By David K. Shipler
I spent
last week in Russia and felt as if I had woken up, after a long sleep, to an
unrecognizable world. Putting aside the
nefarious activities of Vladimir Putin’s government—Crimea, Ukraine, cyberattacks,
Novichok, and the police-state mechanism poised to act at Putin’s whim—Russia
has revolutionized itself, at least on the surface.
I’d
last been there 25 years ago, in the liberalizing Gorbachev era and then right
after the breakup of the Soviet Union, so I witnessed the beginning of change:
a freer discourse, an occasional private restaurant devoted to pleasing
customers rather than repelling them. But my true reference point, the time I
seem to have fallen deeply asleep, was the communist period of the late 1970s,
when I lived in Moscow for four years. Awakening last week, I felt like some
country rube who had never seen a city’s bright lights. Or, as my son Michael
noted as we traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg for the World Cup, I seemed
to be switching glasses all the time, looking through Soviet lenses in utter
amazement.
Gone
are the depressingly gray state-run stores and restaurants with empty shelves,
long lines, and unsmiling clerks and waiters with no motivation to serve.
Decent restaurants in Soviet days required connections to get reservations, and
some had signs screwed permanently to the doors saying, “Myest Nyet,” “No
Room.” Who wants customers when you get paid anyway by the state? And except
for the caviar, the food was rarely gourmet. A Russian joke went this way:
Customer:
Is the fish fresh?
Waitress:
I don’t know. I’ve only worked here two weeks.
