By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 4/28/24

My mention in my last essay of using the Estonian route to St Petersburg now that the Finnish border crossings are temporarily or, more likely, permanently closed, elicited several expressions of interest from readers, some of whom also may be looking for new ways to access Russia from Europe.

In past travel notes, I devoted some attention to the peculiarities of the political situation in Estonia where the Prime Minister and her government are among the most vicious Russophobes on the Continent and biggest cheerleaders for NATO expansion, to the outskirts of Moscow if they had their way. At the same time, their capital, Tallinn, has a substantial Russian-speaking population. I have in mind permanent residents, not tourists passing through. You see and hear them not only in the pedestrian zones of historic Tallinn but also in the shopping malls at the city outskirts. When we took the Tallink ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn a week ago many if not most of the passengers, particularly the younger ones, were Russian speakers who seemed very much at home.

Considering the anti-Russian policies and propaganda of the government, you may wonder why Russians come and why Russian speakers stay in Estonia.

Allow me to venture a guess based on what I saw as a bus traveler going from Tallinn to St Petersburg when I looked up from the movie screen in front of my seat and looked out the window. There is no denying that the farmsteads and little settlements on the Estonian territory along this west-east route are in better condition and more prosperous than the little wooden houses, some dilapidated, that line the road on first 100 km inside the Russian territory. As you move further east in Russia, the houses show prosperity, but they are already the country residences of Petersburgers, not the indigenous population. And, of course, when you approach Petersburg itself, the dynamism of the city is evident in world class infrastructure including some remarkable bridges and arterial highways.

My point is that Russian speakers in Estonia may well appreciate that they are living in a country with higher living standards for the lower strata of society than in neighboring Russia.

In this essay, I intend to add some realism as regards foreigners’ dealings with the authorities, beginning with the first obligation of anyone arriving here for more than eight business days: registration with the communal offices.

This is something that Western experts who have official Russian hosts have not faced, since the hosts take care of it all, very discreetly. The same is true for tourists on short visits: the registration is performed by the front desk staff of the hotels they stay in. But for all others, and that includes myself traveling on a visit to relatives, one is obliged to visit the nearest government office performing registration of foreigners and fill out 4-page registration forms that are very demanding. Filling out the papers by hand can be maddening, because any error you make sends you back to point zero, told to start afresh. And filling the form out on your computer using a downloaded form comes up against the Russian bureaucrats’ making little changes here or there in the form at least once a year without warning, which may well invalidate the now outdated form you are using.

In this essay I may disappoint readers who would like to believe that Moscow is the New Rome and that Russia is a very desirable place to live compared to the West which seems to have entered into moral degeneracy and terminal decline.

This turn of mind is now rather fashionable ever since Tucker Carlson in several video reports following his interview with Vladimir Putin, took his audience on a walking tour of Russian supermarkets and debunked all notions that Russians are suffering from the effects of Western sanctions. What he showed was a cornucopia, he demonstrated that Russians are ‘spoiled for choice’ in their diet, as the Brits would say.

Meanwhile, Carlson’s filmed visit to the Moscow subway showed that Russian public services are world leaders and not decrepit, as the liars among our government leaders and captive press in the West would have us believe.

However, Carlson had neither the time, nor the background knowledge to pick up nuances that go beyond the presence of Snickers in food stores or the quality and price of fruit and vegetables on sale in Moscow. I intend to present a more balanced view of how Russia and Russians are faring now in this third year of the Ukraine war.

As it turns out, precisely the food supply and pricing is the most positive feature of everyday life. It has not only held steady but is visibly improving in ways that both average workaday Russians and the wives of better-paid corporate managers can see and feel. The government claims that, overall, 2023 was a year that saw real wages rise 5% across the country. Judging by what the supermarkets are stocking, there is every reason to believe that consumer spending is ticking up, not just on essentials but on extravagances that brighten daily lives.

As recently as a year ago, when I sought to prepare a festive meal to treat visiting friends, I had to travel to the Petersburg central district from my outlying borough of Pushkin, 15 km away. Today, there is absolutely no need to go further than several hundred meters from my apartment building on foot to pick up delicacies that exceed even the high expectations of your typical Russian guest.

New specialty stores have opened in my neighborhood, which is populated not only by corporate managers but also by folks of modest means, including a large contingent of military families. Pushkin is home to a number to Ministry of Defense institutes, always has been going back to tsarist times. It also is a training center for military personnel sent here by ‘friendly countries.’ And so I am not surprised to see several blacks in their home country uniforms doing shopping in my Economy supermarket.

Regarding the new retailers, I think in particular of “Caviar and Fish,” whose product offering I will mention in a minute. Then there is the local branch of a Belarus food products chain that offers very good hard cheeses and dairy products. And further afield, 2 km away in the ‘downtown’ of Pushkin, a branch of the Bouchet bakeries has opened, offering for sale very authentic jumbo croissants, fruit pies and cream-filled cakes of every variety.

Changes even have come to the long-existing Economy class supermarket across the road from my apartment, Verny, which now offers some high value yet affordably priced items that Russian consumers adore. The most exceptional of these is premium, tender smoked white fish from Lake Ladoga, vacuum packed in 200g portions. This maslyanaya ryba (literally ‘butter fish’) is a favorite of Petersburgers. For years, our friends traveled across the border to Finland to buy this and similar smoked fish delicacies. Let the Finns weep over their lost trade while they build their border wall now.

The ‘ Caviar and Fish’ shop opened at some time in the past 7 months when I was unable to visit Petersburg. It is also part of a retail chain in Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The product range is limited and focused on what you simply cannot find elsewhere, not here and certainly not in Belgium: fresh, unpasteurized red salmon (gorbusha or keta) caviar in plastic containers of 125 grams flown in from Kamchatka in the Russian Far East and priced from 7.50 to 9.50 per pack. Then there is an assortment of black caviar offerings from various members of the sturgeon family, ranging from the enormous Beluga native to the Caspian down to the trout-sized sterlet that used to abound in West European and British rivers once upon a time and was the fish of royalty. The black caviar comes in glass containers of as little as 50 grams and is of two very different types: fish-farmed or wild. The wild version is 40% more expensive than the farmed fish caviar, but the difference between the two is day and night.

 Except for plutocrats in the West, few of us venture to explore the difference. In Russia, even folks who watch their budgets will do the taste test to celebrate some memorable anniversary with the right kind of caviar.

In Belgium, in Israel, in France, in Italy, in Russia and surely in many other countries, during the winter holiday season shops and restaurants feature the locally raised sturgeon caviar for a touch of extravagance. Given the tiny amount in sampler glass containers, you do not feel the hefty price per kg and may splurge on what is, from my experience, close to tasteless. By contrast, real wild Beluga is sensual and rich in taste.

This new wild sturgeon caviar in “Caviar and Fish” will cost you between 35 and 50 euros for 50 grams, but you and the person you choose to treat will have no regrets. This takes you back in time to the heyday of Soviet Russia, when many things in public life may have been fairly awful but when the luxury dining pleasures available to select offspring of the proletariat and their foreign guests were extraordinary.

Of course, there are also down to earth gastronomic pleasures that everyone here can and does indulge, none more so than the seasonal little fish called koryushka that is caught on its way from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland to spawn in the period following the break-up of ice on the lake and river. Now is the time, and a plate full of freshly fried koryushka is a must for visitors to the city in the coming several weeks. At the market, these fish sell for about 7 euros per kg in the best size category.

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Setting a lavish table for guests is a tradition deeply embedded in the culture here. But the other side of the coin is lavish gifts from guests to host.

In anticipation of reader comments that I am describing the way of life of the wealthy, I point out that our guests are from the intelligentsia stratum of society that never was nor is today well paid or well pensioned. One of our guests is a semi-retired journalist, editor of a publication of the Union of Journalists and part-time professor in a Moscow School of Continuing Education. Another guest is a retired engineer-designer of modules for civilian-purposed rockets, whose pension is above average only because he is a blokadnik, meaning a survivor of the Great Siege of Leningrad in WWII.

The lavish gifts to one’s host may take the form of the bottle of 15 year old fine Georgian brandy (konyak) that our Moscow friend brought us a couple of days ago. But it always takes the form of a bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house. And to ensure that no visitor comes empty handed even in our outlying borough, in our residential neighborhood there is a 24-hour florist just a 5 minute walk away from our house. Indeed, our guests brought roses to our home banquet.

Sanctions or no sanctions, the Dutch flower trade continues to function in Russia very well. Amsterdam is the source for most everything you see in shops. Since the price for flowers was always very high here, the additional costs of getting payments to the supplier while circumventing the SWIFT blockade are passed along to consumers without problems. I was delighted to pick up some very fresh tulips the other day, paying 10 euros for 8 flowers, which is a premium of just 20% above what I pay for the same in Brussels.

Prices above Western levels almost never apply to foodstuffs, which, as Tucker Carlson correctly pointed out, are generally several times (not percent, but times) below supermarket prices in Western Europe on an apples for apples basis.

However, let us not pretend that there are no negative sides to the sanctions for the Russian consumer. This comes into view when you redirect your attention to computers, smart phones, home electronics, white goods and similar. Suffice it to say here that most well known global (Western) brands have been sold off since the Special Military Operation began and have not been replaced. What you see instead, on the computer Notebook or Laptop shelves are what we would call ‘no-names’ or Brand X coming from China’s producers for their domestic market. And if you find an Asus or Acer, then, as I heard from the salesman in our local branch of a nationwide electronics chain, they cannot sell you Microsoft Office software. Why not? Probably this is due to orders from the manufacturer. This does not mean that you will not have Office on your computer, but you will be buying a pirated version and Microsoft may cause you many headaches when they detect it, as they surely will. I know from personal experience.

I say this as a ‘down payment’ on my next installment of travel notes.

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Before closing, I wish to share with you our experience of what makes Russia, and in particular St Petersburg, the unique cultural center in the world that it is, and the decisive reason why I keep coming back year after year.

As I said above, many of our long time friends in the city are card carrying members of the Russian intelligentsia. That makes them interesting personalities by definition. Politically it makes them nearly all “Westernizers” or “Liberals” by definition. But in this essay, I put politics aside.

Our Tamara arranged for the six of us to visit a “concert” given by a well known performer and teacher of traditional Russian romances in a most extraordinary venue: the musical scores and instruments shop called Severnaya Lira (Northern Lyre) on Nevsky 26, just adjacent to the landmark pre-Revolutionary Singer Building dating from the start of the 20th century that has for decades served as Petersburg’s number one bookseller.

The Northern Lyre has been operating at this address from before I moved to Petersburg in 1994 to work and live. This is the store where we bought a slightly tired but still functional Krasny Oktyabr upright piano that we still keep in our apartment. It is where I bought all my scores for learning to play the cello straight through to the German edition of Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

The store used to be shabby. It remains shabby. But it is run by a team of young music enthusiasts who apparently stage there the kind of mini-concerts that we saw last night. They only have seats for an audience of ten and the several others who walked in during the concert were standees. There were no suits and ties, no cocktail dresses in this audience of middle aged folks who obviously have some connection or other to the store or to the soloist. There was one kid, a girl about aged 10 with her mother. In numbers, this concert was perfectly in line with the early 20th century salons where many of the songs were created and first performed. Of course, those salons were necessarily the property of the well-to-do.

Our soloist has a perfectly pitched voice. Not strong but very precise and agreeable to the ears. She was accompanied by a highly regarded and musically very accomplished pianist who is holder of a Russian Federation award. They presented romances drawn mostly from the repertoire of a celebrated Leningrad stage performer who died many, many years ago but is regarded as a very important popularizer of the genre and inspiration for composers of her age.

The store may have the subtitle Noty (Scores), but neither soloist nor accompanist had any scores. They could go on for hours relying solely on memory. That musical professionalism was always the hallmark of the Mariinsky Theater singers and other Petersburg orchestra members whom we got to know back in the 1990s.

The ”concert” was free of charge. Looking past her through the storefront windows we saw the stream of pedestrians on Nevsky Prospekt who were oblivious to this cultural event. Still further, across the boulevard stands the Kazansky Cathedral, a symbol of this city.

I cannot imagine a concert like this in any other city I know of and it makes Petersburg especially precious.

After the concert we walked our friends a few hundred meters up Nevsky Prospekt through the throngs of pedestrians who, on a pleasant, dry Saturday evening like yesterday come out from the entire city to this boulevard to see and be seen. So it was in the 1840s, so it is today.

We went to one of our favorite haunts in Petersburg for drinks, the ground floor bar of the Grand Hotel Europe (Gostinitsa Evropeiskaya). This was the favorite hotel of Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the place where he took a room immediately upon arrival from abroad. It is located just across from the Philharmonic hall (originally the club of Petersburg nobility) and from the so-called Square of the Arts on which the buildings of the Russian Museum and the Maly Opera Theater (originally the Italian Opera) are situated. The ensemble of these streets dates from the 1820s.

There are many 4 and 5 star hotels in Petersburg today, but there is only one Grand Hotel d’Europe. When we left the hotel to catch the taxi we ordered by phone, former Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi (2000-2004) arrived by taxi with his wife. Obviously for him as well, this hotel has warm memories.