To Russia, at Long Last

One of the prime selling points of the Baltic Sea cruise for me was the scheduled stop at St. Petersburg. I had studied Russian in high school and college. I’d lived in the Russian dorm at Middlebury College for one year and eaten countless meals at the Russian table in the dining hall. At one point, I could converse in Russian adequately in these situations. But I’d never traveled to Russia (or to the Soviet Union before it dissolved). Russian-language immersion in the United States, even at Middlebury, could only go so far.

Over the forty-two years since I graduated from Middlebury, my Russian language skills had atrophied. I could barely say “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Thank you,” and “I studied Russian in school, but I’ve forgotten almost everything.” I kept those phrases memorized, in case I ever needed them, but in forty-two years, I had never used them.

But finally, this summer’s cruise would take me to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). I would have two days in the city. It wouldn’t substitute for spending a semester abroad, as many of my Russian-speaking college friends had done, but it would be something.

My sister and I signed our party up for two all-day tours through Alla Tours, a St. Petersburg-based tour company. They would take care of all visa issues, admission prices, transportation, lunches, and other logistics. All I needed was rubles to tip them at the end.

Unfortunately, when we arrived in St. Petersburg, my husband didn’t feel well, so only my sister, her husband, and I took the tours.

Because of Russian customs protocols, it was a madhouse getting off the ship the first morning. All the passengers who had booked tours through any tour company crowded on the lower decks waiting to disembark. The Celebrity cruise line gave preference to passengers who had booked the ship’s tours. But thanks to my sister’s social skills (she’d met someone in the bar the night before), we had allied ourselves with other Alla Tour customers, and the Alla customers had arranged to be right behind the Celebrity customers in getting off the boat.

After meeting our Alla tour guide and bus driver, we spent a long and rainy day going from one museum or church or palace to the next. That evening we crept, exhausted, back to the ship to sleep. Then we awoke for another long and slightly less rainy day going from another museum or church or palace to yet another. More exhaustion at the end of the second day.

Our guide was wonderful, the tour well-arranged, and we saw a lot. Yet I didn’t feel that I knew St. Petersburg well, though I knew it better than Helsinki (which we’d seen the day before our arrival in Russia).

On the Alla tour I’d heard a lot of Russian history—and I’d seen a lot of Russian history. I’d stood in the room in Yusupov Palace where Rasputin was murdered, been in the Church on the Blood built over the location where Alexander II was assassinated, and seen the graves of the last Czars of Russia. I’d walked through portions of Catherine Palace and the Hermitage and the Peterhof Gardens—all magnificent assemblages of long-ago opulence. I’d heard a Russian Orthodox cantor lead a congregation in song. I’d eaten borscht in a Russian restaurant and seen tiled artwork in the St. Petersburg subway. I’d boated on the Neva River. I’d had some great moments in Russia.

But these two days didn’t give me much insight into the way today’s Russians live—only into the way the Czars lived more than a century ago.

My father had been to Moscow in the 1970s on business. I remembered him talking about the concrete buildings he was in, including nuclear reactor facilities. He’d talked about the shoddy Soviet construction. We passed by many neighborhoods consisting of blocks of gray, ugly apartments in St. Petersburg. The contrast with the ornate palaces we toured was striking. Our guide said the stark high-rises were examples of Soviet-era buildings, and I thought of my father’s comments.

How similar, I wondered, was Russian life today to life during the Soviet era? I surmised life today was probably more similar to Soviet life than to life in Czarist Russia–the Czars had lived like princes (which they were) and the peasants had lived like, well, peasants. What was the average Russian’s life like today?

Someday, perhaps, I’ll return to Russia to explore the nation more fully than my two day trips permitted. And I will brush up on my language skills before I go. If I’m going to encounter more Russians than an English-speaking tour guide and bus driver, I’ll want to be able to say more than “спасибо” (“spasibo” — thank you.)

What foreign countries would you like to visit?