The Russia Tucker Carlson Didn't See

Media personality Tucker Carlson has been the target of criticism the past several days for a string of positive stories about life in Russia — and rightly so. His reports are misleading at best and journalistic malpractice at worst. I know because I’ve been to Russia.

In fairness to Carlson, I made the trip 20 years ago come May, and the realities of Russia may have changed since then. But the biggest change is that the country isn’t particularly open to or safe for foreigners, especially Americans. Russia is also at war and under international sanctions as a result. It is far more likely that Russians face worse circumstances now than when I was there in 2004.

With that in mind, I’m going to share some observations I made while blogging from Russia. My perspective was shaped not by limited and controlled access to the capital city of Moscow but by three weeks as a guest in the homes of actual Russian families. I spent most of my time in Nizhny Novgorod, which is an eight-hour train ride from Moscow, and also visited Dzerzhinsk and Pavlovo.

I understand Carlson’s coverage in one sense. He and I both came of age during the Cold War, and this is what I wrote after I first stepped onto Russian soil with a friend: “We never thought the day would come when Americans would be able to enter this beautiful country. We truly feel blessed to be here.”

I was still awed by the very idea of such a trip upon returning to America. The first news we heard at the airport, about the death of Ronald Reagan, reinforced our thinking. “It seemed fitting that Reagan, the U.S. president who crushed the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, died the very day we returned from a religious trip to now-independent Russia,” I noted a few days later.

But I was writing for a small audience of friends and family, and I didn’t close my eyes to the realities of Russian life just because I was amazed to be there at all. By contrast, Carlson has been reporting to a global audience of millions, and his coverage is incomplete. He isn’t painting an accurate picture of the Russia I saw.

Here are edited excerpts from the blog I wrote while I was there:

The cost of living

• It costs only 30 rubles an hour at the Internet café in Nizhny Novgorod. That's about 33 cents — amazing how cheap everything is here. It's much cheaper in Nizhny than in Moscow, where we paid 20 rubles for 15 minutes at the Internet cafe near the train station, but even Moscow is cheap when compared with the United States. It only cost 30 rubles to take a cab several miles in Moscow, and the Metro train is even cheaper. By way of comparison, a cab across town in D.C. is anywhere from $7 to $10, and an equivalent Metro ride would have been at least $3.50.

• We had to catch a cab from Dzerzhinsk to Nizhny, which is about a half-hour away. Our host negotiated with the taxi driver because he thought the driver would jack up the price for American passengers. Our negotiator expected the price to be 300 rubles and looked disappointed for us when it was 350 rubles. That's a difference of about $2, and the total fare was the equivalent of about $15. Fifteen dollars for three people to take a half-hour taxi trip through the Russian countryside. Several years ago, I took a cab by myself from the eastern edge of Washington, D.C., to Falls Church, Va., and it cost me $35!

• We shopped for trinkets in Nizhny, and I filled my backpack with an array of items without managing to spend much money. Our host had suggested that we shop here as much as possible because the cost of living, and thus the cost of buying trinkets, is so much higher in Moscow.

The quality of transportation

• The D.C. Metro system is much cleaner, and people don't drink booze on the trains and buses like they do in Nizhny. We were on a bus last night where four rowdy teenagers with a bottle of beer about the size of two liters of soda boarded and started wreaking havoc.

• I am amazed at how many people cram onto the half-pint buses here (they call them taxis). I long for a D.C. Metro ride where I can have some elbow room.

• One thing is the same in Russia and America: If you step into a cab, your odds of surviving the day rapidly decline. At one point on the open road, our cabbie was driving almost 90 miles an hour. That may not sound like much, but the roads are in the condition of those in West Virginia.

• I hate walking and traveling by bus, train, tram and taxi in Russia. I want to drive. I want to be in control. I want to travel more than four or five miles in 30 minutes (D.C. rush aside).

Food and drink

• Many people grow their own food here. The landscape is dotted with small, subsistence farms that exist because people might not have food otherwise. Our hosts in Pavlovo talked about how they garden and can vegetables. They farm regardless of the weather. They have no choice.

• Russians eat a lot of dumplings. So far I've had curds, millet porridge, hot dogs (nothing like the U.S. version), canned salmon, lots of rice and potatoes, and homemade chicken soup. The one staple I've noticed has nothing to do with the meal itself: tea and sweets, ranging from cookies and cake to chocolate bars. We also eat a lot of crackers. I miss all the red meat of my diet in America.

• The soft drinks are lukewarm at best, and ice, as in most of Europe, is almost non-existent. They don't really have Diet Coke. They have Coca Cola Light, and I find the taste unappealing.

Street scenes

• The amount of dust and dirt on the streets here astounds me. I've always been amused by the people in Washington, D.C., whose job is to hose down the sidewalks outside various buildings in the business district. I now have a greater appreciation of why they do it. The same goes for trash collection and pickup. Rubbish floats around the streets of Nizhny, and trash cans in public areas can be rare. If the wind kicks up, you may be eating dust and fighting off floating debris as you walk.

• Stray dogs occupy the streets, including the "dog church" (our host’s description) that meets near the place where we met for worship.

• Many of the trees in urban areas are whitewashed three to four feet up the base. This is to protect the trees from insects. It reminds me of my summer days in the country in West Virginia when I whitewashed the trees on my uncle's property.

Moscow versus the real Russia

• Our tour of Moscow offered a completely different view of Russia than what we saw in Nizhny. Nizhny is dirt poor — and dirty. Moscow is very much like capital cities in the United States, including Washington — prim, proper and polished, with pockets of poverty but also areas of great wealth and stunning architecture.

• Moscow has beautiful apartment complexes, including one where it costs $2,000 to $3,000 to rent a small space, according to the guide on the bus tour. They have an embassy row. And the campus of Moscow University rivals any of the big schools I've seen in D.C. or throughout the United States.

• Our host said the reason for the disparity in the cost of living between Moscow (as well as St. Peterburg) and other cities like Nizhny is the control that Moscow maintains over national revenue. Most of the money goes to the two biggest cities — and to the most popular attractions for foreigners. The rest have access to limited funds.

Russian bureaucracy at its worst

• I have had to take two cold showers since arriving — and I do mean cold. My scalp was literally numb after one shower in Moscow. In Russia, the hot water is turned off by region at least two weeks at a time during the summer while officials do repair work to pipes, and the two-week process usually takes longer. Russians also can expect to have their flow of hot water halted regularly at certain times in the morning, so you have to hope you plan your showers right.

• My American friend and I had to get blood tests, a new step in the process of getting “registered” in the primary location for visits to Russia. Our host spent the better part of three days in line at the local registration office to satisfy this burden.

Not-so-polite society

• In Russia, shoving is something of a norm. If you're moving too slow, or you're trying to go somewhere that someone else doesn't want you to go, you may just get pushed out of the way. I saw it happen to three slow-moving people going through customs at the Moscow airport and to a woman trying to board a bus that had no vacant seats.

• Smoking is rampant. It reminds me of my youth, when I was subjected to secondhand smoke almost everywhere. I didn't think much about it then because that's just how Americans lived, but I've become accustomed to a society where smokers are cast onto porches and sidewalks or relegated to non-smoking areas.

I’ll close with this longer edited excerpt from a post I headlined “Degrees of Poverty” because it serves as a detailed counterpoint to the kind of reporting that America has been getting from Tucker Carlson. He is right about how cheap goods are in Russia compared with the United States, but those prices are a natural consequence of a depressed economy, poor citizenry and manipulation of the market to give the government power over people’s lives.