By Jeffrey Carl
Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.
“Russia on 6,000 Rubles (about five bucks) a Day,” or “Moscow Does Not Believe in Decent Chinese Food”
by Jeffrey Carl
Staff Writer
Having traveled to Russia last summer, I was asked to write up a brief guide for those intrepid souls who might wish to visit there themselves. This is fine with me, because it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The following is a listing of basic “Dos” and “Don’ts” for visiting – a condensed version of “Everything You Wanted to Know about Going to Russia but Realized You Don’t Know How to Ask the Locals.” And if you’re as incurably American as I am, you’ll have a lot of questions. Good luck, happy trails, and don’t forget to write if the economy over there gets work.
First Rule: Have a good time. All of the sarcastic little attempts at humor aside, it’s a wonderful place. The people are friendly, conversational, and generally kind. Saint Petersburg is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen, and the “White Nights” in June – when the sun never fully goes down – are gorgeous. Moscow’s “Stalinist Gothic” architecture is breathtaking. Leggy Russian girls stroll by that would make heads spin in any country of the world. Georgian Champagne is excellent and cheap. And, being an American, you know that you’re automatically the coolest person within a 50-yard radius.
Second Rule: The domestic Russian beer tastes like WD-40 motor oil. Try to avoid it if at all possible; if you’re in a major city, there will probably be plenty of nicer bars or pubs run by foreigners, set up specifically for (comparatively) money-laden travelers like yourself. Not that alcohol can’t be bought anywhere: when I was there, Stolichnaya vodka could be bought for about 1200 Rubles (95 cents) per liter at any kiosk along the street in Moscow or St. Pete’s. Absolut Vodka, imported from nearby Sweden, could be bought for about four bucks per liter. And the most expensive vodka – costing eight dollars a bottle, or about half the average Russian’s monthly wage of 15,000 Rubles – was Smirnoff, which is bottled in exotic Hartford, Connecticut. If you’re looking for Jack Daniel’s, you aren’t seeing any until you get back on the plane.
And while we’re on the topic of sin and its accomplices, American cigarettes are cheaper in Russia than they are here. Marlboro or Lucky Strike brands – the status symbols among younger Russians – go for about 90 cents a pack. The cheapest native Russian cancer sticks, called Byelomorkanal, cost about four cents a pack. They are fat, stubby, and filterless, and taste like you’re smoking plutonium. Considering that some of the tobacco probably comes from around the Chernobyl area, you probably are.
Third Rule: Bring your own Ny-Quil. The only time I really feared for my life was when I caught a cold, and the Russian family I stayed with decided to suggest their favorite home remedies. The mother of the family was a chemist, and the father was a physicist. And their respective cures for congestion were warm milk and inhaling steam, and vodka. I half expected them to pull out a small reserve box of Red Army-issue leeches with multiple warheads. So bring your own medicine, unless you happen to be particularly fond of the vodka cure.
Fourth Rule: Bring your own Won Ton soup. I went to every Chinese restaurant in Moscow and St. Petersburg (three). It seems that even though they had both been Communist nations for a long time, the Russians and the Chinese never got along, because apparently none of the Chinese stayed around long enough to explain how to make a decent egg roll. In my mind, an advanced civilization is marked by the availability of good Chinese food. There may be some somewhere in Russia. Elvis may also be working in an Iowa laundromat. But there is very little evidence for either.
The native Russian food is actually quite good, but due to a poor availability of supplies (a national tradition), the basic menu repertoire almost always stays the same. I mean, I like beets as much as the next guy, but after the fifteenth serving of borscht and black bread (judging by the taste, it is made just like regular bread, but the wheat in the recipe is replaced by dirt), you can be ready to kill people for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
Which brings me to the slow infiltration of American food into the Russian culture. Since last year, I have been told that the number of McDonald’s in Moscow has increased from one to three, and in St. Petersburg from zero to one. But it isn’t quite the same: there are two hamburgers on the menu: the “Beeg Makh,” and the hamburger. There is one size of fries (small), and one size of Coke (small). And don’t worry about telling them to only put a little ice in the drink – nobody in Russia puts ice in anything. Lunch in McDonalds will run you about three bucks, or what was then about 20 percent of the average Russian’s monthly wage. There is also a Pizza Hut in Moscow (they’ll deliver before the next ice age or it’s free) and a Baskin Robbins in St. Petersburg. Thankfully, not one of the 33 flavors is “double-dip vodka borscht fudge.”
To make a long story short (probably too late), after five weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I had a horrible desire to go home – not for Democracy, or Home, or Freedom or the Statue of Liberty – but for American food and my girlfriend. And don’t tell my girlfriend, but I could have delayed coming home even longer if someone had brought me a bucket of Extra Crispy chicken from KFC.
Fifth Rule: Don’t hang around the hotels too much. For one thing, you miss out on the real Russia. For another thing, the foreign hotels are ridiculously expensive, and you still probably can’t get ice in your drink. The Russian hotels are cheap, but are decorated like the Waldorf-Astoria after a limited-scale nuclear war, and the staff is hindered by the fact that apparently nobody in Russia has realized that a “service economy” has something to do with “service.”
The first night we stayed in Moscow, one of the other students on the trip and I were up late. Wondering what to do, I realized the only proper thing for a journalist to was to go drink in the hotel bar. My friend ordered a screwdriver and was greeted with blank looks that seemed to say, “the poor American fool thinks he’s in a hardware store.” No one had heard of the drink because the Russians had plenty of vodka but apparently orange juice just doesn’t grow on trees there. His bar tab was itemized: four dollars for the vodka, and ten for the orange juice.
Sixth Rule: Learn a little Russian before you go. Specifically, learn “nyet,” or no. Practice saying it frequently, and in a loud voice with a stiff-arm gesture and a menacing sneer that says, “We won the Cold War, so back off.” As soon as you are recognized as an American – which usually takes about three seconds – you will be approached by everyone from wizened old pensioners to tiny Slavic versions of the Little Rascals, trying to sell you anything from “genuine Soviet military pins” to “real American baseball caps,” bearing the logo of the Cleveland Redskins or the New York Cowboys.
Eventually you develop a reflex for saying, “No, thanks, I don’t want any, and sorry, I don’t speak English anyway.” It’s about that time that you look at the sixty- and seventy-year-old retired women, standing on the streets, selling cigarettes and trying to augment their average 9,000 Ruble (eight dollars) monthly income any way they can. Their lined, thin faces show a mixture of pride and fear. Pride in being Russian, pride coming from surviving a life of strife and turmoil, pride which keeps them from begging like so many of their countrymen have been reduced to. And fear that they may not be able to survive a new capitalist age that they neither fully understand or have any real place in.
I wasn’t a smoker, but I bought a pack from an old woman on a street corner in St. Petersburg. She was selling them for 150 Rubles; I gave her a 200 Ruble bill and as she fumbled through her one and five Ruble bills, I told her, “Nyeh nada” – to keep the change. She almost cried. “Spaceba, spaceba,” – thank you – she told me again and again and blessed me. All for about five cents.
And then all your pride in being a Buick-driving, VCR-watching, I-floss-my-teeth-with-small-countries, capital “A” American breaks down. You realize just how bad things are there: a country that is just ending one of the darkest of dark ages and trying to rejoin a world that feared it – and left it behind. They are trying to be reborn as a capitalist economic power – and it’s a painful “I-was-in-labor-with-you-for-three-weeks” birth. You don’t feel superior; you just feel sorry for the people who have to live with the bitter fruits of the past.
While I was there last summer, the Ruble exchange rate went from 1,000 to a dollar to 1,300 per dollar – 30 percent currency inflation – in five weeks. It has stabilized much since then, but in many ways the situation is a thin veneer of order over a lot of misery and people who feel like they’ve just moved to a new planet. Granted, it comes pre-furnished, but it’s still a new planet.
Much has stayed the same: most of the mid- or lower-level civil servants are still the old Communist “apparatchiks” who were running things before. The State still owns almost all of the land (accordingly, most Russians still pay less than a dollar a month for rent and utilities) and almost all of the businesses.
And yet it has all changed: the main streets and parks are home to countless beggars. These people have lived their entire lives under a government that watched everything, that controlled everything. And now their government can barely take care of itself, let alone the people who have always depended on its insulating their world. It will take Russia a long time to change, and it will involve many sacrifices. And when you walk past these sacrifices, selling their cigarettes, you can’t help but taste the tiniest part of their pain. And you become very glad that there is a home to go back to.
All things considered, Russia is a wonderful place to spend time. My friends and I walked along the riverfront of St. Petersburg at two a.m. without any worries – something you probably shouldn’t attempt in a large city in America without bringing along a Mechanized Infantry batallion. I had a wonderful time haggling in street markets, making offers in my poor Russian, and getting responses in much better English. Russia is a country that reads: book vendors were everywhere, and a bound volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies in Russian cost me 55 cents. You haven’t laughed until you’ve seen “The Karate Kid” in a movie theater with dubbed-over Russian voices. And you can go to Russian dance clubs, recycle old dances like the “Twist” or the “Mashed Potato,” and everyone will think you’re a disco god.
