Investment Biker Page 19

  As we pressed on, more and more gas stations were out of gas or limited us to ten liters each. Because I listened to the BBC shortwave news broadcast nightly, I knew that the Gulf crisis over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had raised the world price of oil. I was certain the USSR was selling its petroleum products overseas at top dollar to get hard currency, but the Russians assumed it was only another mysterious shortage. Naturally, they didn’t know that for years their oil production had been the world’s largest.

  Whenever there’s a national problem and the government explains things to its citizens, don’t believe the explanation. Figure out where the money trail goes, and you’ll almost always know what’s going on in the real world.

  The hundred and fifty miles from Ryazan to Moscow were all four-lane.

  Despite the crowded roads with their aggressive drivers, we felt wonderful. When we had landed in Siberia two-and-a-half months before, Moscow had been only a dot on the map, Siberia a vast expanse of paper. Every day I’d draw a new line on the map, showing what we’d done—and here we were, we’d made it!

  Both of us were exhilarated. And now we were about to see Moscow itself, the capital of the largest contiguous empire the world had ever known, one larger than that of the Chinese, the Romans, and the Spanish. As someone who had studied history and politics, I could not conceive that anyone would ever again conquer so many square miles, and here we were charging into its capital on 1,000-cc steeds.

  Had you ridden into Xi’an and Rome and Samarkand at their heights, you would have found rich people and unparalleled luxury. Moscow should have been the richest city in the world, but it was a place where you couldn’t buy a carton of cigarettes without a riot. You couldn’t get a bottle of vodka. You couldn’t get soap. You couldn’t get toilet seats. You couldn’t get anything. Even though Moscow dominated this gigantic empire of hundreds of millions of people, what we were driving into was a large, poor city, a city of the Third World. It was huge, there were big buildings and wide roads the way you’d expect at the seat of a powerful empire, but there was no vibrancy, no texture, no depth. This was a bland, dismal city, a gray monument to a dying faith, a city without a soul.

  Odder still was the fact that since the days of the czars, Moscow has never had much. Moscow was the richest city in the Soviet empire, yet Birmingham, Alabama, had more. Harlem had more of the everyday necessities of life, available to anyone who simply walked into a store. African cities often had more to offer in terms of luxury goods—even regular stuff like toothpaste, shoes, beer, a shirt, a pair of socks. Here, even if you had money, little was available at any price.

  Tabitha was from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and she lives about four blocks from where she grew up.

  She loves cities. After two-and-a-half months of Siberian wilderness she was ready for a city, a big city. Back in New York she loved to walk and observe street life, the souvlakia man and the different shops and the West Africans selling fake designer watches on Broadway and the incredible variety of people, everything that makes New York’s streets vital. When we came into a wonderful city she always made time to take long walks. She would plan strolling tours along the city’s most famous streets, viewing them as urbanologist W. H. Whyte did, as rivers to be swum and played in. The first time she was in London she had walked eight or nine hours and had been exhilarated by her tramp.

  So on two different days she went walking in Moscow, every minute expecting it to become interesting. If you started walking in Paris at the far end of the Champs-Élysées it might be boring, but the closer you got to the Arc de Triomphe, the more interesting street life would become. As she walked along Moscow’s streets—ulitsa Gertsena, Pushkinskaya ulitsa, Kuybisheva ulitsa—she kept thinking, Any minute now it’s gonna start happening.

  She tramped about Moscow for four or five hours at a stretch and it never became interesting. The city’s continual gray sameness was oppressive. On the street there was no life, no vitality. Nothing seemed to be going on. Along Broadway back in New York there were always deliveries being made. She told me that night that she couldn’t remember seeing even one. There were few shops, maybe two every three or four blocks, one of which was likely to be a bakery. By the end of Tabitha’s Moscow walks she was exhausted, not exhilarated; downtrodden, not stimulated.

  We had heard of Suzdal, the legendary town outside the capital that a thousand years before had been larger than Moscow, but nothing prepared us for its score of ancient churches.

  If Tamerlane’s mosques in Samarkand and the Emperor Qin’s terracotta armies will provide Uzbekistan and Xi’an with tourist dollars for decades to come, so Suzdal and environs will bring visitors by the tens of millions to Russia.

  Over our entire journey of seven thousand miles across the Soviet Union we had not seen more than a dozen architecturally significant buildings. Out in the hinterlands the ancient churches were crumbling from disuse. Many had been destroyed or converted for other uses. Often the glorious onion domes had been dismantled and replaced by flat roofs. Here in the Suzdal area, a few miles from Moscow, were dozens of ancient monasteries, museums, convents, and churches, many lovingly preserved on a green country plain.

  Set in what was originally a fertile wheat-growing area, Suzdal became a center for monasteries after it came under Moscow’s rule in 1392. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rich Moscow merchants had displayed their Russian Orthodox spirituality by putting up little churches in Suzdal—sometimes one for summer and one for winter—each merchant striving to outdo the last in pious splendor.

  I was amazed that the Communists hadn’t razed them all. Maybe because the town was small, nobody had ever thought of turning these religious gems into apartment houses for state workers. Maybe the churches had never been torn down to make way for industrial progress because the Moscow-Nizhni Novgorod railroad passed by twenty miles to the south. Anyway, luckily for the world, to this day the area has kept its glorious religious buildings and its rural charm, forgoing air pollution, big-city noise, and ugly modern buildings.

  The most magnificent church was called, oddly enough, the Kremlin, or “fort.” Building was started in the twelfth century and completed in the eighteenth. An enormous onion dome, cobalt-blue with gold stars and topped by a cross, was surrounded by four miniature replicas of itself, all five towering over scalloped gables and whitewashed stone.

  The Nativity Chapel was filled with brightly lit gold panels of late-seventeenth-century icons. Many were painted in a combination of Byzantine and Russian Orthodox styles.

  Suzdal didn’t only have magnificence, however. The wooden church of St. Nicholas, brought here from the village of Glotovo, held no more than twenty worshipers but brought home the importance of religion to eighteenth-century Russian villagers.

  The churches might have been built by rich merchants in a vain display of spiritual worthiness, but the quiet buildings, the long arched walkways, and the faultless skies had a calming effect on us. Nothing we’d seen so far in the Soviet Union had been as remarkable.

  To our amazement, one of the churches had a plaque that said it belonged to the Russian Orthodox Synod in New York.

  I was stunned. The New York Synod had been founded by White Russians, czarists fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. In Red Square, I thought, Lenin must be whirling in his glass coffin over the fact that a local church had pledged allegiance to his worst enemy.

  Inquiring how this could be, we met Father Valentin, the church’s spiritual leader. Several months back, he said, he had been asked by the KGB and the bishop of Moscow to spy on foreign visitors. He had refused and was transferred to another church, one out in the boon-docks. His parishioners made such a fuss over his departure, however, that he was brought back. Yet a proviso was added to his return—that the renegade church couldn’t be part of the local synod—punishing its parishioners and Father Valentin alike.

  He wrote New York and asked permission to join the synod outside of Russia, whic
h was granted, which is how the synod on Ninety-third Street in Manhattan has a branch in Suzdal.

  In Moscow we visited Maxim Kruglova, a young doctor who had been not only the first in his class, but number one in the country-wide medical competitions. While he was passionate about medicine, he was forced to work for a trading company because there was no money in medicine at that time in Russia.

  At Moscow Medical School, the Soviet Union’s chief medical school, he said there was a small specialty in preserving Lenin’s body. Every five or six years the school turned out a graduate; it didn’t need too many. The chosen few were selected to go down to Red Square and work on Lenin’s remains.

  Maxim said that because an ear once fell off Lenin’s head, visitors weren’t allowed to talk or make a sound while viewing the remains. Visitors also weren’t allowed to put their hands in their pockets, as they might be saboteurs.

  Today people will periodically stand up in the Russian parliament and ask, “Why don’t we bury this guy? This is absurd, he’s not even our hero anymore.” But his tomb was a big tourist attraction back then, so they couldn’t afford to bury him.

  Actually, Maxim said, Lenin had wanted to be buried. He’d left specific instructions to be buried in his mother’s church cemetery or some such place. Then Stalin had come along and said, “No, we have to build him up as the hero of the revolution, so put him out there in the Square.” He had known that the people needed an icon, and he’d had nothing else. Stalin had wanted to be displayed there, too, as if to show that he was another hero of the glorious revolution. Originally he had been placed in Lenin’s tomb, but one night Khrushchev had moved him out under cover of darkness.

  Maxim wanted to come to the United States to practice medicine. While there was nothing wrong with Soviet medicine as it was taught, doctors were forced to work the way local mechanics worked on cars: They made do. You might be a superb doctor, bursting with the knowledge of your specialty, but without CAT scans, penicillin, scalpels, and vaccines, how could you do your job?

  Moscow. The extremely inexpensive subways were nicer than New York’s, each station with magnificent chandeliers and designed by a different architect. Stalin had built them, one of the few things he had done right, but we found little else over which to marvel.

  We still couldn’t find Moscow’s heart, its hub, nor any glitz or glamour. Even Red Square, the putative center of Moscow, was not bustling with Muscovites. The city was as dull, lackluster, and lifeless as a day-old pot of oatmeal.

  The huge government department store, called GUM, had few goods. Long queues were everywhere, the people in them as stolid, somber, and grim-faced as mourners at the funeral of a distant relative. We supposed they didn’t have anything to smile about, or that they didn’t want to be caught in public smiling, afraid somebody might ask, “Why are you happy? What’s going on?” In private people laughed and giggled with us, but in public they were always grim.

  In Tokyo, New York, and Buenos Aires you constantly run into a corner restaurant, a bistro, or an antique shop in which it’s fun to poke around. There was none of that here. It didn’t exist. In Moscow, you didn’t stumble into some unique little shop, because it wasn’t there. In the Soviet Union the idea of a pet store was incomprehensible. In all of Moscow’s vastness there were maybe three cafés in which you could sit down and order a cup of coffee. The meanest café in many African or South American cities had a better menu than the best of these.

  In a Moscow kindergarten we visited a former dissident, Tatiana, a trim, attractive woman who had been four years in a labor camp and another four in internal exile.

  “Our people are finally waking up,” she said. “For seventy years we’ve been like these children here, waiting to be told by our parent, the Party, what to do. We took no initiative, the way five-year-olds expect their parents to do for them. It’s hard to break out of that old mind-set, but now we’re all seeing we have to fend for ourselves. Hunger, scarcity, that’s what’s doing it. The Communist Party is dead.”

  At a huge outdoor flea market near Moscow, German military uniforms, equipment, and medals from World War II were on sale, items abandoned by the defeated Nazi battalions hastily retreating to the fatherland. The Russians’ former enemies were coming back from Berlin and Munich as tourists and buying at outrageous prices the equipment their fathers and grandfathers had abandoned fifty years earlier.

  We cranked up and left Moscow. We stopped at Borodino, the great battlefield. As it happened, we were there on the same day the battle had begun, August 26. Poor Napoleon. He had won the battle here in 1812 but lost so many soldiers that his ultimate chances at victory had been doomed.

  As I read Napoleon’s speech to his soldiers, in the wind I heard the strains of the “1812 Overture.”

  “This is going to be a great battle,” Napoleon told his men. “Someday you’ll tell everybody with great pride you were present at the Battle of Borodino. Let’s win this battle and race to Moscow so we’ll all have warm apartments for the winter.”

  Winter started here in September. Even this early we felt a sharp drop in the daytime temperatures from a few weeks before in July. I felt it on my neck; the air had a real chill to it, cool in the morning and cool in the afternoon.

  Those soldiers must have felt that chill, too, and said to themselves, “Oh, Christ Almighty, we don’t want to be in this place for winter, we’d rather be back in Paris.”

  But Napoleon said, “Don’t worry, guys, we’re all going to Moscow and get apartments.”

  What he didn’t know was that Moscow was going to burn the whole place down. “Okay,” the Russians said, “you want it, take it, but we just burned everything in sight. Take the whole city.” So Napoleon lost the war. Would it really matter three hundred years later who had won?

  I was certain that those scores of thousands of dead twenty-year-olds on both sides would have preferred living out their lives rather than dying here in the “great” battle few now remembered and even fewer cared about. Some might say this particular battle had changed history. Does anybody really believe that France would have still controlled Russia nearly two hundred years later even if Napoleon had won this war?

  Tabitha and I were glad to be getting out because winter was roaring in, the one I had worried so much about earlier back in China and Siberia.

  Finally we reached Brest, our last city in the USSR.

  Properly speaking, Brest was Polish. But Stalin had wanted it and made it his after the Second World War, another example of a border drawn by a victorious army. People cry out these days for stable borders, but if this one is left unchanged, it will only endorse Stalin’s madness in setting borders and his lust for more territory.

  We’d been almost three months in the Soviet Union on this leg, June through August. I was ecstatic at having made it and depressed at leaving. Ecstatic at knowing that most of our road problems could be easily solved in Europe, where we would find good roads, tires, spare parts, medicines, and money. I would be able to communicate with the world we’d left behind. I might even be able to get a real newspaper, which I hadn’t seen since Tokyo. But I was depressed that this once-in-a-lifetime trip was over. This had been special, the panorama of a giant country in transition. The Soviet Union was coming out of a decades-old winter into a spring whose nature would be cruel.

  At the border we found a gigantic queue. The Poles had already freed up their prices and their currency. Their money was fully convertible, and they had legitimate pricing. Of course the Russian Communists hadn’t yet. So while there wasn’t much to buy in Russia, all the Poles and Hungarians were piling in to buy whatever they could at absurdly low prices. In Poland gas was two dollars a gallon; in Russia, twelve cents. With everything else—cars, sheets, pots, pans, refrigerators, TVs—there was the same discrepancy. The Poles would take these low-priced goods back to their country and make a killing, selling Russian products for twenty to a hundred times what they’d paid for them.

 
Naturally, having made the same mistakes for seventy years, the Russians didn’t just fix their currency or their prices. Instead, they put on export controls. The border guards had long lists of what you couldn’t take out of the country. One guy had a bunch of sheets taken from him. We had souvenirs and Russian medals we were anxious about, but the guards didn’t seem to think we could take out many refrigerators and sheets on our bikes and so they gave us only a cursory exam.

  Riding through the Polish countryside felt like pure freedom. We could go anywhere we wanted. The currency was convertible, so we didn’t have to worry about black markets. We didn’t have to worry about where to find food and gas.

  A year previous the Poles had freed up everything. In Warsaw on every block, vendors were selling Marlboros and Pepsi-Colas from kiosks. Back in Russia there had occasionally been kiosks, but they sold mainly Russian cigarettes and only after you’d been in line for three hours. In Polish kiosks you could buy dresses, candy, whiskey, sodas, radios, batteries, flashlights, consumer goods of every stripe and variety, nearly all imported, which we hadn’t seen since Tokyo. Few people in Warsaw had a real job, so they’d hit the streets selling to hustle up a zloty.

  With completely convertible currency, the nimble ones could go to Berlin, buy goods, and bring them back to sell at home.

  After struggling through Turkey, China, and the Soviet Union over the past several months, we weren’t in the mood for old-world charm. We stayed in the Warsaw Marriott, which was like heaven. All the hot water we wanted! Well-cooked meals on white tablecloths! All the coffee we could drink! Soft sheets, and the beds made for us! Newspapers. Faxes. The phones worked. I could pick up the instrument and talk to anybody I wanted. I even found a gym nearby. I had forgotten it was possible for the world to work properly.