Major European banks that continue to do business in Russia paid the government four times more in taxes in 2023 than in the year before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Financial Times reported. [https://www.ft.com/content/cd6c28e2-d327-4c2a-a023-098ca43eacfb]
The seven lenders — Austria’s Raiffeisen, Italy’s UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, the Netherlands’ ING, Germany’s Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank, as well as Hungary’s OTP — reportedly paid around 800 million euros ($857 million) in taxes to the Russian state last year.
In 2021, those same banks paid 200 million euros in taxes, according to FT.
At the same time, the seven banks reported a combined profit of more than 3 billion euros last year, though part of these funds cannot be withdrawn from Russia due to wartime restrictions on dividend payouts. It is because of this increase in profitability that the seven banks paid more in Russian taxes in 2023, according to an analysis by FT.
The amount of taxes paid by the major European banks to the Russian government totals around 0.4% of Russia’s non-energy budget revenues expected in 2024, which highlights the role foreign companies continue to play in propping up Moscow’s financial stability despite Western sanctions and an exodus of foreign companies following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Western sanctions imposed in response to the war, which cut Russian banks off from the Swift international payment system, have increased the appeal of Western lenders among Russian clients who seek to maintain access to the West — but they have also benefited the banks themselves.
For example, Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) saw its Russian profits more than triple to 1.8 billion euros between 2021 and 2023, a figure that is half of RBI’s total profit. Raiffeisen, which has repeatedly said it plans to exit Russia, also paid an additional 47 million euros in 2023 as a windfall tax imposed by the Kremlin on some companies, according to FT.
FT said its report did not include U.S. banks like Citigroup or JPMorgan as they “do not report comparable Russian results on the group accounts used” for its calculations.
Citigroup paid Russia $53 million in taxes last year, while JPMorgan paid $6.8 million, according to calculations by the Kyiv School of Economics.
As Ukraine’s defeat in the war moves closer, the neocons are desperate to draw the US further into the fight. Over the weekend, former US State Department official Victoria Nuland told ABC News that the US must help facilitate Ukrainian missile attacks deep inside Russian territory. The Biden Administration has to this point avoided involvement in such attacks, likely because Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia will strike any facility that supplies or facilitates strikes inside of Russia, wherever they may be.
It’s a clear warning from a nuclear power, but as Nuland and her fellow neocons see their Ukraine project failing, they demand escalation. This is just what they did in their previous disastrous projects like the Iraq War, the attacks on Syria and Libya, and the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. For them the failure is never because it was a bad idea in the first place, but that not enough lives and resources were poured into that bad idea to create a good outcome.
But Russia is no Iraq nor is it Libya. This time they are playing with World War III and nuclear destruction and no one in DC seems concerned.
Last Thursday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, said that NATO trainers deployed within Ukraine was inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said. This, of course, is exactly how we got the Vietnam War, but Russia in 2024 is hardly late -1950s Vietnam. Russia of today is a country that can fight back and can project military power all the way to the source, which means the United States.
Is Nuland’s Ukraine project worth dying in a nuclear war over?
The whole US involvement in this proxy war has been based on lie after lie. They said we had to help Ukraine defeat Russia because democracy itself was at stake. Then Ukrainian president Zelensky cancelled elections, so they told us we have to help Ukraine defeat Russia because Putin won’t stop there – he’ll soon be marching through Berlin, London, and maybe even New York!
Doesn’t it remind you of how the neocons were warning us that Saddam was going to attack the US mainland with drones and that he was operating mobile weapons labs? Anything to get the public on board for their war.
The fact is the neocons and warmongers lie constantly. They will do whatever it takes to get their wars and sadly we do not have an independent media in the US to challenge them on their lies. Our media is so closely tied to the military-industrial complex that it is also a stakeholder in war profits, so they aren’t about to rock the boat.
Anyone who thinks we cannot get sucked into another war like we were with George W. Bush’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is not paying attention. It is happening again, in real time.
The fact is we live in a deeply corrupt society dominated by individuals who do not believe in truth. When you don’t believe in truth you will have no qualms about manipulating others to do your will. So unless they are stopped, neocons like Nuland will demand more attacks on Russia, more US troops in Ukraine, more escalation. Until Russia fights back. Then it will all be over. Is this what we want?
When Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, Vladimir sent his ex-wife and their four-year-old son abroad for safety.
Like most Ukrainian men, he stayed behind, barred from leaving by martial law. But after two years alone, and having been declared medically unfit to serve, he decided to join the family in Germany.
“A child needs a father,” he said.
Now, he could be stranded after a controversial law stripped fighting age men abroad of consular assistance. Those between 18- and 60-years-old will only be able to replace their passports in the Ukraine, meaning they will have to return to the country – and risk the draft.
The move, designed to help plug a dire manpower gap in the country’s armed forces, addresses long-running tensions over men who managed to evade a ban on foreign travel for the duration of the war. But critics, including some serving soldiers, have warned it may be unconstitutional and will simply encourage those who are already overseas to stay away. Poland has suggested it could even deport Ukrainian men back to their home country for conscription.
For his part, Vladimir, 39, will not be heeding the call and returning: “It was morally difficult [to leave] but I decided my family needs me. I don’t feel any kind of pressure from family or friends to go back. My mates all understand my situation.”
Units undermanned
Ukraine’s military commissariats, or local recruiting offices, were overwhelmed with volunteers in the first months of the invasion. But ebbing enthusiasm and high casualties over the past two years have left many units dangerously undermanned.
Ukrainian and Western military planners have identified the manpower shortage as one of three critical issues that must be addressed if Ukraine is to resist the current Russian offensive and eventually regain the initiative.
“The immediate focus has been on munitions, especially air defence artillery, on fortifications, which includes proper defensive lines, and thirdly, on this question of manpower,” one Western official said of recent talks with Ukraine.
“As far as putting people on planes goes, we have not been asked about that and I don’t imagine being asked about it either,” the official added when asked if his government would send Ukrainian men home.
The Ukrainian government has taken a number of measures to raise new recruits, including lowering the draft age from 27 to 25.
But Wednesday’s announcement appears to have caused some confusion within the Ukrainian government. One Ukrainian official told the Telegraph that they were not entirely sure how the law would work because issues like exemptions for those legitimately unable to fight – such as Vladimir – do not seem to have been addressed.
Dmytro Lazutkin, the press secretary of the Ukrainian ministry of defence, said there were no plans to issue conscription notices overseas.
“The ministry of defence cannot comment on the actions of the foreign ministry. I think it’s pretty unrealistic,” he told Radio Free Europe.
It has also drawn a mixed reaction from Ukraine’s allies. Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, Poland’s defence minister, said “Ukrainian citizens have obligations towards the state”, and that Warsaw would help “in ensuring that those who are subject to compulsory military service go to Ukraine”.
German authorities have said some Ukrainian men will be able to extend their residency in the country even if their passports expire as long as there is some way to identify them.
Men between the ages of 18 and 60 have officially been banned from leaving Ukraine since the president Volodymyr Zelensky introduced martial law on the first day of the Russian invasion in 2022.
In practice, many were able to obtain exemptions, either by being declared unfit for military service, having three or more children, or by gaining special permission to travel from the government. Others have tried to leave illegally, some by smuggling themselves across Ukraine’s western borders. Mr Zelensky cracked down on officials abusing exemptions to travel last year. The bar for being passed fit to serve has also been lowered.
The European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat, says 4.3 million Ukrainians are living in EU countries, 860,000 of them men 18 years of age or older. The British government says it has issued 256,200 visas under its scheme for Ukrainian refugees. It is not clear how many of them were for fighting age men.
Ukrainian men living abroad told the Telegraph they had no plans to return to fight and considered the law unfair.
“The law is not fair”
“My passport is still valid,” 39-year-old Vladimir said, “but I think for many people who came here from occupied areas like Mariupol, the situation is a bit insulting. Russia destroyed their homes, and now their own country is taking a stick to them.”
Volodymyr, a builder from Western Ukraine who has been living and working in the Czech Republic for most of the past eight years, said: “The law is not fair. And all my Ukrainian friends from the Czech Republic, Lutsk and Kyiv think so. Nobody is happy with it. The government is forcing us, and with such laws we will step away from them. We will take citizenship in other countries.”
“People won’t return. The longer the war goes on, the more laws like this are passed, the more people hate Ukraine and the government. Why should I return to fight? For what? Why didn’t the government care about labour migrants like me before the war?”
“Every day we have less and less territory and fewer and fewer people. Some have been killed, others swam the Tisza river just to escape.” The Tisza, a tributary of the Danube, marks a 10-mile stretch of Ukraine’s border with Hungary.
One man, who admitted leaving the country illegally and is currently in Indonesia, said he felt no obligation to fight for the country and considered himself an observer rather than a participant in the war.
Perhaps surprisingly, the law has even drawn criticism from some soldiers. “I absolutely agree with them,” said Nikita Rozhenko, a recruiting sergeant with Ukraine’s Kharkiv-based 113th brigade, when asked what he thought of their opinions. “To tell them they left Ukraine so they are not Ukrainians any more is not normal. We need to invite people back, to greet them gladly, and not tell them they are not Ukrainians. It’s bulls***.”
“This law won’t work properly. It is a political compromise and no one wants to take responsibility. It is not good for the military and it is not good for civilians. It is for everyone and no one.”
Sgt Rozhenko, who lost an eye in the first year of the war but like many wounded is still deemed fit for service and cannot demobilise, admits current recruitment is dire. While his ideal soldier would be 27- to 30-years-old, the average candidate is around 45 or 50, from the social and economic margins of society, and often in poor health.
“The doctors pass them as capable. When they get to their units the commanders see people who are tired, with bad health, some with chronic diseases,” he said.
The fix, he argues, is not threatening people overseas, but allowing people to choose their units.
“No one has listened to the military. The military wants straight recruitment to the brigades without going through the commissariats. It will be much more effective and much fairer. This will lead us to victory and the people will serve where they want, how they want, and with people they want,” he said.
“Lots of people want to serve, they just don’t want to be assigned to a ‘meat brigade’,” he said, using soldier’s slang for units where “low level commanders and high level commanders don’t give a f*** about their people.”
He refused to give examples, but said all soldiers knew who the good and bad units and commanders were.
“Brigades who understand people are very valuable and must be kept alive” would naturally expand and grow stronger, while the poorly one units would wither and eventually disappear, he argues. Ultimately Ukraine would end up with a more efficient and professional military.
“It would be like free market recruitment – and now we have the USSR.”
In international diplomacy, summit meetings stand apart from regular high-level meetings when they are held at key moments or important junctures to reinforce partnerships and/or launch major initiatives.
The summit meeting at Beijing last Thursday between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin last falls into such a category, taking place at a momentous juncture when a great shift in the global power dynamic is happening and the breathtaking spectacle of history in the making playing out in real time. (Read my article in NewsClick titled Sino-Russian Entente Shifts Tectonic Plates of World Politics.) [https://www.newsclick.in/sino-russian-entente-shifts-tectonic-plates-world-politics]
The two statesmen spent an entire Thursday together after Putin’s presidential jet landed at the crack of dawn in Beijing. Extensive and very detailed discussions indeed took place. As Putin said later, this was a state visit which turned into a “working visit.”
The “debriefing” on Saturday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the foreign and security policy elite in Moscow at the annual plenary of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy — Russia’s equivalent of the Council of Foreign Relations headquartered in New York — soon after Putin’s entourage returned from China gives some invaluable glimpses into the ‘inside track’ of the closed-door discussions in Beijing.
At the most obvious level, Lavrov hit hard in his speech at the US and its NATO Allies with exceptional bluntness that their agenda to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia militarily and otherwise — to “decolonise’’ or “dismember” Russia, et al — is pure fantasy and it will be resolutely countered. Lavrov predicted that the escalation in western weapon supplies to Ukraine only highlights the ground reality that “the acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West” will continue in “full swing”.
The western thought processes are veering round dangerously to “the contours of the formation of a European military alliance with a nuclear component,” Lavrov said. In particular, France and Germany are still struggling with the demons in their attics — the crushing defeat France suffered at the hands of the Russian army in the Napoleonic war and the destruction of Hitler’s Wehrmacht by the Red Army.
The big picture is that the West is not ready for a serious conversation. Lavrov lamented that “they have made a choice in favour of a showdown on the battlefield. We are ready for this. And always.” That Lavrov spoke in such exceptionally tough tone suggests that Moscow is supremely confident of Beijing’s support in the crucial phase of the Ukraine war going forward. This is the first thing.
The current Russian offensive in the Kharkov Region took off when only six days were left for Putin’s forthcoming visit to China. Moscow gave the clearest signal possible that this is Russia’s existential war which it will fight no matter what it takes. Beijing understands fully the highest stakes involved.
In Lavrov’s words, “Russia will defend its interests in the Ukrainian, Western and European directions. And this, by and large, is understood in the world by almost all foreign colleagues with whom we have to communicate.”
In his speech, Lavrov acknowledged that the stance of the Chinese leadership is a matter of great satisfaction for the Kremlin. As he put it, “Just the day before, President Vladimir Putin visited China. This is his first foreign visit since his re-election. Negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping and meetings with other representatives of the Chinese leadership have confirmed that our comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation surpass the traditional interstate alliances of the previous era in quality and continue to play a key role in maintaining international security and balanced global development.” This is the second thing.
The salience of Lavrov’s speech, however, lies in certain momentous remarks he made regarding the future trajectory of the Russia-China entente as such. In measured language, Lavrov declared that Russia has an open mind on “building a real alliance with China.”
“This topic can and should be discussed specifically. We [Russian foreign and security policy elites] can and should have a special conversation on this topic. We are ready to debate and discuss the ideas expressed in publications and aimed at building a real alliance with the PRC,” he told the elite audience.
Indeed, this is a hugely consequential statement against the backdrop of the gathering storms in the US-Russia-China triangle, with Russia in the middle of a bitterly-fought proxy war with the US and Beijing bracing for the inevitability of a confrontation with Washington in Asia-Pacific.
Lavrov, the consummate diplomat, ensured that his explosive idea of a “real alliance” had a soft landing. He said, “The assessment given by our leaders says that the relationship is so close and friendly that it surpasses the classic alliances of the past in quality. It fully reflects the essence of the ties that exist between Russia and China and are being strengthened in almost all areas.”
Indeed, the very fact that Lavrov aired such views openly is important, signalling coordination between Moscow and Beijing. In some form or the other, the topic figured in the discussions in Beijing just the previous day between Putin and Xi.
Of course, never in their history have Russia and China been so deeply entwined. But for the Sino-Russian entente to assume the form of “a real alliance,” conditions are steadily developing in the Asia-Pacific. Lavrov noted meaningfully that “Our actions in Chinese and other non-Western areas arouse the undisguised anger of the former hegemon [read the US] and his satellites.”
He argued that even as the US is on overdrive “to set up as many countries as possible against Russia and then take further hostile steps,” Moscow will “work methodically and consistently to build new international balances, mechanisms, and instruments that meet the interests of Russia and its partners and the realities of a multipolar world.”
With an eye on China, Lavrov pointed out that the NATO is actively making a bid for its leading role in the Asia-Pacific region. The NATO doctrine now speaks of the “indivisibility of security in the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific region. Blocks are being introduced into it — the incarnation of the same NATO. More and more numerous attempts. “Threes”, “fours”, AUKUS and much more are created.”
Lavrov concluded that “it is impossible not to think about how we should structure our work on the topic of security in these conditions.” He sensitised the audience that the time may have come to combine “the Eurasian ‘sprouts’ of a new architecture [EAEU, BRI, CIS, CSTO, SCO, etc], a new configuration with some kind of “common umbrella.”
Lavrov assessed that such an effort will be entirely in sync with Xi Jinping’s “concept of ensuring global security based on the logic of indivisibility of security, when no country should ensure its security at the expense of infringing on the security of others.”
Lavrov disclosed that Xi Jinping’s concept on global security was indeed discussed during Putin’s visit to China both at delegation level as well as in a restricted narrow format, and during the one-on-one conversation between the two leaders. He summed up that “We see a great reason for the practical promotion of the idea of ensuring global security to begin with the formation of the foundations of Eurasian security.”
Lavrov made these profound remarks publicly on the eve of his working visit to Astana to take part in the Foreign Ministers Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. China is assuming the SCO Chair later this year. Lavrov continued the discussions on this complex issue with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, whom he met earlier today in Astana. The Russian readout is here:
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
