This was written in November 1994. At the time, I didn't understand why the things I describe here were happening. Now I do - Russia was being systematically looted of billions of dollars worth of cash by US banking interests. For information on what caused this tragedy, see Chapter 6 of Mike Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon - The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.
I spent from October 5 through October 9 of 1994 in Moscow; this article is not so much a "trip report" as a random sampling of the things I found interesting about the place.
There were very few car repair shops, and no gas stations; yet the streets are full of cars, trucks, and buses. (Well, maybe not full, but certainly busy.) It seems that the repairs that get done on most cars get done by their owners, at the side of the road where they have broken down. Maintenance, especially on cars' engines, seems to be nearly nonexistent – probably 1/4 of the cars put out visible smoke, and the entire region around the city suffers from really bad smog because of that.
There are still lots of cigarette smokers in Moscow, even though most buildings (including the entire subway system) are no-smoking.
Money is a real problem: things aren't quite bad enough to fit the economists' definition of a hyper-inflation, but the ruble has gone from being worth about $1.50 in 1987 to being worth ... no; let me say instead that 1,000 rubles today there were worth about 35 cents.
Update from U.S. News & World Report, 10/24/1994 issue:
On Thursday, October 18, the ruble fell to the point
that the rate was 3,926 to the dollar -- or about 25
cents per kiloruble.
Update, 5/5/2004:
The ruble has been revalued, with the effect that on that day
one dollar was worth 29 rubles, which means that one ruble was
worth about 3.5 cents
The value of the ruble is falling so steadily that, rather than putting money into banks, it makes more sense to buy dollars, even after paying the commission that the currency exchanges charge. This produces some startling results:
The hotel I stayed at, the Ukraina, is a huge old building, built back when the leaders of the Soviet Union wanted to impress all their visitors from abroad with the "successes" of the Soviet system. Enormous. Each floor has a lobby that's bigger than most U.S. hotels' main lobbies; and the main lobby -- wow! But up in the lobby on my floor, every night when I came back in, there was a family sitting around a candle on the coffee table, talking. And when I got up to go to breakfast the next morning, there they would be, asleep on the sofas in the lobby. I guess they lived there, probably at the sufferance of the floor's "key lady."
The key lady is a Russian hotel custom. Each floor of the large hotels has a woman who lives in a suite of rooms set aside for her on the floor. She is the one you leave your room key with when you leave the building, and she is the one who -- if she can understand you, that is -- handles your requests and complaints.
Services are cheap; a metro ride, for example, costs 9 cents, and a pay telephone call costs 1 ruble (35/1000 of a cent). My ticket to the Moscow Circus cost $1.85, and that included a 25% commission to the selling agent. Most food things, though, cost about what they would here: a (wonderful!) fresh-baked loaf of bread cost me 54 cents, and a can of coke (yes, they have them) cost 45 to 50 cents, depending on where I bought it.
There are two major problems with money:
It was getting on towards winter in early October -- temperatures got almost down to freezing overnight, and the ground was covered with frost every morning. However, the buildings weren't heated. Not that there was anything wrong -- the heat just hadn't been turned on yet. And I'm not talking about my hotel, or any particular building; the heat for the entire city is centrally managed and distributed, and the requirements that tell when the city's heat can be turned on just hadn't been met yet this year.
English is spoken nearly everywhere. (It was very interesting, for example, to watch a Japanese tourist communicate with a Russian hotel clerk -- in English.) Since most consumer products come from Western Europe or the U.S., the Roman alphabet is everywhere. The Cyrillic alphabet is still what Russian is written in, of course, but it's wild to see "Marlboro" right next to "Dom Knigi" (House of Books).
There are three English-language newspapers in Moscow. None of them is more than 16 pages (4 sheets of paper), but they all cover the news fairly completely. Some sample stories in the copies I brought back are:
The strangest thing I saw regarding the language were the stop signs. "Stop" in Russian is (again, transliterated to the Roman alphabet) "Ostanovityes" (sort of). That's kind of long to fit onto a stop sign, so the Russians use a little sign with the Cyrillic letters for 'S', 'T', 'O', and 'P'.
The funniest thing that happened to me was that one night, at about 1:00 AM, the telephone rang. I said hello (making sure that whoever it was heard that I was speaking English, not Russian). This very sweet female voice then asked me, "Hello? You want good sex?" I said "No, thank you," and she -- just as sweetly as before -- replied, "Bye-bye," and hung up.
My scariest experience was being accosted by a bunch of Gypsy kids, probably 10 to 13 years old. A girl came up to me and asked for money; when I said "Nyet," she started patting down my leg while the rest of the herd started circling around me. I said "Nyet!" again, louder, and when that didn't stop, I put both my arms out wide and spun around once, fairly screaming "Nyet!!" I'm sorry it took that to get them to back off, but Utah after the locusts has nothing on tourists after an onslaught by a gang of Gypsy children.
Most Gypsies, though, are fairly nice. They are beggars, and everyone stays as far away from them as they can usually, but I sat next to a Gypsy family in the subway, and exchanged funny faces with a Gypsy 3-year-old just like any other kid. (Which of us was the kid? Both, of course.) On the way up the escalator, the Russians stayed several steps away from the family, giving me and one other man who wasn't afraid of them lots of room on the normally cram-packed escalator.
Those escalators are pretty impressive, on their own. The subways are WAY down underground -- they were originally built to double as fallout shelters back in the 1950s. I estimated, by how fast the escalator was going, the angle it was pitched at, and the time it took to get us down and up, that the subways are about 200 feet underground.
All in all, Moscow is now a "been there, done that." It was very interesting, but very depressing, as well. It's a shame to see a great nation sliding down the road to ... well, not ruin, exactly, but an awfully bad time ahead. Kinda scary, too: there's going to be a point where the people are going to say "Enough!" and try something different. And if that something is Zhiranovsky, the world had better watch out. My trip, more than anything else, convinced me of the wisdom of helping Yeltsin and the other forces of democracy in Russia as much as we possibly can.
Then, somebody told me I didn't say enough in the stuff above, and asked me some more questions. Here they are, along with the answers: