Like a lot of us, I’ve been reading a fair amount about Ukraine and especially Russia these days. It fascinates me how quickly American news items on Russian military and diplomatic machinations turn into psychoanalysis–the Russians miss the glory days of the Tsar or the imperial Soviet Union. I wish the American media would turn the same psychoanalytic lens on domestic news instead of their usual freshman year sociology. Americans murder each other at such high rates because they are suffering from ennui and purposelessness.
The more I read about Russia, the more ignorant I feel. This summer, my wife and I are scheduled to visit the largest of the 22 republics in the Russian Federation. I’ll bet you anything you can’t name it. In any case, we’re really looking forward to seeing Ufa, its capital city. It’s where Rudolf Nureyev grew up. I told you you’ve never heard of it.
This morning, after listening to a podcast with Robert D. Kaplan–whose book “Balkan Ghosts” inspired me to spend a month traveling around Romania in the late 1990s–I turned on Tchaikovsky’s wonderfully lyrical violin concerto. I got to thinking about the psychic scars Soviet domination left on Eastern Europe. Of course, some of it was the absurd cruelty of communism. But not all of it. There’s also the burden of being controlled by the interests of a larger country. A decade or so ago, I spent a week in Baku and was struck by the combination of reverence and resentment Azeris had for the Russians. On the one hand, attending a Russian university could gain one high status. On the other hand, their country’s sovereignty was limited given the size and might of its enormous neighbor. There was simply nothing they could do to push the bear back. It reminded me of Porfirio Díaz’s famous quote, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” But in a short time, I got the sense that the small states surrounding Russia had it much worse.
All this got me thinking about the one blurry night I spent in the Republic of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea. When I arrived in Baku, I left a letter for a high-ranking Dagestani diplomat with the front desk at my hotel. They said they’d have it delivered.
You see, the brother of my uncle by marriage lost a lot of money in the 1990s in oil investments in Dagestan. But apparently, he had some old contacts he wanted to share with me. (The brother also happened to own the Chateau Marmont in its glory days.) In any case, when he heard I was going to Azerbaijan, he told me I had to visit Dagestan. He wrote a note in a sealed envelope addressed to the plenipotentiary of this or that. That’s what I left at my hotel’s front desk assuming nothing would come of it.
A day or so later, I got a call in my hotel room from a man who clearly spoke very little English. He told me–in one way or another–that a car would come that day at 7pm to pick me up. I had no idea who was picking me up or where I was going. But sure enough that night I was picked up and whisked away in what I later guessed was a $200,000 Mercedes. The passenger chair moved to accommodate the turns in the road. The driver, probably the guy who called me, had already used all his English on me. So we sat mostly in silence as he drove up the coast to Dagestan.
When we finally got out of the car, I found myself at what I think was a dimly lit disco in a water park. The people were frighteningly good looking. I was handed vodka shots, and told through a combination of laughter and pantomime, that it was not acceptable to sip the vodka. I may or may not have talked to a few people. I may or may not have danced that night. At five am the next morning, I was dropped off at my hotel in Baku. I still have no idea where I had been or who I was with. But I’ll never forget my one night in the Republic of Dagestan.
