Rah Rah Rasputin

We all passed out early on the night train back to Petersburg. Three days of nonstop in the most muscular city in Europe takes it right out of you.

Tolstoy associated St. Petersburg with femininity and Moscow with masculinity and Christ was he right on the second. Walking through Red Square is like being in the triangle formed by a muscular, flexing arm. On one side you have the Kremlin walls––huge and formidable, red with blood like a biceps under strain, both threatening and ostentatious. To the East is St. Basil’s Cathedral, the ornate hand and wrist of the arm, its onion domes twisting to the sky like fingers and a facade carved up by the lines of a wrist or the palm. It’s smaller than you think, and so well manicured it looks downright Disney. The long northern forearm of the square, opposite the Kremlin, is occupied by GUM (pron. GOOm), once the largest department store in Europe, now the continent’s largest irony. GUM has every top brand––Gucci, Prada, Versace you name it; it’s a palace of upscale, nouveau riche capitalism right on Red Square, where soldiers and the tanks and missile launchers would rumble through, singing Lenin’s praises, and pledging their balls and bolts to the eternal Soviet Union.

Not that the irony all that meaningful it just tickles me––the hubris. New Russia mocks Soviet Russia so endlessly there’s no sense in tallying up the examples; it’s condescending and obvious. As a matter of fact, I’d say there are four stages in Russian history––pre-imperial, imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet––and they coexist so uneasily its like being at the world’s most awkward family reunion, or an interminable divorce hearing between four spouses. Imperial Russia mocks pre-imperial Russia; the Soviets mock the czars; and post-Soviet Russia mocks everything that came before it, but loves and needs them too as history. Listen as you walk down the street, and you’ll hear the four eras stating their cases, pulling and tugging in different directions. That moulding on the building there is so elegant––I miss the czars. But thank God for the buses and the trains and the power––only Soviets could do that. And now look at that––a real Russian church, if only Peter hadn’t confused this whole country. Now I’m hungry, and if it weren’t for this Russia I’m actually living in, I couldn’t just pop into a coffee shop.

As Willard says in Apocalypse now––‘Kurtz broke from them (the military) then broke from himself. I’d never seen a man so broken up.’ Or a country.

PS: The title of the post is the chorus to the song that woke us up at 6:45 on the train back to St. Petersburg: an electronic, Russo/Euro-trash tune, in English, celebrating the mystic Rasputin. This is where I live.