Lenin’s Office, Stalin’s Bunker and other Wonders

6 February 2000 Samara

Four of us flew out for Samara about seven p.m. I not only fit into the seat, but I also fit into the seatbelt. (I was dieting.) The flight was only 1.5 hours and the drive from the airport to the city an hour. We got to the National Hotel at 10 p.m. My room had an enormous bathroom with the light switch so high I could hardly reach it, a shower curtain which is rare, BBC and Eurosport on the TV, and a refrigerator that sounded like a plane taking off. I had to unplug it to sleep. On the TV was a sign in English, “If the TV over hot, don’t use it. It means death.” It never got over hot.

Breakfast the next morning was cabbage, white fish, blini’s (thin pancakes) and jelly, white rice, bread and coffee. The snow was mid-thigh high on me and it snowed every morning, thawed every afternoon, and froze every night – so it was a slippery, slushy mess.

Monday, we had an all-day seminar on violence against women. We started out with 225 people and by 6 p.m., had 17. Many had to leave midafternoon to get to their homes in rural areas due to the train schedule. It’s just as well. The local women had organized “entertainment” – a fashion show of half-naked women in negligees. Jim, the local ABA representative, and I were both flabbergasted and made them cut it short and refused to pay.

After I spoke, the only question asked me was, “Are you married?”

I answered, “Are you crazy?” Everyone cracked up laughing.

Tuesday breakfast was cheese, cabbage, cottage cheese with sour cream on it, blinis with meat, bread and butter. It’s a set menu.

Samara is part of a “development zone” where many foreign countries are focusing experiments to find the right path for Russian development.

Speaking at a fourth-year law class, I had a great deal of trouble with the teachers not letting the students answer but answering themselves, or “helping” the students. I said several times, let them figure it out themselves.

Law Students. Note 7 women and 2 men. The guy on my right was the translator.

I asked the boys what they had to do around the house when they were growing up. None did anything. Then I asked the girls – cooking, cleaning, ironing, take out the trash, washing, etc. The next day I spoke to different fourth year law students and asked the girls who their idol was when growing up – Barbie. I asked the boys – Superman

In the van back, I asked the two Russian lawyers why the students, one year from law school graduation, seemed unable to take a problem and figure out what to do with it. They explained that in their legal education, they never look at a problem and figure out how the law might fix it. In the USSR, there were no problems. So they only look at the law and memorize what it means and what kind of situations to apply to it. The concept of law as a problem-solving mechanism does not exist. The idea of being creative to figure out how to solve a problem is alien.

I found out later that the next day, two female students had come to the professor’s office privately to ask, “You mean if he beats me, it doesn’t mean he loves me?”

Wednesday we were going on a tour, and I sat in the hotel lobby waiting for the rest of the group. A man was seated near me, and we began to converse. When our translator came in, I addressed her in English. The man in the chair said, “I’m the guide but you spoke such perfect Russian I never suspected for an instant that you were an American!” I was very proud.

The tour was interesting. The town is 400 years old and started as a fortress to protect the Russian borders. Two hundred years ago, they had a stock exchange. There are some beautiful buildings built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I took a photo of two building side by side – one restored since the end of communism and one what they left. The difference is striking. (Unfortunately I can’t find the photo.) The city is at the intersection of two rivers; Volga and Samara, but there is only one bridge. In the winter, people cross the Volga on the ice by foot or in horse drawn carriages; in the summer on ferry, in the spring and fall by helicopter.

We saw the building where Lenin practiced law for 18 years. He was a public defender and won most of his cases. His father was a supervisor of education and his mother a teacher. They lived in a very nice apartment on the second floor above a store. Samara and Kazan compete to say Lenin began his revolutionary activity in their town.

The area used to be a German Republic that was destroyed during WWII. Now the Germans are coming back and have given quite a bit of money to rebuild. It has a philharmonic, ballet, and drama theatre in this city of 1.2 million, the countries sixth largest. They used to have 37 Orthodox churches and now they have three – an improvement. There is also a good-sized Polish population as they were relocated there by Catherine the Great to develop the arts and crafts.

Then we went to Stalin’s bunker, one of the best kept secrets of WWII. Samara was the seat of the WWII second capital. If Moscow was lost to the Germans, the government would move to Samara. The U.S. embassy even moved there. A bunker was built in 1942 for Stalin and the government to continue operating despite bombing should German planes get that far. No one knew about it until 1992. When it was opened, it was reported that some Russians in their 90s who had worked on building it were shocked because they had signed lifetime pledges of secrecy.

The bunker is the deepest in the world, 37 meters, a subway tunnel straight down. It is a 25-story building constructed in nine months. It was built for 150 people to work there and one, Stalin, to live. We walked down eight flights to the bottom. In Stalin’s very spartan private bedroom, he had six doors of which only two worked. The purpose of the other four, designed by him, was to scare the visitor into thinking KGB were listening behind every door and ready to leap opt and apprehend anyone saying a wrong thing. He used a double to go to various meeting to confuse potential assassins. (I took photos of this too but can’t find them.)

In the conference hall, the tables are arranged in a T with him at the top and ministers down both sides. Another leg runs parallel for the four secretaries to take notes. The secretaries had to have their backs to the ministers and never look at their faces. They were to identify people by their voices only.

During the war, Samara was the airplane building capital and still is an aerospace city. They have 15 state higher education institutions and many more private. It is now also an enterprise zone and the U.S. and Canada, Germany, and others are dumping lots of money there to develop a prototype of capitalism.

On Thursday we had a two-day seminar for 25 police and 25 prosecutors on violence against women. When we were putting the materials into the packets, I heard one prosecutor say, “Look at that organization; how fast they go.” He then said to me, “Do Americans really think there is a “new Russia”? The reality and the idea do not coincide for Russians. Not an auspicious beginning and unfortunately proven to be true.

The man behind me to my right with the mustache is the police officer I hired to train for me. He is a 6-foot 6 inch paratrooper who fought in the Russian-Afghan war that they lost just like we did. His wife was a baker and sent us on our trips with fabulous pastries.

On the other hand, Ludmilla and Irina were talking in the van on the way home about how much had changed for them when there were no goods in the stores, soap and sugar were rationed, everything required huge, long lines, and all women carried heavy bags with them everywhere in case they found something to buy. There were no clothes, no shoes, no coats.

Samara has a government shelter for battered women, and the women spoke last about their services. She wanted us to come and visit so we bravely started out. The van, provided by the prosecutor, broke down on the way. So there we were rolling backward down a hill in rush hour traffic with no lights trying to jumpstart the van. I was sure we would get hit, but we didn’t. Finally he gave up and we all piled out to walk two blocks and catch a car. Walking two blocks is not as simple as one might think. It was extremely icy and dark. So first I put on my ice walkers. Then I got out my flashlight. At the corner, we crossed the street with the light, but it was not long enough and I had to make a choice: be hit by a bus rounding the corner or step in muddy water up to my ankles and clamber up an ice bank. I did not get hit by the bus. Then we got to an underground crossing that looked like it had been recently bombed. The handrails were all twisted metal sticking out of the walls helter-skelter waiting to stab and infect with tetanus any unwary passerby. The concrete in the steps was all busted out. The granite floor was pockmarked.

Andrei Suprenkov, an investigator from Moscow prosecutor’s office, spoke on Friday about rape. I had never used him before, so I held my breath. I disagreed with a lot of what he said but could live with it. When he started talking about specific mistakes, I became unglued. He wanted a psychological exam and interrogation of relatives and friends of the victim to find out features of her behavior and personality to avoid attacks by the defendant on her. That of course has nothing to do with the question of did he or did he not rape her. He admitted police are often reluctant to do a good job and refuse to use expertise that is available in NGOs. He suggested the victim get her own lawyer and that is a role the NGOs can play.

The discussion of damages and financial compensation came up. He said bring criminal case first and civil later, but Galuzin said bring them during the case and don’t be afraid of it because such damages are common in other criminal cases why not this? One woman said the judge adds in the civil case and another person said a civil case cannot be brought within the civil which is incorrect, but no one corrected him.

During my presentation, three stupid women sat in front and constantly talked loudly and blamed the woman for everything. But in the bathroom, the women cops said they were very happy with the presentation and so much appreciated it.

That night thirteen of us went out to La Cucaracha - the only Mexican place in town. I should have known better than to order Mexican food in Russia after living in Arizona! I ordered tuna salad and an hour and 10 minutes later got the usual – cucumber and tomato. An hour after that, we got our orders except Jim who never received his at all. I ordered a chili relleno which was breaded (and shouldn’t have been). Inside a red pepper was four tiny bits of chicken and something that looked like hamburger and tasted like shoe leather. The guacamole was mayonnaise with green food coloring in it – at least that is what it looked and tasted like.

They had good dance music, and we danced till we dropped. Jim is convinced that McDonalds is going to change the country – it’s the only place they can go and get decent food, in a clean place, with fast, friendly service. McDonalds left Russia in May 2022.

This is how I spent your USAID money which is .071% of the total U.S. budget. Cutting it completely won’t save enough to spit. But most of it goes to Americans and American companies anyhow. We had a boss and four American attorneys in our office who all got paid. Then we had 8 Russian staff who got paid much less than us, more than average Russian pay but nowhere near what we got.

In Cambodia, we had to buy a car. Left up to me, I would have bought a used car in Cambodia for about $2,000. No. We had to order a new car from the U.S. and have it shipped there and pay duty all of which took forever and cost a bomb. All our computers had to be bought in the U.S. It is U.S. citizens and U.S. companies getting the bulk of the aid money.

In Russia I spent $10,000 a month on travel, materials, hotels, food, and hiring Russian speakers. The money was well spent to build “soft power;” that is relationships, getting to know each other, understanding cultures, learning about systems of law so that when there is a dispute you can solve it without fistfights, duels, or nuclear bombs but rather sue each other in court. It is to let people know one another and understand how alike we all are and that we can be friends not enemies. Remember when Russia started the war on Ukraine and there was a massive flood of Russian men out of Russia because they did not want to go to war and kill their Ukrainian brothers.

Is USAID perfect? Of course not. Are there problems? Yes. But solutions need a scalpel not a hatchet.

We have already lost in Africa. Because of our racism, we have invested little. China has. Everywhere I went in Africa, China was there constructing roads, bridges, docks, sea and airports, building relationships and leaving the countries in debt to them. As we gut USAID and pull out the little we do in Africa, we have ceded the continent to the Chinese.