For the Price of a Hat

Thirty years ago this month, I took my first trip to Russia.

I was a college student discovering a new world, haplessly idealistic, overcome by wonder. We traded jeans for rubles, were bounced about like Pachinko balls in the under-stocked arcades, rendered numb by the litanies of Intourist guides, and chased from a elite disco by threats that the KGB was coming to break up the fun, having learned that foreigners were in attendance.

A few days before our departure from Leningrad, a handful of us fell under the influence of a black marketer. He snuck us into his dingy apartment block, and pulled a box full of ancient icons out from under his bed. I spurned the icons, instead bartering my warm down coat for two fur hats.

It was on that frosty January evening in 1982, running coatless back to my hotel (I could really have used Gogol’s overcoat at that point), that I was bitten by the Russian bug.

The symptoms of the resulting ailment will be familiar to most readers of this magazine: a disproportionate interest in tsars, commissars and any author whose last name ends in ov, oy, or sky; a strange affinity for potatoes, dill and vodka; a grudging acceptance of the preeminent role of Fate and Serendipity in one’s life; and an irrational tendency to argue about things from the Russian worldview, while simultaneously realizing that such arguments are often ridiculous. And so on.

My Russophilia disease, because that is what it is, really, has been stoked over the past three decades by dozens of trips to Russia, and of course by the experience of living and working there in 1989-90, when so much was changing so fast. I constantly berate myself for not taking better notes.

Yet when I look back over the past 30 years, I marvel less at my own bizarre experiences than at the scope of change that Russia has undergone: from oppressive communism to robber capitalism, from one-party dictatorship to constitutional oligarchy. Russia has endured coup attempts, rigged privatization, natural and man-made disasters, and economic default, somehow regaining its place on the world stage.

In December, after an 18-year battle, Russia cleared the final hurdle to join the World Trade Organization. At the end of 2012 it will host APEC, in 2014 the Winter Olympics (see cover story, page 28), and in 2018 the World Cup. Russian billionaires are funding American museums and publishing houses (see page 52), buying up multinational corporations and major sports teams. And, as this issue was going to press, we learned that Russia – which barely 13 years ago teetered on the edge of an economic abyss, begging loans from the IMF and aid from the West – was making overtures that it might help save Europe from its incipient economic meltdown.

It is a remarkable transformation, and I’m willing to bet a fur hat or two that it will continue to be interesting to watch and participate in for some time to come.

Enjoy the issue.