I was carrying a dead body on an icy gangplank when I realized I might have made a horrible mistake.
Russia is the opposite of a public service announcement & a violent Monty Python skit.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we endorse Frank A. Spring’s review of Reacher: “This show is like if the Hallmark Channel production team made a Matlock/Hee Haw crossover with the commitment to extreme violence of HBO’s Oz.” Better still is his latest chapter of Regulator. And I share a story from my time in Russia.
As always, we recommend things to do (pre-order Sarah Bird’s new novel), read (Glen Weldon’s conversation with the Oscar statue), watch (ABC’s Abbott Elementary), and listen to (Robert Glasper’s terrific new jazz album, Black Radio III).
But first, have you seen this meme?
This is a mockup of a traffic sign in Russian, except instead of directions to different cities, the words have all been changed to tell the driver to go to hell, though it sounds much worse in Russian. This joke, posted online by Ukravtodor, the State Agency of Automobile Roads of Ukraine, is based on their very real request to take down traffic and street signs to confuse Russian invaders. Some intrepid Photoshop comedian took the joke a step further, imagining a 20-year-old Ivan leading a column of tanks into Odessa, looking up at a highway sign and being told to go f*ck himself. This is the Russian version of Godwin’s law: As a Russian endeavor continues (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of it ending up in violent absurdism approaches 1.
I wanted to be a spy, so I majored in Russian only to have the Cold War end, we thought, halfway through my junior year. I did my last semester in Moscow and tried my hand at journalism, working for a Texan who spoke very little Russian. A friend visited him, also from Texas, and they decided a midnight train trip would be fun, and since I spoke passable Russian, I was handed a stack of rubles and tasked with arranging things. This is how we ended up in a cab in the middle of the night in Nizhny Novgorod looking for a hotel.
If that paragraph seems rushed, so was history at the time. This was only a few years after Mikhail Gorbachev had released Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov and his wife Yelena Bonner to return to Moscow from a seven-year exile in the closed city of Gorki, which was renamed to its pre-Soviet name, Nizhny Novgorod. Me, Billy, and Bob (who I’ve written about before), thought going to a city so remote that it was suitable for internal exile would be a good time. This was before cell phones, and we were hundreds of miles from anyone who knew us. We had no plans, no reservations, enough money to last us a few days, and only one of us spoke Russian. For expats living in Moscow in the early ‘90s, this all seemed perfectly normal.
As a Russian endeavor continues (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of it ending up in violent absurdism approaches 1.
The taxi driver took us to a succession of hotels, only to find that there was some convention in town, and no one had any vacancies. When he pulled up to the floating hotel on the banks of the Volga River, it seemed like our last chance. He got out and went inside, came back and told us they had rooms, but there was a problem. Wait, he said, without explaining further. So we sat there for half an hour or so before we suggested that going into the hotel might be a good first step to checking into said hotel, and he looked at me and asked, “Are you strong men?”
I should have been scared right then. I knew he wasn’t asking about our physical strength. At the time, I thought muscle definition was something you get from a dictionary. More to the point was how he was looking at me when he asked. He wanted to know if we were strong where it counted. With no basis in fact or experience, I responded, “Da, da. Silny. Nu, paidyom!” Yes, yes, we are strong. Now, let’s go!
Imagine a river cruise boat with hotel rooms in the berths. We walked down a narrow, wooden, ice-encrusted gangplank with not-incredibly-safe handrails to the boat, and then down some stairs into the lobby where several men stood silently in a circle looking at two bodies on the carpeted floor. By the looks of their soaked clothes, the two men had clearly been pulled out of the icy river. One was writhing slightly and moaning. The other, if not yet dead, would be soon. He did not move. He did not make a sound. And they were right in front of the registration desk. Bless our taxi driver. He was trying to spare us this sight.
“Are you strong men?”
Soon, after a period of useless gawking at the suffering man and the dead man, the paramedics arrived, quickly assessed the situation, put the dead guy on a stretcher, and whisked him away, leaving us with the moaning man in the lobby. Reader, I was well into my 40s before it occurred to me that the paramedics might have better spent their time by tending to the suffering than clearing out the dead, but at the time that didn’t seem strange, nor did the ice on the wobbly gangplank going from the shore to the boat. As my friend Robin used to say, Russia is the opposite of a public service announcement. You have to caveat all the emptors in Russia.
The paramedics returned with the news that—get this—the gangplank was dangerous and difficult to negotiate while carrying a body on a stretcher. It might go easier, they said, if they had help. They asked for volunteers, whereupon 22-year-old me, who had not yet tasted the pain of his own bad decisions, volunteered both myself and Billy. Stupidly and optimistically leaping into the breach to help a doomed stranger seems a very American thing to do. In retrospect, the way the other men faded into the wallpaper seems very Russian.
You have to caveat all the emptors in Russia.
We left Bob with our bags in the lobby as we—two medics and me and Billy—negotiated the body on the stretcher up the stairs, out into the cold night, and up the gangplank, the medics working backwards, me holding the right pole with my left hand and the wobbly hand rail with my right, trying to keep my feet on the right side of the gangplank and not get them tangled up with Billy’s. It was only at this point, leaning my body over the river to make room for the stretcher, looking down at the black, cold water, that it occurred to me what a fantastically idiotic thing I was doing.
The optimism that led me to that moment had no grounding in the violent history of the Russia that I’d studied. You could ask with good reason how someone who had studied a country could so easily Mr. Magoo his way into a city better suited to exile than tourism without so much as a hotel reservation. You could ask the same of a president who laughed at the idea Russia was a major threat or another president who looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. “I looked the man in the eye,” said that president. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” You might ask the same of the presidents around the time I was in Russia who saw the fall of the Soviet Union as a milepost on the path to western-style democracy.
Nope. Russia gonna Russia. Give it half a chance, and Russia will end up in a violent Monty Python, the sick man playing second fiddle to the dead, being carried by stupid Americans up an icy gangplank in the middle of the night. Ukraine may fall, but before then there will be a tank column, lost in Odessa, stopping at a kiosk for directions and being told to go f*ck themselves.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Ordering bagels
What I’m reading
Sally Jenkins: “In its USWNT settlement, U.S. Soccer essentially made an admission: It was all true” - This helped me see this issue with fresh eyes.
“A large reason we made the decision to file the equal pay lawsuit was to acknowledge what everyone knew — we weren’t paid or treated equally,” Rapinoe said via email. “So all these years later, on this monumental day when we have announced this historic win, one of the most meaningful parts of it is that, for the first time, someone apologized to us.”
Glen Weldon: “Oscar, We Need To Talk” - *chef’s kiss*
OSCAR (SCOFFS): I am now, and have always been, cool.
GLEN (STARTS SCROLLING ON PHONE): Do you seriously want me to send your 1989 opening number to your popular friends right now? Because I’ll do it. Ah. Here it is. Rob Lowe. Snow White. Oh hey, Merv Griffin, I forgot about the Merv Griffin part. Wow, eleven full minutes. They’ll be so impressed. How cool.
Yair Rosenberg: “Your Bubble Is Not the Culture” - Great piece not just on criticism but on not mistaking your lived experience for the broader cultural experience.
One of many things that made the late Roger Ebert great was that he retained the ability to watch something as a conventional moviegoer and rate it accordingly, even if as a critic, he’d seen 100 similar films and had a different reaction from that perspective. He knew that most people who go to the movies are not looking for the next great work of cinema, but rather something with which to enjoyably pass an afternoon with their families. So he would do fancy film events where he’d discuss the technicalities of cinematography in the work of Martin Scorsese, and then turn around and give four stars to Iron Man.
What I’m watching
I did not want to like Abbott Elementary, ABC’s new comedy about an underfunded Philadelphia elementary school. But there’s a moment toward the end of the second episode when I went all in.
Space Force S2 went by so fast with so little impact that that no one can hear you laugh.
What I’m listening to
With all the stars featured on Black Radio III, Robert Glasper could have called this album Diaspora, but that would have been a little too on the nose. Adding “Why We Speak,” with Q-Tip and Esperanza Spalding, to the playlist.
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback this June!