"FIVE YEARS OF RUSSIA -
TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH"

This text was delivered by VOA's Moscow Bureau Chief Peter Heinlein, on May 25, 2000 to The English Language Discussion Club in Anglia British Bookstore in Moscow to an audience of some 100 people. With the permission of the autor, we are happy to print its text here for our readers. Peter Heinlein, after almost five years in Russia, is now working in Washington, D.C.

As I prepared this presentation, I wondered if, when you hear what I have to say, you are going to think of me as an Ugly American, as someone who has gotten a bunch of mistaken impressions based on incomplete understanding of Russia’s language and people. Someone condescending, preachy, telling Russians about their own faults. Nobody, not Russians nor Americans, wants some outsider to analyze the problems of their society. And sometimes I feel Americans are excessively preachy, and offer simplistic solutions to some very complex problems.
But I have made the decision to go ahead and say what I feel, (you know what they say “Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread!!!”) because somehow I believe you will understand that …..I would like FEW THINGS MORE than to see Russia succeed. And I see so many needless obstacles to that success.
So thank you for indulging me these few minutes of pouring out some of the frustrations and agonies gained during my Russia experience.
This evening, this speech in a way brings to a close a pretty wonderful five year chapter in my life. We’ll be leaving Moscow this summer, going to the United States. I almost feel like a foreigner going there.
It’s been 11 Ѕ years since VOA sent me to India. So in some ways I’m looking forward to going back. I now have a wife and two kids who’ve never lived in the United States. My son has lived almost all his life in Moscow, my daughter has lived here since she was born. Both of them speak Russian, and think they are Russians.
My little girl we call Laura Loppitchka. She’s just three and goes to play group at the British embassy. The other day Princess Anne was there to dedicate the new building and as Loppitchka was going into school, dressed in a traditional Belarussian dress, a group of reporters was standing around waiting for the princess to arrive. When they saw Loppitchka, they asked her, “Are you Russian?” She put on her biggest charm-smile, posed carefully and said “Da”. Our embarrassed nanny had to explain, “No, her daddy is American and her mommy is Danish”.
My son is 5 Ѕ, and only knows himself by his Russian diminutive, Karlusha. He does realize his name is Karl, but doesn’t answer to it. Only Karlusha.
Of course life for most foreigners in Moscow is quite comfortable, and it’s going to be hard making the transition back to being just an average Joe in the United States. No special privileges, no nanny for the kids, no one to pick up after us around the house or wash and iron our clothes. We’re spoiled rotten by the “expat life”.
We’ve had a wonderful experience here, great joys mixed with deep sorrow. I had the pleasure of getting to know a dear woman, Galina Starovoitova, only to see her gunned down. I made a great friend in Alec Batchan, a legendary figure to VOA listeners of the late Soviet period. He fell dead just 47 days ago, at the age of 47.

And just today, I was listening to the news and heard that two journalists were killed yesterday in Sierra Leone. One of them was a great young man I met last January while covering the fighting in Chechnya. I just wrote his obituary this afternoon. His name was Miguel Gil Moreno. I remember our meeting well. That was the day, January 4th, when he came out of Chechnya, after spending three weeks in Grozny. He may have been the only westerner in Grozny that last few weeks of December, when the Russian armed forces unleashed the full fury of their awesome power against the city.
Not only did he live to tell about it, he came away with some stunning video, damning evidence of the horror that was inflicted on Grozny in those days. But he was a dare-devil, always testing the limits, and yesterday, the odds caught up with Miguel Gil Moreno. He was only 32.
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to use my spare time to think of how to explain the Moscow I see. Much of my spare time comes while I’m driving, and the obvious metaphor for life in Moscow is the traffic. This afternoon, as I was driving into the city, I stopped at a corner to allow a pedestrian to pass. It was an elderly woman standing in the middle of a busy intersection.
Two things happened. One, the woman froze in her tracks and wouldn’t budge. Second, the guy in the car behind me started blasting his horn, further frightening the poor woman. I realized it was no use, so I started to go, but the guy behind me whipped out across the middle line, into the oncoming traffic, and slammed his accelerator to the floor. BMW car. But it was only about 100 meters to the next turning place, where both of us were turning, so he wasn’t able to get in front of me. But after the turn, he made another swerving loop to pull in front of me, then slammed on his brakes and stopped.
I see this kind of behavior every day. I live at one end of Kutuzovsky Prospect and work at the other end, so I travel the entire length of that little stretch of insanity at least twice daily.

People seem to have absolutely no consideration for each other. The traffic is often flowing at more than 110 kilometers an hour, (which frankly I don’t mind), with faster traffic weaving in and out of the lanes, and with a middle lane congested with blue light traffic going in both directions even faster than in the regular lanes. And as these maniacs hurl their vehicles at each other, traffic police are standing idly in the center lane, stopping violators.
In my years here, I’ve seen no fewer than 10 accidents involving fatalities on Kutuzovsky Prospect. Scores, maybe hundreds of lesser bangups. And almost every day, some motorist is standing out in the traffic lanes with a broken down vehicle. The wonder of it, though, is that there are not massive pileups every day. Life is almost meaningless out there. And yet, despite the chaos, it gets tens of thousands of people to their destinations every day.
It is quintessential Moscow. And as much as we curse it, we have to admit there will never be another place in the world, no matter where we go, that will be as interesting and exciting.
I compare this experience to a university education. It has been a thrilling adventure. I love to hear my boy Karlusha say “We went to see MY Kremlin”.
The Kremlin. You know, I grew up imagining that the Kremlin was some monolithic monstrosity. This was the height of the Cold War, and the Kremlin was portrayed as the home of the Evil Empire. Nowadays, it’s just down the street, a marvelous tourist attraction. We go there, take visitors for tours, and find it is filled with, what do you think, CHURCHES.
Being here these past 4 Ѕ years is like having a front-row seat to history. Experiences like standing just a few meters from Boris Yeltsin on Red Square for the massive victory day parade a few years ago.

And incidentally, I am among those who firmly believe that when the dust settles, when historians have had a chance to digest this period, Boris Yeltsin will go down as one of the giants of the 20th century, right up there in stature with Lenin and Stalin. But while Lenin and Stalin will be remembered for the brutality and pain they inflicted on Russian society, Yeltsin will be portrayed in a positive light.
What can match the majesty of the Bolshoi theater? It is one of my favorite Moscow experiences. I take every visitor to the Bolshoi, and I will miss it.
Another treat is simply driving through the Russian countryside, seeing life like it really is. Meeting real Russians “prosta lyudi”. But at the same time experiencing the hopelessness many Russians feel, and the unmatched patience with which they accept their fate.
We foreign journalists were at a loss a few years back to explain to our audiences about Russian workers going on strike to protest that they hadn’t been paid for six months or a year. The government was that far behind in paying salaries and pensions.
WHAT? SIX MONTHS? In the West, you’d be more likely to hear about employees going on strike because they were demanding a 10-percent raise. Never mind not getting paid at all. That wouldn’t cause demonstrations, it would cause riots. So how do you explain that people have not been paid for a YEAR’S WORK? For a western audience, it just doesn’t compute.
But despite our priviliged life as expats, the experience for me personally, and I have heard from many other foreigners life here has, overall, been hard. Most news organizations treat this as a hardship post.
I can tell you, and people tell me, that I’ve aged a lot in the five years we’ve been in Russia. Of course the first handicap was the language. I had never thought about coming to Russia, never studied the Russian language or history, until a few weeks before I arrived. Even after years of lessons, I’m not anywhere near fluent.

That, naturally, has limited our circle of Russian friends. My wife, who is a diplomat, spoke no Russian either. So getting started here was not easy, to say the least. At the end of our first winter, someone asked my wife what she liked best about Moscow, and she replied “the weather”. (She likes winter sports)
And of course 1995 was consumed by the first Chechen war. I spent most of the first year engrossed in Chechnya. It was certainly depressing, and gave me a harsh introduction to Russian life and politics.
But it is the second Chechen war that has been the most disturbing, possibly because this time I was closer to the war, making several trips to Chechnya.
And it was a real eye-opener. Mostly because it brought home so clearly the difference between what I saw…first hand…and what the Russian people were being told.
After my visits there, I found myself unable to hold conversations with my Russian friends and acquaintances. They just would not, COULD NOT, accept what I was saying.

to be continued