August 24, 2004

HORSEFEATHERS GOES BALTIC

(Posted by Dr. R. for Dr. K.)

If you have a very short attention span, cruising is for you. If you have a bee-like mind that alights on a flower, sucks it dry of nectar and moves on, cruising is for you. If you have a cognitive style characterized by short, superficial bursts of observation that result in profound generalizations and deeply held beliefs that are confidently asserted and widely circulated, cruising is for you.

The rule is that you may not spend more than three hours in any port, usually accompanied by a guide who takes you to town halls, old churches, and souvenir shops. But you will be amazed what you can learn about the people of a country in a very short time, especially if you keep your eyes open and your mind closed. What follows are some notes written about the various peoples and places of north-eastern Europe.

Denmark

Denmark is a toy country. It is the kind of country that you’d expect to see in the windows of Lord and Taylor around Christmas time. It has a population of about five million, about the size of Chicago’s. It prides itself on its hundreds of windmill farms, which produce about 15 percent of its energy needs. It will never have nuclear power, the stylish guide says proudly. In fact, one third of the population rides bicycles everywhere, even though Denmark is one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. If you want to buy a car you must pay a two hundred percent tax on it. A $25,000 car will cost you $75,000. Copenhagen is charming and clean, and its people are calm and easy, and if our guide is representative, rather droll. They are also insufferably smug and holier-than-thou about their lifestyle and the righteous way they live.

Gdansk

Gdansk, hopelessly mutilated by the Nazis during the war, and then misprized for fifty years by the Soviets because it had once been Danzig, the queen of the Baltic and East Prussia, is now a small struggling city trying to climb its way out of poverty through hard work. But whereas Germany had access to capital through the Marshall Plan, Poland has few or no sources of capital to draw on for investment.

They try to bring money in through tourism but there is nothing to see in Gdansk—the Nazis destroyed everything. There are only a few facades of buildings that have been renovated to look like the 16th century trading houses of the old Hanseatic League. Everybody who doesn’t work in the port in Gdynia scrounges for tourist money by selling postcards or toys that sound like chickens cackling, or, if you are a young music student, playing a Mozart quartet in the town square. There is not much there, and so there is not much to remember.

Tallin

Estonia is a curious little country. It has a population of 1.5 million people, a little less than Queens’, a third of whom are Russians left over from the Soviet Union, who for whatever reason have chosen to stay in Estonia. It seems most proud of its long history of being conquered. It has been conquered by just about every country in Europe north of the Mason-Dixon line: Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Germany, etc. Its two major industries are timber and tourism. And except for Tallin, its capital, there is not much there except forests. The “old town,” of which there is much left, is medieval, the new town is just old and run down. But there is a hopeful spirit there that is missing from Gdansk.

St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg, aka Petrograd, aka Leningrad, aka St. Petersburg was invented by Peter the Great about three hundred years ago because he wanted Russia to have more contact with the West. He saw that Russia was hopelessly backward and hoped to create a window on the West so that Russians might take as a model the advances that the enlightenment had brought to Western Europe. Alas, even after three hundred years Russia still has a lot of catching up to do.

St. Petersburg is still the Second World. As we walked down the gangplank to the quay, we heard the sounds of a lively little brass band playing “Hold that Tiger,” and then “There’ll Always Be an England,” then “God Save the Queen.” At first we all thought that this was a cheerful introduction to the city arranged by the city fathers. But then we realized that this was only a group of elderly musicians scrounging a few rubles from tourists wherever and whenever they could. Our early pleasure turned to sadness as we grasped that these were once professional musicians who were reduced to degrading themselves for tourists playing the “Tiger Rag.” Wherever we went in St. Petersburg we saw such musicians, sometimes a soloist, sometimes a group of three or four scrounging for a few coins in front of tourist attractions. In front of the eighteenth century Peterhof Palace they had donned silly looking powdered wigs as they played what they thought would please the endless parade of tourists. Sad, very sad.

St. Petersburg was the only place in Europe where we had to show our passports and get landing cards from passport control on leaving the ship. We were warned that unless you had an individual visa, you were obliged to stay with the group. This entailed getting and giving up our landing cards several times during our thirty-six hour stay. And passport control was deadly serious as they examined our passports and looked—not glanced—at us to make sure our faces matched our pictures. They appeared to mean business.

There is no better example of the Second Law of Thermodynamics—entropy— which says that things tend to break down and become degraded unless they are supplied with energy, than St. Petersburg. The place has broken down, is breaking down, or is about to break down. Most things are in a state of disrepair, cracked, in need of paint, pot-holes everywhere.

Although most people on the street wear cheaply made clothes there are plenty of cars on the street—Hondas, Toyotas, Fords—and according to one of our guides most people go off on weekends to their summer cottage and their vegetable gardens.

“You are forbidden to take pictures without a charge.” This sign appears in the Peterhof Palace and in most museums. In fact the phrase “You are forbidden…” appears constantly in public places and casts a pall over Western sensibilities. It is a manifestation of an authoritarianism that Americans are not used to. It is easy to feel that officials—public servants—in this country have power over you rather than that they are there to serve you.

An example will suffice. On the bus on the way back from a performance of the ballet “Giselle,” the bus driver turned on the bus radio to some American pop-music sung by a Russian in heavily accented English. The music was loud, unpleasant and totally out of keeping with the beautiful performance we had just seen and heard.

At first we all thought that as soon as the bus started the driver would turn the music off. But he didn’t, and after about ten minutes of this obnoxious situation, I made my way up to the front of the bus and spoke to the uniformed woman who seemed to be in charge of the bus. “Couldn’t you turn that music down,” I said querulously, “It is very loud and unpleasant.”

“Loud? Unpleasant? Why is it unpleasant?” she asked sharply, acting as though I had insulted Russian culture. I opened my mouth to say ‘Listen you Russky apparatchik, I didn’t come four thousand miles and spend a hundred and fifty bucks on this concert to have you ruin it with a lot of Russky pop trash.’ But just at that moment the Goddess-of-Safe-Return sped down from Mount Olympus and wrapped my mind in a cloud of tact. The serious man at passport control flashed into my mind and I realized that I was still in the Second World, Glasnost or not. “It is very loud,” I said, “and my wife is getting a headache.” She turned and barked a command to the driver, who switched the radio off. As I returned to my seat a round of applause and cheering went up. “Well done,” a voice in the back of the bus shouted. The rest of the group, all Brits, were too polite to say anything on the bus, but kept coming up to me the next day, on the deck and in the dining room, to thank me for taking action. What would they do without us?

One of the highlights of St. Petersburg was Ludmilla, one of our tour guides, who told it like it is in Russia. She is a fat, ugly, middle-aged woman who had lived in Holland for many years before returning to her native St. Petersburg. She is very intelligent and witty, with a sardonic sense of humor, especially about Russian men, who are like mentally defective children, she says.

While the rest of the passengers on the tour were off shopping we were able to have a nice chat with her. She says that the two main problems in St. Petersburg are the unending influx of Chechen Muslims and the pervasive corruption in government. The Chechens are primitive and do not want to learn the ways of city life. They take over a neighborhood and make it so threatening that the Russians move out. And there is no law enforcement available to protect the ordinary citizen from them.

What about the Hermitage? Ah yes, the Hermitage. Isn’t that First World? Well, yes and no. Catherine the Great started the collection in the eighteenth century. She was not a connoisseur—Catherine’s collecting, like her sex life, emphasized quantity over quality—and she bought art wholesale to fill the space on her many walls. Her representatives all over Europe made arrangements with dealers to buy various collections that came on the market. You can imagine that dealers took the opportunity to get rid of lots of inventory that wasn’t moving. And, of course, this process of wholesale art buying went on for two hundred years. The net result is a huge collection of art with a handful of masterpieces and the remainder made up of objects that are often not quite top of the line. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection is perhaps the best—because it was purchased for the Tsar by an industrialist who knew the artists and something about art. If you are impressed by the quantity of art rather than its quality, then the Hermitage is the museum for you.

HELSINKI

Helsinki is surely the neatest and cleanest city in Europe. There is no garbage visible at all and almost no graffiti. The streetcars are beautiful, and everything seems to be the opposite image of St. Petersburg. Here everything works, and looks well. There are no grand or even beautiful buildings, only well designed ones. Moderation, modesty, simplicity, common sense, are all words that seem to fit Finland. The people are friendly, polite, and appear to live comfortable lives. One could easily live a pleasant, dull life here. Words like “passion,” or “grandness,” probably do not appear in the vocabulary of that strange Finnish language. A psychoanalyst would go broke here.