Tomorrow, Wednesday, 8 June, I will be leaving Petersburg, leaving Russia. My return home will follow in reverse order the same path as my arrival a little over five weeks ago, taking a bus to Tallinn, Estonia and thence two days later onward by plane to Brussels.  The bus company assures me that the delays at the border due to processing of Ukrainian refugees heading for the EU are now less severe, which is a comfort to us.

I use this time to piece together the many observations on everyday life in Russia’s second largest city that could not be accommodated so far in my essays focused on musical life, on life in the countryside, on the food markets.

We have passed the hundred day mark of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and the effects or lack of effect of the sanctions are that much clearer with the passage of time. This will be a leitmotiv of the observations presented here.

 I am emboldened to present both big and petty observations because ever since 24 February there are very few Western observers on the ground to report on the real as opposed to imagined daily life of Russians.  Mainstream journalists left the country not long after the start of hostilities.  Others simply never came here, because no business or tourist visas were being issued. So I ask the reader to bear with me if my remarks on a host of topics exhaust your patience with any one of them.  I am all you’ve got for the moment.

Food

In my essay about my visits to Petersburg and provincial food stores, I offered a brief survey of economy class, mid-range and high class supermarket chains, with some further words on vendor stalls in the city markets.  Now I wish to direct attention to the top of the top, a food emporium that rivals Harrod’s in London or the best gourmet food shops in Paris, the world’s capital of gastronomy.  I am talking about the branch of Azbuka Vkusa [The Alphabet of Taste, or perhaps better rendered as A to Z of Taste] located in the -1 Level of the Stockman building on Nevsky Prospekt.  This is not the only branch of the given chain in the city. Nor is Petersburg its home base – that is Moscow.  But it is surely the most exciting location and most representative of what Russia’s wealthy class can buy, sanctions or no sanctions.

The Azbuka Vkusa moved into its Nevsky Prospekt premises when they were vacated by Stockman’s own food supermarket in 2014 shortly after the first round of sanctions on Russia were imposed. The departure was surely motivated by supply problems for what was, after all, just one of two outposts in Russia of Finland’s biggest department store, the other location being Moscow.  The departure was something of a shock, because Stockman’s had created the first gourmet food supermarket in the city in the early ‘90s and remained, until 2014, the nec plus ultra.  The discovery of delicacies in Stockman’s St Petersburg prompted locals to travel across the border to Lappeenranta periodically to stock up on quality food products that otherwise were not available at home. 

When Stockman’s shut the doors of their food hall in 2014, we feared food shopping would lose its glamor.  We were mistaken. Azbuka Vkusa has many outlets in Russia and with greater heft comes greater ability to manage the logistics and finance needed to stock the store with exquisite food products from all over the world, many of which are simply not available in Europe for political reasons (Iran) or restraints on free trade to protect domestic interests of Spain, Italy or Greece and other producers, for example.

This store chain puts the previous tenant to shame. The sheer variety and luxury of the present offering in fresh produce, cheeses, meats, fish, tinned conserves of all varieties is stunning. The fresh fish section offers swordfish from Sri Lanka, wild salmon from the Faroe Islands (presumably Russian caught), some unidentified white sea fish from Egypt, and dorade from Turkey. In a tank, there is a two kilogram live Kamchatka King Crab waiting for a buyer at 200 euros.  Live oysters in another tank are brought from both Crimea (large) and from the Far East (very large).  Farmed mussels are brought in from Crimea.

In the produce section a couple of weeks ago I purchased for 6 euros a 500g packet of green asparagus which, according to a vendor, were grown in the Moscow region!  On a later visit I found more asparagus, though less robust; it had been flown in from Peru. Just imagine: twenty years ago Russians did not know what an asparagus looked like; it was only an entry in some 19^th century encyclopedias. 

The produce sourcing is global – kiwis from Chile, oranges from Egypt.  Beef steaks in vacuum packs fill a large refrigerator display with labels describing them as Ribeye, New York style, filet mignon, strip loin dry aged. The marbleized beef comes mainly from Voronezh, which in the past five years has become a national center.   Additionally there is an open butcher shop just adjacent to the refrigerators which displays cuts of veal, beef, pork that merit all due respect.

The cakes section and chocolates rival the best one can find in specialty stores in Brussels.  Breads, cheeses are all exciting.  Needless to say, there is a prestigious selection of wines and spirits. A great many wines from the most sought after French, Italian and other famous estates cost several hundred euros a bottle. But the shop also promotes excellent quality Crimean wines from as low as 7 euros a bottle.

In my first walking tour of St Petersburg food shops, I mentioned the upmarket Perekryostok chain. Allow me to add a few details here, particularly as regards the fresh fish counter, which has surprised me now that I have shopped there for several weeks. Their offer of fresh dorade and sea bass from Turkey deserves special mention.  Freshness and quality like this cannot be matched in the top of the line Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize (‘The Lion’ in its US subsidiary).  I can only imagine that the fish are flown in daily from Turkey to ensure this freshness, which bests what the Belgians offer coming from Greek fish farms. Notwithstanding high transportation costs, the prices here are a good 30% below Belgium.

I close out discussion of fish with a couple of words about salmon, which was widely sold before the sanctions regime took effect and was priced at roughly a 35% discount to prices in Belgium.  With sanctions, the farmed salmon from Norway disappeared. Farmed salmon from the Faroe Islands continued to be sold until the more rigorous sanctions post February 2022 came into force.  Implicit in my bracketed remark on Azbuka Vkusa salmon, the fish are probably wild, caught by Russian boats under a treaty that the Faroes are loathe to cancel. Then, from nowhere, farmed salmon from Murmansk came onto the market, but at what I would describe as a 25% premium to supermarket prices in Belgium. And now, in the city market, I found that there is a multiplicity of farmed and wild salmon from the Baltic on sale.  Clearly there will be a market shake-out before there is a new normal established.

Throughout the food chain, whether Economy, Middle Class or Premium, I note that new supplier countries are emerging.  Iceberg lettuce and celery are among the new entries from Iran. Iranian canteloupes in even the Economy chain Verny would be fair competitors to the prized Cavaillon melons from France and Morocco that appear in Belgian stores.

Cosmetics

For this entry I am reliant on my wife’s shopping experience.  Whereas both staples and luxury food products are fully stocked in St Petersburg supermarkets, the same cannot be said of foreign branded mass market cosmetics. Russian ladies have surely been out hoarding because many well known brands are already out of stock or remain in very limited ranges.  However, certain elite products buck the trend.  My wife found that a shop specialized in very pricey world beating Korean and Japanese skin creams have no trouble maintaining stock. Middlemen have already moved in to assure supplies via workarounds, i.e. ‘parallel trading.’ This, of course, adds to price but is affordable to the traditional clientele.

Similarly, when my wife went shopping for luxury Italian fabrics including silks, she found that the stores are receiving daily shipments, presumably also via middlemen and roundabout logistics.

Finally, I offer a comment on the shuttered street level shops and mall tenants that have been gleefully reported by Western journalists:   yes, major Western branded stores have closed down, not all, but a great many.  Their loss is felt on the most prestigious shopping streets and malls, where they bought market share for their products by lavish spending on promotion, including prestige premises.  However, outside these limited addresses, one does not see gaps in the street level stores in Petersburg.  I see more empty store fronts in shopping streets in Brussels than here.

Musical life:

“Ognenenny Angel” [Fiery Angel] at the Mariinsky

This revival of a legacy opera production dating from the early days of Valery Gergiev’s management of the Mariinsky and launched jointly with Covent Garden was an important musical event, very suitable to the first week of the White Nights Festival. The cast was excellent and Gergiev conducted, which speaks for itself. However, this first class event, did not have an audience to match. 

We were sitting in 3^rd row orchestra seats (stalls in British parlance) which were sold to us by the Mariinsky online ticket office at a 40% discount. However, looking at those seated around us, I understood that we had overpaid: they surely got their tickets gratis. The Mariinsky has done this from time to time to fill seats and avoid an embarrassing void just in front of the performers.

This audience listened attentively, applauded where necessary, but was remarkable for being very poorly dressed. Although the Mariinsky stopped setting a dress code many years ago when Western visitors showed up in jeans and sweaters, I had never before seen hefty men wearing singlets take front row seats. Out of 1500 in the audience overall, maybe a dozen men wore suits or sports jackets.  Women were proper but in cheap apparel. For a premiere performance, this sartorial descent of the audience does not augur well for the financial health of the theater going forward.

We also saw another legacy production in the historic Mariinsky-1 building – ‘Eugene Onegin’ as staged by Yuri Temirkanov in the early 1980s. Temirkanov was Gergiev’s immediate predecessor as music director of the Kirov/Mariinsky. He famously also was stage director of two operas, of which Onegin is one. He moved from the Mariinsky to the Philharmonic, where he remained for the rest of his career, combined with principal conductor positions in the USA.

The Temirkanov production of Onegin is visually a delight. Yes, it is retro in the same sense as Zeffirelli’s various productions of Verdi operas were retro when they were kept in repertoire by Met intendant Joseph Volpe for decades.  But Onegin is about a certain place and a certain age. Its ‘updating’ by contemporary stage directors in the West to impress on the audience the universality of the composer’s message by abstract decoration and costumes only creates contradictions between what we see on stage and the words we hear or read overhead, all to the detriment of the work. In the Mariinsky production, when Tatyana tells the Nurse to ‘open the window,’ there is a window to open.

The evening of Onegin was a good demonstration of what Gergiev has made the leitmotiv of this season’s White Nights Festival when foreign performers are largely absent for obvious reasons – to feature young performers who have received their advanced training within the theater but are still unknown to the audience.  Good voices and musicality were in evidence on stage even if the casting was uneven.  However, in all fairness, without big name guest performers from abroad, a ‘buzz’ is missing, and that is what drew in the wealthy Russians in the past.

In St Petersburg, even before the sanctions, wealthy society tended to favor the smaller Mikhailovsky opera house over the Mariinsky on most evenings. Seat prices were high and no seats were discounted for pensioners, none were given out for free at the Mikhailovsky.  The wealthy could feel comfortable with their privilege.  Perhaps the Mariinsky will have to move in this direction to navigate the new age.

Until June, the Mariinsky theaters announced at the start of each show that the audience was obliged to wear masks during the performance for their own safety and that of the staff. In fact, no one wore masks in the theaters, just as no one was wearing masks when shopping, dining in restaurants or in other public spaces, including the metro and buses. Only store personnel and public service workers were wearing masks.  That all ended on 1 June. However, at the theater a temperature check is now being made on everyone just ahead of the passage through metal detectors.

The abandonment of Covid precautions is in fact justified at this time by the very low rate of infection in Russia, including in St Petersburg. About 4,000 new cases are declared daily nationwide, about 400 daily in St Petersburg.  At this rate, the chance of contracting an infection is 50 times less than in the USA at present.

I cannot close this discussion of my evenings at the opera without mentioning our pre-theater dining experience. 

It was a shock to discover on our first evening out that our favorite venue, the French cuisine gourmet restaurant Vincent, just opposite the old theater, closed for good just days before our arrival. It had barely survived the shutdowns during the pandemic, but the latest stress arising from the disappearance of foreign visitors obviously was too much for the owners.  During our visit to another gourmet restaurant, just a few minutes’ walk down the same street, the staff explained that they have been hard hit by a fall-off in clientele.  Indeed, my wife and I were the only diners at 6pm.

For sure, the folks in the audience in the front rows of the Mariinsky during the Fiery Angel performance don’t have the spare cash to frequent pricey restaurants.  However, this restaurant, Repa [the Turnip] has the support of maestro Gergiev for his entertainment of guests and colleagues in a private dining room after shows. It also is aiming for a Michelin Guide star, which, if we speak only of the quality of the fare put out by the imaginative chef, and not about the numbers of diners, they have good reason to expect.

Of course, it is difficult to foresee how the Mariinsky and its commercial neighborhood will weather the storm created by the Western sanctions and disappearance of well-heeled foreign visitors.   A couple of days ago, the morning news on radio Business FM carried relevant information that is promising. The news item was the announcement by Marriott that they will be leaving the Russian market.  The commentators noted that the departure of major hotel brands will change very little in the Russian hospitality industry since all of the hotels are owned by Russian investors. They also remarked that four and five star Moscow hotels are fully booked for the coming two months. The prices for rooms begin at 15,000 rubles per night (220 euros). And whereas in the past their clients were mostly foreign visitors, today the overwhelming share of hotel guests is Russians. 

Tour Groups visiting cultural venues

As the calendar moved on to June, there was a visible uptick in tourists in the district where we have our apartment, the ‘borough’ of Pushkin, just opposite the park and Catherine palaces that have long been a major tourist attraction. To be sure, today there are no Chinese, who swarmed here before the pandemic. Nor are there any other foreign tourist groups at all.  Russian groups are just beginning to show up, but they are still too few to be a nuisance to individual tourists like ourselves or a major financial support to the museums.

A week ago, we visited the Hermitage Museum and it was a delight to be able to stroll around without crossing the currents of groups.  We could approach the best known and loved paintings, inspect them at close distance without being shooed away by tour guides or members of their groups keen to take photos. This is a moment to savor, even if it is depleting the ticket revenues of the management. Absent foreigners, they have had to triple the entry ticket price for Russian pensioners.

As property owners, we follow with interest news about the local real estate market.  I have not seen figures for St Petersburg, but the news from Moscow is that their prices are rising by 30% this year. The average price for apartments in the capital is now over 400,000 rubles per square meter, meaning 6,000 euros.  This is half the price of Paris, but double the price of Brussels. The explanation is price inflation in construction materials and labor. Russians are perplexed, because nearly all construction materials are now produced in country, not imported.  The prices appear to be resisting decreased demand that results from the still high interest rates on new mortgages outside of special government programs.

Life in the countryside

In my essay on impressions from our visit to our dacha in Orlino published a couple of weeks ago, I said that the situation there was stable, with small improvements such as improved roads this past year.  I should have added that over the years we have witnessed fashions that sweep through the town.  Maybe six or seven years ago everyone acquired a Chinese ‘trimmer,’ usually gas powered to cut the ‘grass’, meaning the green undergrowth, mostly weeds that passes for a lawn in many yards including our own. Only a very few have true seeded lawns. 

The next fashion wave was siding.  Siding was being applied to new houses built from cement blocks or from pressed sawdust panels to provide an aesthetically pleasing exterior. Often the colors selected were shocking – pastel pinks more suited to the Caribbean than to the Russian North.

Siding was being applied to century old and decrepit hewn log houses to give them a wholly updated look with clean lines. What lies inside is nobody’s business.  The next fashion wave to hit our countryside was greenhouses.  Every landowner in our area was putting them in.  And if your neighbor had one, you tried to move ahead and put in two. Even neighbors who were seldom seen in our town and could hardly look after the greenhouse plantings had their own greenhouses installed. 

This year, ‘special military operation’ or no, yet another wave of investment and home improvement has rolled over the countryside:  new roofs.  Houses which otherwise have not been altered for 80 years or more now are acquiring roofs based on a new product that looks like ceramic tiles but is laid down in panels, so that the installation is a matter of just a couple of days, and the cost is substantially less than traditional tiles.

On the war:  Que sera, sera

As I remarked in a previous essay, Petersburgers do not talk much about the war.  This is not because of state repression, as many Western media would have us believe. No, it is simply because opinions are divided. People know where their friends, relations, acquaintances stand and they avoid raising issues that would only unleash acrimony. However, when there is anonymity, as for example among taxi drivers or hair dressers, talk flows more freely.

What I hear with regard to the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine falls into the long Russian folk tradition of авось. This philosophy encapsulated in one word corresponds to what the 10 or 15% of the population who profess Islam would express as Inshallah. However, given that Russians are now celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great, who opened his Window on Europe by founding this city on the Neva, it is more appropriate to make reference to European folk thinking from the popular Italian song Que sera, sera:  “what will be will be, the future is not ours to see…”

Along with this sense of resignation before historical forces greater than our abilities, I hear the comment that “every hundred years the Europeans get it into their heads to destroy Russia.” If Europeans see Russia as the aggressor by its move into Ukraine, here the causality is taken back one step to the NATO installations and instructors active in Ukraine over the past 8 years leading to the preparation of an army of 150,000 nationalists prepared to pounce on the Donbas in March 2022.

As for the periodicity of European madness, most adults here think back at once to Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 1812 which attracted adventurers from all of Europe keen to glean spoils of war in Moscow. Then, of course, came World War I and the German assault which drove deep into the territory of the Russian Empire.

Today the hostile position of Chancellor Scholz has touched off neuralgic reactions in the population. His pronouncements on arms shipments to Ukraine, on Germany casting off the pacifism which dominated its policies for the past fifty years to create ‘Europe’s largest army’ set off alarm bells in Russia. These are the policies of the weak leader of a coalition dependent on the Russophobic Greens to stay in power. But the Russians are focused on the results, not the causes of policy.  What they hear brings up memories of German violence and barbarism seventy years ago, all the more so here in Petersburg, where the German Siege cost more than a million civilian lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Postscript, 11 June:

Several readers sent in comments to my report on “Russia today at ground level,” demonstrating that they understood fully well my subversive intent.  The point of a detailed and unbiased description of shopping experiences, cultural events and the like was to show that the ongoing war and the fierce sanctions imposed on Russia by the Collective West have not deprived Russians of their pleasures and normal life.

One or two readers sent in spoiler remarks, asking how Russians are coping with spare parts for the autos now that manufacturers have cut ties with the country, whether white goods such as refrigerators and washing machines have exploded in price for the same reason, and much more.  But such attempts to denigrate what I reported for failing to be fully comprehensive, beyond the capacity of any one observer, are just a variation on the theme that one fool can ask a hundred questions more than a wise man can answer.

Without claiming to be that ‘wise man’ I answered the questions by showing how in a couple of product categories that I or my wife saw on sale, parallel trading was already ensuring the supply on the Russian market of goods that their manufacturers no longer market directly in Russia.  Nearly everything that Western firms have withdrawn from Russia is purely civil in application, has no dual use and is not itself prohibited for sale to Russia. Therefore it may be taken for granted that most everything will continue to be available to Russian consumers if at a moderately higher price. Or the market niche will be filled at lower prices by enterprising Russian manufacturers.

As regards software, including apps, I do not doubt the ingenuity of Russian programmers and the appearance of replacement services that are Russian designed and brought to market.  After all Yandex, not Google, was the largest Search Engine in Russia before 24 February, and V Kontakte, not LinkedIn or Facebook, was the largest social network.

It has been my rule not to join the vast majority of my fellow political commentators at the scrimmage line in sterile debates of the one subject of the day, week, month that has attracted their full attention. Their debates are sterile because they ignore all but a few parameters of reality in Russia, in Ukraine. For them, ignorance is bliss. They do not stir from their armchairs nor do they switch channels to get information from the other side of the barricades, meaning from Russia.

I will violate this overriding rule and just this once join the debate over how Russia’s ‘special military operation’ will end.   Nearly all of my peers in Western media and academia give you read-outs based on their shared certainty over Russia’s military and political ambition from the start of the ‘operation,’ how Russia failed by underestimating Ukrainian resilience and professionalism, how Putin must now save face by capturing and holding some part of Ukraine. The subject of disagreement is whether at the end of the campaign the borders will revert to the status quo before 24 February in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality or whether the Russians will have to entirely give up claims on Donbas and possibly even on Crimea.

As for commentators in the European Union, there is exaggerated outrage over alleged Russian aggression, over any possible revision of European borders as enshrined in the Helsinki Act of 1975 and subsequent recommitments by all parties to territorial inviolability of the signatory States. There is the stench of hypocrisy from this crowd as they overlook what they wrought in the deconstruction of Yugoslavia and, in particular, the hiving off of Kosovo from the state of Serbia.

I mention all of the foregoing as background to what I see now going on in Russian political life, namely open and lively discussion of whether the country should annex the territories of Ukraine newly ‘liberated’ by forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics with decisive assistance of the Russian military. By admission of President Zelensky yesterday, these territories now amount to 20% of the Ukrainian state as it was configured in 2014.

In the past several weeks, when Russia concentrated its men and materiel on the Donbas and began to score decisive victories, most notably following the taking of Mariupol and capitulation of the nationalist fighters in the Azovstal complex, leading public officials in the DPR, the LPR and the Kherson oblast have called for quick accession of their lands to the Russian Federation with or without referendums. In Moscow, politicians, including Duma members, have called for the same, claiming that a fait accompli could be achieved already in July.

However, as I see and hear on political talk shows and even in simple political reportage on mainstream Russian radio like Business FM, a counter argument has raised its head.  Those on this side ask whether the populations of the potential new constituent parts of the RF are likely to be loyal to Russia. They ask if there is truly a pro-Russian majority in the population should a referendum be organized.

This is all very interesting. It surely is a continuation of the internal debate in Moscow back in 2014 when the decision was taken to grant Crimea immediate entry into the RF while denying the requests for similar treatment from the political leaders of the Donbas oblasts.

However, there surely are other considerations weighing in on the Kremlin that I have not seen aired so far. They may be likened to the considerations of France following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the possible reunification of Germany was the talk of the day.  Sharp witted observers said at the time that President Mitterand liked Germany so much that he wanted to continue to see two of them.  Today Vladimir Putin may like Ukraine and its brethren Slavs so much that he wants to see three or four of them.

To be specific, from the very beginning the number one issue for Moscow as it entered upon its military adventure in Ukraine was geopolitical:  to ensure that Ukraine will never again be used as a platform to threaten Russian state security, that  Ukraine will never become a NATO member. We may safely assume that internationally guaranteed and supervised neutrality of Ukraine will be part of any peace settlement. It would be nicely supported by a new reality on the ground: namely by carving out several Russia-friendly and Russia-dependent mini-states on the former territory of East and South Ukraine. At the same time this solution removes from the international political agenda many of the accusations that have been made against Russia which support the vicious sanctions now being applied to the RF at great cost to Europe and to the world at large: there will be no territorial acquisitions.

If Kiev is compelled to acknowledge the independence of these two, three or more former oblasts as demanded by their populations, that is a situation fully compatible with the United Nations Charter.  In a word, a decision by the Kremlin not to annex parts of Ukraine beyond the Crimea, which has long been quietly accepted by many in Europe, would prepare the way for a gradual return of civilized relations within Europe and even, eventually, with the United States

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Last week one of my “to do” tasks for this trip to Russia was successfully completed: I spent an hour in a recording studio of Radio St Petersburg’s Chanel Five speaking to Professor Andrei Leonidovich Bassoevich about the edition of my Russia in the Roaring 1990s published here in November 2021 and more generally about the cycles of friendship-enmity in Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe over the past half century. 

Bassoevich has been the presenter of this show for the past twenty years. He has a distinctive way of interviewing and of lightening the style of the broadcast by insertions of music and other sound tracks relevant to the subject at hand.

Our conversation was conducted in Russian.

https://cloud.mail.ru/stock/3rBxnMfcQCPak5pn9PR3dDTU

In Volume II of my Memoirs of a Russianist: Russia in the Roaring 1990s, the diary entries which constitute three quarters of the book describe in considerable detail the musical and literary life of the country that I saw firsthand and in which I participated as sponsor in the name of my employers. Notwithstanding an economic collapse that was deeper than America’s Great Depression of the 1930s, Russia experienced a cultural renaissance, moving in new directions and bringing out great new talent that won over discerning cultural consumers the world over. My conclusion was that High Culture was, is and forever will be a distinguishing feature of Russia come what may in world affairs and in the domestic economy.

In this essay, I propose to examine how Russian culture is faring in the face of the new and dramatic challenges posed by Western sanctions and by the “cancel culture,” “cancel Russia” movements that are being fanned by Western media. They have resulted in the cutting of cultural ties at the intergovernmental level and also at the level of individual artists and individual symphony halls and opera-ballet theaters from both Russia and the Collective West.

Playbills in the West are being censored and revised to remove Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and other Russian staples of the international musical repertoire in a manner similar to the way Wagner was cut from repertoires during and after WWII. The direct consequence is the removal of opportunities to appear on Western stages for the best performers of such works, meaning both troupes and individuals first and foremost from Russia. Artists who regularly crossed what were invisible borders now are confronted with almost insuperable obstacles

I focus attention here on music, meaning opera, concerts and ballet, because, of all the performing arts, it is the most accessible to the broad public at home and abroad given that knowledge of language is not a requirement for full enjoyment.

But before we look at the present, I will go back to the 1990s and direct attention to what some of the same Russian institutions and individuals as figure in the news today at the head of Russian musical culture were doing then.

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Musical leadership in Russia today is less concentrated geographically and institutionally than it was in the 1990s.  Many new theaters and greatly improved troupes have emerged in places like Kazan in Tatarstan and in Novosibirsk in Siberia. They are well financed by local government, which is flush from income generated by extractive industries, and with their deep purses can attract some of the best talent in the country.  Nonetheless, the one person and the one house of music that stood out in the 1990s and which set the tone for the nation then remains the bellwether today:  Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater of St Petersburg.

Under Gergiev’s guidance, during the 1990s the Mariinsky moved way ahead of its key competitor and long-time ‘ elder brother,’ Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, which was beset by internal discord, political interference and an inability to respond appropriately to the economic challenges of the market economy then being established. It was precisely Gergiev’s genius at selling his ‘product’ abroad via recording contracts, joint productions, foreign tours and the development of opera and ballet festivals that drew in leading artists from the world over as well as a wealthy audience of foreign and domestic visitors.  Meanwhile, “Friends of the Mariinsky” fund-raising associations were cultivated in major musical centers. Besides financial contributions, they helped with the rebranding of what had been known as the “Kirov” company in Soviet times, to the new “Mariinsky” label. 

As musical director, Valery Gergiev had a clear agenda which he implemented with great consistency and success. Keen to turn his house orchestras into quality performers of symphonic music, he downgraded the ballet repertoire, for which the Kirov was best known abroad, to second place and brought forward the opera troupe with new, more demanding repertoire. This entailed promotion of Wagner, and of the Ring Cycle in particular. It entailed the promotion of compositions by long ignored geniuses of Soviet Russia, meaning Sergei Prokofiev in particular.

Gergiev invited leading stage directors from Europe to update the visual presentation of scenery, lighting and costumes from the static Soviet past, and, most importantly, to bring up to world standards the delivery methods of the singers themselves. From “stand up and sing,” they became actors and actresses on stage. The introduction of titles in English and Russian was a finishing touch to engage the audience in the dramatic flow of the opera.

Annual tours abroad to London and New York, among other global opera centers, consolidated the Mariinsky’s worldwide reputation and provided financial assistance to the orchestra members and singers who otherwise received miserly paychecks at home. 

All of these priority initiatives came together in 1991, three years into Gergiev’s tenure as Music Director, when the Mariinsky launched a sensational, unforgettable co-production of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel with London’s Covent Garden. The presentation of this opera had been held up for many years by the inability to find a suitable female lead singer for the role of Renata. With the casting for this role of the young and rising star, Mariinsky soprano Galina Gorchakova, this gap was filled. Following the presentation of this show in London, Gorchakova was named opera singer of the year in the United Kingdom. She went on to make an important international career, during which she noisily denounced Gergiev as a “dictator” because of his tight control over the private lives of his protégés. Sometimes Valery Gergiev does not hold a grudge and today Gorchakova works at the Mariinsky as a voice coach, her singing career having ended some time ago.

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In the new millennium, the hyper-active musical director and chief conductor of the Mariinsky Theater, Valery Gergiev, oversaw the creation of a musical empire.  A spectacular new opera house, dubbed Mariinsky II, was built adjacent to the historic 19^th century theater, which underwent much-needed renovation.  Five minutes walking distance away, a third venue was added, the Concert Hall, where concert performances of operas also are presented on a daily basis.  Moreover, in a manner which paralleled the Russian art museum world, where satellites or affiliates of the Hermitage were being set up in other Russian cities, the Mariinsky went beyond domestic touring to establish several permanent operational bases in the country. 

One was in the city of Vladikavkaz, the capital of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, the area where Gergiev was born and spent his childhood. Western readers will know this part of the Caucasus best from its connection to South Ossetia, which was once territorially part of Georgia and was the land over which the Russian-Georgian War of 2008 was fought. The Gergiev family has maintained close relations with Ossetia. Valery’s sister Larisa, who otherwise is engaged as director of the professional vocal school attached to the theater in St Petersburg, holds administrative and production oversight positions in Vladikavkaz.  Lest one think that this remote territory is a musical backwater, I note that the conductor of last Friday’s splendid production of Rossini’s Barbiere di Seviglia in Mariinsky II, Zaurbek Gugkaev, bears the title of ‘honored artist of the Republic of North Ossetia.’ His conducting was world class.

Another key achievement of the Mariinsky’s extension of its domestic and international reach was the opening of its ‘Maritime Region Stage’ in Vladivostok in 2013. Housed in a new and architecturally exciting building, this opera and ballet company operates a full season of productions. The logic of its creation was not merely to raise the attractiveness of living in the Russian Far East by adding a center of European high culture there to complement the university center developed on Ostrov Russky in the Vladivostok harbor, but to serve as a beacon to opera and dance aficionados in neighboring Korea, Japan and China, where potential demand was huge. The logic of this investment seemed impeccable….until February 2022.

When the “iron curtain” fell on Russia once again following the start of the ‘special military operation’ on 24 February, among the first news reports in Western mainstream media were about the scandalous dismissal of Valery Gergiev from his position as principal conductor by the Munich symphony and of his status as persona non grata at the Met in New York, where he had once been very welcome together with the entire troupe for Russian seasons. Soon afterwards, the world renowned soprano who began her career at the Mariinsky, Anna Netrebko was also kicked out of the Met, while European performances in La Scala and elsewhere were cancelled on the phony pretext of health problems.

Gergiev did nothing to challenge the disgraceful and cowardly actions of his Western partners. He had seen this circus before, when he was given the boot by his hosts in Europe and America over his patriotic stance in support of the Kremlin during the 2008 war with Georgia. After a few years, they all came back to him to beg for renewal of ties.

However, Anna Netrebko’s career as singer is by definition not going to be as long-lived as Gergiev’s conducting career. Moreover, her tax residence is in Austria and that is where her home is, meaning that it would be personally quite painful to pull up stakes. Thus, she made the decision to meet the demands of the Met and openly denounced Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. In doing so, she enraged fans in Russia and a planned performance in Novosibirsk was immediately cancelled there by her hosts. Still she failed to sway the stubborn Met General Manager Peter Gelb to rescind his blacklisting her.

Gelb’s pre-Met career was in marketing at a leading recording company. As marketer he always pitched to the bleachers and continues to do so, without regard for ethical or cultural values. 

Netrebko’s public turn away from the Kremlin did win her some concessions in Europe. Her first success was at the Opera of Monte Carlo. Other appearances followed.  Now, as the White Nights Festival gets underway in St Petersburg, there are rumors that Gergiev has invited her to perform in one or another opera.

Follow-up Western mainstream coverage of the ‘cancel Russia’ movement affecting Russian cultural icons told us about the departure of a Resident Conductor at the Mariinsky, the American Gavriel Heine. Since joining the company in 2007, Heine had taken over nearly the entire historic ballet repertoire, conducting the orchestra both at home and on tour abroad. His loss to the Mariinsky will be felt, although as I explained above, the theater places primary emphasis on opera, where interpretation by the maestro at the podium plays a substantially bigger role. I also note that Gergiev has had a succession of Western conductor protégés over the years.  A select few like Gianandrea Noseda, went on to make international careers of the first order.  Others remained relatively obscure. 

The Bolshoi company in Moscow took a much bigger hit when its Russian music director and principal conductor Tugan Sokhiev resigned, saying he had been under pressure to take a stand on the military operation in Ukraine. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Sokhiev also resigned from his decades long position as head of the Orchestre nationale du Capitole in Toulouse, France, for the same reason. This case illustrates perfectly the dilemma of performers who have not only great talent and skills, like Netrebko, but also brains and self-respect, like Sokhiev.

Turning from the fate of individuals to that of the institutions which shape national culture, we note that the descent of the new Iron Curtain instantly stripped away all of the foreign sources of income and performance opportunities of the Mariinsky company as a whole.

Now that the traditional White Nights Festival which runs from 24 May to 17 July is about to open, I have taken a look at their program to consider what changes the sanctions have made.

Firstly, you note the nearly total absence of foreign performers. This may well explain the unusual fact that a good number of performances on the playbill are still listed with casts “to be announced.” Nonetheless no shows have been cancelled, and as in the past each of the three Mariinsky venues in St Petersburg that I cited above offers one or more performances during each day of the Festival.

It is still too early to say what effect the loss of foreign visitors will have on ticket sales to the Festival events. One side effect of the difficulty Russians have had traveling abroad since the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic was that domestic tourism shot up and St Petersburg is a top tourist destination. That trend has of course been given further powerful encouragement by the shutdown of air transport links with Europe and America, and the complication of getting visas for travel abroad resulting from the shutdown of foreign consulates and expulsion of embassy staff dating from the beginning of the military operation.

Of course, the foregoing will not be of much assistance to the Mariinsky’s Vladivostok stage. The city is nearly twelve hours flying time from Moscow and is not a significant tourist destination among Russians. It is now cut off from the neighboring countries. China remains under lockdown, and both Korea and Japan have joined the sanctions parade.  Relief to Vladivostok will come only when China reopens. In the meantime the house will surely incur serious operating losses.

Besides out-of-town Russians, another boost to sales in the St Petersburg venues has been the implementation of a previously introduced scheme of federally financed allowances enabling students to buy tickets to museums, concert and opera houses for tiny out of pocket cost. At our evening in the Mariinsky last Friday, there were large numbers of young people present, despite the posted ticket prices that would normally be out of their reach.

In a way, market laws have long determined pricing of tickets at the Mariinsky. As a rule, starting prices for ballets are double the price of operas. Ballets are less demanding intellectually and they are considered by loving parents to be a perfect way of introducing their children to high culture.  All seats are sold out whatever the price.

At performances of the best loved ballets, Swan Lake and Nutcracker, there will always be lots of kids aged six and up sitting with their parents in the most expensive front rows of the stalls (“orchestra seats” in American parlance). By expensive, I mean on the order of 150 euros. The same seats will sell for half that to see a popular opera, one quarter of that for an opera that is either not beloved by Russians (as, for example, Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyennes in the current Festival) or is simply a poor show with dull staging and weak cast. Needless to say, there are very few of the last named category in the coming weeks.

In the program of this year’s White Nights Festival, there are several shows which will be in great demand and which are priced at levels that may cover direct costs of the theater. I have in mind Swan Lake in several star-studded casts and a revival of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace staged by the Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky.  I was present when this opera production premiered on 11 March 2000. Also present at the opening was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who spent the day in St Petersburg as the first Western leader to meet with the newly installed President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. He was seated with his wife in the royal box, next to Vladimir Vladimirovich. The whole Russian government was in attendance and security was extraordinary. The opera’s revival is particularly timely today:  while the first half, Peace, is lyrical and romantic, the second half, War, is very patriotic, aggressively anti-French and more generally anti-West. It should do especially well with the audience now.

Other shows in this year’s Festival may also do very well in drawing audiences and keeping the box office busy on the strength of a single star performer.  I have in mind the June performances of Macbeth, Don Carlos and even the less loved Troyennes in which the soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk sings. She might just as easily have taken the easy way out and stayed in Paris or Salzburg, where she is most welcome, but Semenchuk has opted to sing in this year’s Festival, which will warm the hearts of Russian opera lovers.

The White Nights Festival has in the past featured performances by world renowned instrumentalists. Looking over the program, one might conclude that this aspect of the Festival has suffered the most from the ‘cancel Russia’ movement.  However, there will be a concert by the Russia-born pianist Nikolai Lugansky that is sure to be successful. Given his solid standing in the West, Lugansky’s boldness in coming to St Petersburg merits recognition.

One special feature of this year’s Festival is the attention given to works by the ‘house composer’ of the Mariinsky, Rodion Shchedrin, who will be celebrating his ninetieth birthday in December of this year. Shchedrin is best known in the West not for his ballet and opera compositions but as the husband, now widower, of one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated ballerinas, Maya Plisetskaya.

Schedrin has composed in many different genres including instrumental music ranging from chamber music to concertos and other orchestral pieces. His pieces for the stage have been shown in various European and American theaters, but have not entered into repertoire and are unfamiliar to the general public, except for one – his Carmen Suite.

The four pieces by Shchedrin to be performed in this Festival are the ballet Little Hump-backed Horse and the operas Adventures of an Ape, Boyarina Morozova and The Enchanted Wanderer. In light of the patriotic feelings sparked by the military operation in Ukraine, Gergiev may well now regret that he did not have the foresight to bring back to the stage Shchedrin’s opera The Left-Hander, which premiered in 2013 and was dedicated by the composer to Gergiev’s sixtieth birthday that year. I can say, from my personal impressions, that the production which premiered in the Mariinsky as staged by Aleksei Stepaniuk was brilliant.

The opera The Left-Hander is based on a novel by the 19^th century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, as are several other operas by Shchedrin. The Left-Hander is set in the first quarter of the 19^th century, in the rein of Alexander I, the conqueror of Napoleon in 1812, who later made a royal visit to the United Kingdom, which is depicted here. The opera highlights the civilizational divide between Russia with its sobornost (collective solidarity) and England, with its individualism. Very timely!

Finally, it bears mention that in keeping with the house rules Gergiev established at the very start of his directorship at the Mariinsky, the Festival program includes a couple of Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde. Let it be noted that these productions, as well as the other featured operas that I mentioned above all require enormous theatrical resources which very few opera theaters in the world can summon in the best of times.  The Mariinsky is proceeding full speed ahead in these, the worst of times.

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I have spoken of how the Mariinsky may fill most seats and cover some of its Festival related expenses from the box office.  But the loss of its revenues from foreign tours, recording contracts, live broadcast contracts (Mezzo and national broadcasters) present an enormous challenge to management.  In this context, none other than the country’s President has stepped in to help. It is widely rumored that Putin proposed to merge the management of the Bolshoi theater in Moscow with that of the Mariinsky theater, all under the musical direction of Valery Gergiev.  The vacancy in the Bolshoi created by the departure of Tugan Sokhiev makes this decision not only possible but necessary for the sake of both companies. 

Of course, taking control of the Bolshoi has been a long time ambition of Valery Gergiev.  It will be opposed by many in the Moscow musical establishment, but no one will dare go up against The Boss. The benefit for the Mariinsky in the new, pending arrangement is that it will be able to tap into some of the generous federal funding that the Bolshoi has enjoyed since the 1990s, when it failed to enjoy the success in the global marketplace that Gergiev had assured for his theater. Most everyone in the Russian musical world will be watching closely to see how this proposed merger develops.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Spending some time in the countryside was one of our objectives on this trip to St Petersburg and now that we are into our third day I have some impressions to share about what has or has not changed out here since the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.

My location is 80 km south of Petersburg, in the hamlet of Orlino within the Gatchina district of Leningradskaya Oblast. Population about 300 in season, maybe one third that number year-round.

Ours is the main street that takes you from the nearby intercity highway down to the large lake 200 meters away which is the pride of Orlino and the key attraction for summer visitors.  Our house is lined up with others facing the street; and behind it the property opens onto a long strip of land that traditionally was dedicated to subsistence farming, meaning fruit trees, a vegetable garden and the obligatory patch of potatoes. 

We are separated from the neighbors by picket fences and it is common to chat over the fence about the usual concerns of weather, infestations of Colorado beatles threatening the potato harvest and the like. Right now the key question is whether it is still too cool to plant the potatoes. When the birch trees are blooming, like now, is the right time to plant says one neighbor.  No, the real test is to lower your trousers and plant your butt on the soil; if it feels cold, wait a while. So much for folk wisdom… 

Politics rarely arises and it is not a subject of discussion today, though convictions can be expressed otherwise. One change I note is the appearance of the national flag on houses. Never saw that before. It fits into a broader pattern:  a couple of weeks ago orders were given by Moscow for all schools in the country to raise the flag at the start of each week and for all students to sing the national anthem.  Curiously, in a country that is in a proxy war with the United States, these public shows of patriotism look very much like America in the 1950s.

The quiet discussion of the war which we have had with locals closest to us shows unquestioning confidence that it was necessary to preempt an attack on Donbas and Crimea by Ukrainian forces planned for the first week of March and that it is being properly prosecuted.  Yes, soldiers are dying, but that is in the nature of wars.  Should there be a mobilization?  Absolutely not!  One professional special forces contract soldier is worth 100 recruits says our friend and handyman Sergei.

Though we come and go several times in the year, this is the first time in all ten years of our visits to Orlino that the neighbors took an interest in how we got here.  Was it difficult, they asked? The fact that we come from Belgium, more specifically from Brussels, now registers with them in a way it did not in the past.  I suppose I can thank Frau von der Leyen for that.

Finally, a word about television. Like most everyone in this hamlet, like most everyone living in the hinterland across this vast country, we have satellite television. The installation of the dish and tuner is a one time cost. We pay nothing for what we watch. There are on the decoder a few hundred stations listed, but in practice we only watched a half dozen foreign broadcasters plus the three main Russian state channels. 

I was not surprised to find that French and German broadcasters are no longer available on our satellite tv. However, it was unexpected to see that BBC World News and Bloomberg are still available.  This supports my conclusions about cable television in Petersburg: that the exclusion or retention of given channels seems to be the result of commercial deals between content providers and the Russian distributors.  I imagine that the removal of nearly all foreign stations from our cable service in Petersburg is due to that factor rather than from any government orders. In this way it would be like the withdrawal of Hollywood film companies from the Russian market. “Animal World” is gone. “National Geographic” is still available.

Otherwise little has changed in village life from what we left behind on our last visit in October 2021.  The food shops in Orlino and in the surrounding villages are fully stocked. Prices are unquestionably higher but not shockingly so. Local roads that were dodgy have been fixed and we drove on smooth asphalt. The taxi service has been improved; it now operates 24 hours. Gasification has finally come to Orlino: some residents on a parallel street to ours are now getting their connections after a wait of many years.  Life is good…

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Several months ago, when talking about the way everyone in Russia faced economic hardship immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Vladimir Putin spoke for the first time about how it affected him:  for several months he had to take work as a taxi driver just to be able to feed his family and pay bills.

Those days of generalized destitution in the Russian population during the early 1990s are long gone. But formerly well placed officers in the Soviet intelligence community and in other branches of the siloviki still turn to taxi driving to make a supplemental income and to fill their days with interesting conversation. I know this from first-hand experience, such as what I am about to share with you.

I observed long ago that for me taxi drivers have always been a major source of information on how people really live here. That goes for our “regulars,” meaning individual drivers who may work for taxi fleets but become attached to us when we are here for several weeks and take us on our longer trips – into downtown Petersburg or out to the dacha. It is all the more true of the drivers sent to us by automated dispatchers of the big fleets when we are out and about in Petersburg. In the context of complete anonymity, given that we will never meet again, these drivers are often especially chatty and informative.

Yesterday was a case in point.

Our driver from the fleet in ‘green livery,’ Taksovichkoff,  turned out to be a retired officer of the Soviet/Russian Foreign Intelligence (GRU), as he told us towards the end of the ride. He picked us up during rush hour. The downtown traffic was slowed to a crawl by bottlenecks and we spent close to 40 minutes in his car in a conversation that at least initially was intriguing.

He opened by saying he is very worried that nuclear war is now a real threat and could end civilization. But whether that happens will depend on who strikes first.  If the Americans launch first, then truly everything will go to hell globally.  But if the Russians strike first, they believe they can contain the risks and humanity will go on.  He says that advisers to Putin are urging him to consider a first strike but that the President is holding back. “He does not want to go down in history as the one who did it.”  The last point sounds a lot like a line from the conversation in the War Room between Peter Sellars as President of the USA and his senior general in the always relevant film, Dr. Strangelove.

Otherwise, the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was also a topic in our exchange.  He maintains contact with former pals in the service and so I take his story with a high degree of trust.

Our GRU officer in retirement said that the first five days of the ‘special military operation’ were a disaster, with heavy loss of life on the Russian side.  It was all due, he said, to the incompetence of the major generals in Moscow who were in charge of the invasion. Considering the debacle, he accuses them of treason.  In fact, they were removed from command days later and shunted to one side. But our driver insists the whole lot of them should have been shot.

Why were they incompetent?  Because they owed their jobs to corruption, not to merit. The major generals were armchair experts, whereas the Russian Armed Forces had plenty of simple generals who had proven themselves in the field of action.  Moreover, Intelligence experts were kept out of the operation, which explains its starting out on false premises about the enemy.

I tried to comfort him by noting that incompetence and corruption in the higher ranks of government and military are problems that also exist in many countries, including the USA.  He wasn’t listening: “they should all have been shot,” he repeated.

My question how things are going now was met by silence.

After sharing these observations and opinions, our driver decided that it was time to move on and directed the conversation to a totally different topic, his concerns over global warming, telling us that his expert friends in high places believe that climate change is now irreversible whatever we do. The methane emissions from the oceans are rising and will overwhelm mankind’s best efforts to halt the process.  Then he turned to speculation on divine intervention that has allegedly gotten Russia out of hopeless situations, including on the battlefield, in the past, going back to the Borodino battle during the war with Napoleon. At this point, I turned off my mental tape recorder.

“Loose lips sink ships” as they used to say in the States.  Despite the Terror, in Soviet times Russians blabbed quite a bit.  In the Putin era, this has been largely cut off at the source. The Boss takes all the big decisions alone, so that the possibility of leaks is excluded.

The chitchat of taxi drivers can relate what they hear from friends in high places. These elites are, of course, not in full agreement among themselves. But their views set the limits on what the Boss can do either way.

Before closing, I acknowledge that not every taxi driver is a patriot. The other day, a driver from the same ‘green livery fleet’ said just before dropping me off at a hotel: “I really hope the Americans will win in Ukraine.” Perhaps he thought he would engratiate himself with me, an obvious foreigner. Perhaps that is what he truly believes. But I was perplexed to think how his country’s defeat could serve his own interests, financially or otherwise.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, Johnson’s Russia List, the daily digest of news and commentary about Russia to which a great many American academics and international affairs professionals subscribe, has been filled with articles by respected experts from think tanks, from the universities all explaining why Russia is losing the war.  Some of these analysts specialize in military affairs: they tell us that the Russians do not have sufficient men and materiel to close the cauldron in the Donbas and achieve their objective of destroying Ukraine’s most effective fighting force. Being just a layman in these matters, I read their arguments with concern.  This concern is amplified by the writings of other American experts published in JRL who explain how Russia’s failure at arms will precipitate regime change or chaos in the Russian Federation.

Against this background, I was amazed to read today’s Morning Briefing from The New York Times, which seemingly out of nowhere is telling a very different story.  It is so remarkable that I copy it uncut below.

Quote

Russia makes gains in eastern Ukraine

More than two months into the war in Ukraine, Russia is making some significant territorial gains, even as its invasion has been marred by poor planning, flawed intelligence, low morale and brutal, indiscriminate violence against civilians. Follow the latest updates from the war.

Russian forces have advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, according to the Russian defense ministry — provinces where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s army for eight years. If confirmed, the news makes it more probable that Russia could entirely control the region, known as the Donbas, compared with just a third of it before the invasion.

If Russia can hold on to, or expand, the territory it occupies in the south and east, and maintain its dominion in the Black Sea, it could further undermine Ukraine’s already battered economy, improve Moscow’s leverage in any future negotiated settlement and potentially expand its capacity to stage broader assaults.

Unquote To be sure, Russia’s announcements yesterday of successes in reaching the western and northern territorial boundaries of what had been Lugansk oblast before the civil war that began in the summer of 2014 bear on the NYT’s article. However, by just following the daily maps of territories under the control of the Lugansk People’ Republic the “new” conclusion about the overall state of play could have been reached by any military professional without guidance from the Russian Ministry of Defense. I believe the greater factor in the NYT’s change of tune today about who is winning and who is losing the war was the successful passage yesterday of a new 40 billion aid package by Congress. From the standpoint of Washington, “mission accomplished” and now we can move on. The entire logic of that bill was to provide urgently needed assistance to back Kiev in what has been portrayed as a very successful defense and the start of a counter-offensive against the Russians to recover lost ground. If the Ukrainians are seen to be losing, and losing badly, why bother? In this regard, it is worth considering another item in the news today, this time in the pro-Kremlin Russian daily newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta: Quote A foolish PR stunt by the Kiev regime to seize Zmeiny Island [in the Black Sea, southwest of Odessa] on the eve of Victory Day led to the senseless death of more than 50 Ukrainian fighters and soldiers from elite subdivisions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition, the Ukrainian army lost 4 planes, 10 helicopters, 3 cutters and 30 drones. This was reported by the representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov. In particular, during the attempt to seize the island, the Kiev regime lost in the area around the island three SU-24 bombers and one SU-27 fighter jet. Out of the 10 Ukrainian Air Force helicopters which were destroyed, three Mi-8 were shot down with a landing party on board along with one Mi-24 support helicopter. Additionally, six Mi-7 and Mi-24 helicopters which were detached to the operation were destroyed on ground near the city of Artsiz, Odessa oblast. Konashenkov said that three Ukrainian armored Centaur landing craft cutters were destroyed at sea together with their landing parties on board. “Thus, this military adventure ended in catastrophe for Ukraine.” Unquote

If this is indicative of the way the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive in Donbas will be managed, it is unlikely the trajectory of the war sketched in today’s New York Times article will be changed in the coming weeks, with or without Mr. Biden’s package of 40 billion dollars of assistance.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

One of my highest priorities in these writings is to record personal impressions of significant Russia-related events in which I have been a first-hand witness, i.e. to practice active journalism as opposed to sedentary commentary on what others have said or written. Over the course of two years beginning in the spring of 2020, visa and other restrictions imposed by nearly all countries including Russia to combat the Covid epidemic stood in the way.  Then following the onset of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, getting to Russia became still more challenging when air and train networks were shut down. Nonetheless, when there is a will there is a way, and it is a rare pleasure to once again report ‘from the field’ on yesterday’s March of the Immortal Regiment in Russia’s Northern Capital.

This was the first parade celebrating Russia’s victory over fascist Germany in World War II per the Russian calendar after the two-year suspension due to Covid. Lest the skipping of a parade go underappreciated by readers, allow me to remind them that May 9^th is the most important holiday of the year to Russians, trumping personal birthdays, because virtually every family in the country lost loved ones in World War II. Twenty-six million died in defense of the homeland, the greatest wartime loss of life in human history.

The March of the Immortal Regiment was added to the commemoration ceremonies several years ago as a ground-up movement that provides a personal and family oriented counterpoint in the afternoon to the formal military parades on the morning of the 9^th in Moscow and in major cities across the country. Nearly all marchers hold aloft photographs of their fathers, grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers who fought on the front or who served the defense effort at home, both those who died in the conflict or who lived on as veterans.

I have written about the Immortal Regiment four times following my participation year after year, and so I can bring a certain comparative sense to what I am about to say.

Let me begin with numbers.  Surely, the high point was in 2019, when it was estimated that one million people turned out for the March in St Petersburg alone, roughly one quarter of the city’s overall population. Though I have not seen official numbers, my guess is that this year’s edition attracted significantly fewer. 

It would be risky to name any reason for reduced attendance.  The weather was reasonably good:  no rain or snow showers, as have occurred in the past, just a cold breeze recorded as 10 degrees C. 

Perhaps lower attendance may be explained by a popular mood that is depressed by the military action now going on in the Donbas.  It did seem to me that the joyfulness of families, of three generations from grandparents to toddlers participating in the same public event, was less in evidence than in years past. Perhaps there were fewer dating couples in the parade, no flirting policemen and women on the sidelines, though overall young people were very present.

I will not hazard conclusions from these several observations. It is very much to the point that among the thousands of people whom I saw around me only one person was carrying a placard on which was written: “Peace. No to War.”  And that individual carrying a dissonant message was left alone by the good-humored crowd singing Katyusha; no scandal resulted.

After walking down the traditional route starting from the Alexander Nevsky Square by the riverside to the Uprising Square and continuing for several hundred meters along Nevsky Prospekt in the direction of the Palace Square, we left the parade and headed for our traditional May 9^th dinner with friends or relatives.  Same friends, same apartment.

The table was richly set with the appetizers that support vodka toasts so beloved by Russians of a certain age: marinated slivers of salmon, pickled herring with onions in sour cream, salted wild mushrooms and assorted herbs and greens. Only this time there were very few toasts.

Following the tradition of the household, our host read from his poems published in a volume dedicated to May 9^th.  He is a certified blokadnik, who spent his early childhood years living in a downtown apartment with family during the entire Siege of Leningrad.

This time he went off script and left his poems to tell us how he survived:  with one or two other children, he would cross the street from his apartment house and would be given some sweets or table scraps by soldiers in the garrison building on the other side. But he also told us of his macabre experience witnessing partly eaten frozen corpses, the results of cannibalism by which some adult neighbors survived.

The atmosphere of our gathering was altered in other ways. For the first time ever, our camaraderie was interrupted for several minutes by a quarrel over the necessity and sense of the ‘special military operation.’

Our friends, our hostess, are all Russian patriots.  But they are also flesh and blood people with personal and family concerns over how the war affects them and their loved ones. Will there be a general mobilization?  Will men as old as 50 be called up?  These questions weighed on the celebratory mood of May 9^th and begged to be discussed. In this respect yesterday’s Victory Day was unlike any I have witnessed until now.

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Before closing, I am obliged to remark on the morning’s televised spectacle from Moscow and its grand military parade that the whole country was watching. Perhaps the attention was all the more keen due to expectations, fears that some new escalation in the military operation would be announced from the tribune by President Putin during his brief speech.

As it turned out, Putin’s words were very restrained.  There were no threats of nuclear attack on NATO nations posing an existential threat to Russia. The word “Ukraine” was not mentioned once. All talk was of the Donbas and of the historic Russian lands (meaning the Eastern territories of present day Ukraine) which were threatened by a Ukrainian punitive expedition in the run-up to Russia’s launch of its ‘special military operation.’ The operation, he said, was preemptive in nature from the get-go.

Western commentators found little to sink their teeth into other than the seeming admission that the operation is taking a toll on military personnel: this may be tweaked out of President Putin’s signing a decree providing for additional financial compensation to the families of wounded servicemen or those killed in action.

Meanwhile, Russian observers, such as the political scientist who offered his appreciation of the speech on Business FM radio St Petersburg this morning, explain that by tradition a presidential address during May 9^th celebrations is not the format for announcing decisions with respect to military operations. In this respect, Western observers were simply naïve in their expectations.

As for the military parade itself, the expected symbolism was respected.  The parade was opened by flagbearers carrying aloft the flag which was hoisted atop the Reichstag in Berlin following Germany’s capitulation to the Red Army and other Allied forces. At his entrance to Red Square in his open-top Aurus limousine for a review of the troops, Russia’s Buddhist Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu crossed himself in Orthodox fashion as required  after passing under an icon mounted above the portal.

Otherwise, the parade was noteworthy only for its brevity. There were plenty of tanks and also of the Grad truck mounted multiple rocket launcher that is seeing a lot of action in the Donbas. But there was only one intercontinental missile on display, the Yars which is launched from a mobile carrier and which was deployed by the army more than ten years ago.

Most importantly, the air show or ‘parade’ was cancelled at the last minute due to unfavorable meteorological conditions. This deprived both the domestic audience and foreign observers of a view of the specially configured ‘White Swan’ heavy bomber known as the Judgment Day aircraft since it is intended to take on board the President at the start of a nuclear war.

Nonetheless, the fraught times in which we are living were brought to mind by one aspect of Putin’s appearance on the tribune and of his subsequent walk to the Eternal Flame at the walls of the Kremlin in the Alexander Garden: he was shadowed the whole time by a security guard carrying the briefcase with ‘the button,’ meaning the key to unleashing Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022 

In the past few weeks, I have commented several times on the way Western media and politicians either overlook or fail to understand the Russian Way of War as implemented presently during the military operation in Ukraine. They judge the success or failure of the Russians by what the U.S. Armed Forces would do if their objective were to subdue Kiev. With no ‘shock and awe’ opening by the Russians and considering the very slow progress of their move to free the entire Donbas region from Ukrainian control, Western commentators consider the Russian effort a failure.

Perhaps the most extreme analysis and most dangerous conclusions were presented on 6 May by a British journalist who has for decades written about Russia and is widely considered to be an expert, Mary Dejevsky.  Her article in The Independent was given a heading that almost says it all: “By hyping up the Russia threat, the west helped ignite this war. It turns out that Russia had a far more realistic idea of its own strength, or lack of it, than the west allowed.” 

In the body of the article, Dejevsky takes us back to the days of the USSR, which despite its faltering economy in the Gorbachev years was considered in the West to be a military powerhouse. The country’s poor performance in the Afghanistan war and then the total collapse of the Soviet Union forced a revision of the mistaken notion of a military threat from Moscow. 

Now again, she believes the West has overrated Russia’s arms.  She supposes that the arms manufacturers in the West have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth. However, Russia’s poor results against the Ukrainian forces, which have been trained and supplied by the West, compels us to think again.

Unfortunately, Dejevsky goes beyond this observation, which is shared by all too many Western commentators. Her concluding paragraph merits full quotation:

“The west fatally misread a weak state as a strong state, meaning that its attempts to second-guess Russia’s behavior largely misfired. If there is to be any new relationship between the west and Russia – which is unlikely to be very soon – the west must start with this basic reassessment. It must accept that Russia is a weak state, and that the west and Nato are strong.”

Quite amazing that she does not see what is right in front of her nose. About Russian military strength, the fact that Russia now occupies a part of the Ukraine bigger than the United Kingdom thanks to its advances in the ‘special military operation’ somehow does not register. As for economic strength, it is also amazing how blind she is: the market economy of Russia today is vastly more resilient than the command economy of the USSR. Indeed, no other country on earth could have withstood the ‘sanctions from hell’ that the USA has imposed on Russia since 24 February.

But my key point is that if Russia is deemed to be weak, then American and EU pressure will have no limits and will precipitate a reaction from the Kremlin that takes us straight to Armageddon. Vladimir Putin has threatened precisely this and he is, above all, a man of his word.

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Now I would like to direct attention to delusional thinking on the Russian side that may in its own way head them and us to Judgment Day. The material for my commentary is a front page feature article on today’s online edition of Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a high quality pro-Kremlin newspaper.

Pride of place in the right column is an interview with Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. His position may be likened to that of Jake Sullivan in the USA. He surely has the ear of Vladimir Vladimirovich and what he says in this interview should worry us all.

Patrushev opens by stressing that the root evil in present world crises as in the past is Washington’s striving to consolidate its global hegemony and to prevent the collapse of the unipolar world.

“The USA does everything to ensure that other centers of the multipolar world do not dare raise their heads. However, our country not only dared but declared for everyone to hear that it will not play according to imposed rules. They have tried to force Russia to renounce its sovereignty, its self-awareness, its culture and its independent foreign and domestic policy. We have no right to agree with this approach.”

So far, so good. I broadly agree with Patrushev on the foregoing.  But the problems begin as he proceeds, in particular his expectations of what the future holds for Europe:

“What awaits Europe is a deep economic and political crisis for the various countries. Growth of inflation and lowering standards of living already are making themselves felt on the pocketbook and in the mood of Europeans. Moreover, large-scale immigration adds to the old threats to security. Almost 5 million Ukrainian migrants already arrived in Europe. In the near future, their numbers will grow to 10 million. The majority of the Ukrainians arriving in Europe expect Europeans to maintain and look after them, but when they are forced to work, they begin to rebel.”

Patrushev goes on to forecast food shortages that will push tens of millions of people in Africa and the Near East to the edge of starvation. To live on, they will try to reach Europe.

He concludes: “I am not certain that Europe will survive this crisis. The political institutions, supranational associations, economy, culture, traditions may all recede into the past. Europe will be gnawing at its knuckles, while America will be rid of its main geopolitical fear – a political alliance between Russia and Europe.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Patrushev is confusing what he would like to see happen with what indeed will probably happen. Intellectually mediocre, conformist and slavish in their pandering to the American overlords as the leaders of the EU Member States and EU central institutions may be, they are unlikely to lose political control at home. Their instinct for survival is not that far gone yet. Moreover, passivity and indifference to the political class are the rule in most of Europe. What the highly unpopular Emanuel Macron just achieved in winning reelection is proof positive of that reality.

Patrushev’s belief in Western weakness is as fraught with danger as the notion among the U.S. and European political establishment that Russia is weak.  These misconceptions easily lead to reckless policies of brinkmanship.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

In my Memoirs of a Russianist: Volume II, Russia in the Roaring 1990s* published in February 2021, my diary entries from the period 1998-2000 devote a good deal of attention to the exodus of Western businesses from Russia following the default of August 1998.  In the preceding five years, the number of companies setting up business in Russia and their headcounts in country had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where there were 50,000 expats and their families in Moscow alone. In the year following the default, the expat population fell by more than 50%.

 Most small and medium sized foreign companies that, in fact, lacked the resources to get their arms around the huge and complex Russian market threw in the towel.  Large multinational corporations nearly all stayed on, but they halted all further investments in the country and replaced their expat managers, including those in the key positions of general director and finance director, with local staff.

In fact, the promotion of the Russian employees was for those employees a Pyrrhic victory: the departure of the expats meant that Russia was downgraded in the corporate priorities generally.  Moreover, the organizational change within Russia was often accompanied by a change in the corporations’ global marketing structure. Companies like the one I worked for at the time as general director, United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), known today as Diageo, gave a strong signal to investors that Developed Markets in Western Europe and North America now trumped the formerly hyped Emerging Markets. The latter would no longer report directly to senior management in headquarters as had been the case hitherto but would instead be subordinated to individual Key Markets. This had the advantage of burying losses in places like Russia within the performance reports of large, established and profitable markets.

I have had reason to think over these issues as we all have read in mainstream media about the closures of the Russian operations of most U.S., European and even Japanese and Korean corporations in the weeks following the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in February. 

Whatever the wishes of senior management, today the practicalities of doing business dictated at least a temporary suspension of operations in Russia for the very same reasons as I saw around me in 1998: a collapsed ruble exchange rate followed by great volatility and a compromised banking system. The challenges facing any company running a business entailing importation of finished goods or components from abroad were as great in February 2022 as in September 1998. Thus, at a minimum one had to expect suspension of business activity. 

What has changed is the way the 2022 crisis has been driven by geopolitics at the level of Western governments imposing sanctions on Russia and at the level of society in the West, where the ‘cancel Russia’ movement has been promoted by the media. These are factors that skittish business executives could not ignore. Hence, the widespread decision of very big corporations in 2022 not merely to suspend operations but to close down altogether and exit the country.

Does this make sense in the medium and long term?  When may these companies reconsider their decision and try to reenter the market? What does the temporary or permanent departure of Western companies mean for Russian firms that may be tempted to fill the void?  In what follows, I will try to answer each of these questions.

In conclusion, I will offer a personal observation on the cycles of construction and destruction in business life.

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Does the departure of major corporations from the Russian market now make sense in the medium and long term? 

To be sure, the Russian market lost its appeal for Western business executives long ago following a series of severe shocks. The default of 1998 under President Yeltsin was the first. The second came in 2008 during the global recession triggered by the failure of Lehman brothers in the United States and the toxic assets of mortgage loans that had been securitized and sold worldwide by American banks: the Russian economy, alongside other Emerging Markets experienced a very big setback. Then came 2014 when the first hard sanctions were imposed on Russia by the USA and the European Union following the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. 

For some industries, for example beer brewing, which has been wholly dominated in Russia by AB InBev, Carlson and a very few other global players, the general rush for the exit in February may have given them a pretext to close what had long ceased to be the money spinners they had hoped for. For other multinationals, like Apple, the share of Russia’s contribution to sales and profit may have been no greater than 1%, so the withdrawal from the market falls within the normal accounting margin of error and could be taken without any adverse impact on share values while resulting in good PR. For still other companies like the international banks operating on the Russian market in consumer banking, the pull-out from Russia entails sustaining substantial pain and multibillion dollar losses.

The decisions taken now with so few apparent reservations or second thoughts represent a total write-off of major investments of senior management time and capital over the past 25 years from when all of global business was knocking at Russia’s front door to get in.  As regards consumer goods manufacturers in particular, they also are writing off the possible future rise of the Russian economy and purchasing power in a country of 150 million citizens as it undergoes reindustrialization through government supported import substitution. Vast numbers of good paying high-tech jobs will be created.

When and under what conditions are the companies leaving the market today likely to make a reentry try and what obstacles will they face?  From my experience as someone who reported to top management in London headquarters of multinational corporations, I find it hard to imagine that those leaving today will be ready to reconsider resuming activity in Russia in less than five years.  The decision to leave is taken at the CEO or Chairman level and no Vice President with regional responsibility will dare come back to them with proposals to reverse such decisions any time soon, since it would be the equivalent of denying the correctness of the decision to leave.

Nature abhors a vacuum and in the meantime, one way or another it is highly likely that the place of those departing will be filled by other companies, first and foremost by Russians.  All of which brings us to the question of why the foreign companies have dominated so many sectors of the Russian economy. This is something I witnessed back in the 1990s when the Western businesses were first being set up in Russia. The key lever back then was working capital, which the Western companies had and which existing Russian companies or entrepreneurs did not have. Western industrial and consumer goods may have been better than their Russian equivalents, but that was not the decisive issue.  Western goods were offered to wholesalers and retailers either on consignment or on generous credit terms that the Russian manufacturers could not match.  An additional advantage of the major Western brands was their marketing and advertising skills.

Today, when Western companies leave, there will be many Russian companies of long standing as well as start-ups that will, with government assistance, have the working capital essential to make a go of it. And once they are entrenched in any given industrial sector, it will be hard for any foreign company seeking to reenter the market to gain traction.

Secondarily, the place of many Western manufacturers in the Russian market may be taken by Chinese and other non-Western corporations who have political backing and see business opportunities in Russia that did not exist for them until now, when global competitors have left the field.

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In a week or two, I will be making an hour-long presentation of my Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s on a St Petersburg radio show called “The History Club.”  Back in November 2021, which is when this should have taken place had there been no new wave of omicron, I had a story to tell about the construction of the Western business presence in Russia which I participated in during the 1990s. This was a story that had its positive and negative sides.  Some of the companies at the time, such as the intermodal shipping and railway logistics company SeaLand, made a very positive contribution to Russia’s infrastructure while also making a handsome profit on their investment. I knew their story from the inside having been the lead candidate to replace their Russian manager.  Other companies were ill-adapted to achieve much in Russia because their internal political wars between the field and the headquarters precluded taking business decisions on the basis of objective profit and loss analysis as opposed to the interests of individual company officers. I knew such companies from having worked in them. Yet, on balance, I think more benefit came from the presence of Western companies in Russia than the damage that the blundering of some caused. A generation of Russian managers was trained in what had been until then alien business concepts and practices.

As I prepare for my radio talk, I find that the subject at hand is truly history, an age gone by. What we built in that decade and in the years since has been largely destroyed in the past few weeks, as Western companies have pulled up stakes. This is sad, but not tragic.  It is a good reminder that nothing is forever, that change is the only constant in our lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

P.S., 29 June 2022: I was amused to read yesterday that my employer in Moscow from 1998 – 2000, the world’s largest wine and spirits company, Diageo, headquartered in the U.K. have just announced their plans to shut down their operations in Russia over the coming six months. The 299 company employees of their Representative Office in Russia will be offered redundancy settlements. This is an outcome which we came very close to implementing in 1998 following Russia’s default in the midst of economic collapse.