Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 74: Down a rabbit hole, deep into the Belgian beer paradise (1998).
Insofar as ordinary Americans know to find Moscow on the European continent and not in Idaho, we tend to associate the city with fear, loathing and the grandiosity of the tsars (both God-ordained and Soviet), as well as the frozen immensity of the Russian winter.
In 1999 when Barrie Ottersbach and I spilled into Moscow, we learned to our chagrin that it can get hot enough in high summer to fry eggs on Red Square’s missile-polished paving stones.
Our stated objective was to visit Danish buddies Allan G. and Kim W., both of whom were working in Moscow at the time. The city was dramatically different than I remembered it from a mere decade previous, although it hadn’t yet become the skyscraper-dotted oligarchic landscape of today.
For Russia, 1999 was an interregnum of sorts, with the increasingly unpopular (and sozzled) President Boris Yeltsin resigning office only a few months later, to be replaced by a little known former Dresden resident and fan of Radeberger Pilsner named Vladimir Putin.
My Beers in the GDR, Part Two: Sharing a few Pilsners with a future war criminal
Would Russia’s future be its past, as so often has occurred during the country’s turbulent history? The signs were muddled, and so was I — at least at first.
From the beginning of the trip, it was a strange and disjointing sensation to be returning at last to a land that had captivated me so intensely earlier in my life with music, literature and the glories of a properly laid zakuski table.
In particular, it seemed almost wrong to be entering Russia by airplane.
Before, back in the decidedly dark ages of the...Read more
