After World War II ended in May 1945, the alliance against the Nazis, between the USA and the USSR, ended, too. For the next thirty years, no American Navy warship made a port call in any Soviet Union port and visa versa. But, in April 1975, a US Navy cruiser and a destroyer, as they ended Mediterranean deployments, though expecting to return home, instead received orders directing them to Leningrad USSR. It came as a hell of a surprise, at least, to the personnel on the ships, including me, a division officer on a guided missile destroyer.
That is how, after several years of active duty in the Cold War, and wearing the uniform of a US Navy Lieutenant, I happened to take these snapshots, in May 1975, of my shipmates taking in sights in Leningrad, back in the same year and the same place that Vladimir Putin first joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where he long served as a party functionary.
Our visit was a very big, world news kind of deal, according to many reports, including this from the New York Times, having substantial diplomatic implications, into which, as an officer, I was dragged, somewhat, despite my utter lack of diplomatic skill, at least back in my 20s.
Mostly, though, and somewhat oddly, I thought at first, our Communist hosts squired us around to the Tzarist palaces and churches, mostly the same ones that still lie at the focus of modern tourism in that city under Vladimir Putin. Back in 1975 it eventually sank in to me that the Communists’ efforts, to preserve and show off the remnants of the excesses of their former ruling class, were meant to vilify those excesses and to celebrate the victory of workers over the autocrats with the conversion of the rulers’ pleasure parks for the use of ordinary workers on holiday.
Under Putin and the Russian oligarchs, the Tzarist monuments no longer serve any such purpose, quite the contrary. Ordinary Russian workers can no longer elbow their way into these places, unless they are tour guides or work there. Meanwhile, mobs of foreign tourists suck the oxygen from all but the monuments’ largest rooms and halls, while the presentations typically have a decidedly Tzar Pride tilt.
Russian President Putin would be just as happy to forget the October Revolution and carry on the tradition of the autocratic tzars. The Russian tourism industry has conformed itself to that.
I know some of these things because, for years, it nagged me that, back in 1975, I couldn’t share such a unique and extraordinary experience with my spouse, for obvious reasons. But, in 2017, still married, we went to Leningrad together, though Putin has renamed his hometown after his idol, Tzar Peter the Great, and the city again bears its Tzarist name of St. Petersburg.
Following that trip, it took me quite a while to collect my thoughts and mixed feelings about tourism for Americans in Putin’s Russia. I’ve summed up some of my ambivalence in a video essay, based upon our visit to the great Tzarist palace pictured at the top, built, rebuilt and expanded, in turn, by Catherine I wife of Peter the Great and Empress after him, Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth, and, eventually, Catherine II, a/k/a Catherine the Great.
Vlad really digs, and likely profits, from all of this tourism. My feelings about it aren’t nearly so straightforward, though I’m glad I did it.
But I only needed to hear one Russian guide gushing about how Putin recovered and DNA tested the bones of Tzar Nicholas II and his family, executed by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg, in the Russian Ural Mountains, then had them interred in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul alongside the other imperial Tzarist tombs. Standing in St. Petersburg in 2017, gazing on the tomb of the last Tzar, newly put there by the hand of Vladimir Putin, it became chillingly clear that Putin and modern Russia have become at least as great an adversary of the US that the former USSR, against which I spent most of my Naval service contending, ever was.