Russia evokes a sense of fear for anyone remembering the cold war era.  Beyond that, my knowledge of Russia was of busty blonde women and dour men in Hollywood Spy movies.

During a month-long holiday we unravel a few layers from the crumbling veneer of communism to gain some understanding of today's Russia.

Touching down in St. Petersburg airport, weeds sprout from a tarmac devoid of vehicles while the boxy Stalinist buildings have a faded abandoned air.   A peroxide blonde stewardess poured into a tiny mini skirt meets our flight.

Just nine years after the official collapse of communism we found a place of contrasts that wavers between capitalism and chaos, a kind of no man's land created by transition that is just holding together. 

It is hard to correlate images of an ordered drab Russia with the crazy carnival atmosphere in the airport carpark with cars parked haphazardly and a band playing in the background, this is more like an Asian village on market day.

Russia is a land of rituals - and no guest should arrive empty handed.  Great extravagant bunches of flowers are carefully carried off the plane and are offered with smacking kisses on both cheeks. While the Russians at times seem to be faded– they supplement this drabness with unnaturally bright clothes and flowers are a special gift, abundant stalls brightening every corner.

The white nights are famous in the far northern hemisphere when darkness never comes. These long mild summer days allow us ample time to explore the most European of Russia's cities, St. Petersburg with its’ many wonderful palaces, cathedrals and monuments.

The imposing grandeur of these fabulous buildings contrast with the life on the cracked and weedy footpaths, while the decaying roads are filled with ancient Lada Cars.

A story about Russia would not be complete without mention of this hardy little car, which is in my mind synonymous with the ex USSR.  In the 1960s Brezhnev, decided to build up the Soviet auto industry – and thus the boxy little Lada was born. Today the Russian roads are filled with these distinctive cars which look like they’ve not been repaired or the design altered since the day they first hit the road.

Below the cities run efficient subway systems – in the era of soviet paranoia they have been designed to double as air raid shelters. 

Like a ride at the show, great escalators, almost vertical, plummet thousands of commuters over 100m into the earth.  Echoing in the subway tunnels, a ten piece ensemble play Russia’s most famous composer, Tchaikovsky, in order to supplement meagre incomes.

At lunchtime in cosmopolitan Moscow young women in high heels and thin tight pants, casually swig from beer bottles as they walk up the street.  An older neatly dressed man, perhaps on his way from a business meeting, stops at a beer booth and continues on his way, plastic cup in hand. 

In Russia, the sour sweetness of alcohol dominates public spaces, and employers tell us that it is difficult to find good workers who aren't drunks.  We wonder whether a whole nation turned to alcohol to escape its misery.

Russians are notorious for their love of vodka, but in communist times there were state-sponsored facilities where people were assisted to 'dry out.' Now, there is nothing, and even worse, no incentive for people not to drink.

Drinking is taken very seriously in Russia and once the shot glasses are filled with pure vodka; a toast is made – to friends, and family, with the third toast always to love. Toast made, the vodka is shot down, followed by a gherkin or ham or other savoury on the table. We’d started drinking just after lunch and by late afternoon the lady of the house had brought out sweet cakes, biscuits and tea – all apparently part of the ritual.

With each round of drinks, a toast must be made and as the day passes by the toasts become philosophical and even whimsical. These are an educated people, aware of what they could have been, but also aware of their shortcomings, an innate lack of confidence.  

My friends told me a popular Russian joke about two Russians trained to be spies in the German camp in World War Two. Blue eyed and blonde, these Russians spoke perfect German and were trained down to the tiniest detail.  But they got caught.  Why?  Because all Russians have a slouched posture, a stoop that characterizes them to this day.

We find ourselves asking - what do people do when a system collapses?  Communism made the people dependent on their state for basic necessities such as housing, heating, and healthcare. Two generations of people grew up not having to worry about them – now they want the consumerist lifestyle of the west but don't understand that work and initiative are necessary for wealth.

Staying in homestays all the way across Russia, our experiences were sadly similar - apartment entries were always barricaded by a heavy steel door. Once admitted we would then climb six or seven flights of dank, dark stairs smelling of urine, body odours, and last nights' dinner.

The unlocking of a complicated series of locks on two doors (an inner and outer) would preempt our admittance to our homestay apartment. Each night we would be barricaded in behind these doors, along with the smells of fatty food scorched on dilapidated stoves, and the inescapable evidence of ineffective plumbing wafting up through the pipes.

Our hosts took in foreign tourists to make ends meet, and invariably, we displaced family from their rooms, or more frequently were put up in the living room – we learnt about lives incomprehensible by our standards. 

People are so hungry they are reputedly pulling parts off de-commissioned and derelict nuclear reactors and selling them on the black market, their hunger outweighing the dangers of such work.

For them, fears of acid rain are very real, and marginalisation occurs every day in Russia.  A twenty-year-old girl born in Siberia when her parents were exiled there, tells us that the police can stop anyone in the street - if they don't like the look of you.

We become friends with a man in his 30s who like others his age served as a conscript in the Russian army - he bitterly relates years of "hell". While in the army he was constantly hungry and in his spare time would gather berries in the woods to supplement army rations.

Wide highways, tall buildings, and many public spaces with distinctly communist monuments attest that Russia was once a great super power – and yet it seems like this country stopped in its tracks twenty years ago, and progress hasn’t come to them as quickly as the rest of the world.

Copyright Ariana Svenson, 2005 - Comments and enquiries, please email us.