UW Gazette, April 9, 1997 Dr. Herbert Fernando of UW's biology department reflects on a recent trip. My destination was St. Petersburg, better known as Leningrad to this generation, a place I had visited three times before and lived for two months on one occasion on official work. My main purpose was to meet Dr. Ludmilla Kutikova, chief scientist at the prestigious Zoological Institute. I also met four other colleagues of hers all retired like herself who I had met on previous visits. Much of my brief stay was spent here and at Ludmilla's house discussing our joint work. The Zoological Institute was founded by the founder of modern Russia, Peter the Great. It is one of the largest, if not the largest, Zoological museum in the world. Originally meant to house zoological curiosities, it was later expanded to a fully representative museum of the animal kingdom. Its galleries extend 4-5 kilometers in length, I was told, and I got a measure of this by walking through some of the galleries. In the display cabinets are 40,000 specimens, while the stored collections reputedly have over 1.5 million specimens and 300,000 species of animals. I was skeptical because the total number of animal species named is around a million. However I was assured by the guide, who was a sci entist, that this figure was accurate. The museum houses the famous frozen mammoth and many exotic large animals collected by Russian and Soviet expeditions from all continents. The insects displayed contained thousands of specimens including many very large and colorful specimens. The Russians seem to go for the abnormal and the spectacular. One of the exhibits contains all sorts of fetal abnormalities. I arrived in St. Petersburg on the "Sibelius", a train traveling between Helsinki and St. Petersburg. I was met at the station by Ludmilla and a much younger zoologist, Victor Alekseev, whom I had been in correspondence with for about a year and who I had met only a few days earlier in Oldenburg, Germany at The International Conference on Copepoda, the main reason for my trip to Europe. I was hesitant to travel to Russia in these turbulent times but the chance of meeting Lud milla, Victor and my other scientific colleagues overcame my fears. Traveling to Russia now is very different from communist times. Intourist was in charge of almost all visitors and staying in the home of a Russian was verboten. The reception in Russia was bureaucratic in the extreme and travel within the country was restricted. Entering the communist block coun tries had other hazards. My passport was "lost" twice in embassies belonging to this block. I have a suspicion that my frequent travel was perhaps construed as that of a courier. This may be pure fantasy, but not an impossible scenario. I had a dossier with the secret police in Czechoslovakia and my colleagues were questioned about my frequent visits there. The drill is now simpler. It costs 60 dollars to obtain a visa plus a courier charge of 25 dollars at their embassy in Ottawa. Only the first page of my passport had to be sent. In St. Petersburg I still had to get a stamp from the local authorities. Fortunately the venue of this office was only a block from the Zoological Institute. However the office where this stamp was given, though singularly free from police of the communist days, was buried deep in the recesses of a building which was practically unoccupied and had no signs to guide people. Behind the desk was a young woman, not in uniform. She spent fifteen minutes talking with an older woman and arguing, not in an unfriendly way, with her. I asked Ludmilla what this was all about. She told me that the official had been explaining that the rules for visas for Russians who had lived abroad had been changed recently. It cost me 22,500 rubles for an official stamp. This is now about 4 dollars. Before the demise of communism the ruble was above par with our dollar. In Russia you now pay for essen tial government services as in Ontario under Mike Harris's commonsense revolutionary regime. I stayed in Ludmilla's apartment. It was quite large by St. Petersburg standards and had three bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen bath, and toilet. The construction was spartan. She told me that this rather dreary apartment had housed over twenty people belonging to three families in Stalinist times. We walked for 20 minutes to the Metro station for a thirty minute ride and then took a bus to the Institute. Seniors travel free on all public transport. Ludmilla's apartment is in a prestigious area in Gagarina Street. Close to her house is a park which was the site for the cremation of the dead, daily, during the seige of Leningrad. The apartment blocks look dreary by Canadian standards, but there is a play area for children and some park space where people walk their dogs and this has some greenery. Ludmilla and her husband Mischa are both retired, but like many of her colleagues she does some work still for the Zoological Institute. The income of the family is about $200 per month. They had not been paid for four months. They live on a meager diet but it is varied and nutritionally adequate, I think. Imported food is prohibitively expensive. I took each of my friends a large Edam cheese from Amsterdam. This was greatly appreciated. At the Zoological Institute my task was to locate some tropical zooplankton references for Ludmilla. While going through the card catalogues I noted that about fifty of my 250 publications were in their collection. The library is impressive but I did not see many computers. Like in much of Russia, Institutes and Universities are desperately short of funds for upkeep, let alone modernization. There is still, though, a core of dedicated and very competent people looking after the collections and the library. In the basement they were still doing experimental work. They were using snakes for research and the smell of uric acid, in the dank, airless corridors, was very strong. I had a Cook's tour, with a scientific guide, of the display galleries of the Museum of the Zoological Institute. The collections are still well maintained though the surroundings are spartan and the displays have not been mod ernized. There were many exotic mammals from all over the world, some of them now extinct like the Tasmanian Devil, an Australasian carnivore like a fox. Two thousand species of birds (one third of the total number) including the extinct Moa of New Zealand were represented. Many expeditions had re turned with marine material including the Pogonophora, first described as a new Phylum by the Russian Scientist, Ivanov. The collection is priceless like the nearby art collection in the Hermitage. The staff of the museum, like other government employees, are not well funded, let alone paid salaries regularly. There is some help in the way of scholarships and funds from the EEC and North America. Russian professionals face a daunting task just to survive. The famous Russian Ballet Company, the Kirov, survives by touring many countries most of the year and earning hard currency to keep their performers and managers paid. Even in the dark days of communist rule, Russians remained a warm and caring people in spite of incredible difficulties. I can recall how the Strelkovs brought me rice- gruel for a week during my struggle with diarrhea caused by Giardia. A similar kindness was recorded by my colleague Zbigniew Kabata, who works at Nanaimo, British Columbia. In 1974 when our family visited Leningrad we were guests at the Strelkovs' for dinner. We noted that we ate meat, potatoes, cabbage and salad. The hosts had little meat on their plates. At the Institute in Ludmilla's room, a small table had been set up, Russian style, with vodka, salami, tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and sweets. At the table were a galaxy of scientists, Oleg Bauer at 81 was still active scientifically. He was the doyen of the world fish parasitologists in the 1960s to the 80s. Alex Gusev, war hero, came from a distinguished professional family but lived in banishment after the revolution.His crime was being born into a family of a prominent lawyer.When he protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia he was marginalized. He remains one of the world's leading authorities on Monogenean worms which parasitize fish. Yuri Strelkov works at the fisheries Institute GOSNIORH and is a leader in fish research. His wife, Irena Amosova, was a scientist at the prestigious Cytological Institute and works now as a part time administrator. All these scientists had been immensely produc tive in spite of the poisonous communist policies they laboured under. All are now pensioners and live very modestly. However, housing is still cheap and medical attention, of a sort, and local travel are free. I visited The Peterhof with my young colleague Victor Alekseev, a rising star in his field. It is sited on the shore of the Baltic Sea and is the most extensive monument to its founder Peter the Great. It is characterized by a vast French garden and fountains that are surrounded by gilded statues of classical antiquity. It took us over two hours to walk through a small section of the extensive gardens. Unlike in communist times the atmosphere is relaxed. There are no police and military uniforms to be seen around, and a variety of food and drink are freely available, including the inevitable capitalist coca and pepsi cola. Beer costs US$1 for 250 cc and pop costs about the same. We had lunch in a cozy little restaurant called Matrioska. We had Solyanka soup (Polish), Bulgarian salad and a Russian specialty, Pelamina, which is a pasta dish which looks like Chinese wonton. So much for national dishes. Together with wine and tea and coffee it cost us about US$ 35. We met two touring Canadians from Toronto and Edmonton. On our way back Victor collected a zooplankton sample. We got back to Ludmilla's flat in the evening. During my short stay, I met quite a few Russians. One of them was an official who had held a high position under the communists. He said that he hated Russia in its present parlous state. He said that Boris Yeltsin was a criminal. When I asked him to list his crimes he could not come up with anything except to say that Yeltsin was a drunkard and was in some way responsible for the war in Cechnya. He had voted for Yeltsin in the elections (Yeltsin was formally sworn in during my visit) but said that he personally favored a more authoritarian government. He said that Hitler had done some praiseworthy things. This was not agreed to by any other Russians I met. However while his attitude may be more extreme than the norm, many perhaps share some of his attitudes. I struck a positive note usually by saying that Russia had a well educated public and a history of material achievement and now democracy, however fragile and flawed. These, I said, could be the mix, given even a modicum of good government, for real economic, political and social progress. Modern technology, education and a free market could turn things around as it was doing in Asia, I suggested, given the chance. Perhaps, I said, in twenty-five years Russia could be on a par economically with some western nations. Ludmilla lives with her husband Mischa, a retired railway engineer, and their grand daughter, Marsha. They live modestly and have few luxuries. Basic food items are still cheap and there is some hope that things will get better. Most importantly, the dark cloud of communism with its unforgiving and stark ideology has been lifted from their shoulders. Ludmilla and all her colleagues and family were very appreciative of this change. My last day in St. Petersburg included a visit to Peter and Paul fortress, the burial place of the Tsars, the Westminster Abbey of Russia. The same area was also used as a political prison in later Tsarist times. We walked through many of the museums, military and others and also saw the cells in which famous political prisoners had been held in Tsarist times.. We made a brief stop to view the "Aurora" which fired the first salvoes that set the October revolution in motion. It is anchored near the hotel named St. Petersburg. It was The Leningrad during communist times. We had lunch at a picturesque Georgian restaurant. The decor was Georgian and the lights were dimmed. I was afraid I would step into one of the ornamental ponds which occupied a fair amount of the floor space. We had black Georgian bread, spicy soup and sashlik and washed it down with Georgian wine. It is amazing how many Russian and ethnic food specialties I had during this visit. In communist times it was an ordeal just to get food in a restaurant. Bag carrying Russians coursed the streets looking for food to buy. In fairness though it must be said that food was cheap then, though the variety was restricted. My trip back by train ended in Heinola, Finland, where a domestic sauna awaited me before dinner. My host was an expatriate Russian married to a Finn. She was my interpreter during an official visit to The Soviet Union. She talks longingly of Russia and patronizes Russian theater and ballet whenever there is a performance nearby in Finland.. I took a bus to Helsinki and flew via Amsterdam to Toronto. I had got a minuscule feel for what it is to live in post-communist Russia for Russians. Life would be hard, but hopefully it will improve - and the terrible nightmare of the communist experiment is mercifully over.