3 ms·

I visited Moscow in the late 1980s. I expected to be harassed and followed according to all those 'What it's like inside Russia' books I'd read over the years.

I visited Moscow in the late 1980s. I expected to be harassed and followed according to all those 'What it's like inside Russia' books I'd read over the years. I discovered a bunch of people who were far more kind, moral and honest than the ones in New York that I'd visited a couple of weeks earlier. I hadn't felt particularly safe in New York, I felt safe in Moscow.

nocoiner 4y ago
It doesn’t seem shocking or even the least bit surprising that you didn’t feel safe in New York at the all-time absolute peak of crime, when the murder rate was 6x what it is now, but, as a foreigner, you felt physically secure in the capital city of a totalitarian surveillance state. Is there a more broadly applicable point here than your subjective experience of late-80s NY versus late-80s Moscow? Or am I just missing your point altogether?
- simonblack 4y ago
  I suppose my point was that I had been convinced that the Russians were horrible people by all the stuff I had read in the West up to that point.When I actually had to interact with them in the flesh, I found that the Western stereotypes of Russians that we had been given were all wrong. On my first morning in Moscow, I asked the hotel concierge for my passport. She asked what I was doing that made that necessary. I said 'I'm going into the City. Don't I have to have it on me if somebody asks me for my papers?' She burst out laughing and said 'You don't need your passport for that. But you can take it with you if you want.' I replied 'No, don't worry about it then. It'll be safer here with you than with me.' But they DO think differently. One area that I discovered was in the deal-making process. Westerners tend to make deals quickly, and then try to find loopholes in that deal AFTERWARDS to reduce costs to themselves. Russians are painful for Westerners to make deals with as they will debate all the various points of difference, even tiny ones, BEFORE the deal is struck. Sometimes, there is no deal made. However, any deal that is struck with Russians will be followed both to the letter and the spirit of that deal. An example of this is that gas supplies were being made to the Europeans for years and years under existing deals that were in place, even as more and more sanctions were placed on the Russians by the Europeans.
wrp 4y ago
I can't remember what writer, maybe P.J. O'Rourke, who quipped that at least one benefit of living in a police state is that you can count on the streets being well policed.
- simonblack 4y ago
  I only had one interaction with the police. I was walking across Red Square when a cop car pulled up and they blew a whistle at me. I had no clue. Then a another pedestrian said to me in English, "You have to walk between the marked lines." I had been walking just anywhere on the roadway. And it is a 'roadway for vehicles', not a 'square for pedestrians' to go where they like. I suppose the cops thought it'd be too much paperwork to charge me with jay-walking.

nocoiner 4y ago

It doesn’t seem shocking or even the least bit surprising that you didn’t feel safe in New York at the all-time absolute peak of crime, when the murder rate was 6x what it is now, but, as a foreigner, you felt physically secure in the capital city of a totalitarian surveillance state. Is there a more broadly applicable point here than your subjective experience of late-80s NY versus late-80s Moscow? Or am I just missing your point altogether?

simonblack 4y ago
I suppose my point was that I had been convinced that the Russians were horrible people by all the stuff I had read in the West up to that point.When I actually had to interact with them in the flesh, I found that the Western stereotypes of Russians that we had been given were all wrong. On my first morning in Moscow, I asked the hotel concierge for my passport. She asked what I was doing that made that necessary. I said 'I'm going into the City. Don't I have to have it on me if somebody asks me for my papers?' She burst out laughing and said 'You don't need your passport for that. But you can take it with you if you want.' I replied 'No, don't worry about it then. It'll be safer here with you than with me.' But they DO think differently. One area that I discovered was in the deal-making process. Westerners tend to make deals quickly, and then try to find loopholes in that deal AFTERWARDS to reduce costs to themselves. Russians are painful for Westerners to make deals with as they will debate all the various points of difference, even tiny ones, BEFORE the deal is struck. Sometimes, there is no deal made. However, any deal that is struck with Russians will be followed both to the letter and the spirit of that deal. An example of this is that gas supplies were being made to the Europeans for years and years under existing deals that were in place, even as more and more sanctions were placed on the Russians by the Europeans.

wrp 4y ago

I can't remember what writer, maybe P.J. O'Rourke, who quipped that at least one benefit of living in a police state is that you can count on the streets being well policed.

simonblack 4y ago
I only had one interaction with the police. I was walking across Red Square when a cop car pulled up and they blew a whistle at me. I had no clue. Then a another pedestrian said to me in English, "You have to walk between the marked lines." I had been walking just anywhere on the roadway. And it is a 'roadway for vehicles', not a 'square for pedestrians' to go where they like. I suppose the cops thought it'd be too much paperwork to charge me with jay-walking.