What A Drag It Is Getting Old

Okay, for everyone out there under the age of 50, this blog posting takes its title from an old song by the Rolling Stones, Mother's Little Helper (1966.)

Sigh...Yeah, I was young once.

In an earlier posting I described what it was like to return to Moscow after an absence of many years. It was 20 years ago this week that I saw Moscow for the first time, 15 years since I was last here. Much has changed in the intervening years, both with Moscow and with me. Gazing upon Red Square for the first time in 15 years, about four weeks ago, I wrote, "Memory is a lonely place."

Indeed it is. The 1993 version of Moscow isn't here anymore, nor, as I noted, is the 1993 version of me. At 37 I still had a lingering touch of the romantic in me, was still capable of tasting "the wine of astonishment." At 57 I'm afraid I've become jaded to almost everything. And cynicism may be a lot of laughs, but it isn't much fun. I kind of miss 37 year-old me. You know the old Frank Sinatra song, I Wish I Were In Love Again? I know that song's sentiment very well. Now.

And before I get to my real subject, let me toss a bone to all of you conspiracy buffs out there: I suspect that there is a "stealth" takeover of Moscow going on ... by the Japanese.

Evidence: the once-merely-occasional request that you remove your shoes upon entering a Russian apartment is now universal. When I was working at the U.S. embassy here 20 years ago, you only removed your shoes upon entering someone's home during the winter. That made perfect sense, seeing as how winters here are a matter of ubiquitous snow and slush, and who wants that stuff tracked all over their carpets? Russian friends whom I would invite for dinner would often bring their carpet slippers along, shuck their snow boots at the door and slip into their slippers for their visit, a custom I found both homey and charming.

But now everyone expects you to do it, and year-round, not just in winter. When I go to teach a student, I always have to remove my shoes upon entering their home. Even in spring. I don't mind especially, but I usually forget to bring my own carpet slippers, and when my hosts offer me a pair, they're always too small.

Now, the universal removing-of-shoes upon entering a home is a custom most of us associate with Japan. Why is it now also a universal custom in Moscow? Could it be that those sneaky Japanese are "Nipponizing" the poor Russians?

And that's not all my evidence. When I was here in 1993-94, you seldom if ever saw such a thing as a Japanese restaurant on the streets of Moscow. Now they're everywhere. It seems like everywhere I turn these days, I see a sign that says,"японский ресторан" -- "Japanese restaurant."

If my conspiracy theory is correct, it truly IS a stealth operation, because I have yet to see a Japanese person here. They're invisible. Koreans, yes: two of the children to whom I teach English are Korean. But I haven't seen any Korean restaurants here; the main evidence of Asian cuisine in Moscow comes from Japan.

Wonder why???

All right, now that I've gotten that out of the way, back to my main subject, which is how drastically things have changed around this town in the past two decades.

I grew up during the Cold War, when we were programmed to think of the Russians as The Communist Enemy, and they were programmed to think exactly the same of us: The Capitalist Enemy. But as I look around the streets, the Metro trains and the buses of Moscow today, it occurs to me that now you probably wouldn't find a single Russian citizen under the age of 30 who even remembers the Communists.

Let's pretend you're a Russian man or woman born in 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet premier (and also the year I turned 30.) This would mean that during the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when eastern Europe jettisoned Soviet-style socialism, you were only four. When the Soviet Union shut down and went out of business in 1991, you were six. When Communist dimwit Gennady Zyuganov ran for president of Russia in 1996, promising to bring back the USSR and glorious Soviet Power (he lost the election), you were eleven. And when Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, you were still only 15.

So here it is 2013. You're 28 now, and you have no memory of commissars, the KGB, Komsomol, the GULAG, Radio Moscow, Lenin's image everywhere, mile-long lines to buy toilet paper, western radio prohibited, only two newspapers for sale anywhere, (both of them government-controlled) or any of the rest of that fun stuff. Just about the only vestige of Soviet pomp and circumstance that still remains is the annual May 9 parade in Red Square, with its promenade of missiles and tanks. But its intent now is to celebrate the national victory over Hitler in 1945, not so much to strut the spectacle of Soviet power, which isn't there any more because the Soviets aren't there any more.

From the point of view of an American who was raised to regard Soviet Socialism as the most evil thing on the planet, I suppose this is a good thing. In 1993 we feared a communist revanche and we took guys like Zyuganov seriously. The only people in Russia dreaming of a communist revanche any more are those with loose sphincters, bad eyesight and failing memories. Soviet nostalgia was a very real thing during the Wild West days of the Boris Yeltsin period, with the implosion of the USSR still fresh in everyone's memory and economic chaos rife throughout the land. But that's history now. I doubt that you would find very many 30-year-old Russians lining up to vote for a boob like Zyuganov, whose promise was to restore the glorious Brezhnev years, which even Russians used to refer to as "the period of stagnation."

Which brings me to my REAL point. I do kind of feel sorry for elderly Russians who would like to see Brezhnev pulled out of the grave and placed back on his throne. Because in a way I do understand how they feel. In one of his "Lake Wobegon" monologues years ago, Garrison Keillor noted the similar phenomenon of elderly Minnesotans who migrated from Norway in their youth and remember Norway as heaven because "Norway was where they were young and healthy. Minnesota is where they're sick and old." The USSR was where many elderly Russians were young and healthy; Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation is where they're sick and old. And sometimes poor -- the Soviet collapse of 1991 wiped out many people's pensions.

But I feel my own version of this. And it is a drag, looking around at what I see and thinking the thoughts I cannot avoid. Specifically this: my ex-girlfriend here in Moscow, Nadya, told me many years ago how young Russians in her youth routinely learned the art of kissing on the Metro escalators. Nadya herself did her share of it when she was a kid, (some of it with my old pal Sasha, whom I have not been able to smoke out of hiding in a full month here.) Naturally, after Nadya told me that story, I took note of the youngsters I would see smooching all over the place here in the city: on the Metro, in the parks, sometimes on street corners. Swapping spit on the Metro is a time-honored Muscovite tradition; it hearkens back to the days when apartments were scarce here, people lived with their parents as long as they do in America now, and young people had no place to go for privacy. So they got frisky in public. Ah, youth.

But it makes me sad for highly personal reasons to look around 2013 Moscow, see the public canoodling still going on and think that most melancholy of thoughts, that when I first arrived here twenty springs ago, many, perhaps most of these young lovers I see kissing on the Metro were not yet born.

Not yet born, think of it.

Memory is a lonely place.

What a drag it is getting old.