The western edge of the square is dominated by the imposing Kremlin walls, which circle the perimeter of the government headquarters. I hadn’t expected the Kremlin to feel so much like a fortress. But that’s what it is. The Kremlin is one of the oldest parts of the city. It’s an ancient walled citadel from which eleventh-century princes administered the expanding city-state of Muscovy.
The creepiest part of Red Square is Lenin’s mausoleum. Conscious of the ease with which leaders could be elevated to the level of a deity, Lenin was adamant about not being turned into the patron saint of the Soviet Union when he died. To him, this was no different from the way people worshipped the tsar he’d worked to overthrow.
Lenin spent the last years of his life warning other Soviet higher-ups about Joseph Stalin, a man he thought had the potential for ruthless abuse of power. As soon as Lenin died, Stalin set about pursuing just that. He started by embalming Lenin, putting his body in a glass casket on Red Square, and erecting Lenin statues all over the country. Even today, people wait in line for hours to file past Lenin’s casket.
Actually, I take it back: the creepiest thing about Red Square isn’t the Lenin mausoleum, it’s the Stalin impersonators roaming around, hoping to pose for photos with tourists in exchange for tips.
I shudder when I see the first, a stout man with a thick mustache and a long gray overcoat.
Stalin is thought to be responsible for more human deaths than almost anyone else in history. Historians place his death toll between 20 and 50 million. And yet here he is, smiling and waving across Red Square, ducking into the nearby mall when he needs to use the bathroom.
Few of the Russians around me seem troubled by this. Stalin’s grave still sits beside those of venerated Soviet leaders outside the gates of the Kremlin, and though his body has been moved to another location, on the day that I visit, someone has left roses at his marker. Though few families in Russia today would be completely untouched by Stalin’s waves of repression and terror, neither the Soviet nor Russian government felt it could afford to sacrifice the political capital of his victory in the Second World War. So they left Stalin hovering in the awkward space between international tribunal criminal and war hero. The problem with not taking your despots out back and shooting them, however, is that time erases the memories of their worst crimes, and today, it’s not hard to find young Russians who admire Stalin.
As I always do to cope with things that enrage me, I log this detail for a future joke. Something about Stalin impersonators trolling for tips, or no, that’s too easy. Maybe something about what jobs a person goes out for before they try Stalin impersonating, or how they know they’d be good at the job. Maybe there’s a job interview. “What would you say is your greatest weakness?” “Trusting Adolf Hitler.” I wonder how this material would play here.
On my third day in Moscow, I take the metro to a famous park, and when I get out, I find a long line of people holding flowers for no discernible reason. I pull out my phone and Google “flowers Russia line.” I Google the date—maybe today is some kind of holiday? I find nothing. The line is long, easily a thirty-minute wait, but people keep arriving on the metro from different parts of the city and joining the end of it, by themselves or in groups. No one seems in much of a hurry.
I walk all the way down to the front of the line, and I realize that it’s stretching to the gates of the French embassy. People are waiting to add to what’s already easily a four-foot mountain of flowers and candles and teddy bears. Then I remember: there has been a terrorist attack at a nightclub in Paris. It seemed so sad and distant when I read about it on the news this morning; now, all at once, it’s real.
I’m again sobbing. (Potential tourism slogan for the former Soviet Union: “Come for a few good cries!”)
I never make it to the park. Instead, I spend the whole day outside the French embassy, watching the line of people grow, watching the other tourists gape, as stunned and spellbound as I am. “No one would ever do this back home,” I hear an Australian man tell his companions. People hold signs that say NO HATE. An old man with a look of profound sadness wears a beret and carries flowers arranged to look like the French flag.
I strike up a conversation with two high school students, Dima and Andre, who thankfully speak English, and I ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind all day: What made you come here? How did you know to do this?
They looked shocked by the question. “It is a pity,” Andre says, shaking his head. “Only in such moments like this we remember that we’re mostly the same, our nation and France, and only in such moments we remember that there is something like humanity in us. That’s why I’m here—it’s my duty as a human.”
Dima looks upset. He tells me he couldn’t sleep last night when he heard the news, and he stayed up all night watching videos of the concert, trying to help the police by identifying the terrorists in the video, which, okay, Interpol might have better resources, but still.
I think about what the Australian said, and what Natalia said about the difference between America and Russia, and I think, yeah, there’s no way this scene would happen in New York. I can’t picture ordinary people taking a few hours out of their day to show up and make a gesture. And maybe that’s all it is: a gesture.
But I think about the way even the most worldly Americans I know have a tendency to see Russians as cartoonish villains, how they almost imagine that the country is full of people who think and speak like Vladimir Putin, and I think about all the people who saw my heavy suitcase and, without saying a word, picked it up and carried it, and the people who offered me rides and put me up in their homes, and I think about Andre and his duty as a human.
“Little Joseph was born in Georgia,” Pavel is telling us. “As a child, he was very poor. He often played in the streams and forests.”
Little Joseph is perhaps better known by his adult name, which is Joseph Stalin, and we’re talking about him because we’re poking around in his former secret underground bunker, which is no longer secret, but still very much underground, to the tune of twenty stories below street level, and accessible only by stairs or a single, overworked elevator, which Pavel repeatedly reminded us we could not take down unless we were “quite old” or “having a very big illness.”
Built at the height of Cold War tensions, the seventy-five-thousand-square-foot complex was meant to serve as a secure command center in the event of nuclear war. It was designed to withstand a nuclear blast and provide enough clean air, water, and food to sustain staff for up to three months without outside intervention.
Today, it’s a Cold War museum, set up to look like an active Soviet bunker and displaying artifacts from that era, like radio equipment and military maps, and things that should never be displayed, like a life-sized, lifelike Stalin mannequin, which is casually seated behind a stately wooden desk.
Pavel is leading the one English-language bunker tour of the day.
“I can do the Russian tour,” I said when the woman at the front desk informed me of this.
Upon hearing my accent, she’d narrowed her eyes and replied, “No, you can’t.”
At first, I’m impressed by Pavel’s English, but after a while, I start to suspect he has simply memorized the entire tour, perhaps even phonetically. When I ask him questions, his answers alternate between scripted and nonsensical.
“So did people ever live in the bunker?” I ask him.
He asks me to repeat myself and I do, slowly, and afterward he shakes his head. “Sorry, I do not understand your question.”
In addition to Russian and English tours, the bunker offers laser tag, and can be rented out for children’s birthday parties.
I start feeling bad for Pavel after a mishap in one of the final rooms. “So now we will do a live demonstration of launching a nuclear missile,” he announces. “Who would like to volunteer?”
I’m somewhat of a tour fanatic. I take tours whenever I travel, and I scope out the offerings on my home turf
. I’d probably take a guided tour of my own apartment, if it were offered. I can therefore say fairly confidently that if a tour guide asks for volunteers on an excursion where the median age is higher than twelve, he’s going to get a bunch of adults staring at one another, waiting for someone else to raise her hand first.
This is exactly what happens to Pavel: we all kind of look at each other. I think everyone, at this point, feels a little sorry for him—I doubt any of us would be surprised if he told us, at the end of it, that this was his first day on the job.
Pavel seems to take our reluctance to volunteer immediately as a denunciation of his skill as a tour guide. “Okay,” he says quietly. “So the demonstration is canceled.”
I spend my last night in Russia on an overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where I’ll catch a connecting flight back to Moscow, and then on to China. This the end of the first leg of my trip. I’m heading back to China for a planned work break that will also allow me to save money for the next leg of my trip—if I decide to go.
If I’d looked at a map before planning my trip, I would have flown home from Moscow, not St. Petersburg. But because I think geography is best intuited, I paid extra to fly out of St. Petersburg, which I knew was farther north than Moscow, and therefore assumed would be farther away from Europe.
Already, I can feel the things I will miss about the former Soviet Union while I’m gone. I’ll miss getting a torn receipt for every purchase, even trips to the bathroom. I’ll miss how, at restaurants, you sign your bill, and then the server witnesses it by adding her own signature. I’ll miss the cozy beds on trains and the awkward cots in Couchsurfing stays.
The train I book to St. Petersburg is accidentally top-of-the-line—the bathrooms are automated and clean and each carriage has an upper and lower deck. There’s real coffee, instead of a cup full of instant grounds and directions to the closest samovar.
In the morning, the train wakes us with music that slowly grows louder. A soothing female voice comes over the loudspeaker to welcome us to St. Petersburg. “We hope it was a pleasant journey,” she purrs, “and that your trip in the city will be useful.”
Wet, heavy snow falls from the sky. I climb to a rooftop and look out over the city at dawn (which, lucky for me, is still going strong at nine a.m.). I feel so many things, but above all, I’m smiling, almost laughing, because even if this trip never turns into a book or part of a college’s core curriculum, I’m so proud of what I’ve done, that I did this, that I made it, that I did what I set out to.
The signs at the airport are wonderfully mistranslated. FOR YOUR SAFETY, one warns, PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING ONEROUS.
I don’t know what flight path the plane follows, but I like to imagine it goes due east from Moscow, undoing all of the travel I just finished. Though I don’t feel it happen, at some point on the plane my trip slips from present tense to past. “I’m traveling through the former Soviet Union” becomes “I traveled through the former Soviet Union.”
Even now, I know I’m not finished. I feel there’s more Russian to be learned and more Russia to see, and I also have a vague sense that I need to cross a continent by train.
I think about how Moscow seemed to symbolize the ambitions of the Soviet Union, and I contemplate my own aspirations. What would it be like, I wonder as the plane speeds through the clouds, to do a stand-up gig in Moscow?
Three: The Trans-Siberian Railway
18
Trans-Siberian Prelude: A Brief Stopover in China
“Come on, dude, you should have known I grew up in Brest,” Anton says, smiling. It’s a familiar smile, one that conjures up the past without warning.
I’ve been back in Shanghai two weeks, and already my life is returning to well-worn rhythms: work, comedy, dinner with friends, trips to the grocery store that don’t end, as they once did in Uzbekistan, with my accidentally buying pinecone-flavored mouthwash. Also, because I’m an idiot, I’m having beers with Anton.
“Whatever,” I say, biting my lip to fight back my own grin, “Belarus is a small country.”
To be fair, Anton and I probably couldn’t have avoided each other if we wanted to, but we’re 100 percent not trying. Since we broke up, Anton has started performing at the comedy club I started in Shanghai. This bothered me at first. He doesn’t live in Shanghai and when we were together, this was unquestionably my turf. When we first broke up, I didn’t have to see him if I didn’t want to. Now I have no choice. But it’s been two years, and I’m trying to be a better person.
Anton and I were on the same show tonight and coincidentally ended up at the same bar after. We’re in a group but keep catching each other’s eyes, slipping in words that carry coded meanings only the other will understand, referencing the private language we once shared.
In Turkmenistan, I went out of my way to camp beside a crater filled with fire. Now it seems I have returned to Shanghai to play with it.
To return to a place you know after being somewhere else is to see the familiar with fresh eyes. By this point I’ve lived in Shanghai, on and off, for almost six years and know the city like my childhood bedroom, but for my first few days back, everything seems foreign and new. For me, half the magic of travel is returning to some version of home and noticing all the odd details rendered invisible by familiarity.
The air is warm and smells faintly of cigarettes. I’m shocked by the sight of two men walking down the street hand in hand and then saddened by the implications of my reaction. I hadn’t even noticed how hidden queerness had been in the places I just visited. It seems strange that the Internet is censored here and not in Belarus.
I realize I’d grown used to certain quirks of the former Soviet Union—the sticks of gum delivered with each restaurant bill, the way that metro stations that connected two lines assigned two different names to the same station, one for each line. Mostly, I marvel at how easy it is to buy things. Grocery stores sell all different kinds of cereal and produce that’s not in season—a luxury I hadn’t realized I’d taken for granted, until I watched the produce sections grow smaller and more paltry as autumn wore on in the former USSR.
At first, I have the impulse to purchase everything I could conceivably someday need. I pick up tape at convenience stores and buy three different types of shampoo. I quickly amass a collection of batteries and umbrellas.
In the former Soviet Union, shopping was a struggle. Some of the smaller cities still felt like they were running on the Soviet system of commerce, with a few enormous department stores that sold everything, instead of many small stores that sold some things.
I assumed that my Russophilia would take a hiatus while I was back in Shanghai. I am, after all, in a Chinese city, surrounded by Mandarin speakers and fed daily reminders of the one undeniable realm in which China had achieved cultural superiority over the Russians: the food. Russian cuisine is a valiant attempt to do one’s best with root vegetables. Chinese dishes, in contrast, burst with flavor and abound in variety. There’s a reason you can find Chinese food almost anywhere you go and would be hard-pressed to name two Russian restaurants in your city.
Plus, there was the fact that I had already done the thing my Russian obsession had pushed me to do: I had gone and seen these places with my own eyes, built a foundation in the language, celebrated a wedding, and visited Lenin’s embalmed remains.
But in the months I spend in Shanghai, I somehow manage, in the middle of a Chinese city, to surround myself with Russians.
My first lead comes from my friend Olga, who has recently hired a personal trainer. “He’s Russian,” she tells me, “and very good.”
I had never considered hiring a personal trainer. I prefer exercise that feels like napping, like yoga and promising myself I’ll do the seven-minute workout tomorrow.
But I’m intrigued by the fact that he’s Russian. “Do you feel like you’ve gotten in better shape?” I ask.
“Oh, yes!” she exclaims. And then, sensing where this is going, she add
s, “But I don’t think he speaks English.”
This sells me on it. I imagine myself killing two birds with one stone: developing a six-pack while also keeping up my Russian.
“Can I have his number?” I ask.
Olga frowns. “I think . . . it will be very hard for you to communicate.”
Her trainer’s name is Sergey, and I message him with some help from Google Translate. He sends me an address that sounds familiar; when I arrive, I realize why. His gym is in an office building that happens to house the first company I worked for in Shanghai.
I take the elevator up to the fifth floor, hoping I don’t bump into any former colleagues on the floor below. I didn’t know this place had a gym, I muse.
It didn’t, I realize when I get off the elevator. Sergey’s gym has simply taken the office space directly above my old company and converted it into a gym. Across the hall, white-collar workers in business casual manage accounting books and prepare visa applications. The bathrooms near the elevators are used by gym patrons and middle managers alike. It doesn’t feel like a gym; it feels like an office space that was turned into a gym in the middle of the night and without proper permits.
Sergey greets me with a firm handshake and no smile. He’s serious, solidly built, and extremely hot.
He nods that I should get on the treadmill.
It quickly becomes apparent that Sergey’s English is better than my Russian, but he’s much shyer to speak in a second language than I am.
“What you eat?” he asks as I walk on the treadmill.
“Like, today?” I reply.
He shakes his head. “Every day, what you eat?”
“Umm . . .” I struggle to think of all the foods I eat on a daily basis. I begin to list them, leaving off the things I sense he wouldn’t approve of. “Quinoa, kale, cereal, yogurt, dumplings, sushi . . .”
From the look in his eyes, I can tell he understood none of this. “Eggs?” he asks.
Open Mic Night in Moscow Page 33
