Burson-Marsteller

From Russia with relief

by Dennis Landsbert-Noon on 9th September 2008 • The Cast Blog

It wasn’t exactly the most auspicious week to be visiting Moscow for the first time. With tensions in Georgia still running high – and bellicose rhetoric of a return to the Cold War coming from all sides – I can confess to a slight frisson of apprehension as my plane touched down at Domodedovo airport.

Muscovites, on the other hand, were in a party mood. “Moscow Day” was in full swing and thousands of cheerful and well-behaved families thronged the streets to celebrate the city’s 861st birthday.

Strolling around Red Square in the balmy evening, looking around at the happy, relaxed faces – music and dancing in the background – this certainly did not seem to be a city which harboured even the slightest thought that it might soon return to the dark days of détente.

Indeed, the Muscovites I spoke to were charming and friendly, only faintly embarrassed that there was any tension between our respective geopolitical blocs at all.

The “Georgia situation” was frankly and openly discussed, but there was no echo of the anti-Western, Soviet-style speechifying coming from behind the high red walls of the Kremlin. Quite the reverse, there was instead cheerful hope that, with a new US President on the horizon, all the recent tensions would once again melt away.

Strolling along a street lined with the sort of luxury boutiques that would make even James Bond blanch a little before reaching for his wallet, my new prospective client (and host) cheerfully pointed out an impressive brown building ahead.

“Lubyanka,” he said with a chuckle. “Famous headquarters of the KGB. Now a tourist attraction.”

It is truly hard to reconcile the hackneyed mental image I have carried ever since my youth – of sinister, heavy-set figures skulking around a grimy KGB headquarters – with these clean new Moscow streets of capitalist luxury.

In a bright and trendy café full of happy Muscovites, most were of the opinion that it would be almost impossible for Russians to return to the “bad old Soviet days” now that everyone had grown accustomed to their new, more comfortable lives.

A few, though – with a hint of Chekhovian gloom – suspected that the current leadership might rather prefer to reinstate a new Soviet-style dictatorship. The veneer of wealth and capitalism was just that: a veneer. And the top echelons very likely wanted to keep it that way.

It is not all so rosy, they said. Corruption, they explained, is still endemic in Russia. Indeed the Moscow Times that day carried a full-page feature on how students no longer studied for exams, but simply paid a large wad of Roubles to their examiners and were awarded a degree. The bigger the wad, the better the degree.

However, with President Medvedev on a new mission to stamp out corruption and reform Russian’s legal system, I told myself that this might well change for the better in the not so distant future.

Just as I had come to a comfortable and complacent conclusion that my apprehension about visiting Moscow had all been nonsense – and I was confidently ambling along a brightly lit street near the shopping mall – I was given a reminder of the residual unsavoury undercurrents.

It was a perfectly executed scam. A team of three: the first, walking briskly past me appeared to drop his wallet, which was bulging with money; the second, walking alongside me, picked up the wallet and called out to the chap ahead that he had dropped it. Then just as the first started to remonstrate that some money was missing, the third – a fake plain-clothed policeman – flashed his badge, pulled me over and wanted to check my passport and whether I had the missing wad of money in my pocket.

I didn’t and so he handed me back the contents of my pockets and ordered me on my way again. But when I gathered my wits a few minutes later, I discovered I was 2,000 Roubles (€55) the poorer.

Walking back to my hotel, I started to be plagued by doubts: was this trivial but unsettling incident perhaps an analogy for a different Russia from the one I thought I had discovered? Were the Chekhovians right? Was the Georgian offensive just a slick Kremlin scam, writ large? Were those sinister KGB figures still lurking, albeit in the finest Armani and Gucci suits? Was this Russian warmth, openness and friendliness only skin deep?

My confidence was shaken – all the more so when, a few minutes later, I heard yet more footsteps coming up fast behind me. A woman ran up thrusting a 100 Rouble note at me and babbling something in Russian. Not twice in one night, surely!

Then she put the note in my hand, gave me a big smile and turned away – and I realized that it must have dropped out of my pocket when I had recounted (again) my remaining 400 Roubles.

I’m reassured… I return home with memories of warm, kind and friendly Muscovites, together with a timely warning that no city is entirely safe. I got away lightly this time – and €55 was a cheap price to pay for that lesson.

---