New Russia

The "face control" checkpoints outside the dazzling, hedonistic caverns of night are a byproduct of New Russia. PHOTO: Michael Serazio

At its best, travel, like life, is about balance.

The ideal schedule balances the elements: art and architecture, nature, food and drink, religion, sport. One should spend no more time on dead
people than live people. No more time on classical culture than pop.

For every night at the Bolshoi, a shuffle through the wood shavings of a proletariat's dive bar should follow. Let the high minded mingle with the low brow on the itinerary. Get wound up, but find ways to chill out. Steamy bathhouses provide the antidote - the proverbial aspirin - to thin the blood pressure after traversing Moscow's suicidal thoroughfares. Chase the night with revelry - and toil through the day with equal joy. To sleep through either would be to miss the big picture. You'd return home with an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.

For if travel truly aims to avoid the "tourism" label, it is an exercise in approximation; an effort to understand what things are like for people who live in a given place. What are the bridges and tunnels of daily life; what are its ebbs and flows? With ten days to work with, we could catch merely a glimpse - a fleeting window of opportunity to peer in on another culture. Yet this trip uniquely demanded even more than that. We were asked to become foreign correspondents on the fly.

To learn about an entirely new world, literally, and question the guideposts as we went along. It is, of course, what every journalistic endeavor is about at its core, but without a common language, hoping to report seemed, at times, a laughable, ludicrous endeavor.

When you can't even speak to sources, literally again, the odds are stacked hopelessly against you. And, yet, somehow, with or without a translator, this band of ragtag journos managed.

Our whirlwind began in moody, muddy, madcap Moscow, where everyone looks sketchy and crosswalks are guesswork. In terms of layout, Moscow, a megalopolis spawned from a medieval seedling, shares certain tendencies with other cities of the same urban genealogy. Like Tokyo or London, the grid is spun round and twisted about so that buildings and parks and monuments converge at odd angles on the horizon, concentric circles confirming origin and hinting at what's to come.

Like Tokyo, there's a futuristic style in place - only it's a future left behind 50 years ago. The Jetson spires that soar in the distance seem less hopeful, less assured, less Yuri Gagarin, and more like an ironic joke projected onto the Russian character, an ethos battered by time into resignation, cynicism, and, as many writers have noted, mystery.

Communism failed. The idols fell. And capitalism comes packaged as a plastic amusement parlor. Moscow itself seems, in some ways, a grittier, crumbling version of Vegas. Cranes, sprinkled along the horizon and hunched over construction projects, seem to project less momentum than in a place like Berlin, which is also converting itself to progress after Iron Curtain stagnation.

Everything about Russia projects toughness, or a quality like gloom hardened. Their leaders embody this grizzled determination, from Stalin's vacant stare to Putin's inscrutable, watchful gaze. The weather blows hard on the Russian soul - endless sleets of freezing snow, permanent sepia tones, and a long, dark winter always waiting around the bend with a sadistic, shivering smile on its face.

Officially, the reason for our trip was to tell the story of New Russia that's being written in synagogues, on an endless train of iconic edifices, and by gummy, Ned Flanders 7th Day Adventist missionaries. Yet the story of New Russia that I see is not of religion, but of rejecting religion. In a context where people can, for the first time, freely choose the road of faith, I find people turning away from it - a kind of national reverse psychology. There is religion here, but it's a faith of the godless. It's hookers whiling away the night on cell phones in hotel lobbies. It's young men drowning their sorrows - and their lives - in vodka. One guesses their faith would need to be at least as strong as that of the hermetically sealed clergy we met. Perhaps stronger.

At the dawn of the 21st century, I see a decadent Muscovite soul - prostitution and murders, gambling and mafia, drugs and racism, and unrepentant, unrestrained, lusty capitalism. The "face control" checkpoints outside the dazzling, hedonistic caverns of night are a byproduct of New Russia, namely the nouveau riche who seek nouveau pretensions, adopting the patterns and tropes already in place among the world's elite.

In addition to "face control," the local buzzword for bouncers separating the wheat from the chaff for admission, certain nightclubs now require "special cards" needed to get into "V.I.P. rooms." Elitism has apparently filled the vacuum that communism vacated. Now wealthy Moscow can have popularity contests just like New York or London. Now high fashion, the most dubious of all the arts, can take root and the underdressed underlings can be shut out once again. The proletariat, never a Very Important Person, finds himself back out in his dive bar, knee-deep in wood shavings. Meanwhile, flatheads in three-quarter length leather jackets and women with bushy mullet's leftover from the set of Knotts Landing or Dynasty file past, eager to claim their admission into New Russia.

There's an unmistakable fatalism in Moscow - a sense that the boat is sinking and you might as well swill all the vodka you can before it's over. Headline (I swear): "Someone Disappears Every 15 Minutes." Headline (I swear): "Drinking Problem Found At Nuke Sites."
"Taxi-cab, Moscow-way," the driver says, fording a stream of armored Mercedes as he pulls into traffic, negotiating invisible lanes, noticing as I search fruitlessly for a seatbelt, which seems to have been removed from all taxi cabs here. (And every car seems to have the potential to be a cab, as you stick your hand up on the street corner and suddenly a boxy piece of tin pulls over and unlocks the door for you.)

We haplessly stumbled around subway system bomb shelters, taking escalator journeys to the center of the earth, beyond fallout, beyond hope of getting back to the hotel.

Russian history, too, has been a series of hapless stumbles, especially the 20th century. When things couldn't seem to get worse, they somehow found a way. The gray-beard generation, who've seen it all, play out their days in retirement, sitting on a frozen lake, piddly dental floss jammed into the aqua slush below, hoping to catch dinner.

Of course, there are coping mechanisms - churches being the first of which. Around every corner, fantastical Disney onion domes bloom and reach out above the tree line. Wherever possible, it seems, they've thrown a coat of outlandish, eye-popping paint on these houses of worship - peachy pastels or electric blues or lemonade yellows or some other baby-carriage hue that helps the eye get through the dreary, muted merry-go-round of seasons. Perhaps that's also why communism failed. Its severe, grim architecture, uniformly granite with frowning facades, did little to lift the soul the way, say, hypnotic St. Basil's Cathedral does.

The street corner markets in Kazan inform us of the stage Russia is at musically. Van Halen guitar riffs pierce the eardrum, grow wings and take flight. Self-parodying Eurotrash techno bounces along, blissfully annoying. An MTV sensibility - America's most potent weapon perhaps - has infiltrated the airwaves and invaded the clubs. Every dreamboat Russian singer prances about practicing his Justin Timberlake puppy dog eyes as the camera swoops in for a slow motion close-up. Nightclubs segue into strip clubs and vice versa. Outside you have to bundle up. Inside less is more. A pretty girl with sparkling stars over her nipples throws Pepsi to the crowd.

In Kazan, we managed to get way, way off the beaten path. It's the type of place Lonely Planet eulogizes just before they defile it by going to press. And, yet, in Kazan, or just outside of it, redemption reappeared.

The Russia that had been seen thus far - freezing, brutish, severe, grim, solemn, irritated - the sleep-deprived travelers we had occasionally lapsed into - crabby, cranky, snappy and sniping - the history we had read - that cruel passage of time - the thuggish, slutty, seedy, dangerous, cynical, downtrodden - the pushing and shoving on its gilded subway platforms - the flagellating ascetics and all the shocks that Russian flesh is heir to naturally - at the end of it all, purity! Hope! Innocence! Joy! In the beautiful expressions, the giggles, the unsmudged freckles of children at the Raifa Virgin Monastery just outside of Kazan.

As Kitaro Nishida once noted, "If my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this." Indeed, these children seem to have a grasp on something - enlightenment, if you like - before life - that short, nasty reality on display throughout Russia - set in. They still had smiles on their soul and if I could muster up one prayer on the course of our pilgrimage, if I could slow down long enough to focus, I would pray that these children could keep their smiles somehow.

But everyone marches out of the Garden of Eden one day or another.

"Truth speaks with the mouth of a child," a monastery guide tells us later that day.

True, how true.

On the eve of departure, a wave of ambivalence washes through my system. Never before had I so wanted to get home and never had I been so fearful of what that return meant. The respite - the escape - that vacation should always provide had terminated. Time to get on with the final chapter of the year and, for many, time to stare down that dark abyss that awaits us after graduation, that stream of thin envelopes that comes back from potential employers.

At its best, travel is about balance. It's about balancing your personal needs and comfort with the often limited possibilities of a given situation. With a group, it's about balancing dynamics, proximity, relationships.

I can think of no better team to have attempted that with. Thank you all for what wonderful things you bring to the table and best of luck as the road takes you elsewhere.

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