Snapshots

Friday, July 11, 2003
Delta Flight 30, on tarmac, JFK

"Uh oh," says the woman next to me as we wait for our flight to take off for Moscow. She points to a newspaper headline--"Bomb in Moscow Kills 1." It is less than a week since Chechen separatists killed more than a dozen people at a rock concert outside the city, but it's curiosity rather than fear that I feel. ("The Chechens aren't interested in tourists," Sheila McCarthy explained to me last week. "They want to get into the heart of Moscow.") I want to understand these "black widows" and discover what possesses these women to volunteer as suicide bombers. Once back home I find myself reading any article that mentions Chechnya, not just the headlines, looking for answers.

Saturday, July 12, 2003
Cabin 109, Novikov Priboy, Moscow

Sunday, July 13, 2003
Lunch at the Kempinski Hotel, Moscow

"I can only think of Stalin as a very benevolent leader. He was called 'little father.'" This unexpected statement comes from fellow cruise-ship passenger Judy Traub of Long Island. It is more surprising when you learn that at the age of 5, under Stalin's rule, Traub was deported from her native Poland to a Siberian labor camp.

In 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact split Poland. The town Traub's family lived in fell to the Soviets, the rest of her relations to the Germans. When her father requested a move to the German side to reunite the family, it was seen as an act of disloyalty.

Three weeks later Traub and her family heard a knock on the door one night. The family was sent to an outpost 2,000 kilometers from the Trans-Siberian railroad's last stop. "At the time it seemed like the worst, but that's how we survived," Traub said. When they returned home to Poland a few years later all of their relations but one uncle had perished under Hitler.

Sunday, July 20,2003
Novikov Priboy, Svir River

Tonight was our Surprise Entertainment. My Russian language group sang "Kalinka" and "Moscow Nights"--in Russian--on the boat deck accompanied by our onboard musicians (an accordionist and fiddler). For our show-stopping encore we played the wooden spoons. Later in the program a Russian girl from the gift shop came out in a sequin cocktail dress and sang "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and for the finale, Arty, one of our Russian interpreters, belted out a Celine Dion number. Now that's cross-cultural entertainment.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003
St. Petersburg

Walking on the sidewalk this afternoon I passed ice cream vendors, souvenir stalls, and then a muzzled brown bear, attached by a leash to a boy. For a few rubles passersby could--and did--sit with the bear for a photo.

Continuing on I saw a few Gypsy families, mothers with young children, babies, sitting in doorways, asking for money. Our Russian guides warn us to hang tight to our belongings, but I refuse to feel their condemnation and only see poverty, hardship. Later I am shocked to learn that at this same moment Joan and Ev Brenner are swarmed by an entire family, their bags opened, a set of eyeglasses taken. The Brenners are ultimately rescued by the sudden appearance of policemen who drag the family away.

Wednesday, July 23, 2003
On bus in St. Petersburg

"Freedom and democracy are for the intellectuals, it's better to have sausage on the table." Olga, our tour guide in St. Petersburg, relates this Russian sentiment to explain the difficulty of the transition for the older generation, the ones who lost their savings, saw pensions shrink with the downfall of Communism and don't even bother to vote. Olga, though, who supplements her paltry teacher's income as a guide, does not agree with them. "Freedom is a great psychological change," she says to explain the economic instability and rising crime rate around her. But "freedom is such a great value in itself that people should be willing to pay anything for it," she tells our busload of Americans. "It was stressful, to put it mildly, to live under the Soviet regime."