Gas explosion in St Petersburg pipeline

The lights flickered on and off, ther was the roar of thunder like a distant thunderstorm. It was repeated a few times. It was no thunderstorm. From the 9th floor I could see the sky in the horizon glow red, flickering and then there was a billowing cloud of smoke rising towards the sky.

The smoke was rising slowly, almost like a cloud which meant it was at least three-four miles away. It was around midnight so the sky was still light and the redness was spreadin across it, reflected within the thick column of smoke.

It was incredible. The smoke widened and spread and filled the sky and then it started to rain! For a video of the event check out this link from YouTube posted just moments ago!

Living in Russia

Living in Russia it is sometimes easy to become hypercritical. There are a lot of things which get to you after a while. The dirt and grime which no one seems to mind. The fact that customer service consists of goods being flung across a counter. The fact that no one smiles and everyone seems to be obsessed with money because there are few jobs and no safety net here and everything that was, is no more.

It is easy to focus on ideological differences and the fact that this was a land which did nothing but accept communism for 70 years and did nothing about it.

Within this framework it is easy perhaps to forget a much larger, unique picture. This was a land of a people who passionately believed in the rule of the Tsar and shook it off, almost by accident. It is the land of a people who then fought the Germans to a standstill, dehumanizing themselves in the process and proceeded then to roam across Eastern Europe and Germany.

Meanwhile, back home, they laboured through consecutive generations believing, truly, that one day, some day they would end up with a workers’ Paradise where all goods would be free and everyone would just walk into a shop and take anything they needed, according to their needs.

It takes a special kind of mindset to believe that and it goes beyond naivety.

It takes an even stronger mindset to suddenly have this revealed as false and then go through the upheaval the shattering of a dream and the loss of every vestige of national pride entails and still function sufficiently to pull themselves together.

The result right now is a patchwork reality where some struggle while others live in unimaginable luxury. A place where opportunity and equality still favour those with either might or connections. A place where life continues to be precarious, where alcoholism is a problem, where men are dead by 65 and women are graded only on looks. A place where the old networks no longer work, where the individual which was once thought to be bad is now considered to be acceptable, a place where the young are still not given much of a saying and the old are still considered ‘wise’ by the fact that they have grown old.

There is illiteracy, ignorance and superstition. Illogical beliefs that Communism might again triumph against a morally bankrupt capitalist system. There is also some hope. Hidden, nurtured, hardly spoken of.

The hope that tomorrow will be better than today. The hope that the future is coming. The hope that there will be a better world than this one and it will all start here.

Perhaps this is a steadfast, unique characteristic of a society that maybe has not changed much or has changed a lot. Either way it is this stoicism and ability to find hope even when they do not speak of it that marks Russia and Russian people apart from the rest of the world.

We drive on the pavement here

Russia, or rather St Petersburg is a city made by a city planner who knew how to use a ruler. "We make a road here," he must have drawn a line on a pristine sheet of paper, "and another one here," drawing perhaps a parallel line, "and one here, and here and here," more lines, reach perfectly parallel to the others and then those lines intersected by perpendiculars until he ended up with something that looked like an extended version of the framework you use to play 'noughts and crosses'.

"And here we make the pavements," I can imagine him saying shading in with his pencil on either side of the straight line creating in his head a city with streets built to take gun carriages without even trying and pavements where crowds could gather to watch without feeling too jostled with each other.

The Communists, when they came into power, did their best to translate their ideal of architecture which was so functional as to crush the human spirit, so bleak as to relieve life of anything resembling happiness and so universally similar as to stamp out individualism practically forever.

Flats became boxes. Furniture became items. Everyone had the same flats, furnished by the same furniture and wearing the same clothes and if you think IKEA is bad (which is doing great down here by the way) wait until you see what can be produced by factories governed by the notion that the one aspiring goal of every individual is to arrive at a worker's paradise where everything is free (yes, including furniture) and everyone takes only what they need (yeah! you heard that one right, they actually believed that).

In that version streets, incredibly straight and incredibly wide were bordered by incredibly wide pavements, space, as a matter of fact was all around (ok, there were precious few cars) and cramped quarters were reserved only for where people lived.

In the 21st century St Petersburg has more cars than it used and no parking spaces. Ok, that is not a new problem. Every city on the planet suffers that ill. But where others create underground car parks here they simply park on the pavement.

Worse still, they drive on the pavement. Now there are many reasons for this, not least because pavements are meant to be driven on, or at least they have sloping curbs which allow cars to drive on and off in order to take a shortcut, access a shop entrance or simply get off the road.

And drivers, being drivers, which means they are like water, simply use them all!

So you are walking along marvelling at the fact that here is a pavement which could easily take two cars abreast when you hear a roar and there behind you there are two cars abreast driving on the pavement with you in the way and that's when you also realise that in all that flat expense you are on there is no place to hide and nowhere to jump to other than a busy road!

You would expect cars on pavements to go a little slower but then that would credit Russian car drivers with an amoebal awareness of something lying beyond the end of their bonnets and this they simply have not got!

People of course here are used to it and they squeeze against buildings or step into flower patches or the curb in order to avoid them, but for a Westerner used to pavements meant only for people it's still something that takes a little getting used to.

Three and a half hours of darkness

St Petersburg this time of the year is a wonder in its own right. It gets totally dark about 11.40pm and dawn breaks around 4.00am. We are heading towards the white nights and there is a palpable sene of energy in the air that is hard to exaplain.

Why we do what we do

There is always a deeper underlying reason in patterns of behaviour. In why we do what we do. In behaving in a certain manner and developing a certain outlook and making certain decisions.

The 'Hawk' or 'Dove' argument, the risk or the safe choice are not always the defining charactersitic here. The argument though has perfect validity with the way we see the world.

Some build and some destroy. The motivation, in each case, is the same. Each chases a world view, one in which they believe in staunchly.

Sometimes I want to scream!

There is a nightmare I once had while awake in which I thought that hell on Earth must be a place where no one cares and no one listens - humans are trapped in a somnabulistic trance from which there is no escape, doomed to forever amble about in a zombie-like existence where life has little real meaning and where every action is governed by the same animal instincts that drove man before he came out of the cave and looked up and saw the sky.

To say that Russia is like that is too hard. There are people here (and let's not forget Google's Founder is Russian - though, yeah, he got out) who must be good. Who are good. Yet as a society governed on primal instincts, where, women are used up and cast aside, where everyone steals and everyone lies, where the group is prized above the individual, this kind of society makes me want to scream: wake up!

There is no censorship of the internet in Russia (though news and television are now State controlled and there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of expression), but so few people access anything other than porn on it that it may as well not exist.

You can never make a horse drink water no matter how hard you try!

The letter that wasn't posted

I don’t normally start entries here like I am writing a novel. Sometimes in the details you capture the essence of a transformation that has such huge ramifications for society that it truly leaves you stunned. I sometimes joke about the last war being all about ketchup and our ability to enjoy our tomatoes in liquid form through a plastic bottle and this is not far from the truth.

Ketchup, to make and market properly, requires such an extensive network of supply-chain economics, free-market-economy principles and a truly consumer-orientated society (you couldn’t get it in Communist China before it opened up its economy) that in a “seeing the world in a grain of sand” approach, this is exactly what the last war was about.

We take the sending of a letter for granted. The number of times the Royal Mail has been fined for failing to meet its targets of 98% next day delivery for First Class post have been something we get used to. We expect post to work. We send a letter and it gets there. In the postal service we have created a low-cost, incredibly effective, efficient network that seems to span the globe. A letter addressed to the US gets there in seven days. A package to South Africa just reaches its intended recipient. Because it works so well we don’t really see the mechanics of it. We do not see the manpower, the organization, the thinking and planning, the supervisory machinery, all the things that go into setting up and then controlling a quality service.

We do not see the invisible stuff either. We do not see, for example the pride that goes into doing a job well or the responsibility that even the loweliest of us feel, or even the system of accountability that makes it difficult to not do your job.

All I wanted to do was post a letter. It was in an envelope and written on paper using ink. This is low-tech stuff, we’ve perfected it since the days of the Pony Express. The Post Office was just 15 minutes away from my flat on foot and I walked down to where I thought it would take a few minutes to buy the right stamp and send a letter from St Petersburg to London.

Ok, there are a few surprises in store now. The first one was the building (bearing in mind that Post is a government service). It was low, of the pro-cat variety that vanished with the asbestos scares in the 70s, with some pebble-dash exterior, low ceilings, bad lighting, dirty walls, cracked melamine floors and the sort of place you’d call a dive had there been food or drink or music on offer.

A couple of huge notice boards choker-filled with notices announced proudly that this was ‘Information’.

There was a counter with a low divider and the places for two Post Office Assistants, though one was shut with a typed notice giving opening times. It was just after 12.00 and the second, apparently would not be open until 12:15.

I joined the queue in the one which was manned and seeing how I was about eighth in line I thought it would not be too long. A couple of enterprising souls came in, looked at my queue and gamely joined one other person waiting patiently in front of the shut place which should open in 15 minutes.

I suppose I should have worried here and then because they had decided to join a queue without an assistant which would open in 15 minutes rather than join mine, but hey, I was sinking in a state of depression brought about by the setting which I was now busy inventorying, so I did not think much about them.

I took stock of the setting behind the counter. The person serving was at a low table dominated by a massive telephone and she was busy checking something on a parcel that was being sent by the first person in the queue. She was in her late 50s dressed in a uniform which would have marked as janitorial staff anywhere else and yelling something which sounded like numbers into the handset.

There was a door, left open, behind her which presumably linked the service end of the Post Office to the admin staff. I say presumably because it was opened to a low-ceilinged corridor with walls that had not been painted or cleaned for at least 50 years. There were low-wattage incandescent light-bulbs adding to the horror-set image and a half-open door along the corridor wall leading, presumably to an office.

At the end of the corridor there was faint, natural daylight. There was no sign of life in the corridor behind her so I set about studying the layout behind the counter. She was still reading some laborious code on the telephone and the queue had not moved. It was now 12:08 so it’s not like I had no time.

Obviously ergonomics and basic furniture are not big in the Russian Postal Service. The area behind the counter was split in two by two large, sturdy wooden tables (complete with faded wooden surface and splinters). The larger of the two was covered with papers, the parcel that was being prepared plus a massive phone. The second one, of a lower hate by a good three inches, had a PC (switched off) and some more scattered papers.

Behind that, about seven feet away were two grey, battered, six foot high metal filing cabinets with a row of sorry looking potted plants on top which looked like they had not seen the light of day (which is about right as the nearest daylight window was at the far end and covered with notices) for years. The plants were dirty, the plant pots were dirty and the filing cabinets were dirty. What’s more they were open and inside was a filing nightmare with folders left willy-nilly everywhere.

By the time I had finished examining all this I was beginning to feel like an extra in a gulag prisoner movie and the queue had still not moved. The other queue, the one forming in expectation of the coming Post Assistant was now four strong.

It was, by the wall clock 12:13 and the parcel was almost finished upon which point the sole Post Assistant serving announced she would be taking a break in two minutes for 15 minutes but as a post track had arrived with letters and parcels to be sorted and she was on her own she was going to be busy. We all had to come back ‘later’.

I know it sounds incredible. Particularly as I walked back home feeling depressed, rang up DHL and had the letter on its way within an hour after paying about £40 for the service. The thing is it never used to be like that (apparently). In the old Soviet system a Post Man was a coveted position to be served with pride.

Post was regular, the Postman was greeted as the harbinger of happy news and the carrier of people’s thoughts and being one elevated you socially. Now it takes seven days for a letter to be delivered across St Petersburg. Russian companies uses couriers and the Post Assistant that ‘served’ us gets paid about £3 a day doing a job no one wants from a position of power because if she leaves it she’s hard to replace!

I suppose I should finish with a moral which should be along the lines of ‘don’t use paper if you can go digital’ but I will eschew my normal cynicism and think about how change, while good, when it happens without control or too fast also destroys things which are good and neglects to replace them.

Post services are part of a country’ national identity and its sense of pride. Here, they are a source of dismay, irritation and an affirmation that Russia is still second-best in the world.