Standing on the platform at the Helsinki train station, a fellow walked up to me and asked in Finnish, “Tämä on junan Pieksämäelle?” I replied in English, “No, this is the train to Saint Petersburg.” He sat on the bench next to me, placing his newspaper between us. In a few minutes, he got up and left his newspaper behind. When my train arrived, I picked up the paper and boarded the train. Thus began my journey to the land of my ancestors, with the remaining instructions for my short stay in Saint Petersburg…
Being an American, I am unfamiliar with riding the rails. The closest we come to that, outside of train enthusiasts, is taking the subway in the local city. Not all American cities have subways, so many Americans never experience train travel at all. I’ve been in a lot of cities with subways, so I’m a bit of an outlier, but this sort of train travel is still foreign to me. The train station in Helsinki is like everything else in the city. It is clean, simple and extremely efficient. I was able to find my train by myself like a big boy.
I booked a first class car from Helsinki to Saint Petersburg, mostly because of the WiFi, but also because I don’t care for the riffraff. Now that I am an international man of travel, I now take pride in looking down on the little people. OK. I really just wanted the WiFi. I read somewhere that if you wanted to make sure you had good service the whole way, spend the extra euros on the better ticket. That and you get food services and a charging outlet, which is essential these days. For 65 extra Euros, it is a bargain for a three hour trip.
The first class car has a double row of seats on one side of the car and a single row on the other side. The seats face one another over a table. I selected one of the single seats facing to the back of the train. A middle aged gentlemen, slim, European cut suit, but of the quality one would see from an upper level civil servant, maybe a staffer for a political appointee, got on the car and sat right across from me. The car was empty at the time and only a handful of riders boarded, so his choice was unusual.
The result was I was going to spend three plus hours facing off with a fellow, who looked like Chris Cooper from the Bourne Identity. The possibility that I was either having a flash back to another part of my life or perhaps going to have to kill this man in a life and death struggle on a high speed train occurred to me. I was good either way, but then I remembered I had dosed off while watching that movie last night. He did look remarkably like the guy from the movie, but I’m not a sleeper agent in a CIA program…
A little over a century ago, April of 1917 to be exact, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin got off the train in Petrograd from Finland to change the world. Today I got off at the same station under less auspicious conditions. Of course, Lenin’s trip was more dramatic, as he left Switzerland for the Baltics, then crossed over into Sweden. From Sweden, he and his traveling party, all revolutionaries, traveled by sleigh to Finland. The party broke up into groups of two and three, so they could make it across in the dark and avoid detection…
The Finnish countryside this time of year is all pine trees and snow. In breaks of pines there are stands of white birch. The uniformity of the trees and the various paths and roads cut into them suggests this area is carefully forested. We passed many small farms on the way. Some had the idyllic look one wants to believe is rural live, while others were abandoned shacks. Watching the scene roll by, I could not help but wonder what the Russians were thinking when they decided to invade Finland in the dead of winter…
To expedite travel between Helsinki and Saint Petersburg, customs is handled on the train as you make the trip. Unlike the airport, you just get on the train and the process of inspecting your documents is done by custom agents as you travel. Once you get to the border, Russian border agents repeat the process. They are just like the version you see in movies. It was two women, not bad looking, with scanners for reading your visa and looking up your ticket information, to make sure you are you.
They were quick with the Finns, but they took a strong interest in me. They looked carefully at each page of my passport, then both of them checked to make sure I was the guy in the passport photo. I suppose not many Americans turn up on the train to Saint Petersburg. Talking to my new traveling companion, I learned the train is mostly used by Finnish businessmen. They use Russia for cheap labor, especially high tech labor, in the same way American firms use India or China…
If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, the train station and surrounding area looks like a scene from an old spy movie. It’s actually quite remarkable, for reasons that are hard to explain. It looks like a movie scene, but it is a working, functioning city with people going about their daily lives. I guess I did not know what to expect from the city, but it was quite astonishing to me. It reminded me of my first trip to Boston as a kid. It looked like the pictures, but was also a real place, not just a movie set.
At the front of the train station, I got a cab. The weirdest thing of the trip was the cabbie looked just like my grandfather looked when I was boy. My grandfather has been dead for a long time, but this guy was his doppelganger from decades ago. He was a man in his 60’s and he had the same face and build. He also had the same crystal blue eyes, which was his most striking feature. There was a ton of traffic and plenty of crazy Russian drivers, so I had time to think about the odds of what I was seeing.
This is good time to mention that all of those YouTube videos of crazy Russian drivers are all true and plus some. Anyone who has been to what we used to call the third world knows that insane driving is a feature of these places. Russian is obviously not third world and Saint Petersburg is a mostly modern city. Russians are just crazy drivers. On the trip to the hotel, we saw three wrecks and too many outlandish acts to count. The really crazy thing is they have an otherworldly respect for pedestrians.
After checking in, I did not waste time getting to see the city. I was at the Renaissance, which is just west of Nevsky Prospect. It’s a great hotel and a great place to see all of the normal tourist stuff. I walked the Neva River west toward the docks. It was a beautiful day, so the locals were out in big numbers, walking along both sides of the river. There were also tons of Chinese tourists, so it felt like a weekend afternoon. The sheer beauty of the buildings you pass by is quite remarkable. It’s like being in a postcard.
I’m not the most sentimental guy, but as I was walking along the river, I was feeling a bit emotional. I suppose being reminded of my grandfather must have brought to mind memories I’d long forgotten. Family lore is always a bit dodgy, but I know that side came from Saint Petersburg. I kept thinking what it must have been like for then, all those years in America, remembering what they left behind. They were poor, so it was not like they left the good life, but they did cut themselves off from who they were as people…
Since it has come up in prior posts, Russian women can be quite beautiful, but they can also be ridiculously trampy, at both ends of the scale. On the high end are the glamour whores, who always dress to the nines and love wearing garish sunglasses. They have a look on their face like they are bored and disappointed. On the other end are the type who look like they would be at home in a West Virginia trailer park. They dress like strippers and probably smell like bar soap. They have that bored look on their face too.
There is another type that was the majority, from what I could tell. They are plain and pleasant, thin in their youth. They sort of remind me of country girls. I started talking with a women in her early 30’s, I’m guessing. She had good English, so we could chat without using hand signals. She was visiting her mother, as she lived in England. Her mother looked like she pushed school children into her cottage oven. That’s the thing about Russian women. Father time is never very kind to them…
I walked down to the Dom Knigi, which is a tourist area for having lunch and buying cheap souvenirs. Everywhere you look, there are sellers hawking Russian dolls and lacquer boxes. I guess people like that stuff, but I can think of a dozen better things to sell to tourists looking for a memento. There is one good thing there and it is the Savior on Spilled Blood church. It’s not big, but it is an impressive church both inside and outside. If you are into old churches, it’s worth the walk and the 350 rubles for the tour.
From there I visited the the State Hermitage Museum, which is a collection of buildings that includes the museum founded by Catherine the Great and the Winter Palace of Peter the Great. It is simply impossible to accurately describe how I felt walking across the massive plaza toward it. Maybe is the vastness of the plaza or just the sheer enormity of the building itself, but I felt like an ant walking toward it. It’s one of those things that you just cannot appreciate until you walk up to it in real life.
Like every other tourist, I took a million pics of the place as I walked up to it. I even took some shots of the silly Cinderella carriages they use for giving tourists rides around the city. Unlike the ones you see in American cities, these are modeled after the Grand Coronation Carriage. When you walk into the complex, the enormity of it gives way, as you are suddenly in a relatively small courtyard. It really does give the full effect of what it must have been like for the royals. This was their shelter from their people….
Maybe it was a carryover from the unfortunate bout of sentimentality I experienced earlier in the day, but walking back I suddenly understood why the people revolted against the Tsar. Nicholas II, like all of the aristocratic families of Europe, was no longer the leader of a people. He was just a guy in charge of an empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the three principle monarchs at the start of the Great War, we all cousins. The Tsar’s mother was Danish.
If you were living in Saint Petersburg at the dawn of the 20th century, the royal family and the system that supported them was as foreign to you as space aliens. Instead of the trappings and symbols being a tangible representation of the people’s shared reality, they were symbols of a system that allowed strangers to rule over people they did not know and would never know. The massive walls of the palace and the guards who protected those walls, were a daily reminder that you were ruled by strangers.
That’s how it is with revolutions. The people in charge, at some point, take a turn where they no longer see themselves as an extension of the people over whom they rule. They begin to see themselves as different and separate. They start to turn the rituals and ceremonies of the people’s shared reality into a psychological barrier, reminding the people on the other side that they are not inside. That’s when they start building walls and exclusive retreats. The Hermitage was a tangible representation of this reality.
It’s why the revolutionary can have no empathy for the people on the other side of those walls. The rebel may have some sympathy for the people he must dispatch and some sympathy for the people who must do it. There can be no empathy, though, as when the revolution comes, the people on either side of those walls no longer know one another as people. You cannot have empathy for strangers who hold you in contempt. Those on the other side are defined by your hatred for them.
Walking back from the Hermitage, not only did I understand that the Tsar got what he deserved, I understood why the Bolsheviks were so quick to do it. A revolution that seeks to preserve the past is not a revolution. It is a restoration. It’s like trying to fix up an old house. A proper revolution must always end with the utter destruction of the old order, the symbols of that order and the people who control it. Revolutions are a sacrament in blood, bring forth something new and washing away that the old order.
“A revolution that seeks to preserve the past is not a revolution. It is a restoration.” The problem with the Bolsheviks is that they attempted to replace a thousand year history with something that had never existed anywhere on earth and never will. As Americans contemplate their own coming revolution, they should remember that there are parts of their history that are worth keeping and parts that are not. Nicholas was far more a son of Mother Russia than were Lenin and Stalin, and he tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to do the right thing for a nation he clearly loved. He… Read more »
This is the right wing in a nutshell. Too nostalgic to admit that calcified order cannot be sculpted around. Too enamored with aesthetics to see the impractical nature of the beutiful cage, even as the walls close in.
Yep…
I have a Polish friend who says that Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all eeeeevil jooooos or tools and fart catchers for them. He is a fierce anti-Semite, but he’s also incredibly intelligent.
“He is a fierce anti-Semite, but he’s also incredibly intelligent.”
You make it sound as though it’s odd that both are true.
In America the requirements to being anti-Semitic are either general stupidity, or becoming unusually perspicacious.
Sometimes being a simple person allows you to both see and accept the obvious. Smart people are very good at convincing themselves to not believing their lying eyes.
There are some views that seem to characterize only the very stupid and the very smart. My guess is that dumb people make a few observations and quickly jump to an often radical general conclusion from them. Then, when told by “their betters” that this is wrong, they just stubbornly say “yeah but I noticed that people who drive blue cars are always tall so, nyah, nyah, you’re wrong!” (or whatever their poorly founded idea is). The intelligent will make lots of observations, do research, read about the subject, see a general pattern, and then refuse, out of justified confidence… Read more »
The best combination is people who grow up poor but are smart.
Z you need to remember that the reason that the Bolsheviks were so eager to kill the czar and destroy Russian culture is that they were not Russians. They hated Russians. The leadership and financiers was primarily chosen people. The others were mainly part of Russia’s very own Coalition of the Fringes. Stalin, for example, was Georgian. Now if I was a real thought criminal, I might draw parallels between what happened in Russia and what is happening in the US. Then I might use Russia to project what that will mean for heritage Americans in the future. But, I… Read more »
Russians were quite eager to end the Romanov dynasty too.
Perhaps, but few were eager to end the Kerensky government. The Bolshies were less than 5% of the population.
They might not have been, but when the Kerensky government pledged to Britain and France to keep shedding muzhik blood in their millions by staying in their war, the army and the people did not care when the Bolsheviks deposed him.
True enough, for most. But if the Germans had won the war, which they almost did after Russia caved, they would most likely have changed their tune. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty makes Versailles look like mollycoddling.
(Which is something worth remembering when we discuss how the Germans were robbed by Versailles. Imperial Germany may not have been solely, or even preponderantly, responsible for starting the war, but they weren’t the good guys. Hitler didn’t just pull his plans for Poland and Ukraine out of his fundament.)
I’m half Russian/Ukrainian on my fathers side. (Left the rodinia in 1895-1913) You won’t hear me defending the poor poor Germans and Uncle Dolfie.
And I’m German on my fathers side, and think Russia was the worst country of the 20th century. Neither of our biases amount to a glass of warm spit.
I’ve decided that it’s hugely important that groups have something in their history where they feel screwed over. I get Z-Man and others’ advice that we as a people should be defined by what we’re for, but nothing bonds people together like spite over a past injustice (real or imaginary). The Germans had Versailles. The fact that they did the same thing at Brest-Litovsk didn’t matter in their minds. One issue that non-Southern European Americans have is that no ever stomped our ass. Sure, we’ve lost a few wars – Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – but it’s not like they… Read more »
Southerners have the memory of being occupied.
Memory? Seems pretty current to me.
You’re being ruled over by people who despise and mistreat you right now. (1). And Cincinnati /has/ been invaded, successfully, and more than once. And right now, there /are/ hostile foreigners and invaders pushing around your kids in Cincinnati and places just like it. (1) — You may not think you are being “mistreated” at present, simply because you are not living in the gutter in filthy rags, (yet), but you are indeed being most heinously mistreated. You don’t notice it yet because North America is such a large, rich place, and has not yet spent down all its reserves… Read more »
All true. But as you noted, most whites – certainly upper middle class and wealthy whites – haven’t felt the pain and can’t see what their world would have been like if we weren’t ruled by another tribe and invaded. And, yes, it’s going to get worse. In time, a POC-dominated government will steal our money, force us to live next door to the blacks and browns and encourage violence against us, all the while forcing us to grovel and apologize for our privilege. American whites will learn what it’s like to be Helots. We’ll have our story of bondage… Read more »
The problem I think most people have – is that they’re not able to take a hard look at their life and see where they’re being stolen from. When confronted by the argument that they’re being methodically pillaged – in my experience they just fall back on Stockholm-Syndrome excuses like: “if we didn’t pay taxes we wouldn’t have roads and schools” ” The US needs to support Israel because it’s a democracy” ” we need to spend more money on black children in school so they can learn better” ” we can’t cut the military otherwise the ISIS blue-water navy… Read more »
Propaganda works especially when created by people who control almost all the press and used against a high trust group of people who crave status.
If you were a Southerner, you would know better.
Very important point. There were and are 5% violent psychotic liberals in the society. When somebody want to destroy something, he can use this group hatred and madness. So if any pro white person thinks how many enemy,s he has, then 5 % from your country white population
Cuts both ways. We only need to convert 5% of the population, provided it’s the right 5%
You don’t understand. The enemy is 5 percent of Whites, viz. violent leftist psychopath Whites, plus ALL of the Chosenites, and ALL of the POCs. Pretty big number. Plus, on top of having White psychopaths and highly motivated black shock troops and ooking bands of chaotic rape-apes, the Chosenites and their ching-chong and pajeet flunkies control ALL of the choke points and bottlenecks, plus the Left is, generally speaking, much more tech-savvy. Oh, and plus the youth advantage skews their way. The blind-hatred advantage, too. It’s quite a sobering thing to contemplate. When I see how naive so many of… Read more »
True. But we have two very important – quite possibly decisive – things on our side:
1. We’re one tribe. They are a fractious bunch who generally hate each other slightly less than they hate us.
2. They’re simply wrong. They will run this ship into the ground sooner or later. The more apparent that becomes, the weaker their grip on power.
It’s actually worse in America. The thing to understand about America is that every once and a while, but consistently, New Englanders lose their fucking minds in a religious spasm. It’s the puritans mostly. Abolition was a result of this and the Great Awakening. Prohibition was religiously motivated. It gets trickier in the 1960s, given that many puritan congregations lost their religion at the time. The general shape is there though. As there is in today’s social justice spasm. Vox recently showed that white liberals are to the left of blacks on social justice and to the left of Hispanics… Read more »
Forget DOTR, I await Day Of The Machete, when a half-million unarmed liberal whites are hacked to death by their beloved diversity. NPR, their only news source, should have warned them that a massacre was in progress, but they didn’t want to sound racist.
Absolutely. Poland and Hungary and other Easter Europe nationalists do not appeal to general population. 5 % of determined supporters are more useful to make general reforms.
5%? how about the right .0001%. I know it is foolhardy to pine for a savoir, but i do wonder what a truly wealthy benefactor would do to these circles. Say someone laid 100m each on Enoch, Z, and Derb. would it be used to good effect or pissed away on hookers and coke.
I have a friend who agrees with you. He is so paranoid, he won’t even go online to use email. He says (((they))) will do it all over again right here, and that only a fool cannot see what (((they))) are hatching.
The best thing about Twitter is it allows the mask to drop and provides a glimpse of the hatred the chosen have for the goys. The Covington hoax alone should terrify Whites when they see that prominent media members of the tribe and their syncophants wanted to destroy the lives of kids over a smile. Sad but whites can’t connect those dots yet.
Wonderful travelog, Z, ‘Road to Oxania’-level stuff. But rather important to your telling of the Lenin-slaughter narrative is the presence, on the sealed car with Lenin, of millions in gold bullion, put there by Jacob Schiff and other Wall Street proto-globohomo schemers, who were intent on overthrowing the Czar not because they were appalled by the ostentation of the ruling family but because hey, no Rothschild central bank. The Czars, like Andrew Jackson, had “thrown the rascals out.” And guess what? After the “revolution,” priority no. 1, in addition to seizing control of the apparatus of government, was the creation… Read more »
Haven’t even read this post. Just want to say that without some of these entertaining, imaginative, and smart guys on our side like Z, life would be very dark and alienating right now. We have alot to be thankful for.
Along with the Zman, Morgoth is one of my key help-me-stay-sane guys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFgNoxVkYmQ
Thanks for the tip. I just checked the Morgoth site. It will be a regular stop.
There is a dissident right news site that links to Zman and Morgoth as well as many others. The right side column updates posts all day long.
Nxx14.blogspot.com
The Z man is one of the Booby’s favourite pages, too. Good writing deserves to be read.
If you’ll forgive the self-promotion, The Red-Footed Booby is a site for helping men, young and old, navigate a Western World gone mad (you know, political correctness nazis, feminism, social justice jerkoffs, etc.):
https://theredfootedbooby.com/
All happy countries are alike, each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way.
We’re ruled by jumped up white trash, malicious parasites,avaricious money grubbing immigrants and retards.
We don’t need a revolution, we need a fumigation.
If we allow things to continue on like this, let things rot to the point where no one cares anymore, then good riddance.
Fumigation might kill all of the rats , but it’s not going to repair all of the holes they chewed thru the structure of the nation.
Fixing that is going to require something more than just fumigation. Especially because even if you kill off all the rats – most of the people who are left will get pissed off about you attempting to fix the holes.
They’ll argue that they’ve always been there, they let in the light, they’re good ventilation – whatever.
You can’t stop with just fumigation. It needs to go further than that.
A long time family friend visited St. Petersburg in the 1990s, not terribly long after the end of the Cold War. At the time, he was in his mid to late 60s. He talked about the Winter Palace and how strange it seemed. Large simply for the sake of being large, or as he put it, “we walked a lot to get anywhere.” Around the same time I had toured Italy and Greece. Something that stood out to me when touring St. Peter’s Basilica was that I had seen Southern Baptist churches with more square footage. Even the Square seemed… Read more »
If you haven’t seen it already, you very much need to check out the film “Russian Ark”. Shot entirely inside the Hermitage, it’s a theatrical-style re-enactment of all of Russian history up to 1917. It is also shot in a single, continuous tracking shot with no cuts or edits, meaning the entire film is performed “live” from beginning to end. It is the longest single tracking shot in motion picture history.
Really quite a marvel to behold. I’m sure some enterprising Bakkaball-Americans will cook up something similar any day now.
I’ve always wanted to watch it, but never got around to it.
There is a whiff of revolution in the air. I smell it on myself sometimes.
The question is whether it ends in a bang or a whimper.
I worry about the latter, being just a middle-aged working stiff with zero IRL d-right contacts. Not even my family knows.
I worry too many of our guys are in the same boat.
I donate money, and I’ve written for some d-right publications under a different pseudonym, but is it enough?
They are out there. Find them. Carefully. But even here, deep in enemy territory, there are more than you might think.
I hear people have some success wearing t-shirts with logos/names of bloggers or youtubers we would recognize, but that the other side would not.
Wearing a “Pinochet’s Helicopter Tours” shirt has flushed a few and some nutters to boot.
I was thinking of making a t-shirt that says, “1932-1933: Never Remember”
The biggest problem with revolutions is that once they get rolling, they’re very hard to stop before everyone is murdered or starves to death. The American colonies were lucky to be up against a strong king, which forced us to unite under a strong leader of our own, who then had the authority to say, “The Revolution is over, we won!” No such character emerged in the French Revolution until Napoleon. Lenin might have tired of Bolshevik atrocities and put a stop to them, had he not been crippled by an assassin’s bullet. Instead, it took Stalin’s purges to finally… Read more »
The Terror of 1793-4 was the highlight, not the low, to most dedicated lefties. It is their sine qua non of revolution, and what they would like to see go on and on in whatever revolution they are running. I think this comes from a deep down realization that they have no real vision of a civilization or culture that they want to build, and that any talk about one is but a mere pretext for the destruction they actually desire. The true revolutionary is nothing but a nihilist driven by hatreds. Look at the key players in the national,… Read more »
I think this comes from a deep down realization that they have no real vision of a civilization or culture that they want to build, and that any talk about one is but a mere pretext for the destruction they actually desire. Exactly. There’s this the modern, revolutionary bible “Empire”, by Michael Hart and Antonio Negri. It was all the rage when I was at uni, a 700-page monster describing how the global masses – the “multitudes”, as Negri and Hart labelled them – would rise up, overflow all borders and tear down the existing order. So what happens next?… Read more »
And likely since the American Revolution was, essentially carried out by people who had something and wanted more, it will continue to be an outlier.
The American Revolution really should be labeled the American Coup. American elites wanted total control, to be the end of the line instead of having to report to Britain. They had no intention of overturning the existing order. They just wanted to boss.
Note the veneration over 1793, 1848, and 1968. 1989 is airbrushed away. It is a peculiar fetishizing of the awful and the profane.
The Communists, and the (((communists))), were never made to pay a price after they were defeated in 1989. This was a grave mistake. The Russian people were instead punished by being looted, while the real perpetrators got off scot-free — and even got rich off of the second looting of Russia. The enemy just scuttled off to a new hideout, and began their evil all over again — which is now at the very perch of final success. Following the victories in 1945, the German and Japanese ultranationalists were severely punished, and their ideology was utterly, deliberately and meticulously discredited.… Read more »
You assume the (((communists))) were defeated, but have you considered that maybe the cash cow was used up and the looting of the 90s was their exit strategy?
The American revolution wasn’t really much of a revolution, in the same sense that the French or Russian revolutions were. Those revolutions were all about great reorderings of the societies that spawned them.
The American revolution was simpler. The colonists simply wanted to continue doing what they were already doing, without having King George’s nose in their business. It was more of a change of management than a revolution.
Well put, Bruno. That’s pretty much what the Booby was going to write, but you beat him to it.
There were some Trotskyites agitating for such a great reordering — John Adams mentions this in a letter to his wife — but the Founding Fathers held firm, put away the Declaration of Independence, and wrote a Constitution that said nothing about human equality.
Opps. See that you already wrote what I just wrote, so obviously I agree with you. As I said above, the “American Revolution” was misnamed. It should have been called the “American Coup.”
I look forward to traveling to the home of (some) of my people as well. Perhaps if we meet sometime I’ll tell you the story of the box of Imperial rubles I found in my basement when I was a child, and how my mother introduced me to the concept of fiat currency.
Enjoy the trip!
Thanks for the warning!
“That’s the thing about Russian women. Father time is never very kind to them…” The same can be said about Hungarian women. In some Eastern Asian countries, I am used to seeing attractive women into their 50’s and, occasionally, 60’s. In Budapest, many of the young women are astonishingly sexy but not trampy. Then comes the 30’s and it just disappears. It is rare to see a woman in Budapest over 40 who doesn’t look like she could be an extra in a film about the USSR. When you go into stores, one of the first things you notice is… Read more »
All this may be true. Though as a kid, in the 70s, just about the only images of Russian women anyone ever saw were babushkas. Like they came that way from the factory. Female Olympians with 5 o’clock shadow didn’t help matters.
Nor did Mrs Khrushchov https://bit.ly/2I1s30y
There are plenty of unattractive people to go around. My family is Anglo to the bone, but we all look average at best. My Mom used to say that the family was ‘functional but not decorative.’
“That’s the thing about Russian women. Father time is never very kind to them…”
Reminds me of something Bill Bryson wrote about country girls in his home state of Iowa. He said that they were often quite pretty as young women, but that they were like those blow-up rafts. When they hit around 30, it’s like someone pulls their cord, and they dramatically expand.
An Austrian who was 1/16 Jewish once told me something similar: “Jewish girls are really cute when they’re young. But they look like hell when they get older.” From my casual observations, I concur.
Here in hill country the bloom goes off the rose quickly. The Asian women hold up well but they do work assiduously at it. They spend large amounts on skin maintenance products. When younger i was picky. Now…. not fat, good skin, good to go. The formulas that guide you necessarily become more simple with age.
Eastern Asian middle class and affluent women pretty much view taking care of their skin as a part time job. In this part of Asia, skin care clinics are almost as prevalent as 711’s.
Unfortunately, now in the US all a woman has to be is just overweight and slovenly but not obese and she will have men sworming her online.
That’s how it is with revolutions. The people in charge, at some point, take a turn where they no longer see themselves as an extension of the people over whom they rule. They begin to see themselves as different and separate. They start to turn the rituals and ceremonies of the people’s shared reality into a psychological barrier, reminding the people on the other side that they are not inside. That’s when they start building walls and exclusive retreats.
Hmmm. That doesn’t sound familiar at all….
Any journey can seem like an adventure if you open your eyes and dare to engage with the locals. Good on you for sharing this with us. As to the revolutionary insight, a mature and affluent society always rots from the top down. The people in charge (elites in the new vernacular) eventually become inept and remote because all the hardship gauntlets that produce leadership skill have been systematically eliminated in their sheltered lives. The people at the bottom are always struggling and will naturally revolt when the idiocracy becomes overwhelming. In the USA, we are now accelerating into maximum… Read more »
“There can be no empathy, though, as when the revolution comes, the people on either side of those walls no longer know one another as people. You cannot have empathy for strangers who hold you in contempt.”
I have really been enjoying this series for the cultural observations. This particular quote hit me like a hammer after reading yesterday about the gentleman wearing a MAGA hat at Starbucks. We’ve reached the point of contempt and there is no going back.
FWIW, Czar Nicholas was most certainly out of touch with his people, but he did not hate them or have contempt for them. That’s Bolshie propaganda. As out of touch as the Romanovs may have been, they meant well, which is more than you can say for our current ruling class.
But what was retrieved from the newspaper after the drop in the train station?!
I recall watching a documentary a few years back about the history of Russia. St. Petersburg was the project launched by Peter the Great after he toured Western Europe and felt chagrined by the fact that Russia had no grand cities like London, Paris or Vienna. Apparently, the land upon which St. Petersburg is built was marshland which had to be drained before a brick could be laid. According to a Russian historian they interviewed, more Russians died in the building of St. Petersburg than in all their wars combined.
South African Supermodels seem to be the way to go. I do have a soft spot for Anna Kournicova and Maria Sharapova. It goes along with my belief that every free white man should own a couple of Supermodels if possible. Tube travel in London was enjoyable to me for some reason. The New York subway in my experience was a shithole. The Rocky Mountaineer looks good for recreational train travel. Did I mention Olga Kurylenko? She is Ukrainian-French. She is also on my list.
The best seat, at least in German trains (ICE) is in the dining car. You can often grab a 2-person table next to the window and have it to yourself for the duration of your trip. When I have a 6-hour train ride, I head straight to the dining car, sit myself down, set up my laptop, put my headphones on and stay there until I get off the train. It might cost me a couple of beers, but the dining staff has never asked me to leave. I honestly think they’re happy to have me because I’m one less… Read more »
Did you happen to notice any bizarre architectural features? For example, many buildings have a small set of stairs leading up to the front door. But below what you assume is the first floor is the actual first floor, often half buried in the ground. You might say, well that’s just a basement level. But many have bricked up windows, also half buried in the ground. This feature is common throughout the city. Now, keeping the above in mind consider that Saint Petersburg was said to have been designed and built by Peter the Great. I was able to find… Read more »
So my question is, what caused the ground level to rise between 5 and 10 feet?
It is more likely that the buildings have sunk. Saint Petersburg was built on marshland.
They were just anticipating the appalling 1970’s fad of split-levels, by a few centuries.
Built on marshy loose unconsolidated soil, a similar building phenomena affects San Francisco Mission district…sinking buildings a half story below ground. The 1906 earthquake caused liquefaction, which is: “Loose sand and silt that is saturated with water can behave like a liquid when shaken by an earthquake. Earthquake waves cause water pressures to increase in the sediment and the sand grains to lose contact with each other, leading the sediment to lose strength and behave like a liquid. The soil can loose its ability to support structures, flow down even very gentle slopes, and erupt to the ground surface to… Read more »
“The possibility that I was either having a flash back to another part of my life or perhaps going to have to kill this man in a life and death struggle…”
Don’t punk out on us. I wanna know what went down here…and where’s the body?
I have always been interested in traveling to the Taiga in Russia (the worlds largest coniferous forest). I have no idea what I’d do there, and it’s probably best that it remains an interest only. Sometimes you just know that your imagination is going to outstrip reality.
“Wow. Look at all those goddamn pine trees! That’s fantastic!” (stands around awkwardly for a few minutes.) “Sooo. Wanna go get something to eat?”
Ha. I’ve had that exchange many times.
Her mother looked like she pushed school children into her cottage oven. That’s the thing about Russian women. Father time is never very kind to them…
Well, a diet of roast schoolchildren can’t be healthy.
Re-watched the directors cut of Lawrence of Arabia with my son right before he left to work work for couple of months in the middle of nowhere in the Sandbox. There is an Anthony Quinn line that any leader should take to heart and never forget– “The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor, because I am a river to my people”. The Romanovs forgot.
Not quite a trip to Petersburg, but here’s an impressive 360 view of the interior of the Savior on Spilled Blood Church, courtesy of Google:
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x4696310c2b40516d%3A0x3e676f3bea7153b7!2m20!8m2!1m1!1e2!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e6!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e5!3m1!7e115!4shttps%3A%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP3efz8AVSGMVrYObGV35jbmu3VXORcFFCefYij%3Dw240-h160-k-no!5sst.%20petersburg%20savior%20on%20spilled%20blood%20church%20-%20Google%20Search&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipOwn4MaUSB2zR0-ouuq-kadA3TuxeI0q1ZQe3l8&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5gK28ybnhAhVEsp4KHawdCP4QoiowDHoECA4QBg&activetab=panorama
And there are some exterior views of the left.
The cab driver may have been a cousin.
“…Her mother looked like she pushed school children into her cottage oven…”
Helen of Troy did her thing. Z’s the man who launched a 1000 spit takes. =)
You need to do the sauna thing, before you return to civilization.
Meanwhile, a travelogue a little closer to home.
https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-residents-rebelling-homelessness
Incidentally, I like this journalist’s use of the term “the activist class.”
We have our own sorts of “No-Go Zones” particular to the U.S.’s vibrant demographics and drug-addicted whites n POCs living in squalid tent cities on city streets.
View that hour long documentary. It is an eye opener. VanderLeun put me onto it. The most incredible moments are when the people are given the open mic at the city council meeting, and they vent about the homeless in their midst, while the council members surf their phones and laugh at them.
An example the exalted POC city council members disrespecting their constituents.
Rude Seattle City Council Members
https://youtu.be/gMrBFNoHBkg
#NoCountryForWhiteMen
The documentary is definitely required viewing. The police are even telling residents there is nothing they can do – because the city council is holding them back. Sounds like the same thing is going on in Portland: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/portland-crisis-with-120-vacancies-only-3-out-of-60-applicants-pass-police-background-check/ Last month TGP reported that internal politics and a pro-antifa attitude inside the Portland Police Bureau leadership and city hall has led to an exodus of officers leaving the bureau, either retiring early or going to work for other agencies in the area. With 120 job openings, reports are now coming out that would-be new hires are failing pass the introductory background… Read more »
There was at one time an app that notified you and mapped the high crime area so you could avoid them. It blew up because mapping the high crime areas also mapped something else.
there is an app called Citizen which shows real time crimes & fires & car accidents in your neighborhood, it’s not police radio…. most of the reports are by ordinary people..
I believe this was more of a driving through a new town, these are the areas you need to avoid map application. The media input the vibrancy overlay on the map, and shazam, the app was racist.
Lived in Philadelphia when crack hit town and though in a “nice” area it was within scavenging range of the crackheads. Similar to the heroin addicts they would steal and sell anything, like leaf cutter ants stripping the forest. You’d leave the broken vent window with cardboard in it so the next guy could get in your car to find there was nothing and they’d break the window anyway. And. It. Never. Stopped. I understand how worn down these people are.
It wasn’t just the politics of the time that failed. The Russian Orthodox Church became a mere fixture and prostitute of the Czarist state. Instead of a focus on Christ it became a mere instrument of the state apparatus (much the way Putin is making it today). As a matter of fact you can say that most religious denominations are wholly owned by state subsidies. Look at all the billions of dollars going to various denominations to feed, clothe and house new immigrants. The Pope himself is a spokesman for such lawless flooding of these people. Just as the people… Read more »
Sounds like the place hasn’t changed much since I was there about 15 years ago. Dangerous city to walk around drunk — could easily get run over by the crazy drivers. Observation about the women is spot-on.
I know some on the right really like Putin, and he has done some good things — for instance, much higher fraction of babies are born healthy now — but Russia is still a petro state. They don’t produce anything. Russians are smart and all that talent is being squandered.
It’s also obvious that Russia much lower social trust than other European countries.
“Russians are smart and all that talent is being squandered”
All the smart ones have already moved down here to Brooklyn.
The continuing brain drain will drive the final nail in the coffin.
It’s a shame because they have so much potential, but 100 years of The Boot on Their Neck Forever has damaged the country beyond repair.
Nonetheless I wish them best of luck; I hope that the US could eventually come around the being an ally of theirs, while simultaneously shunning China.
Breaking news: Russia is on the ascent; the U.S. is on the descent. If they have any sense, all those brainy Russian-Americans will move back to Russia where they’ll have a future, away from the giant slum known as the once-great USA.
Observing national IQ maps one day I saw some small east European countries, plus the Ukraine, had surprisingly low scores. Then I realized the smart fractions had been the first to move to where they might advance.
The smart fractions of places like Poland, Hungary and Ukraine were mass-murdered by the (((communists))) a couple of generations ago. Presumably they haven’t yet recovered from the loss of their core natural aristocracy and brain trust. Why do you think (((communist))) architecture in those countries was so breathtakingly ugly and suffocating? Same thing with the art. It was a deliberate attempt to deprive White Christians of their history, culture, and pride. That sort of thing has a profound dulling effect on the mind. I’m fairly certain you’re going to see plummeting White IQ scores in the near future right here… Read more »
That was good for when there was advancement for intelligent whites in the U.S. Those days are past, now we’re Clown World.
Most of the Russians in Brooklyn or anywhere else in America are actually (((Russians))). The young and ambitious Russians don’t come to America – they go to London or Paris.
I’m starting to think you set your itinerary around these posts and not the other way around.
Please tell us a little about your Russian ancestors.