like English. While the visas are being negotiated (we hope) JJ and Paul and I head downtown on the electric streetcar. The fare is a 20 kopeck ticket that is never collected. The honor system? On the broad steps downtown that lead to the river, there are Mickey Mouse and Goofy statues for photos opportunities. I take mine with a bear, since I just won a Hugo for a story about bears. We buy hand crocheted shawls from women who applaud the "Amerikanits." We are embarrassed, feeling mistaken for Republicans. Coffee at a street kiosk, Turkish and sweet. Then we buy beautiful little framed watercolors of country scenes for 35-50 rubles apiece. The market is mostly old country people selling vegetables, herbs, cooked corn, dried fish, potatoes, peppers, bread. All this is legal now. It is mostly food, though; we locate the Beriozka (official hard currency store) to buy gifts. The stuff is cheap: Soviet army watches for 60 rubles; amber necklaces for 120. JJ is in "tschochka" heaven until we realize that the prices are all based on the official exchange rate of 1.77 roubles to the dollar! Leaving glowering clerks and piles of trinkets behind, we beat an humiliated and embarrassed retreat, like Napoleon from Moscow. The climactic Volgacon banquet called for six starts at eight, in the big hotel cafeteria. Dinner is jellied tongue. There are endless speeches which Masha insists on translating (she can't not translate!) even though JJ begs her not to. Then the dancing afterward, as always. We meet two American girls from an exchange program; game rich kids, delighted with their Russian "experience." I entwine arms with Boris for an elaborate drunken toast. At the dead dog party, we make plans with Gakov to try and help some Russian writers and fans get to Orlando for Worldcon /92. A fitting end to Volgacon. 8/14/91 Saturday. Our last breakfast and our passports have been stamped for Stavropol. Yuri has pull (or "blat") though why this wasn't exercised days ago, it's "difficult to say" as always. The Minsk Mafia (Irene, Serge and Yevgeny) stop at our room for farewells. Also the Odessa crew. We would be going to Odessa with them if it were not for a rumored cholera epidemic. Lunch is downstairs for the first time--the upstairs is being used for a local wedding. A little girl with a lace bow on her head peers over the balcony, bored and beautiful. Paul and JJ and I go for a long walk along the river. Sit on a log and talk in the sun. A few more hours in town, and back to the hotel for dinner. The Russian wedding is still going on--loud music and much folk dancing. The little girl is still peering over the balcony, still bored and beautiful. We spend the evening packing and go to bed early--we are going to Stavropol in the bus, and we leave at 7:20 am. 8/15/91. Sunday. The day begins with disaster. There is no car to take us to the bus! At 6:55 Masha is on the phone scolding, shouting weeping. Yuri's driver is off running Friedel and Eric to the airport. Sasha, a Moscow SF fan (with a crush on Masha), plays the hero and dashes out to the boulevard to get a cab. At the last possible minute he shows up with Yuri's driver. We speed through town, running red lights, getting to the bus station five minutes before departure time--and of course the bus leaves twenty minutes late. The station is crowded with poor people, poor packages, poor smells; here is a different Volgograd than we have seen at the hotel or even downtown. Our big, red, smelly Hungarian bus heads out through interminable suburbs and across the steppes, south. The countryside looks like eastern Montana. There is no smoking and no bathroom on the bus, so we make piss and tobacco stops every hour. Dusty little towns with utterly vile outhouses; highway stops for distant collective farms. Halfway to Stavropol, a one hour stop for lunch. We buy meat patties and sit on the grass to eat. The station is on a rise and the steppes roll off a hundred miles in every direction. More and more of the faces are Asian. Kids on bicycles roll around the big bus lot, the best paved area in town. A Tatar on a two-stroke 250 with a sheepskin seat does barbaric wheelies. Half an hour into our picnic we look up and see--a big red bus pulling out! Panic! Passports and money are on board, plus all our luggage! We comandeer a cab by waving a 25 rouble note and follow the bus, finally flagging it down at the edge of town. It's the wrong bus. Ours has just gone to gas up. We return to the station, abashed, in time to leave on the correct bus. Ten hours south of Volgagrad, the country begins to lift a little, but there is still no sign of the mountains Paul and I want to see. I am hoping for a wall on the horizon, like the front range from the Colorado plains. Instead there are rolling bluffs and a few wooded valleys. No one meets us at the Stavropol bus station. Masha calls and learns that Igor and Yevgeny were never notified that we were coming and had given up on us. We are picked up and taken to Igor's. His wife Nellie and son Denys (Russian is filled with Denys's) welcome us with a spread of sausage, mineral water, cheese, pickles, bread. The water is off in their apartment complex so we have to prime the toilet with buckets. On TV there is a Russian game show, like Jeapordy with teams of whiz kids and gongs and spinning lights. I am feeling half sick, and so to bed. 8/16/91 Monday. Breakfast of meat and bread. JJ and I take an early walk, across the street from the huge projects where Igor and Nellie live, among the little tree-shaded wooden houses with fences and blue-painted window frames. Later we ask who lives in them and are told they are all "shacks." Igor takes us on a walking tour of Stavropol. It's a slightly smaller and much prettier town than Volgograd, with tree shaded streets ("The greenest city in Russia"), tile sidewalks, fountains, and older buildings. An air of faded elegance, as opposed to Russia's general faded inelegance. At the market there are armies of old ladies selling strange herbs and roots, looking like the witches in Macbeth. We queue for beer (pibo) and dried fish and eat them in a nearby park. Masha and Igor delight in picking apart dead things; me, not so much. Then to the Caucasus Cultural Institute, a drafty old mansion in a park atop a hill which overlooks the city and the steppes beyond. Yevgeny introduces us to his boss, an affable gray-suited man who gives a long, boring lecture in his big office. Is this the official Party welcome? I almost fall asleep. Then he rises and opens an actual honest-to-god secret compartment in the wall, and we enter a tiny room for a drink of an elegant local Stavropol brandy. There is a Petty girl pin-up on the wall. The man is a former theatre director and never a bureaucrat at all; or was he? It's all a shadow show, and I find out later that Yevgeny himself is the former local Party boss. No luck on our call to our youngest in New York. Home to Igor's and Nellie's "cooked in the pot" beef and cabbage soup. Delicious! Predator II is on TV, entrancing Denys. Danny Glover, squandering his talents, the first Black person we've seen since Kennedy Airport, makes us New Yorkers homesick. Nellie works for a newspaper, the 45th Parallel. She's from Sakhalin originally. Both she and Igor are well traveled and cosmopolitan. On the news there is turmoil in Yugoslavia, Moldavia, Georgia. The news show seems much better than in the US, with better production values and more live footage. You can learn a lot just watching. Nellie tells us (through Igor) that they suspected the coup was coming for months because the news shows were shut down, one by one. 8/17/91 Tuesday. Breakfast with Denys and Nellie, then off for the Caucasus in two cars. JJ, Paul, Masha, Yegeny and squeeze into Yevgeny's new front-wheel-drive Lada; Valery, Vasilye and Igor follow in an older one. Across a low ridge, 2500 to 3000 foot mountains, and into a broad valley. Again I am disappointed: there are no "real" mountains to be seen. The Caucusus we have seen so far are just long flat-topped ridges, low escarpments. The towns, one every twenty miles, are hideous, polluted, dusty and new: it's like Wyoming without the Rockies (or the antelopes). Driving, we talk of the coup. Yevgeny (45) joined the Party because otherwise he couldn't work in publishing and writing. Always felt hypocritical but felt he could do more good in than out of the system. Masha had been a Young Pioneer (Komsomol). Both sing hearty Komsomol songs. Both felt originally that the bureaucrats were perverting Lenin; now they feel Lenin's ideas are in fact the problem. With Yevgeny this leaves a big "hole in the heart, like a wound." Yevgeny drives fast and sure, in the European fashion, passing with cars coming. Automotive insouciance. The air is hazy but Yevgeny assures us it's not pollution. This is wishful thinking; I know automotive pollution when I see it. Success! Spectacular sheer volcanic peaks loom through the haze. They are only some 5 to 6000 feet in height. Beyond, like a ghost, we see a snow-hung mass, bug as a continent. It is Elbruz, at 18,000 the highest in Europe. It is gone soon after it is sighted. Piss and cigarette stop in a small town reminding me of southern Colorado: dusty, overlooked by a butte--the remains of an even more dramatic lava spire that Yevgeny tells us was pulled down and chopped into road fill by the "aparachniks" who had no use for natural beauty. I prowl through a car-parts store--odd bearings, seals, lenses, belts, etc. are laid out on counters. Pyatigorsk, our destination, lays between two volcanic peaks, the smallest some 3,000 feet. On the mountainside we visit the site where Lermontov was killed in a duel. There is a statue with his handsome, young Byronic face; excuse me, visage. Yevgeny tells how a drunken jest led to the duel, but Vasilye has another version. Masha tries to translate both simultaneouly, then breaks down into scolding when she overloads. We all laugh; Masha is the delight of us all! Whenever Yevgeny pulls out to pass, or we go around a curve, or even ride an elevator, she covers her face and says, "Oh, Mama!" A mysterious, dark restaurant near the monument serves us Georgian food and wine for 125 roubles total. At the Intourist Hotel, Paul JJ and I must pay hard currency ($90!) for a room. Our hosts are apologetic but we don't mind; this is the first money we have spent on the trip. (Their rooms, in roubles, are double their uusual rate since they are "with foreigners," but still only a few bucks.) The Intourist is big, clean, modern, grim and ugly. Our room overlooks Pyatigiorsk, and a nearby 5,000 foot peak covered at the top with bright gold heather. The mountain shapes are fantastical, rising out of the rolling steppes. There is a funicular (cable car) to the top of a smaller mountain, but we are too late to ride it. Instead, we visit a little art gallery, where JJ buys two paintings. Masha, the art snob, scornfully assures her she won't have trouble getting them out of the country. ("If I were the customs inspector I would let them out immediately.") We have coffee in a little grotto, surrounded by well-dressed Russian intelligentsia. Then down the tree-lined gorge which was the entirety of the town in Lermontov's time. The boulevard is like the "ramblas" in Barcelona, and one can imagine the ladies and officers flirting and bowing on their strolls in the early 19th century. The building facades are beautiful and ornate, unmarred from Tsarist times. The Russians love and prize their resorts. At the foot of the hill is (literally) the jewel of Pyatigorsk--a cast iron and glass concert hall, in the style of England's Crystal Palace and dating from the same Victorian period. It is just getting dark and the building is lighted from the inside, fabulous shades of red and green and amber. Back at the grim Intourist, we have chicken and fish in Yevgeny's room, then a long, expensive, indifferent meal in the restaurant. There is of course no beer. (Nyet, nyet.) It's easy to see why--the shifts are changing, and the cooks and dishwashers streaming out of the kitchen all carry bags that clink. An Armernian wedding party nearby bursts into song. Vasilye assures us Russia would have been better off without the revolution. I disagree but who am I? Tomorrow we are off the see the "high Caucasus." And so to bed. 8/18/91 Wednesday. JJ and Paul meet for an early walk around town. I sleep late and read. On my way down for breakfast one of the many gray-suited aparachniks around the hotel pushes his way onto a crowded elevator car, even though everyone assures him it's full. I squeeze out and walk down the stairs, finally understanding something of the rage that possesses Russians after years of being pushed around by these petty jerks. A dreadful INTOURIST breakfast of which I will spare you the details. We are now wondering whether we will get plane tickets back to Moscow or have to take a 30 hour train ride. As usual, it's "too soon to say." Yevgeny is on the case. (Isn't he?) Meanwhile, we are off for a observatory 200 kilometers deeper into the mountains. Across another wide valley, through rolling hills, and then up a long narrow winding road between higher and higher dry bluffs. A dissected plateau, overlooked by giant escarpments and hanging ledges. It's like the Southwest. The rimrock goes for miles, higher and higher. There are little haystacks on the impossible sides of steep bluffs; an occasional flock of sheep with a herder on horseback. We reach the top of a pass at 2,000 meters--almost seven thousand feet. From here we can see Elbruz again, still far away and towering two miles over us. To either side of it, just shadows, are the jagged 13,000 foot snow peaks that mark the border of Georgia. Two locals letting their car cool off are sharing mutton jerky that looks like week old road kill. Igor and Masha not only dig right in, they make me eat some ("so as not to offend out countrymen") and pretend to like it. We descend from the pass into a narrow, steep valley, wetter than the other side. There are even a few trees. Caucasian cowboys on horses herd cows along the highway. The hillsides are impossibly steep and green and smooth--a Dr. Suess world. The villages are neat and prosperous. Yevgeny tells us the WWII defenders of the Caucasus, abandoned by their commanders, had frozen to death. Their fate was hushed up until their frozen bodies were found years later under glacial ice. Another bigger town at the bottom, and another broad valley--this one filled with potato farms and green glacial streams. Behind us we see the snow peaks, the elusive spine of the Caucasus. After a long drive between potato fields, we turn up another narrow green valley, a Shangri-la with neat villages under wooded slopes, heavily timbered like the Smokies. At the head of the valley there is a vast complex of white buildings stuck in a narrow gorge. Yevgeny's blat gets us a room in the big gloomy, empty hotel. (Or is it a hotel? The doors are mysteriously padded.) The place is deserted except for a pack of kids playing on secret trails in the bushes. We dump our stuff in our rooms and head up the mountain by car to the observatory. It's as big as Palomar. The Russian manager tells us it is obsolete and the local weather is poor for viewing; but it's still used for some international experiments. He takes us up into the gondola, where a French/Spanish team is setting up to count photons. There is a little dining room near the observatory where we are served--stringy chicken! soup, cabbage, and bread. We are at 7,000 feet again, looking down on clouds, in one of the most beautiful and remote places I have ever been. Back at the hotel, we have a drink before bed. Feeling about half sick, I make medicinal tea from cough drops and vodka. We talk of American writers. What do I think of Hemingway? A great short story writer and a poor novelist. Yevgeny delightedly agrees: A great novelist and a poor short story writer! Whatever. We drink to reversals, to writers, to Kerouac, a favorite of all the Russians except Masha. Yevgeny teaches us a Russian toast: "My soul, will you accept this drink? No? Then away with you!" And so to bed. As always in Russia, JJ and I sleep in narrow twin beds. Birth control? or a Slavic aphrodiaiac? No matter tonight, when I am feverish and exhausted. 8/19/91 Thursday. Today we fly to Moscow from Mineral Vody, the big airport serving all the resort cities. We hope. But first, we want to try and find the Tenth Century Orthodox church rumored to be in the fields near the Institute. We follow some dirt paths and find it at the edge of a hayfield. Afraid of the wet grass (though feeling better) I stay behind while Paul and the others check it out. It is about two stories high, intricate with rooms and chambers, and perfectly preserved except for the roofs. The stones have neither fallen nor been plundered. Nearby, looking on, is a column with a droll, carved face--"much older" than the churches, according to Yevgeny. We leave the mountains and head north through treeless, well cultivated country. Crews in the fields are picking up potatoes that have been laid over by machine. We pass acres of dachas, small houses each with a plot of land; unplanned and funky, like the hippie communes of the Southwest. The Mineral Vody airport is chaotic, the parking lot filled with fumacious buses, cooked corn vendors, families sitting on piles of taped boxes, children running everywhere. The children in Russia are always clean, no matter how shabby the parents. Success! We are on a 6:55 flight. We say farewell to Igor, Valery, and Vasilye. Yevgeny will see us off. With an afternoon to kill, we drive to Kislodovsk, 35 miles away. It's like Pyatigorsk only bigger and livelier, and a little uglier. We have Turkish coffee and I try the mineral waters, smelly with sulphur and dispensed in fountains (hot or cold) in a long Roman looking building. JJ mutinies; she not only wants to walk around by herself, she will walk around by herself. Masha, given no choice, gives in. JJ tries it but keeps running into Paul, Yevgeny, Masha and I. JJ buys a hat. Masha the hat snob holds her nose. ("It's so proletarian!") At the airport we say farewell to Yevgeny. Masha will fly with us to Moscow. We wait in the foreigners lounge and enjoy a "hard currency" ($2) delicious cold Heineken. ("Oh Mama!") JJ is pleased to see Africans, whose French accents betray a West African origin. Also Vietnamese, Germans, Brits. Though we have paid a five rouble "handling fee" to be pre-boarded as foreigners, someone screws up and we dash across the runway at the last minute to push and shove aboard the giant Ilyushin 84. Russian stewardesses are as rude as Russian waitresses. After the seats are sorted out with much shouting and arguing, the stewardesses come around selling newspapers and lottery tickets. Free enterprise? In spite of all the mischigosch, the flight is smooth and swift. Russians know how to design and fly planes, even if their administration is poor. In Moscow we are met by Gakov and Alex. JJ, Masha and I are whisked off to Alex's--a 200 rouble cab ride ("outrageous!" says Masha, but we insist on springing for the six bucks). We crash at Alexei and Olga's, having displaced the entire family to Olga's mother's nearby. 9/20/91 Friday. There is a problem about dinner tonight. We told Gakov we wanted to treat our hosts and spend our roubles. But he arranged for only six, which will leave out Alexei and Olga. I phone and he promises to try and fix it. In the morning, Olga and Alexei take us in for a tour of the center of Moscow. The Bolshoi, the Moscow Art Theatre. Olga the Muscovite wins my heart telling me she hated "dinky" San Francisco. It's a wet, rainy day and JJ, tired of being a good puppy, just wants to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Easier said than done! We finally locate coffee at $1 a cup in the hard currency bar at the Intourist Hotel. Then it's off to Red Square, where we watch the changing of the guard at Lenin's tomb. (Paul's comment: one would have thought Hitler would have killed the goose-step forever.) Then to St. Basil's--a beautiful building and one of the most familiar in the world, but nothing prepares you for actually seeing it--expecially on a gray day when the colors emerge slowly as you draw closer. Tiny brick stairways winding through the dollhouse church; I would hate to be in a dungeon designed by these dudes. Outside the Kremlin, newlyweds are leaving flowers and getting their pictures taken at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Olga tells us Friday is a big day in Russia, since weddings last three days. In the Kremlin we follow Paul and tour the churches, each more elaborately gilded than the last. Paul is transfixed; Olga and I am interested; JJ and Alexei are bored. There is a huge cannon. There is a huge bell. Whatever else the Bolsheviks did or didn't do, they valued and preserved Russia's treasures. The churches have an Italian look. The scale is awesome. As much treasure was wasted on this crap as on the military today; but at least the Tsars left something beautiful behind. Alexei and Olga are worn out (it never occurs to anyone that we might be) and we are met at Pushkin Square and turned over to Gakov, Masha and the beautiful Jean we met at the restaurant on the Don. "Puppies" again we leap aboard a bus and go to the Russian parliament (or White House) where the barricades are bulldozed into heaps of junk decorated with flowers. Hippie squatters live in smoking yurts. A monument to the revolution of 1905 was dismantled and the stones used for barricades. Jean tells us that much of the fighting was organized by Afghanistan vets, who showed people how to stop (or slow down) tanks. Gakov says the military was sympathetic, and informed the resisters that they would obey orders, but "very slowly." It was a great victory over the hardliners, scorned now because they miscalculated so totally and failed so completely. Past Gogol's house to Arbat Street, a squalid McDougal with vendors all selling the same cheap shit: Gorbachev nesting dolls, Red Army hats and flags, chess sets and amber necklaces, street portraits. Our restaurant reservation is for eight so we kill an hour in a luxurious upper lobby of the Metropole, Moscow's Plaza, filled with rich foreigners. Masha and Misha are awkward at hotel crashing, unlike us New Yorkers who know how to do it. We get a glimpse of the sumptuous glass-domed restaurant. Our restaurant, the Slavonic Bazaar was built in the 1870s, the same period as Moulin Rouge, and obviously appealled to the same international arty bourgeois. Checkhov, Tchaikovsky, Stanislansky all ate here. It's a cavernous joint with indifferent food and an elaborate floor show that's like a Russian "Hee Haw" or "Grand Ole Opry"--crude peasant jokes, juggling, and every third act a strip tease. Gakov has done well and Olga and Alexei are with us. Gakov's wife is an angular, attractive woman who works for the film archives and is somewhat scornful of Americans after living a year in Michigan. The food comes in six courses, and I learn the right way to eat caviar--on blinis (little pancakes). Afterward there is dancing, Russian disco style. Paul will stay on for three days but JJ and I leave in the morning. We say our farewells, Masha weeps for us all. On the way back to the satellite city we stop and get film and packages to take to the US from some of Olga's friends. We are to leave early in the morning. And so to bed. Saturday, September 21. Up at six am to get to the airport. An hour's drive in a cab through coal-smelling fog. Alexei goes with us. At the airport we are hours getting checked through: Aeroflot makes a poor last impression. We fly out on a sweet little Tupolev, no bigger than a Lear jet. The runway is socked in and clouds cover the landscape all the way to Finland, so our last glimpse of Russia is the white birches standing silently together at the end of the runway. The Helsinki airport is jammed with US tourists heading home--we were not the only ones in Russia after all. There's no time to enjoy the super-expensive, long-awaited Finnish luxuries. One $2 cup of coffee and we are in the air. Our seat mate is a University of Connecticut professor who just came back from a St. Petersburg conference of scientists and specialists critical of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He says Michelson and Morley gave up too soon. A nice guy but filled with neoconservative guff about AIDS, Russia, Blacks, etc. Finnair is superb as usual. They fill you with food, then ply you with booze. The last four hours of the flight are like a cocktail party. Thirty of our flightmates are Duke MBA students (mostly in their early 30s) who have just completed a two week jaunt to Moscow; by them, we are eased back into the warm soup of American white conservatism. Fulfilling a lifelong ambition, I see Greenland--a tangle of razor sharp mountains near the shore, inland a glaring two mile thick icecap. Heading south along the coast of Labrador is like a journey through time as well as space. The ice melts. Cape Cod, Nantucket, Block Island, Long Island appear--the almost-inundated scraps of a 200- mile-long terminal moraine. Long after the glacier is gone, the piles of sand it pushed up remain. They are where we live. It's only 3 pm in New York when we land, so we seem to have made a two hour flight! We are waved through customs (what would anyone smuggle out of Russia these days?) The bathrooms are clean. The corruption is hidden. And there is no sense of hope or imminent change in the air. We're home. </PLAINTEXT>