Stephan Orth: Behind Putin's Curtain: Friendships and Misadventures Inside Russia [aka Couchsurfing in Russia]

According to the inscription on the plinth, the larger-than-life bust was erected in 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I express my surprise at finding a memorial to the bloody tyrant. “There was a referendum and many war veterans were for it. We’re still a bit Communist here. Come on, we’ll show you your room.”

A short time later, the Lada with the disco sound system turns onto 40th Anniversary of October Street. This would make a good name for a diamond, too—they don’t mean the month, but the revolution. We pull up at a wooden house with blue walls, on stilts, of course. The cultural attaché leads the way to the first floor, opening the lopsided door with the number 11 on it. “Normally this is accommodation for teachers working in Mirny,” she says, handing me the keys. My room is heated to at least ninety-five degrees and has a sofa, a clothes rack, and a flat-screen TV. This will be my home for the next three days.

Truth No. 18:

I feel welcomed. Welcomed to the asshole of the world.

SIX WEEKS EARLIER

ANYONE INTERESTED INchecking out the profile of Genrich from Moscow on Couchsurfing.com should make sure they don’t have any plans for the next couple of hours. At least as far as Genrich from Moscow is concerned.

He writes: “By sending me a request you openly state that you have read, understood and promise to follow the principles of common living explained in my profile.”

In the upper right corner of the screen there is a black-and-white photo of a man sitting on the polished hood of a Jeep. He has hardly any hair on his head, but a full beard that the elderly Dostoyevsky would envy, and he scrutinizes the observer with serious eyes, deep, skeptical furrows in his brow. You could easily envisage his portrait on the bulletin board of a debt-collecting company with the heading Employee of the Month .

After the profile, twenty-seven screen pages await the reader. I learn that Genrich is thirty-one and is interested in a cappella singing, linguistics, cooking, orthodox theology, motorbikes, poetry, and dancing on the table. In the “favorite films” category he has listed Easy Rider , everything by Emir Kusturica, and Die Deutsche Wochenschau (German weekly review, a propaganda newsreel series from World War II). He speaks fluent English, French, Russian, German, Polish, and Ukrainian, and at the moment is learning Ancient Greek, Arabic, Georgian, and Latin.

The centerpiece of his profile is a complicated set of rules on how his guests should behave, spread over a number of Google documents with titles like “IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM ME TO YOU,” “I used to spend a lot of time in vain,” and “When I host people in my home, I live with them.” In case Google documents are not accessible in the reader’s current location, the same documents can be obtained via a link to the Russian Yandex server, accompanied by a note: “And yes, it is accessible from mainland China.”

From the reading matter I learn, among other things:

• that Genrich doesn’t have ten dwarves cleaning up after guests and vacuuming the floor;

• that his apartment isn’t a backpacker hostel;

• that he follows the principle of “rational egoism,” which is why he will only invite people he finds interesting.

Half a page later he cites a sentence that he never wants to read in an email—it goes like this: “I am open-minded, easygoing, I like traveling and am looking forward to meeting new people.” That sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it? Not to Genrich. He thinks such self-portraits on a travel portal are trivial and vacuous. And because nowadays this sentence is probably just copied and pasted from another profile, it’s just another way of saying, “I’m a lazy idiot.”

Speaking of idiots: another link leads to a “checklist of couch requests” for the “extremely busy or extremely lazy,” which raises one’s hopes of speeding up the application process. It’s a trap. A form appears on the screen with nine boxes that have to be ticked, which together form a sort of vow: “I will not send any copy/paste questions,” “my decision to contact this person has a deeper reason that I will cover in my email and which I think will please the host,” “I have studied the principles of common living explained in my host’s profile, I agree to follow them during my stay, and I will mention in my request all points on which my idea of hospitality differs.”

The accompanying link—as I have mentioned, a trap—leads to a seventy-nine-page screen document at WikiHow.comwith thoughts and illustrations on topics like punctuality, hygiene, gifts for the host, length of stay, and toilet etiquette.

If you return to the form page and click “good to go!” without having ticked all nine boxes, a message appears by the empty box with the remark: “I would strongly suggest that you do not skip this part” accompanied by a black exclamation point inside a yellow circle. A tough nut, this Genrich. But I like tough nuts, so I write: “ Privyet , dear backpacker hostel ‘Genrich,’ I am open-minded, easygoing, I like traveling and meeting new people. Have you got a couch for me?”

An equally tough nut: Russia. In the late summer of 2016, a journey there feels like visiting enemy territory. As if we’d gone back to the days when the saying was Visit the Soviet Union before it visits you. On the plane from Hamburg to Riga, I read a few articles that I had saved on my cell phone.

They discuss the possibility of war. The tone is more abrasive than it’s been at any time since the collapse of the USSR twenty-five years ago. Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Gernot Erler, the German government’s commissioner for Russia, and Sergey Karaganov, the honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, all speak in interviews of a threatening escalation of the current situation, even to the extent of military conflict. During a stopover in the NATO outpost of Latvia, I look out of the plane window to see whether the first jet fighters are ready for takeoff, but am able to sound the all-clear.

On the flight onward, a blond Russian woman sits next to me showing her mother cell phone videos from one of the European Cup soccer games. The competition was still in progress. Russia had made an impression mostly because of the actions of its hooligans; they were more athletic and accurate than the elderly Sbornaya team on the field, who, as the last-placed in their group, were eliminated before the knockout phase. Obviously the team had been overlooked by the state doping program, another prickly topic these days.

I try to think about the last piece of good news that I can remember coming out of Russia. I can only come up with a performance of Peter and the Wolf that I saw as a seven-year old. In the end it turns out that the duck that the big bad wolf had eaten was still alive in the wolf’s stomach, because he had swallowed it without chewing.

The majority of Russian stories in the German media are negative, and some of them overshoot the mark. For example, during the Ukrainian crisis in 2013, the German public broadcaster ARD was criticized in an internal review for airing “biased” reports. And just looking at the facts, hasn’t the United States’ foreign policy in the last twenty years caused more problems—from the Iraq War to Abu Ghraib—than Russia’s? Why are there no sanctions imposed against the U.S.? The question is, of course, cynical, as you cannot weigh one crisis against another, but it’s still worth giving thought.