1991

Russian Journey

Visiting Russia in the summer of 1991 was an exciting time in Eastern Europe as all of the Soviet Union’s satellite states were declaring their independence from the Mother Ship, which itself was fast disintegrating, despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s desperate last minute attempt to politically democratize both the state and its collective economic institutions. He was trying to emulate the social democracy of Sweden politically but retain social ownership of the means of production only to manage them more democratically. It didn’t turn out that way as the Soviet Union itself became history before the year was done with Gorby out and an alcoholic and corrupt Boris Yeltsin holding the reins of state.

My first glimpse of the Soviets were when the Lev Tolstoy had crossed the border along the northern part of the Karelian Isthmus and stopped for a passport inspection in a wooded area. We were greeted by a detachment of Red Army soldiers led by a handsome stern-faced woman officer who directed the passport collection by her enlisted subordinates from us passengers. We were destined to stay stopped there while waiting through the red tape of examining and stamping our passports. My fellow seat passengers were an elderly American couple and their young grandson who were on their way to Moscow to pick up the transcontinental excursion train across Siberia to Vladivladstok. To amuse himself the old gentleman aimed his camera through the window to snap photos of the Russian soldiers idling outside by the railroad tracks. Almost immediately our draconian commanding officer appeared from nowhere to our midst as she ordered him to stop taking pictures as this was forbidden by the rules, in a severe voice in perfect Russian-inflected English. What else could my seat mate do but obey her with alacrity? Fortunately, his camera and film were not confiscated.

There was a further stop at the historic old Finnish Hanseatic period seaport of Viipuri on the Gulf of Finland which was ceded to Russia under the terms of the agreements reached to end the Finno-Russian wars of 1939–44. Off in the distance from the gloomy railroad station we could see the round dome of the medieval Viipuri castle-fortress that I only knew from old postcards. Sometime in the afternoon we crossed the old border into Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) where I detrained at the historic Finland Station where Lenin and other exiled Bolshevik leaders were brought to on a sealed German train in 1917 after the February Revolution which overthrew the Czar in Russia. Russia was still at war in the bloody conflict with Germany under the Provisional government of Alexander Kerensky. To relieve them of their Eastern Front, Germany had cut a deal with Lenin to secretly transport him to Russia with 10 million dollars in cash in hopes that the Bolsheviks would take that country out of the Great War by overthrowing Kerensky and allow Germany to focus solely on its opponents on the Western Front. A huge gamble but this expedient sure worked as the October 1917 Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to absolute power. One enemy at a time, and the other again later, marked Germany’s politics.
 

LENINGRAD IN 1991

As I stepped onto the platform at Finland Station, I saw a man in civilian clothes waiting for me holding a hand-lettered sign with my last name printed on it. He whisked me away in a car that took me to a hotel back toward the Karelian Isthmus away from downtown Leningrad on the road back to Finland to a wooded park about 18 miles away that housed the Motel Olgina, a large tourist hotel built recently by a Finnish contractor. As I tried to enter my room after registering, I was accosted by a young man who forcibly tried to sell me a fresh bottle of vodka as I tried to push him away and shut the door. It took a bit of a struggle but I was finally able to close and latch it despite his aggressive persistence. And no sale!

It took practically no time for me find out that the Olgina operated pretty much along the same lines as the Hotel Viru in Tallinn. Bars for serious drinking aplenty, a spacious modern gambling casino, and outside on the patio a dozen or so sexy young teenage-appearing women in short shorts or miniskirts with blouses open to leave nothing to the imagination, bumming cigarettes off loitering men of all ages as openers for some heavy-duty deal-making in carnal pleasures. A lot of their potential clients were Finnish men from across the border looking for action. I got to know a couple of early twentyish young brothers, farm boys from Finland, who said they spent all of their holidays at the Motel Olgina, savoring of young Russian flesh and getting loaded with cheap vodka. As an aging onetime Lothario none of this had any appeal to me. I was a long way from my young dude’s Navy days in South American ports. Young Russian men in cheap suits were also hanging around smoking in the hotel environs, apparently small-time pimps and gangsters who tended to the young women in their tow around the patio and front yard. Russia was a corrupt society and I’m sure the Olgina management was getting its cuts from all these goings on as well, besides the huge profits from the gambling and alcohol.
 

RUSSIAN NATIONAL RACEWALK TEAM

I much enjoyed doing my pre-breakfast racewalking exercise along the splendid paved pathways that wound through the idyllic woodland park surrounding the Motel Olgina. In fact, I saw some really fast Russian racewalkers using them for their training course the very first morning. Then at breakfast I saw the whole Russian National Racewalking team including some women, which was using the park as an official training camp. I found out that they had just returned from San Jose, California where they had competed in the 1991 World Cup Championships! Had I not gone to Europe that summer I would have been working as a volunteer at those championships which were being hosted by my own Pacific Association of US Track & Field with PA Racewalk Chair Ron Daniel as race director. When I tried to inquire of the Russians at breakfast how they had done at the World Cup, they pointed to a shy petite young woman at breakfast whose bronze medal was the only Russian success story of the meet. None at the table, including their national coach, knew much English, but I congratulated their medallist’s success in the Women’s 20K!

When arriving in Russia I had traded some money for rubles, but it was possible at least in the Leningrad and Petroskoi areas to use either US dollars or Finnish markkas for immediate cash needs under the Gorbachev Administration. Of course, American credit cards were also used in financial transactions. When I offered a waiter payment in rubles at dinner, he much preferred Finnmarks or US dollars which he could better work for his own advantage.
 

TOURING LENINGRAD

Kronstadt Fortress

I commuted daily between my hotel and Leningrad City by bus after breakfast. On my first morning downtown I connected with my young female Intourist guide who spoke fine English but who had a Master’s degree in Italian from Leningrad University. Her usual clients were Italian tourist groups but I was her only responsibility that day. Our first stop was the Hermitage museum and Winter Palace which was an important factor in the country’s revolutionary history. Heritage’s fantastic art displays should not be missed by anyone visiting the now St. Petersburg today. Both my guide and I shared our love for Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh whose works were on a special display during my visit. We later went by taxi to the lavish Summer Palace along the south shore of the Gulf of Finland. It was a bit much for me, the lovely vast gardens and lawns and the regal interiors where royalty once held their lavish balls and banquets. I would much rather have toured the fortress at Kronstadt where its soldiers, sailors and civilians had staged their 1921 revolt against the Bolshevik regime to support a strike of Petrograd factory workers, out partly in protest against Lenin’s squelching of non-Bolshevik revolutionary organizations.. We all know of the Trotsky-led Red Army’s bloodbath at Kronstadt that effectively ended any form of worker democracy in Russia.

It was a pleasure to stroll along Nevsky Prospekt, the beautiful grand boulevard that cuts through the Central city of Leningrad. Busy pedestrian traffic filled its broad sidewalks with stylishly-dressed Russian women strolling about. So many charming bridges spanning the Neva river winding its way through the city’s heart. I could picture myself walking across one of them in an evening fog and seeing Dostoevsky’s student Raskolnikoff advancing toward me with a bloody ax in hand. But the daytime scenes that enthralled me most were the winds of a new freedom aborning in Russia along a wall by a park by Nevsky Prospekt. It was tagged its length with handwritten manifestos by citizens pinned to it of ideas bursting out of their conformist cocoons of the past decades. New declarations were going up continuously as people were scribbling their hopes and dreams of a new day to come. The sun was at least for the moment blowing away some of the drab grayness of the Brezhnev Era that had hung for so long over the air of the Post-Stalin Era. But I just about flipped over when I saw a young hairy bearded man wearing a headband dressed in shorts with a blazing Circle A design adorning his T-shirt, and in sandals, hawking his Russian language anarchist newspapers to the crowds swirling around him. Unbelievable, as I rubbed my eyes in amazement! Haight-Ashbury on the Nevsky Prospekt! I had to go up to him and engage him in conversation. Not that we could communicate with our language limitations but we did immediately make a connection as Comrades! (Unfortunately, I was a bit premature in my optimism. The Gorbachev moment was soon over and the country was swamped in a Yeltsin period kleptocracy where all the economy was privatized for a song and the oligarchs of a savage vulture capitalism took over all the way to the grim authoritarianism of a ruthless Putin reign today with serious political opposition pretty much throttled. So the dream of a Russia living in egalitarian freedom and plenty for all is nowhere in sight.) Its people deserve better.

But I was running low on bottled water and dared not try any tap water so I sought the subway to travel to the downtown Intourist store to refresh my supply. I had good maps with clear graphic directions but got lost as I descended into the bowels of the underground. I spotted an attractive young woman sitting on a bench reading a book so I assumed she was a university student. Unfortunately, she knew no English which wasn’t a problem. I showed her my directional maps where I should go and what train to catch, and she immediately got up, nodded and smiled and beckoned me to follow her. We proceeded along a long corridor by the tracks until we reached a down escalator which took us to a lower level track. She walked me to a train boarding stop and waited with me until my train came along. I felt like hugging her but figured this would be a bit presumptuous. I wasn’t in hedonistic California. She smiled and waved as the train came and I was on my way. Again this young lady exemplified the kindness to strangers so many ordinary Russians demonstrated to me. Tennessee Williams’ Blanche Du Bois was far from wrong.
 

ON TO PETROZAVODSK (PETROSKOI)

I could have stayed longer in exploring this ancient capital and its wonders but my schedule put me on a night train to the Karelian Republic’s capital city of Petrazavodsk, or Petroskoi, as the Finns call it, on the shores of the vast Lake Onega. Seated across from me were two friendly young Russian workmen on their way to a work assignment along the way. They offered to share their packed lunch and a bottle of vodka with me, which I politely declined as I had my own travel eats minus the vodka. This again demonstrated to me the “kindness of strangers” and generosity characteristic of many ordinary everyday Russians. Every Russian train of that period also had one huge vat serving as a giant samovar over a heater from which one could ladle a free cup of tea for oneself whenever the desire arose. As night time and bedtime descended upon us, husky railroad maids came to convert every compartment into sleeping quarters for us travellers. I had no problem whatsoever sleeping soundly most of the night on the speeding train.

Waking up in the gray dawn of a Russian morning, I stepped out into the corridor of the compartment to look out of the window as we passed through the forested countryside with its numerous lakes fogged over by the morning’s miasma. It reminded me of a scene from the Finnish epic poem Kalevala which was also a part of the Russian Karelian culture. In my mind’s eye, I could see its great mythical hero Väinämöinen steering a boat through the mists arising from a lake we were passing by to greet his own dawn. I felt I was existing in an unchanging land of a thousand years ago as we moved toward our destination. Finally, as the day wore on we arrived at the railroad station at Petroskoi on a hillside overlooking the center of the city below. I had booked a room at the Hotel Karjala, then the city’s leading hotel, but for the first time on my Eastern itinerary I wasn’t greeted by an Intourist agent at the station. Strange! But I took a cab and proceeded to the Karjala on my own. Arriving at hotel, the woman at the reception, conversant in both English and Finnish, had no record of my scheduled arrival although I could prove it by my travel documents. Fortunately, Intourist had its city offices inside the hotel to where she sent me to straighten the problem out. Again the Intourist officials had no information about me, although my papers showed differently. Apparently, the travel bureaucracy had skipped a beat in recording my scheduling. It proved to me no problem and I was assigned a room. The Intourist official who handled my case was of Finnish-American descent herself, as her grandparents had been Karelian Fever immigrants to Petroskoi in the 1930s from the United States. She spoke no Finnish herself. In addition she recommended that I attend a kantele concert given by the city’s Folk Music Society to which she gave me a free pass for that evening.

After settling into my quarters, I retuned to the hotel front desk and asked about finding author Mayme Sevander, my contact person. Although Petroskoi is a sizeable city it had the feeling of a small town, as the Finnish-speaking clerk told me Mayme was in the United States, teaching the Russian language at a university in Duluth, but called up her daughter for me, Stella Sevander. Russian-born Stella Sevander was a professor of the Swedish and Finnish languages at the University of Petrozavodsk as well as Scandinavian Studies. Being on summer hiatus, Stella immediately drove down to the hotel to pick me up. She had an engaging personality and was a fine conversationalist. Her Russian husband whom I’ll call Alexei was a brilliant language professor who spoke perfect English and was a professional translator who taught other translators the intricacies of that line of endeavor and eventually drove me around the city to introduce me to it. They had a young son who was away at summer camp during my visit.

I had a special mission to Petroskoi to meet with Martta Ranta-Aho, an American expatriate and cousin of Irene Erkkila of San Francisco, one of my friends who I dined with at the “Finn Table” at the Diamond Senior Center regularly during weekdays at home in the Castro District. Martta was the daughter of Kaarle Abram Ranta-Aho and his wife who had gone to Russia when she was a young child as part of the Red Exodus from North America to build a new socialist paradise in Karelia during the 1930s “Karelian Fever.” Irene had given me some cash before my trip to give her cousin in Petroskoi, a woman of my own age. Stella as a Finnish community leader in the city, of course, knew Martta and established contact with her for me to meet her the next day. After dining with Stella and Alexei that evening I went to a wonderful Kantele concert for which I had a ticket from Intourist which included dozens of the area folk music society’s instrumentalists and vocalists giving a top performance unmatched by anything I’d ever heard before or after in their genre.

Martta had a fascinating story of growing up and living in Karelia. Her father Kaarle had worked as a building tradesman in San Francisco and continued at his trade in the construction of Karelia. He escaped the Stalin purges and terror by being sent on a giant construction project in Siberia before fate began to deal its ugly hand in the lives of the North-American expatriates to Karelia in 1937. Martta and her mother continued to live in Petroskoi as there apparently was no provision for families joining their breadwinners in Siberia. They lost communication with Kaarle during the Russo-Finnish Winter War and for good when Finland joined with Germany in the Continuation War during which the Finnish Army captured Petroskoi for a couple of years before the Russians turned the tide of the war in the epic battle at Stalingrad. The Ranta-Aho women had been evacuated with many other civilians from Petroskoi until it was safe to return after the Finns were forced to retreat from the city before the resurgent Red Army to end that conflict in 1944. The Finns saw that Germany that would lose the war with their armies being slaughtered at Stalingrad and by 1943 a sizeable antiwar movement surfaced in Finland to demand a separate peace with the Soviet Union regardless of Germany’s war politics, which eventually succeeded.

With no word from Kaarle in all this time they assumed he had perished during these murderous years that devastated the whole country with 20 million Russian deaths, the largest toll of any ethnicity in World War II. Until one night long after the guns of war had been silenced, there was a knock on the door at the Ranta-Aho apartment in Petroskoi. There stood Kaarle, aged beyond his years, emaciated and sickly, dressed in rags and tattered boots. With rest and food and hot tea in his belly, he told his story. When war broke out, his construction site was closed and he and his workmates were sent off to a Siberian labor camp where he toiled at hard labor with inadequate rations for the remainder of the war. Being a Finn made Kaarle doubly suspect. After it was all over he was either released or escaped the camp and began his long, perilous trek from Siberia back to Karelia hoping to find his family alive. He hitched rides on trucks and cars as well as freight trains, subsisting on a starvation diet of whatever scraps of food he could beg or find. He even rode on ox carts as well as walked when no other transport was available. It was a miracle he survived at all but there he was, at the doorstep of his home to greet his wife and daughter, now a grown woman. I don’t know if Kaarle was able to recover and work again after his ordeals, but when I met Martta at Petroskoi, both her parents were gone.

As an adult Martta married a Russian man with whom she had four children. But she kept her maiden name as Ranta-Aho was the only thing her father left her, his family name. Of her children, two girls and two boys, and now with grandchildren, she only spoke to me of one daughter who was a Finnish-Russian translator. Of her work, she had translated Tampere righter Lauri Viita’s classic novel Moreeni (Moraine) into Russian.

I stopped off to see Stella Sevander one more time before leaving Petroskoi. It occurred to me that there was still a fair-sized Finnish-American colony in Russian Karelia of people who had moved there as children during the Karelian Fever of the 1930s with their leftist parents and had survived and become Russian citizens. . Some of them were already school children when they left the United States. There was to be a FinnFest national celebration in Duluth on The University of Minnesota campus during the following summer of 1992 which I was planning to attend. I came up with an idea I proposed to Stella, that why couldn’t she with the cooperation of her mother Mayme organize a contingent of these expatriates from the States who came to Karelia with their parents in the Thirties as FinnFest visitors as well as go to the American cities and towns they came from, and raise money to finance their trips? This plan excited Stella very much and she said she’d call her mother that very night in Duluth and get the ball rolling organizationally to make the project a reality. We shook hands on the deal to work on making this idea a fact.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

TATIANA NIKOLAEVA AGUREYEVA

On my last night in Petroskoi, I thought I’d go on my lonesome to spend the evening at Petroskoi’s only real night club with a dance orchestra downtown and have my dinner there. I hadn’t treated myself to such an evening anywhere on my Russian trip nor much in Eastern Europe earlier. So I dressed up in my sport coat and shirt and tie which was expected in this classiest joint in town. I’ll call the club “The Tin-Tin.” The young Russian waitress I’ll call Olga who served me spoke quite good English as I was the only non-Russian customer in the place that evening. Upon learning I was an American Finn with knowledge of the Finnish language and had worked as an actor among other ventures in the States, she became very excited. Olga told me that shortly that evening a Russian actress friend would be visiting the club for dining and dancing and who was fluent in Finnish but knew no English.

So it wasn’t long before I was introduced to Tatiana (Tanya) Nikolaeva Agureyeva, an attractive 37-year-old puppet theatre performer who came to the Tin-Tin with a Russian girl friend. I was immediately smitten, a bit unrealistic for an American man of 65 in a strange country with a much younger Russian woman with whom I could only converse in Finnish! As a teetotaller only drinking mineral water I treated Tanya and her friend to a round of cocktails and we were soon immersed in a lively conversation. I found out that Petroskoi had a resident puppet theatre on a separate stage in the historic National Theatre where Finnish and some Karelian language plays were performed. Tanya had leading speaking parts in the puppet theatre as she deftly pulled the strings of the marionettes with herself and the other actors hidden by a screen on the stage. The plays were conducted in the Russian language with their theatre extremely popular in the community, especially with school children. Tanya had been employed full time in the theatre since being a very young adult. She had been taking Finnish language classes for years in Petroskoi, and was sent on frequent tours of Finland either in solo shows in Finnish or with other colleagues who knew the language. Her knowledge of Finnish was quite fluent and good and we were involved in intense conversation all evening. Several of her other girl friends joined us at our table which became a center of attention in the club that night. I did considerable dancing with Tanya and some of her friends during this wonderful evening which I hoped would never end.

Finally the band wrapped it up for the night and my newly found companions suggested we repair to the lounge bar of my Hotel Karjala for a nightcap which stayed open until the wee hours and was within easy walking distance. The bar was crowded with fancier class pickup prostitutes who were available to the Russian Johns or Ivans who frequented the place on weekend nights. By the time we left my female companions from the Tin-Tin were a bit tipsy, except me who was sober but bloated from all the mineral water I had consumed during the course of the evening. I walked arm in arm with Tanya down the steps and bade goodbye at my hotel entrance to this lovely bevy of Russian ladies whose company I had enjoyed that evening as they dispersed homeward. Fortunately, I had exchanged contact information with Tanya earlier in the evening which was only a prelude to the warm friendship that continued in the future although not to the outcome I envisioned from the stars in my eyes that night.

The next day I departed this wonderful city by the Murmansk to Moscow express train. Martta Ranta-Aho came to bid me so long at the railway station. Petroskoi had not seen the last of me yet.
 

EXPLORING MOSCOW

On of the first things I did after checking into my Moscow hotel was to call a man I’ll call Igor, who was one of the anarchist contacts I’d been given in the States. He responded on the phone with very poor English but invited to come on down and see him. I had a mailing address and took the Metro to his residential area, having to change Metro trains at the Red Square Station. I was in the approximate neighborhood when I tried to call him again for further directions for his street address. Another confusing exchange as Igor gave me the wrong bus number to take to the address. As I wandered about the a very busy intersection trying to find this bus, some workman on his way home, seeing me totally at a loss, came up to see if he could help. I showed him the street address I had and the bus number I had jotted down from my phone call with Igor. His eyes lighted up when he saw the street address but shook his head at the bus number I showed him as Igor had given me the wrong information. He grabbed my arm and beckoned me to follow him to another bus stop. Turned out he lived a couple of doors away from Igor’s address, but the bus information had been wrong. So I accompanied him and he walked me to Igor’s door. Igor greeted me with a great flourish and a hug and invited me in. Seemed I’d walked into a pot-smoking party, with a young Russian woman with hippie headband and two chaps who looked like any Haight-Ashbury type who had bought a generous bag of weed to smoke. The box of chocolates I’d brought from the Intourist store paled in comparison. Out came some newspaper pages and the joint rolling began. I took a couple of drags in the communal rites but limited my intake. Outside of Igor, no one in this circle spoke any English as the party was beginning to turn mellow.. When Igor brought out a hypodermic needle and some junk to match, his younger friends got up and left. So I was left to watch Igor pump some heroin into his arm. “Diss my lifestyle,” he slurred. I didn’t want to linger any longer as all we needed now was for some narco cops to burst in. I thanked Igor for his generous hospitality as: “I’ve got to leave as I have a long Metro ride to get back to my hotel.” “Vait, I dake you to Metro!” he volunteered. So we headed out to the bus stop to take us to the Metro stop. By this time Igor was quite antsy and paranoid and wanted to start walking. I restrained him and finally we were able to get on a standing-room-only local bus. As we hung on to the overhead straps, from time to time Igor would give the peace sign with the fingers of his free hand and call out dramatically in English: “Giff peace a chance!” The bus crowd gave us some puzzled looks. Finally, when we disembarked at the Metro, he gave me a big Russian bear hug and declared: “Ve are brudders forever!” I thanked him again as I pulled away and headed for the escalator.
 

 STANDARD MOSCOW TOURIST SITES

Naturally, I visited the usual tourist sites in Moscow, which included Red Square and Kremlin; Lenin’s Tomb and Mausoleum; exterior of the Bolshoi Theatre in its off-season; and the unique bohemian pedestrian street, The Old Arbat. The vast Red Square was staggering in its size which also included The Kremlin and Saint Basilica Cathedral on either side. All this is reachable by foot in the heart of central Moscow.

A must-see was Lenin’s Tomb and Mausoleum. I stood in a long line of people that stretched through the square awaiting access and left my camera at the guard post at the gate to Red Square as no photography was allowed once inside. It was an eerie sight to see the waxen pale, crinkly visage of Lenin as he lay embalmed in an open coffin in a dim, haunting light. A stiff honor guard of uniformed soldiers stood at attention guarding the great Bolshevik icon, not making a making a move or sound as we slowly moved on through and out into the back yard of the Mausoleum which was lined with the memorial plaque-covered Kremlin Wall. Big Bill Haywood (1869–1928) the exiled founder of the IWW and journalist John Reed (1887–1920), early chronicler of the Russian Revolution in his classic account “Ten Days That Shook the World,” are the only Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall. The notorious Joseph Stalin had his own monument in the yard. When he died in 1953, initially he was interred in a coffin next to Lenin’s in his tomb, but due to insider criticism his remains were removed to an obscure spot in the yard outside. (To many of us in the world Stalin was one of the most murderous villains in human history. but in Russia he has his supporters claiming him a great hero in industrializing the USSR in the 1930s, despite the blood on his hands. After all, one of the great apologies for Leninist excesses is that one can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.)
 

STROLLING ALONG THE OLD ARBAT

Old Arbat Street, a ten-minute walk from Red Square which probably started as a footpath around 1493, is one of the most walked-on pedestrian streets in the world and is about a kilometer-long bohemian thoroughfare lined with cafes, small bars, and a favorite haunt of street artists and entertainers, writers and poets and bric-a-brac sales people catering to tourists. At one time it catered to well-heeled intellectuals, writers and artists and was even open to vehicular traffic until its congestion forced it to be divided into the new and old Arbat with cars barred from the latter. The Pushkin Home Museum which I visited is toward its lower end. It was the liveliest people hangout that I found in Moscow, like Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach was in the Beat Era.
 

DOM KNIGI (MOSKVA) HOUSE OF BOOKS

This is Moscow’s biggest bookstore, housing 200,000 volumes in many languages which can be found 8, Ulitsa Novy Arbat Street. I was overwhelmed by its enormity, but since I was travelling light, my only purchases were some beautiful Rotogravure postcards featuring famous Russian stage actors and actresses of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, most of which I gave away later to a Russian-American actor colleague.
 

GUM DEPARTMENT STORE

GUM, this cavernous retail giant with beautifully glass designed interiors, was the pride and joy of the old Soviet Union, still state-owned in 1991. Its operation seemed to be inefficiently managed as I saw relatively few customers and hordes of salespeople, mostly women of all ages, standing behind the counters in large clusters with nary a sale in sight. Although vast varieties of merchandise were available for purchase, little of it seemed to be moving. This gave weight to corporate capitalist propaganda that state ownership by its very nature is grossly inefficient. My only real experiences working in the public sphere at home were to the contrary. As a college student working in the US Post Office during winter holidays was one of wage slavery at its most intense, which saw me stuffing mail into slots at top speed with some lousy straw boss standing directly behind my back allowing me little respite for hours. The other experience was selling hot dogs at my state university college football games underneath the stands during half-times when ravenous fans practically swamped us with their demands for their lousy rot gut. At least that chore in 1948 paid a buck an hour. Compared to cleaning classroom lavatories for 60¢ an hour during evenings. Threats by student part-timers to organize into a union gave them a raise of a nickle an hour to 65¢, effectively squelching that unionizing attempt. (Oh, yes, the GUM Department stores in Russia were privatized with the collapse of the Soviet Union and are now run by private capital for better or worse.)
 

 MOSCOW’S LITERARY HOME MUSEUMS

My wind-up in Moscow was my visits to some of the house museums of Russian literary giants of the past. The first was to the home of Anton Chekhov (1860–1944), the former Ryabushinsky Mansion. It was carefully preserved and housed all the great medical doctor/writer’s furniture, writing desk and typewriter waiting for the author himself to return and start banging out one of his short stories, a genre in which he was the possibly the greatest master in the history of literature. I have seen all his classic plays performed at one time or other: “The Seagull,” “Uncle Vanya,” “Three Sisters,” and “Cherry Orchard.” I played the role of estate owner Sorin in one of the acts in “Seagull”, we performed in an acting class at San Francisco City College, under the direction of Dr. John Wilk. I also had roles once in “Cherry Orchard” in a play reading group in Berkeley. I was greeted at the door of the Chekhov Museum by three very elderly docents who courteously offered me a pair of felt slippers to wear so I wouldn’t disturb the gleam of the polished floor of the museum. None of the docents knew English but gave me a guide booklet in it for my own self-conducted tour of the exhibit. The only male docent’s eyes popped wide open when he saw me write down “San Francisco” as my home address in the States in the visitor register.

I received the same felt slipper treatment by the lovely ancient docents at the Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Museum who was a prolific journalist, novelist, poet and self-acclaimed revolutionary of the 1917 period in Russia. Living long stretches abroad, particularly on the Isle of Capri in Italy, he returned home on the invitation of Stalin as a celebrated proletarian writer, and then ending up for a long period of house arrest, although reputedly he was Joseph Dugashevili’s favorite author. I played the role of a hard-luck Tartar card payer and unemployed longshoreman in “Lower Depths,” his 1902 play about lumpen losers in a seaport rooming house, staged by the Multi-Ethnic Theater at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House in San Francisco, directed by Lewis Campbell. Gorky’s novel “Mother” was a favorite of US Communists during my 1948–’50 sojourn with their politics.

I’ve briefly mentioned stopping at the Old Arbat Street Museum of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837, another Russian literary icon who died at the young age of 37, as did Chekhov at 44. It was approaching train time back to Helsinki so I had to miss visiting the Lev Tolstoy (1820–1910) Moscow museum, one of my favorite Russian writers and a giant in the world pacifist movement who greatly influenced Thoreau, Gandhi, and American civil rights’ Martin Luther King, Jr. in non-violent resistance to oppression to gain one’s goal of a more humane, harmonious world with true “liberty and justice for all.” Tolstoy spent a good part of his life at Yasnaya Pulyana, his inherited 4,000-acre family estate where he wrote “War and Peace,” and “Anna Karenina.” Sooner than I thought I was on the Lev Tolstoy Express train to Finland.
 

TURKU WORLD MASTERS CHAMPIONSHIPS

As soon as I got to Helsinki I went on to Turku and checked in at the City Hostel, where I stayed as a volunteer for the World Masters Track and Field Championships with thousands of aging men and women from dozens of countries in its many events. The Paavo Nurmi Stadium was the site of most of the athletics except for the race walking that took place at a track in the neighboring city of Raisio. My tasks were to assist in all ways possible in these events and serve as an English-Finnish interpreter. Dozens of Turku University coeds served as translators, many of them with multilingual skills, including Finnish, English, Swedish, German and or French so my services here were mostly superfluous except at Raisio where this battery of young women didn’t participate. The only Russian language translator was a retired Finnish Army major, of partially Russian descent who took care of a whole shipload of Russian athletes who came by boat from Leningrad and were quartered aboard their vessel in Turku Harbor. I ate my free breakfast every morning with the good major at the cafeteria in Raisio who told some fascinating stories of dealing with Soviet Army officers during his years of active service. My most useful role as translator was in helping an African-American woman sprinter from New York City in tracing down her track spikes which had become lost in the shuffle. My days at Raisio were busy ones at the race walks where it was my job to call out the starting times for all the heats for the 5000-meters for all age groups and both men and women in Finnish and English and in my limited Spanish as the only Spanish translators were two women from Spain who were students at Turku University who were needed more at the Paavo Nurmi Stadium than at Raisio. We had a large body of English-speaking walkers from the United States, British Isles, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada compete at Raisio, including about a dozen of my Golden Gate Race Walker colleagues from the Bay Area. My most embarrassing moment was when Marin County walker Jack Bray went out like Speedy Gonzales in his heat in complete violation of legal form with bent knees to lead the pack at a speed he couldn’t hold until a former Russian Olympic Champion reeled him in to win the race in their 5-year age group. Only after the Russian passed him did Jack slow down and revert to legal form to finish eighth. He was lucky not to get DQed. When questioned by Toni Harvey, one of our GGRWs, why he did something that crazy, he just said he got carried away in the excitement of the moment. But my most fun came early one morning while a bunch of us were just hanging out near the track waiting for things to start. About a half-dozen Ukranian women race-walkers of various ages were seated at some nearby picnic tables when one of them broke out an accordion and began to play some lively ethnic dance tunes. I couldn’t restrain myself, tore off my warm-up jacket, grabbed one of the Ukranians and started to do a whirling dervish with her in polka time on the concrete pavement! Soon all the Ukranian were out there dancing! Our outburst lasted no more than ten minutes, but what a pre-race warm-up! Other official competitors had arrived by now, formed a large circle around us and commenced a standard, straightened knee, heel and toe warmup. What a way to greet the sunrise!
 

WE ARE THE WORLD!

After the Raisio walks were done I went on other volunteer chores at the main Paavo Nurmi Stadium in Turku, such as slapping race numbers on the thighs of the runners in various running heats. The last official race of the Senior Games was the Men’s Marathon on the final Sunday. I stood just inside the entrance to the stadium through which the runners emerged from their last road loop in the race. I was disturbed at the audience silence as the runners entered the stadium for their final track loops. Typical Finnish reticence. So I thought I’d play the loud obnoxious Yank who cheered and stomped and enthusiastically acclaimed the runners as they approached their grand finale, which I did until practically the last finisher was in. Some smiled and gave me a thumbs up, but most ignored me and some could barely walk as they limped in completely spent. But I felt compelled to introduce a bit of Americana to the scene.

I completely enjoyed the closing ceremony of these world championships at Paavo Nurmi Stadium. All competitors and volunteers wearing their official T-shirts were invited to participate. As we all marched out into the field from our assembly points the public address system loudly blared out that marvelous tune of universal harmony, “We Are the World!” Hundreds of us flooded the field, shook hands, hugged and in other ways greeted one another and for a spell symbolized a world in peace, of international sisterhood and brotherhood, no matter where in other parts of the world never-ending war and violence might rage. This completed one of the happiest vacation periods of my life.

End of Installment 32