Dangerous dispatches

The pre-winter dawn arrives reluctantly, not until close to 8 o’clock. I’m the only person to occupy the hotel restaurant, which makes sense, since today is a holiday – the anniversary of the Great October Revolution (it’s early November, but then who’s keeping track).

I’m waiting for my fixer to take me into the heart of Moscow: the Kremlin. Looking out onto a street normally filled with cold and lonely commuters, I get the feeling that I have come to this city to witness an auspicious event. What better day for some of the old hard-line Soviets to emerge from out of the woodwork, dust off the old gray/blue long coats and fur ushankas, and gather in the Kremlin to raise their fists in defiant solidarity once more. As a child of the Cold War, I’m going to be there to witness the event as it unfolds. I’m going to find evidence that some of the Cold War still exists, if only in the heart of the old Soviet.

With time on my side, I decide to take a jog on the hotel treadmill. It’s while I’m working up a good sweat that my revolution fantasy crashes and burns like a MiG shot out of the sky. On the television, RT is reporting on the day’s holiday, Unity Day.

I do a double-take. What the hell is Unity Day?

According to the report, this is the day the new Russian Federation recognizes its ethnic diversity. In fact, since 2004, this date has been reserved for the nation to celebrate the fact that it is made up of not just one country or people, but many different geographies and ethnic peoples.

Who knew?

Just looking at the video footage of all the varieties of human being who’ve created this massive country – from short, dark, Asian-looking men and women to tall, blond, milk-skinned people — I begin to feel a wave of warm and cozy enlightenment wash all over me.

But then, that’s precisely what I do not want to feel.

You say you want a revolution?

Well today was supposed to be the day for it. I’m expecting throngs of old time Soviets piling into Red Square. I’m expecting unruly crowds taking to the streets, AK47s gripped in their hands, random shots being fired into the air, maybe the occasional Molotov cocktail being tossed at a passing police car.

I guess it takes an American crime novelist to appreciate a good violent revolution.

But instead of a revolution, or the celebration thereof, I get just the opposite. I get namby-pamby peace, love and understanding. What’s next, Free Tibet?

I can get that back in New York!

Undeterred, I hop off the treadmill, shower up, dress in dark jeans, combat boots, black turtleneck, black leather coat and skull cap. I look like David Niven in “The Guns of Navarone” or maybe Jean Reno as the rogue secret agent-for-hire in “Ronin.”

Down in the lobby I meet my fixer. We’ll call her N. Together we walk toward Moscow center. It’s there we’re confronted by waves of shiny happy people coming and going from Red Square. Not a single one of them looks like they want another revolution. In fact, they look really, really happy.

Until now, the walls of the Kremlin were known only to me from the tube-powered color television set of my youth. Back in the days when Russia was America’s enemy and even the thought of traveling to Red Square would be considered a suspicious act. Not of treason necessarily, but one of suspicion all the same. After all, Lee Harvey Oswald lived here for a while, right around the corner from the Kremlin. Now I’m standing smack in the middle of it.

We head through the gates and I am immediately drawn to the massive wide-open square. Lenin’s dark marble tomb is situated off in the distance to my right, directly below the section of red wall where, on May Day, a thickly eyebrowed Breshnev tossed leather-gloved waves at the jack-booted troops marching beside rumbling tanks and trailered nuclear missiles. But today there’s no talks, no soldiers, no nukes.

Leaving the Kremlin, I ask N to point out the KGB building to me. Like the FBI building in DC, this is a huge but otherwise nondescript office building set in the center of the Moscow action.

“It’s no longer K-G-B,” N volunteers. “It’s now the F-S-B.”

Here’s my chance to kick-start a little Cold War action. I’ve heard from people in the know that the secret police hate it when you try and take pics of their crib. So what do I do? I point my camera at the building and snap away. Am I about to be accosted by undercover policemen? Am I about to snatched off the street, my camera tossed to the cobbles and stamped on with the soles of a jackboot?

I hope so.

I hold the camera in my hand and wait for something to go down. Something insidious and threatening. But nothing happens. Shooting a glance at N, I sense that she’s holding back a yawn.

Back when I was a child and the world’s two nuclear superpowers were at each others throats, I was sure the K in KGB stood for “Killer.” Now I can’t help but wonder if the F in FSB stands for “Friend.” As dusk turns to night and a frigid wind blows off the river, I realize I’m actually missing the Cold War. Like Sean Connery as James Bond in “From Russia with Love,” I’m actually missing the danger and the excitement.

N asks me if I’m hungry. I tell her I would like to eat something authentic. Something that can only come from Russia, in much the same way “bicycle chicken” can only come from West Africa. We find a restaurant that serves a traditional Russian meal of stuffed cabbage, dumplings, beet salad, chicken soup and… what’s this? Non-alcoholic beer.

OK, maybe the Cold War is long gone, Revolution Day changed to Unity Day. Maybe the KGB is now the FSB, maybe Red Square is no longer the site of violent political protest but instead a sound stage for Paul McCartney, and maybe its quite possible Walt Disney is planning to install a theme park right beside the Kremlin. But does a country known for its vodka have to force non-alcoholic beer on me?

If there’s one thing I should be doing in Moscow, it’s getting hammered and sickled until I wretch. The Travel Channel pays Tony Bourdaine to get drunk when they send him to Russia. “Look at Tony down shot after shot of Stoli. Look at Tony stagger. Look at Tony win an Emmy.”

Sensing my pain, N leads me to a downtown bar. Together, we tip a couple of pints of traditional Moscow beer. But we don’t get hammered. We don’t get sickled. We just get tired.

It’s been a long day of Cold War hunting.

Out on the street in front of my hotel, N bids me a traditional European goodnight with friendly kisses to both cheeks. As I watch her vanish into the cold dark evening, I pull my skull cap down over frigid ears. I head back to my hotel, more determined than ever to dig up some sign of the old Cold War come the next morning.

Final Dispatch: I finally find the Cold War I’ve been looking for in the form of the Cold War Museum.

Heated political debate between the globe’s two super-powers rages on over who can build more nuclear warheads and the mobile systems in which to deliver them quickly and efficiently. The fight has become so cold, and yet heated, that on more than one occasion in the 70s alone, the USSR and the US will come within a hair’s breadth of blasting one another back to the Stone Age.

As a child, I’m taught to view the Soviet Union with great fear, if not paranoia. The Soviets, we’re told, have their finger on the nuclear trigger. So frighteningly real is the possibility of nuclear world war that “duck and cover” drills will be practiced at my grammar school up until the late 1970s.

What’s duck and cover, you ask?

It goes something like this: in the event of an imminent nuclear blast of some gigantic megaton proportions (say 1,000 times the Hiroshima blast), we neatly-uniformed Catholic school students are instructed to duck and cover our little prepubescent bodies beneath our school desks. By assuming a fetal position, knees pressed tight up against your chest, you are then in position to “kiss your ass goodbye.”

Live Classical music down under in the Metro (Photo by Vincent Zandri)

I might be a stupid kid, but I know that my school desk isn’t about to save me from instant vaporization when the big “red” one drops on my head. Fact is, it isn’t unusual for me to go to bed at night fearing for my life. For me, the Cold War is a very personal war. And it makes me, like many Americans, convinced that our generation will be the last to live on a planet that sooner than later will be ravaged by a doomsday scenario of nuclear multiple blasts and radioactive fallout.

It isn’t until Gorbachev comes along in the mid-80s when the West, particularly Americans like myself, begin to breathe a significant sigh of relief. Unlike his more war-mongering predecessors “Gorby,” represents the warm ray of sunlight that will promise to thaw the Cold War once and for all. It’s his policy of Glasnost, and his cooperation with Western leaders (along with some badly-leaked Politburo info in East Germany), that will inevitably lead to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the end to what we, as Americans, viewed as the Communist threat. In a word, the Cold War was kaput and along with it, the fear of being nuked in our sleep.

Yet even today, with the Cold War clearly fodder for history books, an air of paranoia and distrust still exists in the US. Especially among those who might have grown up in the ’40s, ‘50s and even ‘60s. When I revealed my plan to travel to Moscow, quite a few of my friends voiced their concern. Questions and comments were lobbed at me like Trident missiles:

“Aren’t you afraid of your safety?”

“Did you know that journalists disappear there all the time?”

“You gonna love the Gulag.”

Smart shoppers hustling from store to store (Photo by Vincent Zandri)

I dismissed these warnings. Russia wasn’t a threat anymore and we weren’t a threat to Russia. Not really anyway. Thanks to the Internet, the Russian people have become my friends now. After all, I write for a Russian satellite news network. The great bear that once filled me with fear as a boy now signs my paychecks.

On the other hand, I wasn’t just your average tourist seeking out the Moscow equivalent of a Perillo tour. I was a freelance journalist. Knowing that journalists do, in fact, disappear in Russia and many other parts of the globe, I took a step back. Was I making the right decision traveling to the former Soviet Union on my own?

You betcha…

This is Dangerous Dispatches after all. Even if the Russian Federation has shed its hammer and sickle, I still harbored hopes that some of the old danger existed, some of the old mystery, some of the old James Bond intrigue. In a word, I wanted to feel like a spy.

Fast forward to my landing in Moscow on a cold and overcast Tuesday morning.
My driver greets me at the airport. He’s a thin, middle-aged man who smokes one cigarette off the other. When he pulls out of the airport access road onto the main highway leading into Moscow, I know I’m at his mercy. So far so good, I think. A chain smoking driver who speaks no English. A likely story if I ever heard one. I could already feel the hidden cameras focusing in on me while I listened for the latchless doors to lock automatically.

To my left, a sea of crooked and tortured looking birch trees that Russia is so famous for. Beyond them, snow-sprinkled fields. Cold, barren, inhospitable.

I’m loving it.

The old, the new and the future. Moscow architecture mixesseveral eras at once (Photo by Vincent Zandri)

But then, appearing on my right, a gigantic yellow IKEA superstore, the Swedish furniture manufacturer so popular amongst the Manhattan crowd, obviously having made their mark in the land of Tsars. Not a half mile past the IKEA, a McDonalds, followed by a brand new glass and stainless steel VW dealership, a Volvo dealership, a freaking TGI Fridays, a Subway sandwich shop, and a giant billboard for Papa John’s pizza…Holy crap, so much for danger, mystery and intrigue. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I was in Jersey.

Inside the city, I’m even more shocked to find that, nestled among the onion-shaped domes of the ancient churches and the combination Stalinesque and Soviet-era-style architecture is a modern megalopolis of polished glass and marble towers. Commercial construction is everywhere, as are major clothing and accessory chains like H&M, Channel, Yves St. Laurent, Gap and more. Suited men in alligator loafers, carrying leather briefcases scoot by, no doubt late for important business meetings. Beautiful, long-haired, leather booted women dressed in short skirts or tight jeans, shuffle from store to store, pausing only occasionally to talk on their cell phones or to drop into one of the city’s many cafes. On occasion, an H1N1 conscious person might walk by, a surgical mask covering his or her face. Down in the underground, a quartet of strings and woodwinds performs live classical music while back up on the street, one Land Rover after the other speeds passed.

Walking the sidewalks of this brightly illuminated city of some 11 million, I feel a wave of disappointment wash over my spine. Where are all the soldiers? Where are the tanks? The spies? Where’s the long, black-leather jacketed tough-guy who’s supposed to pull me off the street, shove me in the back of a black sedan and demand that I produce my “papers?”

Okay, I know the Iron Curtain was shredded some 20 years ago, and the Cold War has given over to warm and cozy relations between our great counties, but does Moscow have to remind so much of New York City?

As I sit down to a particularly appetizing Mexican meal of beef fajitas covered in home-made guacamole washed down with Corona beer and served by cowboy-hatted Moscovites (that’s right, authentic Tex-Mex deep in the heart Moscow), I decide that this Cold War Kid needs to search deeper for some danger. Moscow is the home of the Kremlin after all. It’s the political capital. This is Putin’s and Medvedev’s personal crib. The soldiers, the spies, the former home of the KGB (now the FGB), can’t be too far away from the commercial capitalism that has most assuredly destroyed anything even resembling the old hard line rule.

It’s just a matter of heading further into the heart of the red city; into its inner ring. In the morning, this 007 wannabe will try and sneak himself into the Kremlin.

Next Blog: I explore Red Square on what used to be one of the most important holidays of the old Soviet Era: Revolution Day.

I leave New York City behind for a journey to the other side of the world

Which is why I’m in New York City’s JFK International Airport where I’m about to board a non-stop flight to Moscow, Russia. The purpose of this expedition? Like my Africa assignment, I wanted to explore an exotic locale shrouded in mystery . And for a child of the cold war, Moscow, and especially the walls of the Kremlin, represent just that--mystery, intrigue and danger.

Ever since I started writing for RT, I knew that sooner or later, I would have to go Russia. Lying in bed this morning, I took a quick inventory of the places I’ve been over the past decade or so: Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, Italy, France, Spain, England, Greece, the Greek Islands, Turkey, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Africa, the United States, from L.A. to New York; from Bar Harbor to Key West. Russia would represent an exceptional challenge for exploration--something that, having grown up in the age of cold war paranoia, would have been unthinkable even two decades ago. After all, Russia was once the place where communism flourished; where the KGB had a spy on every street corner and where no one, least of all a journalist, could practice an inalienable right like freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Or so I’d been taught.

As I sit in the airport, eyeing the many strangers sitting silently and anxiously, I realize that even if I do write for RT, I know virtually nothing about Russia. I don’t know the language, or how to get around a bustling cosmopolitan city like Moscow. I don’t know what to eat. I don’t even know the exchange rate of rubles to dollars. In a word, I’m winging it.

Suddenly, an old Slovanic maxim comes to mind: “Leap before you look.” That’s precisely what I’m doing by making this journey alone.

I look at the travelers waiting alongside me inside International Gate 7 of JFK’s Delta Air. Some of them stare reflectively off into an imaginary space. Others laugh and joke with their friends. I can make out at least three different languages being spoken at once. There’s black, white, and Asian men and women of all ages, all huddled together for one thing and one thing only: Russia.

Beside me a white-bearded man drinks coffee. He looks out the floor-to ceiling plate glass window onto the tarmac at the big jets arriving and departing. He’s old enough to be my father. He’s also alone. I wonder if I am looking at my future. Will I still be making my way to dangerous destinations when I’m in my 70s? Will I be doing it alone?

People constantly ask me if I get lonely traveling by myself. Of course I do. But then, in a strange way, loneliness is part of the adventure. Being alone with yourself; discovering yourself; reflecting inwards in order to change your outlook. For me, travel isn’t exactly worth it if it isn’t at times lonely, uncomfortable, exhausting and of course dangerous. It also must be somewhat nerve-wracking. And what can be more nerve-wracking than anticipating a 10 hour flight to Moscow?

But the point-of-no-return has arrived now that boarding instructions are announced over the PA. A giant hush settles over the gate interior. The travelers stand, begin gathering their belongings. The big metal doors leading out onto the gangway slam open. I feel the usual pit lodge inside my stomach. More than likely that pit will remain there at least until we reach cruising altitude (it’s unusual for planes to simple fall out of the sky). What’s the old saying about international air travel? Half of those people who take to the air say they hate to fly. The other half just lie about it.

The final boarding call for my flight is announced. I get up, grab my bag.

I face the open door that leads out to the plane that will take me, a child of the cold war, across the ocean to the former USSR.

I walk.

I leap.

Next Blog: Vincent Zandri, live, up-close and personal, from the Kremlin.