By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 5/11/24
We come to Russia, to Petersburg for a lot more than the pleasures of High Culture. A bigger incentive is people, our good and long time friends here. I already mentioned in passing in my first installment that we met up with friends Masha and Ivan (names changed to protect their privacy) from Moscow who came here expressly for a get-together with us and with still another two-some who live here in the city center of Petersburg, Irina and Alexei.
Whether partly or fully retired from their lifelong professional positions, these people, through their own networks, are upstanding members of the intelligentsia in Russia’s two capitals. Ivan may no longer be president of the Moscow branch of the Union of Journalists, but he remains on the editorial board of their magazine and has administrative responsibilities in the university department of journalism. Irina may publish fewer articles today than in the past, but she performs public relations tasks on behalf of one of the clubs of Petersburg’s international friends headed by Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky. Then there are the publishers of the Russian editions of our books with whom we did not share a meal, but with whom we spent three very pleasant hours in their office talking about the state of the book trade and about a lot more.
The overarching conclusion from spending time with these friends, who could all in the past have been described as pro-Western in orientation, is that what Alexander Dugin and Dmitry Simes were saying in the interview on The Great Game that I described a couple of days ago is borne out: these friends now have very positive feelings about the direction the country is taking.
This is not to say that there is complete unanimity among us about what is going on in public life. On the one side, I heard the remark that ever tighter censorship is being imposed on journalism. On the other side, our publishers say that there is absolutely no censorship in the book trade. Of course, we put to one side the ban on sales of the author of the detective stories Boris Akunin and on the one-time Russian Booker Prize winner Ludmila Ulitskaya. Akunin has publicly stated that he donates royalties from his book sales to the Ukrainians and Ulitskaya has made damning remarks on the ‘Putin regime’ and on the country as a whole. In wartime, their removal from bookstores is something you could expect even in nominally free and open countries.
The impact of the war on the lives of our friends is clearest as regards the Petersburg pair. For the past twenty years they travel each summer to Crimea, where they own a patch of land and a tiny house on a hillside overlooking the port town of Feodosiya on the eastern shores of the peninsula. Last year there were Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on the town and they witnessed the midair destruction of these aircraft. One girl who was spending the night on a hillside to watch the dawn was killed by falling debris. As the countdown begins for their train journey to Crimea at the end of this month, they cannot avoid thinking about a possible Ukrainian missile strike on the Kerch bridge on which their train will be traveling for 20 minutes to reach the peninsula. Then there is the uncertainty about how intense the missile and drone attacks on Feodosiya will be this summer. The risks are low but they do not make for calm nerves, which is what you really want from a summer get-away. Some friends of theirs who are also owners of dachas on the hills above Feodosia have cancelled their travel plans, though others are proceeding to the Crimea as in the past.
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I have in previous installments spoken about goods. Now I will turn to services. The one we use daily is taxis and I direct attention to that.
We take taxis around town in Pushkin. But mostly we use them to drive into and from the Petersburg city center.
Back in the bad old days of generalized pauperdom in the 1990s, every jalopy Lada traveling down the street could be hailed and would take you wherever you were going for next to nothing. Forget seat belts! Forget suspension! Forget the rules of the road! The drivers, mostly coming from Central Asia, were free spirits.
Those days are long gone. Nobody today will stop to pick you up if you raise your hand curbside. Unoccupied taxis will not let you in, because they are all radio dispatched, waiting for their next order. And the business has really consolidated in the past couple of years, with many smaller taxi companies having been bought out and with Yandex, the Russian equivalent to Google, having taken a dominant if not monopolistic position in the Petersburg market. I assume Yandex is similarly placed across the country.
One result of Yandex scooping up all the cars and drivers is that when you place your order by phone you have no idea what will be the quality of the car and driver who arrives to pick you up. It may be a proper Yandex branded car in full livery, or it may be just an ordinary passenger car, often quite worn out, operated by a Yandex ‘partner.’ Placing your order via their App is a safer bet, because you see on your telephone what the car and driver look like and have veto power.
Measured in dollars or euros, the taxis operating in Petersburg are cheap. The cars must take in 8 – 10 euros per hour if they are fully engaged. Fares for a given trip are revised up or down depending on the computer projected time of the journey taking into account density of traffic. How much of the gross revenue is passed along to the driver depends on his relationship to the company: his contract may be for rental of the vehicle from the taxi company, or it may be that he provides the vehicle. Our Pushkin based taxi service competes with others when it posts a new passenger call, since any one driver may be under contract with several firms.
In the past, going back a dozen years, when there were only local taxi companies, you could do side deals with drivers to order their services directly, not going through the dispatcher. Back then and until quite recently, I found the drivers to be very chatty and a good source of all kinds of information about local politics, local gripes and so forth. The ride into Petersburg takes between 45 minutes and an hour and a half depending on the weekday and the time of travel, so there was plenty of time to ‘chew the fat,’ as we say.
With the recent professionalization or corporatization of taxis under the Yandex banner, drivers seem less approachable and I rarely strike up conversations with them. However, two days ago, in the last 5 minutes of our late evening drive from Petersburg center to our apartment in Pushkin, I asked the driver what he thought about the fancy and impressive top of the line Geely car we were in. It was as if he had been just waiting for the opportunity to share his concerns as he weighs the possibility of actually buying a Geely, not renting it from Yandex to raise his share of the fares.
The Geely, for those of you who are not familiar with Chinese brands, is one of the biggest Chinese manufacturers, with extensive operations outside China. Inter alia, they happen to be the owners of Sweden’s Volvo cars.
The ride in his Crossover was very comfortable, as you would expect in a car of this type. It was very easy to get into and to get out of. And the interior was up to date, with large a informational screen on the dashboard. However, the driver’s interests lay elsewhere, namely in service life, in resistance to rust (poor) and the robustness of the electronics (poor). Then there is the question of availability of spare parts, which, per his information can take up to two months to procure, and that is a real negative.
You see quite a few Geely cars on Petersburg streets these days, but still more Haval cars produced by China’s Great Wall Motors, Chery from the manufacturer of the same name, and Exeed.
Last night we traveled home from the city in a Yandex liveried Exeed, which also was noteworthy for passenger space and comfort, for good suspension and tight steering. Once again I decided to talk cars with the driver and he was delighted to oblige. By his face seen in profile, it was clear he himself came from one of the Chinese sphere of influence countries. But his Russian was perfect, and he clearly aims to make his future here.
He is satisfied with his Exeed, though he acknowledges there are potential problems with spare parts. We may assume that this will be resolved once the newly arrived Chinese brands build their dealerships and local inventory.
The experience of last night’s driver with his Exeed only goes back a couple of months. Before that he drove a Chery, also in the luxury car category. Its best and endearing feature was safety. He and the car parted company when someone crashed into him at a crossroads and the car was destroyed. However, the air bags worked perfectly and he walked away from the wreck without a scratch.
From this chap I picked up the observation that the Chinese entered the Russian market a couple of years ago with very cheap prices. However, when the South Korean manufacturers left Russia some months ago, the Chinese immediately steeply raised their prices. Chinese cars may still be priced below comparable West European brands like Mercedes, but that is only because Russian consumers pay a premium to import their Mercedes, etc. from third countries in parallel trade.
We may assume that Chinese manufacturers have found their new Russian market to be a boon. Here they can dispose of their internal combustion cars for which there is falling demand in their domestic market now that the Chinese public is turning to Electrical Vehicles in big numbers. In Russia there is virtually no demand for EVs, because there is virtually no charging infrastructure for private cars.
Finally, on the subject of cars and drivers, I say with conviction that the more expensive and comfortable the car, the better the taxi driver follows the rules of the road and shows courtesy to pedestrians. None is ‘racing a traffic light.’ None is flying over speed bumps. None is weaving between lanes. All of these bad habits that raise safety risks were common in the driving public before.
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Victory in Europe Day, 9th May, was celebrated this year like last, with only military parades that people watched at home on television. There were no Immortal Regiment parades that brought the broad public out onto the streets in the years leading up to the Special Military Operation. The risk of terror attacks put an abrupt end to the Immortal Regiment and that is sad.
On the positive side, this year it was common for strangers to congratulate one another with good wishes for the holiday. So it was with our taxi driver who took us to the late lunch/early dinner we shared with friends in the city center. This year you could see cars flying the red flag of Victory day with the same patriotic gusto that Americans show on the 4th of July when they drive around their towns.
Finally, I close out these Travel Notes with a remark on the big Russian attack on the Kharkov region that began yesterday and is still underway, said to be the biggest of its kind since the Special Military Operation began.
There is considerable speculation in the West on what this means. Some say the Russians will try to take the city in the coming days. Others say it is just a feint, to draw Ukrainian troops away from other sectors of the front, in particular, from the Donetsk region, where the Russians will stage their real offensive, seeking to capture the strategic town of Chasiv Yar that has been contested for months and open the way to the full liberation of the Donbas.
Following as I do the Russian state news, I emphasize that the Russians are presently not tipping their hand. They only report the names of the villages in the Kharkov region lying between the city and the border with Russia that they have taken in the past 24 hours. Consequently all that we can say at this point is that the Russian forces have de facto created a ‘sanitary zone’ from which the Ukrainians can no longer fire artillery , drones and short range missiles into the residential neighborhoods of the Belgorod region on the other side of the border, killing civilians and creating havoc as they have been doing for months.
