manners. Russians have American-style manners and then some. Russians have American professional-athletics-style manners. Russians don’t, won’t, can’t line up for anything. At every turnstile, ticket booth, or cash register, they shove in from all sides like piglets on a sow. They have no sense of personal space. They’ll walk across an empty Red Square to stand on the toes of your shoes. Every question or request, at even the most “Western” hotels and restaurants, is met with a stare of dull surprise and a grudging, laconic response. “Do you have soup today?” Waiter pauses, frowns, grimly considers. “Yes.” “What kind of soup?” “Different kinds.” “Could you tell me some of the different kinds?” “Soup of the day.” Small boys, when they see a passing train, give it the finger. An Intourist travel agent, queried on whether it would be worthwhile to visit Khabarovsk, rolled her eyes and said, “ Pfft. I don’t know. I’ve never been there.” I asked a long-distance operator, “Will you put this call through to the United States?” “Maybe,” he replied. Suggested slogan for post-Soviet tourism promotion campaign: Russia— Barge Right In. People who weren’t in Russia before 1991 sometimes think Russian rudeness is a product of freedom. “I guess the Russians are finally free to be rude,” they’ll say. They’re wrong. Manners were worse yet in the USSR and were accompanied by a public atmosphere of defeated fatigue and indefatigable suspicion. Plus, half the people were drunk—a thrashing, helpless, hello-coma kind of inebriation I saw almost nowhere on this trip except occasionally in the mirror. So socialism causes rudeness. And capitalism causes rudeness. But if you go to Sweden, where they’ve got both, everybody’s polite. You figure it out. I gave up and took a boat trip to a palace complex built by Peter the Great— Peterhof, named after Peter, as everything that Peter named was. Here were four or five residences too big to live in, plus one too big to walk through without
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