How the Other (Half?) Lives

Both Vladimir Putin and his soon-to-be successor, Dmitri Medvedev, have pledged to massively invest in Russia’s infrastructure and promote small and medium-sized businesses, two things experts have been recommending for some time. My recent trip to Pskov has helped me to gain perspective on these issues, something along the lines of: oh my god is there a lot of work to do.

Pskov is only 170 miles from St. Petersburg––roughly the distance between New York and Baltimore––yet it takes five-and-a-half hours to get there because the major thru fare, M-20, is a dilapidated two-laner, where you have to swerve to avoid the potholes. It’s lined with crosses and bouquets devoted to all the people who didn’t make it. According to a Reuters story, Russia has 10 times more accidents per vehicle than Germany or Britain and few motorists bother to wear seatbelts. Emergency services are often slow and under-equipped.

Nothing in the area around Pskov escapes poverty––not the roads or the people or the structures or the soggy and dirty landscape. How could wealth or opportunity exist in such a landscape? I can only imagine what it’s like to grow up here (maybe I’ll ask NHL great Alexei Federov, a native Pskovian).

Outside the monastery in Pskov, zombie-faced people limp about. I took a wrong turn and ended up in the frightening world of authenticity. A stray woman captured a stray dog and tried to tie it to a column, but her fingers were too screwed up to maneuver the clasp. She asked me to help, but she had the look of a rabid raccoon and it crossed my mind that she might attack me if I got too close. I told her she should let the dog wander home. I took a step forward and the thing (a German Shepard) practically jumped into her arms. “He must be afraid of men,” she said. I shook my head and went back to the bus.

On the private enterprise end of my initial statement, I continue to be struck by what I perceived as a lack of variety of goods and services in Russia. The same people sell the same things wherever you go. All the restaurants serve potatoes, cabbage, and chicken, rearranged for each course. All the souvenir shops hawk the same junk. Just once I’d like to walk into a little restaurant and get a home-cooked meal, like in Krakow, or find a street where real artisans’ sell one-of-a-kind creations, like in Tallinn. Russians, it would appear, are too busy surviving to bother with all this yuppie crap.

The highlight of the trip was the 1500-year-old Izborsk fortress, one of many that used to line the Western frontier of pre-Kievan Rus. It reminded me of Masada in Israel. At the top of one of the watchtowers there’s a spectacular westward view over the swamps toward Estonia. This view has not changed much since medieval times––the huts below have no electricity or running water and are heated by firewood stacked in their front yards. It’s just as my great-grandparents described it––bleak and muddy. This place sucks and it deserves to be fixed.