Feet on the ground in St Petersburg: first impressions
I had imagined that my first report on this latest trip to St Petersburg which began with our arrival yesterday afternoon on a bus from Helsinki airport would be delivered a week from now when I would have a sufficient store of impressions to share. But as both Oksana Boyko and I agreed during her interview with me a week ago, life in Russia since 24 February is evolving at a fast clip and 24 hours here have already yielded some things which I must share while they are so vivid.
First among them is meteorological: Petersburg is now well and truly in winter mode. The temperature at our arrival was minus 5 degrees Centigrade and there is a snow cover in the countryside. Not enough to ski on yet, but enough to slip and slide on the sidewalks in our semi-suburban outlying district of Pushkin/Tsarskoye Selo.
Why is this important? Because when you are are living in conditions of plus 12 degrees as I have been in Brussels for the last month and you hear about the hardships of the Ukrainians facing winter conditions without heat, without electricity, without water, that story has a remote, abstract character. When you yourself are living in conditions well below freezing outdoors, that vision becomes immediate and alarming even if indoors, as here remains the case, apartments are overheated and, without any thermostats, you adjust the temperature to your liking by opening windows.
This is not to say that I have developed a soft place in my head for the Ukrainians and their government of murderers and thieves in Kiev. No, but I deeply regret the loss of life among civilians in Ukrainian cities as the entire energy grid there is reduced to rubble in the coming weeks. The remaining young and prosperous Ukrainians will get in their cars and land at our doorstep in Brussels and elsewhere in the EU. I think of the splendid Jaguar with Ukrainian license plates that was briefly parked in front of my Brussels house a couple of times in the past few weeks. But the old widows, the infirm, the young children in Ukrainian cities will die in droves in their unheated apartments and no one but propagandists playing to the EU leadership for more funds to be embezzled will take note.
And who is to blame for their deaths? Our leaders in the EU and in the USA will say, without missing a beat, that Mr. Putin is to blame because he is bombing the Ukrainian infrastructure to bits. That is as fair-minded as the same people having said from the beginning that the Russian attack on Ukraine was “unprovoked.” The reality is that without the destruction of the Ukrainian energy infrastructure the Russians could not and cannot put a stop to the delivery to the Ukrainian forces on the front of ever more destructive weapons systems from the US and NATO arsenals. And it is these deliveries that have been prolonging the war and postponing its inevitable end in Ukrainian capitulation.
Now a necessary word about the suffering widows, infirm and innocent children caught in the middle of this confrontation. It has been denounced as ‘barbaric’ by none other than the Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz and his German passport holding colleague, president of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Now that is not hypocrisy. No, it is worse than hypocrisy. German leaders seem to be forgetting who reinvented barbarism in the middle of the 20th century. They are forgetting the one million Leningraders, one third of the city’s population at the time, who died of starvation and cold during the Siege put in place by….the Bundeswehr. Instead they are now weeping over the 6600 civilians whom the UN reports as having died so far in the Russian Military Operation in Ukraine. It would be so much better if they simply shut up and did the decent thing, namely to stop supplying arms to the Kiev regime and called upon the rest of the world to also desist and press for immediate conclusion of peace on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality.
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Now that I have gotten this first overwhelming impression out in black and white, I proceed to the little impressions of daily life in Petersburg after a six week absence.
As is my custom, I have some remarks on retailing in the food sector resulting from my shopping trips yesterday and today, visiting my nearby Economy class supermarket just across the street for staples, visiting the higher end Perekrostok supermarket that is a 10 minute walk away. And visiting the city open air food market in downtown Pushkin, a 15 minute taxi ride away.
There are changes in the product assortment and especially in packaging to report. Price changes are less evident, just as the price for petrol at filling stations has not moved up more than 5% or 10% since 24 February. By change in packaging, I note a downward move in the visual aspects of cartons of juices, dairy products and other liquids now that global packaging suppliers including Tetrapak have left the Russian market and stores of their products have been drawn down and replaced by Russian newcomers to the field. The same surely will happen soon in yoghurts fridges when Danone’s departure is completed. For the moment, their Activia brand is still on sale. Meanwhile, import substitution also entails market entry of new categories of products produced by local factories. I just spotted the market debut of liquid detergent capsules for washing machines to replace powder detergents, which have been narrowed in range by the departure of major Western producers like Proctor & Gamble.
The availability of tropical imported fruits at all price levels of retail continues to impress. The assortment of persimmons or pomegranates here is far more extensive than in Brussels. The famous kishmish seedless grapes, both blue and yellow, are in full season here. Like the other exotic fruits these traditional dessert grapes known in Russia for decades come from Uzbekistan and other producing countries in Central Asia or from Turkey and Azerbaijan.
The wine selection in Economy and mid-market range supermarkets continues to shift away from Western European producers towards Russian, and also towards Balkans producers. The challenge is to find something drinkable amidst wholly unknown labels at prices in the 8 to 10 euro range, which is dominant on the shelves.
My visit to the fish counter at Perekryostok took an unexpected turn. Just six weeks ago I had remarked on the high quality of their sea bass and dorade thanks to better freshness than I see in the same fish categories and coming from the same Mediterranean exporters to Belgium, all at half the price or less of Delhaize, the Lion or of the Moroccan fish seller who supplies local restaurants in our quartier. This time when I stepped up to the counter the sales lady greeted me with: “We have no imported fish!” I can only guess that she determined by my Italian sheepskin winter coat and Finnish sheepskin hat that I am a foreigner and one who will only eat fish coming from my part of the world. I assured her that I was not looking for imported fish, just for good fish. She lost her aggressiveness, confiding to me that they have not received imported fish for some weeks now, and pointing out to me the excellent sudak from Russian suppliers (sandre to the French, Zander to the Germans, sandacz to the Poles) river fish that they previously did not carry but now were featuring at a giveaway price of 6 euros per kilo. I followed her advice and the evening’s dinner was splendid. A fall-back position would have been flounder from Murmansk, also a safe bet and priced at four times below the price for the fish in Brussels.
I decided to test the story about no deliveries of imported fish by visiting my preferred fishmongers in the city market of Pushkin. There they were in the display case – both dorade and sea bass. The sales lady said they had no problem with supplies. In her words, “we get these from Turkey, and they are our friends; they are supporting Russia. What we don’t have is anything from Norway, who are not our friends.” In short, the vox populi behind a fish counter. This same vendor is offering fresh salmon caviar from Kamchatka sold from a big plastic tub at 100 euros per kilo. We used to buy black caviar at that price, but times do change, in Russia as everywhere else. We bought 150 grams and had the very best caviar sandwiches for dinner tonight in years. Obviously the logistics of supply from Kamchatka is well in hand.
When I say that the product assortment in Russian supermarkets is changing all the time now, I must place that in the context of similar goings-on in Brussels. With the sky-high electricity bills, heating bills and inflation in food prices, the general population in Belgium is undergoing a serious deterioration of purchasing power and the results translate directly into what we see or do not see on store shelves. The Russian stores are showing a proliferation of “promotional prices” on all sorts of foodstuffs and non-food products. In Belgium what I see is proliferation of economy, brand-X products at the expense of major brand products. I see that cheaper categories of wine fly from the shelves, economy packed toilet paper flies from the shelves, so that if you are not an early riser on a Saturday morning when you shop for the week you will miss many items on your list.
Moving on, I have a word to put in about banking and foreign currency. Most readers are surely aware that most major Russian banks have been cut from SWIFT and are unable to execute orders of Russian customers to make transfers or pay bills abroad. What you probably did not know is that some middle sized Russian banks that have no ties to the government continued to enjoy their SWIFT status. And as recently as 6 weeks ago one of these banks which is based in St Petersburg assured us that we would be able to make transfers abroad if we completed a real estate transaction here. Today, their website updated the situation, saying that the minimum sum of a transfer abroad that they will accept is for 50,000 euros or dollars. I visited their office to see if this was not a mistake, and learned that indeed that is their new policy and it is likely intended to discourage small retail customers like us from bothering them with an assignment they know will likely end in tears. Experience has shown them that there can be delays of a week or more on the sending side while the Russian government inspects the transaction and there can be delays lasting months on the receiving end in Europe, depending on the country in the EU, even total blockage of the transaction without refund.
Meanwhile, while one door closes another opens. From the very beginning of the Special Military Operation and cut-off of Russia from SWIFT, the exchange rates were bizarrely volatile until Russian banks established market driven cross currency rates that replaced the Central Bank rate for purposes of their dealings with retail customers. And then it quickly became clear that these rates were theoretical because bank branches across Russia did not have euro or dollar banknotes on hand to meet the demand of their customers. Now, as of today, I can confirm that the Russian banks around me in Petersburg are afloat in foreign currency. You can walk in to one bank and on the spot buy 20,000 euros against cash rubles. You can walk into another bank, Sberbank, and order those same 20,000 euros for delivery on the next day. How one can explain the sudden flood of cash euros in Russian banks when there is virtually no tourist traffic is beyond my understanding.
I close with a remark about who exactly is coming across the border from Finland to Russia on the four daily buses operated by the competing firms Ecolines and Lux. Yesterday morning, at the Vantaa Helsinki Airport bus depot, we witnessed the departure of the Ecolines bus at 8.15am They had about 6 passengers aboard. Our own Lux bus, departing at 8.45 had about 40 of the 50 seats aboard filled. In our case, it quickly became clear at the passport control checks that apart from a couple of Finns with their young child and myself, all the other passengers were dual national Russians who held European Union passports. As for the Ecolines passengers, they were Ukrainians, and for that reason alone we caught up with their bus at the Russian border, since they were undergoing close questioning.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022