Val Karren: The Deceit of Riches

Russia’s potential in that time was intoxicating and irresistible to any entrepreneur, foreign or domestic. The present was latent with possibilities. The intelligence, the perseverance, the long suffering of its populace offered the children of Russia a future of prosperity and freedom unknown ever before to the children of the Motherland if only Moscow would allow it.

Moscow for the last several years had been eating its own children. Mercy and decency were not to be found in circles where money and power were being consolidated. President Yeltsin, who was surrounded by self-seeking, opportunistic figures from circles of both politicians and criminals, seemed unaware or unable to control the wholesale theft of the country’s future. The new laws of deregulation were strong with new ideology but void of a long-term perspective for Russia and her people. The ability for the country to correct its path before it was too late was slipping quickly away with each new assassination, car bomb, and back alley murder. The future was up for grabs and everybody was grabbing what they could before the music stopped!

On the numerous billboards along the Leningradskiy Highway, on our way into central Moscow, I could read that Christmas had been officially rehabilitated and was once again in fashion. The taxi driver, a young man with small children who needed gifts from Dedya Moroz (Father Frost) in the morning, charged me an extortionate sixty dollars in cold hard American cash for a lift into town. It surely hadn’t taken long for the principles of supply and demand to be understood on the streets of Moscow.

I sniffed the air in the cabin of the cramped car and looked with suspicion at my driver.

“What’s that I smell?” I asked suspiciously.

“All is normal, all is normal,” my driver responded without actually reassuring me that everything was fine. Seeing my continued distrust the driver leaned across me, his left hand still on the steering wheel, and reached into the miniature glove compartment of this mud splattered Lada, and produced a glass flask of Vodka and showed it to me with a proud smile.

“Thanks… but no,” I held up my hands to refuse his hospitality with even more concern on my face.

“It’s for the windshield!” he insisted as he waved the bottle in the air motioning to the dirty glass we were both squinting to see through.

Right on cue, a large freight truck passed us on the left spraying the windows with a thick mud from the slushy street. For a second or two we could see nothing but brown sludge out of the front windows. The smell of strong alcohol filled the cabin of the car again as the windshield wipers worked frantically to rinse away the mud and snow. Another shot of vodka from the lever on the steering column and we could see the dim street lights again as we hurled down Leningradskoe Boulevard passing the northern river station on our right.

“It never freezes, and it’s cheaper than the real stuff, and I can get it anywhere!” the driver continued to explain his enterprising use of Russia’s magic elixir.

“Clever!” I snorted with irony.

With a gleeful smile, he closed up the glove box before swerving to exit Leningradskiy Prospect just before Belorusskiy Train Station and swung on to the northern bend of Moscow’s outer ring road towards Prospect Mira, and my waiting bed.

“Nope! Nothing has changed since I left,” I said to myself and settled into my seat as we careened through the slushy roads and falling snow, just as Moscow’s skyscrapers came into view through the Christmas snow and urban twilight. Ruby-lit stars burned visibly in a halo above the old city center. It was good to be back!

“Wah wah wah — wah wah wah wah?” Is all I actually understood from the ticket window at the Kazanskiy Train Station after announcing my destination.

“The cheaper the better,” I replied and waited for the large, gray woman behind the glass to tell me a price for the lowest class ticket for the overnight train to Nizhniy Novgorod.

As I moved slowly with my luggage to the train platforms, an older police man in his blue shapka and muddy boots lazing at the side of the gate, eyeing a foreigner, stood up right and asked gruffly, “What are you?”

“American,” I answered with a bit of annoyance in my voice.

“Where are you going?” he inquired holding out his hand to signal to inspect my travel authorization.

“To Nizhniy,” I answered him with a glance upward to the departure board displaying the same destination.

“You? To Nizhniy? We’ll see about that,” He took my passport, visa and train ticket and inspected them all with a suspicious surprise and asked, “What is your program?”

“Linguistics and Literature,” was my official reply.

“Show me your invitation letter,” he demanded.

I produced a faxed copy of my acceptance letter from the Nizhgorodskiy State University stating I was excepted on the tenth of January to begin lectures and readings in Russian linguistics and literature.

After a check and recheck of my documents, he handed all the items back to me. He eyed me up one last time looking for any reason to refuse me. Finding nothing out of place, he relented. With a flick of his head, he waved me on to the platform to my waiting third class sleeper car, wherein I hardly slept a wink of the four hundred kilometer train ride to Nizhniy Novgorod.

Both the surprise and suspicion of the police officer about my intention to travel to Nizhniy Novgorod was expected. Nizhniy Novgorod was until just two years early a “NO GO” city for all foreigners. During the Cold War, the city was a hotbed of research and development of Soviet military technology and was therefore off limits to all without express permission to be there. When the leadership of the Soviet Union wanted to make Andrey Sakharov unreachable to the outside world for his peace activism around the world, they exiled him to this closed bastion under house arrest, where the foreign press and Nobel committee couldn’t reach him. To meet an American traveling unaccompanied to this city just a few year earlier was unheard of in the USSR. All requests to visit would have been summarily refused, and any credentials stating the opposite would have been highly suspect and most likely forged.

Nizhniy Novgorod has been a Russian manufacturing base of both military and civilian machinery since before the Second World War and the revolution of 1917. Renamed Gorkiy during the communist period, to honor a socialist author from the city, the engineers here produced Russia’s greatest technological developments. The SOKOL aircraft factory has been designing and assembling fighter planes since the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s and more recently the MIG fighter aircraft during the Cold War. The ubiquitous black Volga sedan that mid-level apparatchiks and their staff drive around Moscow, as well as the light blue versions for taxis, are all assembled in Nizhniy Novgorod in the Avtozavod (car factory) region of the city. The massive GAZ trucks, born here, roll constantly over the streets of the town, cruising up and down Prospect Lenina on the western bank of the Oka River making deliveries to the plethora of factories. Through the decades Gorkiy developed into Russia’s third city after Moscow and Leningrad due to its strategic location on the Volga River which flows through the heart of Russia’s interior. Students in the province could receive top rated education in aeronautics, mechanical engineering or classical music without having to relocate to either Moscow or Leningrad. In the skies, the streets and waterways around Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia’s latest technologies were being tested and unveiled well out of sight of the curious onlookers, benign or otherwise, until the early 1990s.