Beet Top & The Marsh Mushroom

I have a friend — a trendy Moscow journalist. Sometimes, when I was in the capital, I would visit him at his office. At every meeting, he would yawn, rub his eyes and complain that he wasn’t getting enough sleep.

“What’s the problem,” I asked him. “Why not just get up a half hour or so later?”

My friend replied:

“I can’t. Every morning I have to be at the swimming pool at six.”

“So sign up to go at eight, instead of six.”

“I can’t. If I go at eight, I’ll end up being stuck in traffic for half the day.”

“Well, to hell with it! Then why don’t you just give up swimming?!”

“I can’t. I have to stay in shape.”

“But why do you have to?”

My friend’s answer opened my eyes to the main difference between Muscovites and residents of my own city.

Here is what he said:

“Because life is war!”

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Early in spring, the dirty Neva ice starts showing its cracks. As they break away, the ice floes unhurriedly creep toward the Bay of Finland, where they finish melting. They disappear, slowly dissolving in the deep, leaden waters.

All of us who were born under the low northern skies are a bit like these ice floes. We creep to work in overpacked metro cars. We count our insignificant sums of money, moving it from one pocket to the other. It never occurs to us that life is anything like war.

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The life of a Petersburg journalist could not be less like the journalist’s life as it is presented in Hollywood movies. Our beasts of investigative reporting fall out of bed around midday, stare for a long time in the mirror at their unshaven faces, then drink a few bottles of lager on the way to the office ... These fellows are incapable of understanding why my Moscow friend would gallop through traffic, racing his car’s engine, just to dive into cold water as the sun rises.

True enough, St. Petersburg’s masters of the quill get paid only about one-tenth of their Moscow colleagues.

Personally, I have always liked writing for Moscow publications. They would call, commission an article, then I would send them a few pages of text, and in a few days I could go to Moscow to pick up my honorarium. That honorarium would exceed by several times what I could earn in my home city through a month of hard labor.

Petersburg editorial offices are dull, shabby and smell of dust. In Moscow, they excite the imagination. Without any arguments, I am handed my money in a neat envelope and treated to some fine cognac.

Having walked on clean, brick-paved streets, having strolled along avenues lit around the clock, smiling at well-endowed Moscow girls, I board my train home ... and travel back in time 15 years.

Plaster peels off the wet facades of buildings. At night, not a single streetlamp burns, even on central city streets. Gloomy residents grope through snowdrifts as tall as a man, burying their faces in the collars of their dowdy coats.

As I understood it, perestroika and those other social upheavals were unleashed in Russia so that we might begin to live better. More beautifully. The way it is in movies.

The task set forth was fulfilled. Life has definitely changed for the better. It would even be hard to distinguish it from the movies. But ... only in one city of this huge country. Have you already guessed in which one?

Recently, on NTV, they showed a funny feature. The essence of it was that a female journalist from somewhere in the dark provinces arrived in Moscow to report back to her fellow provincials about life in the capital. So the NTV-niks filmed her filming their city.

The feature ended up being truly humorous.

The provincial journalist visited an outrageously expensive Moscow restaurant, where they treated her to oysters, but she squealed, too afraid to even touch the living, slimy creatures.

Deeply depressed, she toured the capital’s megamarts. In her little town, schoolteachers dig potatoes after work to have something to eat through the long winter. But all around her, smiling, uncomplicated Muscovites were spending as much money on one evening’s fun as she, a staff journalist, had been promised for a whole week’s reporting.

I watched the report to the end, turned off the TV and found myself wondering: “Why do I, someone who lives in a European megalopolis, sympathize not with the carefree and trendy Muscovites, but with this dim-witted woman from some godforsaken town?”

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For 300 years Russia has had not one capital, but two. Over the course of three centuries, residents of both capitals exercised their wit on the subject of their neighbor.

“Moscow is a beet-top,” grimaced Petersburgers, “a big village.”

“Piter is a marsh mushroom,” winced Muscovites, “a province consumed by its complexes.”

Peter I ordered the construction of a new Russian capital in the middle of the Karelian swamps. Just a few years after Peter I’s death, Peter II moved the capital back to the South. Another year later, Peter II’s aunt, Empress Anna Ivanovna replayed it all again in the opposite direction.

Almost exactly 200 years later, the Bolsheviks loaded themselves into an armored train guarded by Chekists, and Moscow, for the third time, became the country’s main city. Another 77 years went by and an ex-Chekist from Petersburg — Putin — forced Muscovites to doubt whether they were really Number One...

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Moscow grew on its hills, century by century. Petersburg was built all at once, according to an exact plan, on an ideally flat surface.

One might wonder: is the hilly-ness or flatness of a city really so important? Yet for patriots on both sides of the barricades, differences in topography and architectural style have become at once a banner to wave high and at the same time a cobblestone to bring down on their neighbor’s head:

“Petersburgers have a primitive way of thinking. Straight streets crossing one another at right angles could only have been built by dimwits. Their city looks like the drawing of a one-year-old!”

“Moscow is and always was a city of petty village merchants. They decorate their city the same way a newly-rich merchant outfits his dresser shelf: ruches, bows, cheap souvenirs — and, most importantly, the more the better! Money he’s got a lot of, but taste not a bit.”

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To tell you the truth, I never thought the differences in the cities’ planning was an interesting subject for discussion.

Moscow, brightly colored and stretching up to the skies, has absolutely nothing in common with my grey and flat city. Yet the differences are not architectural, but something else entirely.

In contrast to the Neva ice floes, the ice in the Moscow river never creeps anywhere. With the arrival of spring it simply burns up, melting in one brief moment under the sun. That’s the way Moscow is. People go there not to be dissolved, but to dissolve.

My Moscow friend, who drives to his morning swims, arrived in the capital from a tiny southern Russian town. He had on him just one change of underwear and a strong pair of jaws.

Within a year, he became a leading political observer for a major newspaper. Within another six months, he was deputy editor-in-chief of the same publication. In another nine months he was living in a four-room apartment and drove to work in a car which cost just a bit less than the value of Russia’s foreign debt.

Meanwhile, only one change occurred in my life during this same time period. Previously, in our editorial offices, I sat at a desk near the door; now I sit near the window.

Moscow makes you dizzy, as if you were standing on the parapet of one of its skyscrapers. My sleepy city’s jaw drops when it hears about what is going on there. Petersburgers believe that Moscow is a beet-top and a big village. But it is also beautiful and Scheherazade’s unreal 1002nd night.

Like everyone else, I also listen. Scraps of those beautiful tales even land on my table, squeezed into the space in front of the window facing the Neva. And I, just like everyone else, drop my jaw in amazement.

Only rarely do un-modern thoughts come to mind: “And why do the newspapers never write about what happens to the heroes of Moscow fairy tales later? On the day after they, as heroes, have conquered the world? After they have taken the heavens by storm and won the war whose name is ‘life’? What do these people do in the years and decades they have remaining?”

But then, such thoughts do not come to me so often. Usually, I simply sit in this shabby office and look out of the huge window at the dirty waters of the Neva.

There, beyond the window, as always, the ice floes creep.  RL