The PC: My shoes are filled with Volga mud: (2) The future is the past.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on April 14, 2014)

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My shoes are filled with Volga mud: (2) The future is the past.

A 1999 travelogue in three parts.

March 31: (1) A tale of a fateful trip.
April 7: (2) The future is the past.
April 14: (3) Beer hunters lurking nearby.

(2) The future is the past.

It was 1999, and from the beginning of the trip, it seemed a strange and disjointing sensation to be returning at last to a land that had captivated me so intensely earlier in my life.

In particular, it seemed quite wrong to be entering Russia by airplane. Before, back in the decidedly dark ages of the 1980s, I’d arrived in the Soviet capital only after long journeys by train, taking me eastward over a period of days through ever more mysterious and primitive concentric circles of the Warsaw Pact. Being able to effortlessly glide into an airport while ensconced in the belly of a Swissair jet seemed positively corrupt and decadent by comparison. The proletariat would harshly judge me.

A decade later, sprawling, brooding Moscow remained the imperial capital of Communism, at least in physical appearance. Seventy years of urban methodology was loosely draped with the familiar veneer of capitalism’s purported victory in the long running saga of the Cold War. Garish neons, intrusive billboards, cellular phones, car alarms — even the occasional coat of paint — all conspired to trick the unthinking visitor into believing that Moscow had become somehow Western.