The Arbat

Twenty one years.  Enough time to become fully of age in the USA.  Enough time for children just born to have children of their own.  Ample time for the end of empires and the emergence of new countries or countries reborn.  For those who have been following this blog, you will notice that I’ve added an author’s photo - a drawing done while I visited The Arbat, Moscow, USSR twenty one years ago.  One of the nice things about Blogspot is the statistics they share with the author.  There seems to be a number of readers from Russia so as a nod to them, this is a reminiscence from my trip to Moscow.

My daughter decided she wanted to participate in a program called Supercamp in the summer of 1990.  It was to be comprised of sixty American kids and a comparable number of Soviet kids.  The venue would be a technical school within the highway loop that circumscribes urban Moscow.  I volunteered to help chaperone sixty middle teenagers into a country that was still mostly closed to outsiders and particularly to westerners.  

This was a trip when the memory of Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane from 1960 seemed fresh because spying between the countries seemed to pervade our consciousness.  His plane was shot down while gathering photographic intelligence well into Russian airspace.  Part of our preparation for the trip was to learn the cautions about what was allowed and what was not - taking photos was on the restricted list.  Some photos were allowed but we were strictly cautioned not to take photos that included railroad tracks or trains, airplanes, airports, anything military or government related, anyone in uniform, etc, etc.  

With all of those cautions etched in my mind, the photo below is from Google Earth.  I got it on my computer yesterday.  Anyone can do it.  By scrolling the mouse I can walk down The Arbat and see 21 years worth of changes.

The Arbat, a street, or a district, in Moscow, is where artists, street performers and all manner of vendors have mingled, performed and sold their wares for nearly 500 years.  It is a section of Moscow that is high on the agenda for the growing number of tourists visiting this mysterious city.  The Arbat is not far from St. Basil’s Cathedral. Its iconic colorful onion domes mark the geometric center of Moscow and sits just outside the Kremlin.  With construction ordered by Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, the result was stunning and unique and legend holds that Ivan had the architect blinded so that nothing similar could be produced.

Most of our time in Moscow was spent at the campus where the classes and activities for the students were held.  None of us, the kids nor the teachers and chaperones really knew what to expect.  Our opinions about the Russian people were heavily influenced by the constant reporting of every skirmish throughout the cold war.  This cold war had been waged for my entire life.  The fear of nuclear war, mutual assured destruction, the doomsday clock and fallout shelters influenced every major event for over forty years.  

Stories abounded about the few westerners who had been granted entry into the USSR. There were frightening tales about those who took the trip but didn’t return because of some minor misstep that led to years in the Gulag or Lubyanka. We were a group of ordinary people trying to help kids from two countries, two cultures, two societies figure out how to set the fear aside.  If fear could be diminished by familiarity, we might find a way to set back the doomsday clock to a few more minutes before midnight.

We found Moscow to be a place that was densely populated by people who rarely smiled but who wanted to meet our kids so they could test out the smiles they’d been practicing.  I learned to smile at the lady who sat at the end of the hall in my dorm even though she could never look at my eyes.  Her duty was to search my room every time I left and for many of those sixteen nights I wondered what she might find that could cost me my trip back home - indeed, cost me my freedom.  I could never get her to talk to me and I regret that failure.

What I remember most are the people we met.  These were warm, hospitable people whose opinions of us had been formed against the backdrop of this conflict between our nations.  Like our misconceptions, they had no idea what to expect from us.  I met Arsen.  Arsen befriended me and we spent hours talking about our families and seeing as much of Moscow as there was time to do.  We saw the important historical sights, the cathedral-like construction of the subway stations, the monuments to their space program and Yuri Gagarin, the Gum department store, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Moscow circus, St. Basil's, the Kremlin, and the McDonald’s that had just been built in the central city around which the line stretched for blocks.  The line would let the people spend a week’s pay for a Big Mac and fries.  According to Arsen, standing in line was welcomed because this is where reliable news of the day was shared person to person.  

When I walked down The Arbat via Google Earth yesterday, I noticed Wendy’s and Subway and several other fast food places with their names spelled in English - English on signs and T-shirts and hard currency (dollars or marks) were seriously forbidden on The Arbat that day the artist made his drawing of me.  The street performers and artists and booksellers are still there where the Arbat has survived for five centuries - so many changes, so little change.  

In such a short time, less than a third of my life, things that once seemed to be  permanent are now difficult to remember and are absent from the life experience for more than a generation.  Those sixteen days spent some twenty-one years ago gave me hope for a better future.  If progress and hope can continue to join hands....

--td