RUSSIA, CONT.

Before our eyes was a Russia sunny and bright with promise, with vivid examples of its dark past, a country bounding from one crisis to another. But, by the end of the 12-day 800-plus miles from St. Petersburg to Moscow on the Volga-Baltic Waterway, some of the old truths that we searched for had been hard to find. Where were the dour outlooks, the suspicions, the mistrust inherited from the Cold War? What’s with the open smiles, the unfeigned graciousness, the eagerness to share?

As if to prove that the past was not totally buried, we had just been shooed off the lawn outside of Moscow’s Kremlin. A guard in a gray military coat, with a red band around his huge visored cap, came out of his wooden shelter and dismissed the trespass with a flick of his fingers.

I was pleased to see that he glowered slightly. After all, I had traveled halfway around the world to enter Moscow’s once-forbidden fortress, with big red walls 65 feet high, 10 to 20 feet thick in places, for 800 years a stronghold of dark and mysterious power.

We were at the tail end of our journey, a trip in which the symbols of oppression forged by Lenin and his followers had been difficult to find. The way we kept on the lookout for hammers and sickles, one might think they were a rare species of wildlife. But in St. Petersburg, where we began our two-week river voyage, to Moscow, where it ended, we found the Communist emblems mostly at the tops of dams and canal locks, and as difficult-to-remove keystones on the uppermost parts of buildings.

After a half century of being fed Cold War images of sometimes chilling terror, the intensity of our American-bred curiosity was forgivable. We were not prepared for the way the Russians deal with their past. They simply purge it, erase its memory with all the apparent ease of a good night’s sleep.

There is still one granite statue of Lenin standing in a square in St. Petersburg. “He is supposedly pointing the way to the future, observed our guide, Misha Ryabokorov. “But today we say he is hailing a cab to get there.”

Regardless of the aim of the Russian economy in the 21st Century, for the sake of tourism and the dollars it fosters, Russia has taken a leap backwards to the 19th Century and before, showcasing the imperial majesty of the Romanovs and all the czars before them. We saw enough cathedrals and monasteries of the Orthodox Church to prompt one guide to remark with a smile, “you must be thoroughly sick of icons by now.”

True, most of the stories of martyrs and saints were beginning to blur with the depth of history. Some brought us to attention. Standing in the church of St. Demetrius on the Blood in Uglich, Anna Pankova told us about Dimitry, the eight-year-old son and successor to the throne of Ivan the Terrible. The boy’s throat was cut on an afternoon in May 1591, allegedly by henchmen of Boris Godunov, the boy’s chief rival to power. The story is somewhat typical of Russian legend, rooted in horror but ending with a small touch of whimsical satisfaction. In 1604, an impostor from Poland, claiming to be the same Dimitry, rode a sentimental tide to power.

When discovered to be the False Dimitry, he was assassinated; his ashes were mixed with gunpowder, stuffed in a cannon and aimed toward Poland, not only dead but humbled.

So many stories of murder and intrigue embrace Russia’s oligarchical past, it would appear that some monarchs were bloodthirsty imbeciles who were not above torturing and killing kinfolk. In the opulent Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, marble tombs mark the resting places of more than one doomed leader, and also the two Great Ones, Peter and Catherine. Some were rulers once exalted, then forsworn and finally forgiven, like Czar Nicholas II, toppled by the Bolsheviks 85 years ago. In 1998, the remains of the murdered Czar, the last of the Romanov rulers, and his wife and children, were interred in a corner room of the great cathedral.

Icons of present-day Russia hit us with surprise. We were threading our way through a huge traffic jam near the Nevsky Prospekt, the main shopping district of St. Petersburg, bustling with small shops and department stores, an eye-opening abundance of capitalism.

To one side of the street, a Marlboro sign, the other showed Jack Daniels Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey. By trip’s end I counted Adidas, Coca Cola, Patio Pizza, Fredericks of Hollywood, Maybelline, Estee Lauder, Stanley Tools, Columbia Sportswear, Bayer, Remy Martin, Honda, Panasonic, Technics.

The imported icons represent just one portion of a huge dissembled nation, one with 11 time zones, a disorder of time and history.

When we meandered outside the restored palace of Peterhof, whose rooms and gardens are unbelievably lavish and rival the Versailles in Paris, we were met by two bent-over old women, of age 75 or older. They stood quietly near our bus, waiting for handouts from tourists. Seeing them brought to mind the 900-day Nazi Siege of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then. Grandmothers with shawls are reverently called “babushkas”. These two would have been young girls during the World War II blockade, which lasted through two bitter winters and killed 641,000 citizens.

The old women in black dresses, now frail, are nonetheless symbols of the Russian capacity for continuing onward. Their faces are etched in a miracle of survival, and so sadly, the poverty of the present. Many of the elderly have lost their pensions since the Soviet collapse. Though St. Petersburg and Moscow, in particular, throb with neighborhoods of free market progress, there and elsewhere streets are lined with people holding out their hands. They pay the price of transition.

You learn about Russia through a series of street scenes. We encountered the dark side in the old dingy city of Yaroslavl, shortly after leaving a puppet museum and theater. My wife and I were accosted by a gang of four or five boys, none older than 12, who yanked at our backpacks and attempted to grab my wife’s camera, all the while shouting, “Rubles, rubles!” One dug his hand into my pocket, forcing me to grasp his wrist. It was an ugly little scene, ended by my chasing the youths away.

Street Scene II, two days later, in Uglich, we saw a little boy and girl, about 9 or 10, dancing on the sidewalk. The girl’s blonde hair was carefully combed back. She wore lipstick and a red ballroom gown. The boy, also blond, perhaps her brother, wore a small but well-fitting tuxedo. Arms outstretched stiffly, they waltzed unsmilingly to a Strauss tune played by a boom box. Near it a shoe box held coins, both rubles and dollars.

When I later mentioned how touching the scene was to a Russian man named Andrei, he reprimanded me for giving the children money.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “It is not right, those children being there. They lose their holiday; they should be playing.”

He complained that budding young artists shouldn’t expect their talent to be used as a means of earning money for their family.

Initially puzzling, his point of view was typical of young and educated adults that we met. Buoyed by a relentless drive to succeed, they want nothing less for their country. Andrei especially warned me against responding to beggars in Moscow. “Most of them are put there by the Russian Mafia,” he said. “Give them nothing.”

As American tourists, we viewed the many sidewalk markets --- much of them displaying high-quality dolls, rugs, quilts, samovars, paintings, hats, gloves and other clothing --- as convenient opportunities to load up on souvenirs.

Maria Gordeyeva, a professor at the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow, who lectured us onboard about Russian politics and history, explained that the country is trying to choose between a bazaar economy of micro entrepreneurs --- estimates are that up to 40 percent of Russian business is conducted underground, meaning untaxed --- and one that more closely resembles western markets.

We found outstanding examples of the latter in GUM’s department store on Red Square. It is Moscow’s biggest mall, with shops filled with electronic goods, clothing and specialty items. I was astounded by the large number of cosmetic stores and beauty salons, and even more surprised by the large numbers of good-looking, well-dressed Russian people.

“I thought everybody in Russia was supposed to be dour, gray and alcoholic,” said Dan Banks, a civil engineer from Pennsylvania and fellow Kirov passenger. The pleasant surprises he saw on his Russian trip, he said, “turned me around 180 degrees.”

For us tourists, the two-week journey removed with finality the Iron Curtain, which had not only blinded us from the Russian personality, it hid the nation’s treasures. The novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev had prepared me for the gold-encrusted interiors of the Winter Palace, where 19th Century aristocracy held parties and balls, but I was stunned to see some of the most widely known and best-loved paintings in Russian museums.

In Catherine the Great’s Hermitage in St. Petersburg, we saw Gainsborough’s Portrait of a Lady in Blue, Da Vinci’s Madonna and Child, Titian’s Portrait of a Young Woman, Renoir’s Girl with a Fan and Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, included with works of Canaletto, El Greco, De Goya, Diego Velazquez, Rubens, Delacroix, Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gaughin, a dazzling collection of more than three million pieces. More surprises showed up in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum: Boticcelli’s Annunciation is here, along with works of Picasso, Gaughin, Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Renoir.

I heard my inner voice saying, “Unbelievable!” over and over on this trip:

When we were entertained by small groups of male vocalists dressed as monks incanting ancient Russian hymns, with voices so pure and strong you felt your spine tingle.

The Dixieland band outside the palace of Peterhof, dressed in 18th Century powdered wigs and silk stockings, playing “All of Me” as we strolled through the gardens.

Slowly it sinks in. The cream of Russia’s artists --- ballet dancers, opera singers, orchestral players, and the country’s best athletes --- have left for the West. Their colleagues now play in the street for money from tourists. You will be entertained!

Having had the experience of visiting other Eastern European countries after communism fell, I had prepared myself to encounter filth and pollution along the Volga waterways. In contrast to Budapest and Prague, where a yellow haze hangs overhead, the skies over the vast countryside of the Russia I saw were of the purest blue, with long sunny days. The temperature in late August and early September barely rose above 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers and canals, however, were mostly brown with silt created by Stalin’s grand scheme to flood the forests and create the gigantic passage from Moscow to the Baltic sea.

This is the Russia that is figuratively and literally backwater and the one slowest to transform. Efforts are underway to cleanse the water and reintroduce the wiped-out wildlife.

Early in our trip along the Svir River, the Viking Kirov made an unscheduled stop at Mandrogi, a new town carved from the wilderness. Here we visited newly built log homes and shops, restaurants and bars. The over-all scene reminded me of the log hunting lodges of the Adirondacks in New York state, except the Russian examples were exquisitely carved and painted with both bold and delicate colors.

At a small zoo we met a young boy named Vashya tending some moose which hopefully will thrive and reproduce in the surrounding forest. “Three boys and three girls,” the youngster beamed in near perfect English. Russian children begin learning our language in the first grade and study it for several years.

Throughout Mandrogi, an atmosphere of “making it” persisted. Young shopkeepers were eager to please, willingly accepting our credit cards. Outside one restaurant were parked a Range Rover, Mercedes, Volvo, Saab and an Opel. I was told they were owned by the entrepreneurs who had invested in the village.

A few days earlier I had teased Misha about so many signs of prosperity, warning him that the proliferation of commercial billboards in St. Petersburg could end up making his native city “look like North Jersey.”

Fully aware he was being needled, he smiled slightly, and staring straight ahead, eyes on the horizon, said without hesitation or shame, “We are hungry.”

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