Miscellany: explaining the disappointments and pleasant surprises of my ongoing visit to St Petersburg

22 May

I have received one acidic comment on my latest essay published here yesterday suggesting that I am joining ranks with George Soros and Anne Applebaum in their decades long campaign to blacken the image of Russia and promote Cold War.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years, I have repeatedly denounced the nefarious activities of the front organizations for the CIA and its USAID subsidiary like Soros’s Open Society units and the all-too-clever propagandist Anne Applebaum for whom ‘The Washington Post’ is her preaching platform.

What I am saying now is that peers in the Alternative Media, many of whom are former CIA officers or U.S. military men, are now openly Putin cheerleaders only because of geopolitical considerations, without any regard for what the regime in the Kremlin is now doing to turn back the freedoms and close the open society that Putin himself built during his first 20 years in office.

With a few exceptions, these colleagues only became ‘Russia experts’ from the start of Putin’s war on Ukraine, because the Russian leader seemed to be in the forefront of the cause of multipolarity and the interests of the Global South versus American hegemony. They know little or nothing about Russia and its people, and care still less. And if you ask me about the seeming contradiction between their serving the army and intelligence of the U.S. in the past and their present work against American global hegemony, I say openly that they have fallen out of love with their own country and its leaders, whom they uniformly characterize as deranged (the president) or idiots (Congress). I disagree with them on both points. I may disagree with the policies of both especially with respect to foreign policy, but I know they are sane, not at all stupid though they are acting most obnoxiously and illegally on the world stage.

Formally speaking, Russia is not at war with anyone. President Putin never went to his legislature for approval of a declaration of war on Ukraine, which he should have done but pointedly did not do. A declaration of war would have implied calling up the reserves massively and a draft on young Russians, which would have been deeply unpopular.

The Special Military Operation is war by stealth. If it had been administered with proper strength, to smash a fly with a hammer, as the Soviets did in their 1956 invasion of Hungary and 1967 invasion of Czechoslovakia, then there would not be much reason for today’s essay. But the strength in numbers fell short of the assigned task because there was no general mobilization. Now in year 5 of a war it is dragging on only because the Russian leadership still lacks the will to do what is necessary for victory. It could kill the Kiev junta in massive bombing of Kiev, Lvov and other decision making centers of Ukraine.

With the passage of time and loss of perhaps 350,000 Russian soldiers dead and four times that number maimed for life, there is growing popular impatience. The KGB successor organization, the FSB, is taking on ever greater powers to suppress dissent, which have as ‘collateral damage’ great harm for the Russian communications infrastructure in this age of the internet, meaning damage to the economy.

At this moment the balance between freedoms and oppression in Russia is still better than what it was in the USA following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and introduction of the very repressive Patriot Act. However, things are headed in that direction here and someone has to say it aloud to counter the Putin worship that I see around me in the Alternative Media.

*****

Despite all of the foregoing, and in particular, the unsettling feeling of being cut off from my own Substack and from many of the sources of information that I regularly use at home in Belgium, I am enjoying a variety of pleasures that will further flower in the days ahead both socially, with friends whom with whom we are meeting, wining and dining, and also culturally, as we begin to book evenings at the performing arts and make refresher visits to museums that we love here. Meanwhile, the gastronomic discoveries in supermarkets and street markets continue day by day.

Across this vast land, there are industrious and ambitous people in the most unsuspected regions who are entering into new fields of agriculture or industrial production and are widening the product assortments on store shelves. This, despite the widespread bankruptcies that I spoke about a day ago.

For lunch today, I will be preparing green asparagus that were grown in a region never known as a supplier of prestige produce to European Russia: the very south of the Caucasus, in Northern Ossetia. Some of you will surely recall that Ossetia was after the collapse of the Soviet Union split in two, with a Russian half in the north and a Georgian part in the South; and this was a cause of the Russian-Georgian war of 2008. There were Russian peacekeepers in the southern part who were fired upon by the Georgians under their then viciously anti-Russian president Saakashvili with encouragement from US president Bush Jr.

Northern Ossetia happens also to be the homeland of Russia’s best known conductor of opera and symphonic orchestras Valery Gergiev. His sister Larisa has headed a costume making atelier for the Mariinsky Theater and a training center for would-be opera singers. Many promising musicians from the region are now making careers in European Russia. At the same time, some enterprising farmers in Ossetia have started supplying excellent green asparagus to leading Russian supermarket chains, as I discovered yesterday.

Another surprise which came during my visit to the Pushkin farmers’ market was the remarkable raspberries now being supplied here from Belarus hothouses. Yes, Belarus, which was long a supplier of meat and dairy products to Russia, often in dedicated stores in Russian city centers, now also is exporting here extraordinary fruits. I say with hand on heart, that these raspberries are superior in size, flavor and storage period in your refrigerator to anything we have on sale in premium supermarkets or fruit stores in Belgium, which sources chiefly from Morocco and Spain. How the folks in Minsk achieve this is beyond my comprehension.

The same can be said for the strawberries from Azerbaijan which you can find in specialty stores around the city and also in the farmers’ market. Forget geopolitics and the frictions at the leadership level between Baku and Moscow. Arguably the best strawberries imaginable are now being supplied here from Azerbaijan. In a week or two I expect Russia’s own Crimea and Kuban to rise to the fore in this red berry competition.

Lastly, I mention the delight my wife and I had lunching yesterday at home on the little seasonal fish from nearby Lake Ladoga, the koryushka, which are fully competitive with the best friture du lac that you will find in Switzerland on Lake Geneva.

*****

The people with whom I meet casually go on with their lives as best they can despite the obvious inconveniences of the communications disruptions and the frequent alerts that they find on their telephone in the morning that ‘a drone attack was averted.’ It comes in the same manner that I get warnings on my phone in Belgium that strong, gusty winds will make strolls in the forest hazardous today.’

Russians, especially young Russians, are traveling abroad in great numbers. My Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to St Petersburg was fully booked. There were several hundred Russians (virtually no foreigners) patiently waiting in line at the passport control desks of the Arrivals floor. In that sense, the country remains open to the world even if media access to outside sources is being sharply and seemingly arbitrarily curtailed.

‘The Financial Times,’ to which I subscribe, is no longer accessible here in the Petersburg internet. At the same time, very strangely, www.nyt.com opens without difficulty. The only explanation I can suggest is that the Russian censors are differentiating between the US, which they want to keep on side, and the European and British enemies, whom they are keen to keep out of Russian media space.

The foregoing suggests that the shutdown of internet resources here is a combination of selective black listing of given platforms and across the board restriction of access by cutting the data flows from 4G to 2G. As the days go by and I better understand what exactly is going on, I will report on it here

At the same time, please note from the foregoing that this Word Press platform can also at any time be de-accessed by the authorities, in which case you will hear from me next when I am back in Brussels in mid June

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026