MOSCOW--If you go to the website of The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper that's been publishing in Russia's capital now for slightly more than 20 years, you will see a link which will take you to a list of stories that the newspaper has covered in the past two decades.
Here is a story that the Moscow Times will NOT be covering: the 23rd of this month will mark exactly 20 years since I, Kelley Dupuis, set foot in Moscow for the first time.
May 23, 1993. It was a Sunday. It was a different Russia, different from before, and certainly different from now. And I was a different Kelley. I was here at that time as a minor employee of the American embassy. I was under its, and the U.S. State Department's protection. Not now. I'm here as a private citizen, an English teacher. Just another happy ex-pat. Ever since I first read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast when I was 16, I've wanted to be an ex-pat. This is my big chance. Hemingway had post-World War I Paris. I have post-Cold War Moscow. Both versions of it.
The two versions of Moscow that I have seen, not to mention the two versions of myself, are as different as Hemingway's Paris and that of La belle Epoque.
I was 37 on that spring day in '93 when I first touched down at Sheremetovo airport. The Soviet Union had been dead and gone for less than two years. Boris Yeltsin was president of the newly-liberated Russian Federation. Moscow's economy was imploding. Conventional stores were empty; the streets were lined with kiosks where everything was for sale. People were selling vouchers in the Metro stations. Hell, people were selling everything that wasn't bolted down. At the flea market at Ismailovo Park, you could buy anything from hot church icons to a used MiG. Beggars were much more in evidence than they are today.
Moscow in 1993 was like Dodge City. Anything could be bought, oligarchs-to-be were just piling up their fortunes, and stories of gangland hits, some of them in broad daylight, were not uncommon.
God, what an exciting time it was to be here.
Not that the "exciting" part of the equation has changed. Moscow is still what it is, one of the world's biggest, most bustling capitals. There's always something going on somewhere. No question, Moscow is still an exciting city.
But 20 years is a lifetime to some people, and when I returned to Moscow just over a week ago, I experienced the emotion people are referring to when they quote American novelist Thomas Wolfe as saying "You can't go home again." Culture shock? No, I've lived here before and knew something of what to expect. I made return visits to the city in the late 1990s, but perspective had not settled in yet -- it was still pretty much the Moscow I remembered.
Not any more. It's the frozen-in-time nature of memory that makes coming home difficult. Nothing is quite as you remember it, and ... the friends you remember are older. Some of them are gone. You're older. Moscow, which was here long before me and will be here long after I'm gone, is also older. But, as cities, unlike people, are able to do, it has also become younger. To me, in some ways and places, almost unrecognizable. I'm staying with a colleague whose flat is near the Улица 1905 Года (Year 1905 Street) Metro station. It's a neighborhood of shops and stores. Across the highway is a large cemetery, into which crowds were streaming yesterday, Russian Easter. But aside from the signs and store displays in Russian, as I walk around this neighborhood I feel as though I might be in many another European city. Where is the distinct, unmistakable Moscow that made such a deep dent in me twenty years ago?
It's still there, but I had to go down to the city center to find real traces of it. Last Thursday was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm, radiant as only a spring day this far north can be. For old times' sake I got on the Metro and went down to the Kuznetski Most station. I got off there and ... just wandered. To my relief, I found ample evidence of the Moscow I remembered as I sauntered slowly down to Red Square, which of course teemed with tourists as it will on a beautiful day.
But when I entered Red Square again after all these years, I felt a curious mix of emotions. In fact I damn near cried. Memory is, first and foremost, a lonely place.
But everything was there: the State Museum, GUM, everybody taking pictures ... although these days they're as likely to be doing it with iPads as with cameras. Two new additions since my last visit: a guy made up to look like Lenin and a guy made up to look like Stalin, walking around offering to have their photos taken with visitors (You gotta wonder what Lenin and Stalin would have thought of that.)
St. Basil's Cathedral must have recently received one of its regular repainting jobs: its technicolor onion domes fairly glimmered in the afternoon light. I sat down on the grass alongside the Kremlin wall and looked at them for a long time, floating like huge, majestic balloons against the blue sky. "I'm back in Russia," I thought."There was a time when I thought this would never happen again, but somehow it has."
It's true that no matter how many times you return to a place that has meant much to you, the magic of seeing it for the first time is never there again. I have experienced this with many places in the travels of my adult life: Washington, D.C. New York City. Paris. Moscow. Even my own home...yes, when I returned to my home town in California for the first time, at age 32, after spending two years in Europe, there was a special radiance even to Chula Vista that I never again recaptured in all of my many happy returns.
So Moscow, 2013 is a different place to my 57 year-old self than Moscow 1993 was to myself at 37. I'll step around the Heraclitean cliche about stepping into the same river twice and say only that despite the inevitable disappointments that nostalgia is heir to, Moscow, like all great cities, has her own wisdom, a wisdom she shared with me once, and I'm most confident, will again.
 |
| May, 2013. Moscow is building a skyline. I think it looks like Rosslyn, Virginia, but that's just me. |
Here is a story that the Moscow Times will NOT be covering: the 23rd of this month will mark exactly 20 years since I, Kelley Dupuis, set foot in Moscow for the first time.
May 23, 1993. It was a Sunday. It was a different Russia, different from before, and certainly different from now. And I was a different Kelley. I was here at that time as a minor employee of the American embassy. I was under its, and the U.S. State Department's protection. Not now. I'm here as a private citizen, an English teacher. Just another happy ex-pat. Ever since I first read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast when I was 16, I've wanted to be an ex-pat. This is my big chance. Hemingway had post-World War I Paris. I have post-Cold War Moscow. Both versions of it.
The two versions of Moscow that I have seen, not to mention the two versions of myself, are as different as Hemingway's Paris and that of La belle Epoque.
I was 37 on that spring day in '93 when I first touched down at Sheremetovo airport. The Soviet Union had been dead and gone for less than two years. Boris Yeltsin was president of the newly-liberated Russian Federation. Moscow's economy was imploding. Conventional stores were empty; the streets were lined with kiosks where everything was for sale. People were selling vouchers in the Metro stations. Hell, people were selling everything that wasn't bolted down. At the flea market at Ismailovo Park, you could buy anything from hot church icons to a used MiG. Beggars were much more in evidence than they are today.
Moscow in 1993 was like Dodge City. Anything could be bought, oligarchs-to-be were just piling up their fortunes, and stories of gangland hits, some of them in broad daylight, were not uncommon.
God, what an exciting time it was to be here.
Not that the "exciting" part of the equation has changed. Moscow is still what it is, one of the world's biggest, most bustling capitals. There's always something going on somewhere. No question, Moscow is still an exciting city.
 |
| This is the Moscow I remember. October, 1993: President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament fired each other, and Russia came close to civil war. I was here when this happened. |
But 20 years is a lifetime to some people, and when I returned to Moscow just over a week ago, I experienced the emotion people are referring to when they quote American novelist Thomas Wolfe as saying "You can't go home again." Culture shock? No, I've lived here before and knew something of what to expect. I made return visits to the city in the late 1990s, but perspective had not settled in yet -- it was still pretty much the Moscow I remembered.
Not any more. It's the frozen-in-time nature of memory that makes coming home difficult. Nothing is quite as you remember it, and ... the friends you remember are older. Some of them are gone. You're older. Moscow, which was here long before me and will be here long after I'm gone, is also older. But, as cities, unlike people, are able to do, it has also become younger. To me, in some ways and places, almost unrecognizable. I'm staying with a colleague whose flat is near the Улица 1905 Года (Year 1905 Street) Metro station. It's a neighborhood of shops and stores. Across the highway is a large cemetery, into which crowds were streaming yesterday, Russian Easter. But aside from the signs and store displays in Russian, as I walk around this neighborhood I feel as though I might be in many another European city. Where is the distinct, unmistakable Moscow that made such a deep dent in me twenty years ago?
It's still there, but I had to go down to the city center to find real traces of it. Last Thursday was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm, radiant as only a spring day this far north can be. For old times' sake I got on the Metro and went down to the Kuznetski Most station. I got off there and ... just wandered. To my relief, I found ample evidence of the Moscow I remembered as I sauntered slowly down to Red Square, which of course teemed with tourists as it will on a beautiful day.
 |
| Home again. |
But when I entered Red Square again after all these years, I felt a curious mix of emotions. In fact I damn near cried. Memory is, first and foremost, a lonely place.
But everything was there: the State Museum, GUM, everybody taking pictures ... although these days they're as likely to be doing it with iPads as with cameras. Two new additions since my last visit: a guy made up to look like Lenin and a guy made up to look like Stalin, walking around offering to have their photos taken with visitors (You gotta wonder what Lenin and Stalin would have thought of that.)
St. Basil's Cathedral must have recently received one of its regular repainting jobs: its technicolor onion domes fairly glimmered in the afternoon light. I sat down on the grass alongside the Kremlin wall and looked at them for a long time, floating like huge, majestic balloons against the blue sky. "I'm back in Russia," I thought."There was a time when I thought this would never happen again, but somehow it has."
It's true that no matter how many times you return to a place that has meant much to you, the magic of seeing it for the first time is never there again. I have experienced this with many places in the travels of my adult life: Washington, D.C. New York City. Paris. Moscow. Even my own home...yes, when I returned to my home town in California for the first time, at age 32, after spending two years in Europe, there was a special radiance even to Chula Vista that I never again recaptured in all of my many happy returns.
So Moscow, 2013 is a different place to my 57 year-old self than Moscow 1993 was to myself at 37. I'll step around the Heraclitean cliche about stepping into the same river twice and say only that despite the inevitable disappointments that nostalgia is heir to, Moscow, like all great cities, has her own wisdom, a wisdom she shared with me once, and I'm most confident, will again.
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