APRIL 29, 2022 – If you view Russia on a globe, you’ll see that the country is so vast, as the sun sets in the Russian Far East, it rises on St. Petersburg, f/k/a Leningrad, in the far west. For my three days in Leningrad, I’d barely reached Peter the Great’s “window to the West.” Now it was time to plunge into the heart of old Muscovy. With a heightened sense of adventure, I prepared to board the night train for Москва (“Moskva”)—Moscow—farther into the “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” that is Russia.
As I reported in my letter home, however, “Just as I was about to board the train, a gentleman rushed up and asked in English, ‘Are you Mr. Nilsson?’
“‘Yes,’ I replied.’
“‘Whew! I was supposed to meet you here to make sure you found the right train. I must have missed you when your cab arrived.’ So much for the Intourist tracking systems. If the KGB were keeping tabs on me, they certainly weren’t forwarding ‘intelligence reports’ to Intourist.”
The letter proceeded to describe the journey: “The train ride was wonderfully comfortable and uneventful except for a late night bull session with two African students, one from Somalia, the other from Ghana. Both spoke fluent English and they were especially friendly and spirited. For several hours we discussed politics and economics of the Third World. Interestingly, the Somalian, whose country is a client state of the USSR, expressed disdain for the Soviets. ‘What they say and what they do are two different things,’ he told me. As a footnote—many Russians I met sounded like Confederate Red-necks when it came to matters of race.”
The next morning, our train arrived in Moscow—but again, no Intourist agent was on hand to greet me, and as in Leningrad, I had no idea what hotel—if any—would be expecting me. Fortuitously, I saw—and heard—an Intourist agent corralling a British tourist group right outside the station. I asked her for assistance, and after examining my payment voucher, she hailed a cab, spoke to the driver, then explained to me that I’d be taken to the Hotel National near Red Square. “They should be able to help you,” she said, as I entered the cab.
“Спасибо!” I said.
“пожалуйста,” (You’re welcome) came her reply.
When the cab pulled up to the hotel a few minutes later, I was thrilled by its appearance and location. I hoped that my payment voucher would work its magic, and soon it did—with minimal hassle at the reception desk. “My assigned place of accommodation,” I wrote home, “[was] located just a hundred meters from the Kremlin and Red Square. The Hotel National was ‘old style,’ so full of Russian flavor I could taste it with every breath. Superb!” My positive memories of the place flooded back decades later when I read Amor Towles’s acclaimed novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the old-style Metropol, near the National.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
