Sunday April 19 - Moscow

Sunday, April 19 I arrive in Moscow after a flight from Frankfurt with only ten passengers. I am met by Dr. Levner and Sergei Yegorov (the husband of Elena Yegorova, who works in the LC Moscow acquisitions office}. The first thing that I notice (having made my last visit to the Soviet Union over ten years ago) is that the border guards are much more relaxed in their duties. On the way into town the deterioration of the former Soviet Union (FSU) is striking: the city is very dirty, the roads are in awful condition, the city buses are heavily overloaded and even many private vehicles are in terrible condition, with several stopped with hoods up or an abandoned appearance.

I have three nights in Moscow before departure to Minsk. Karen Johnson, the sister of LC staff member Eric Johnson, has arranged for a place for me to stay while in Moscow. The first night I accompany her and some of her friends to a new cooperative restaurant located not far the Kremlin. The food is quite good, and in fact I have bliny with black caviar. Because of the advantageous exchange rate (100 to 1), a meal like this at a restaurant that accepts rubles (which this one does) is very reasonable for someone with dollars--about ten dollars. For a Russian with a typical Russian salary, however, it would represent a huge amount. Outside the restaurant there are vendors selling food, drink and souvenirs, among other things. The worst aspect of this is that when they pack up, they leave a huge mess, which is not cleaned up. The city seems astonishingly dirty.

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I make no remarks in this report about my ability to speak and understand Russian, which I guess was OK. More recently, when I visited Moscow in July of 2015, it took three-four days to get to the point where I was able to express myself without thinking too much about it and understand most of what people were saying without apparent effort.