And even if street crime didn’t turn out to be a problem, going alone raised other concerns. How would it feel to be alone on those long train trips? Who would look after my stuff when I needed to go use the loo? In cities, would I be safe taking taxis alone back to wherever I was staying after the inevitable vodka-fueled reunion dinners? My brain began whirling with questions I’d never had to consider before: Should I bring pepper spray? Are you allowed to pack it on international flights? If not, should I buy some there? Do they even sell pepper spray in Russia?
I started to make myself crazy, thinking of the horrifying possibilities. And then, in addition to questions of safety, I had another worry: the battle with Russian officialdom.
The Russian government had recently tightened its visa restrictions, making it unclear whether I could even get permission to travel to all these cities without official invitations to each. One friend told me about an eminent American journalist who’d been desperately trying to get a visa so she could research a book, only to be stonewalled without explanation for more than a year by the Russian embassy.[2] A Google search instantly revealed that I was an openly gay American who’d written extensively about Russia—probably not the kind of person Putin’s government wanted wandering around the country right about now. Should I take down my website? Scrub my Facebook page? Delete my Twitter feed? Or was I being unnecessarily paranoid?
For the first two trips I’d traveled on three-month business visas, arranged for a small fee, with no questions asked, through a company in St. Petersburg. But this time I’d be making the arrangements at home in Los Angeles, and I didn’t even know where to start. So I turned, as one does these days, to Yelp. I found a visa services company in Burbank with a high rating and lots of good reviews, and upon the recommendation of a confident-sounding woman there named Stephanie, I applied for a multi-entry, three-year tourist visa. I submitted the paperwork in early July and crossed my fingers.
Meanwhile, I continued my preparation by going on a new shopping spree. I bought a multiport USB charger; a battery pack for recharging devices on long train trips; and a selfie stick, tripod, and trio of tiny clip-on lenses for my primary camera—my iPhone. All this equipment fit snugly into a backpack, with plenty of room left over for my laptop and iPad. Compared to the mountain of gear we’d taken on the first two trips, which included multiple cameras, a satellite phone, a BGAN satellite Internet communicator, and backups of every conceivable cord, cable, and software DVD, I’d be traveling light.
The technological differences among the three trips were nothing short of astounding. In 1995, Russian phone lines were notoriously poor, so Gary had made an arrangement with Sprint to connect directly, whenever possible, to the company’s telecom nodes located across the country. We also carried phone cords and adapters, so in the rare city where we could dial up through the Russian Internet service Glasnet, we could connect our laptops to phone jacks. Either way, holding a connection long enough to upload our photos and text was a nerve-racking proposition.
To make the uploads go more quickly, Gary compressed the photos to a ridiculously tiny size. The digital camera (a Kodak DCS 420) took photos that were about 1.5 MB each, but Gary shrank them to a minuscule 25 KB. Even that tiny, the photos still took hours to send: on one memorable occasion, it took us eight hours to upload just 400 KB worth of photos. It was as if we were driving down the “Information Superhighway” with a horse and buggy.
Given the poor Internet connections, it would have been impossible for Gary and me to update the website from the road. Fortunately, we had project partners in San Francisco, Tripp Mikich and Chuck Gathard, who worked with Gary to design and build the site and maintained it while we traveled. Every few days, we’d cross our fingers and attempt to send text and photos to Tripp and Chuck, and upon receipt—however long that took—they’d post our updates to the site.
In 1995, the World Wide Web was a new concept even in the United States; according to a Pew Research Center study, just 14 percent of Americans had ever used the Internet. In Russia, most people we spoke to outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg had never even heard of it. People would naturally ask who we were writing for, and I’d say, “Well, there’s this thing called the Internet…” My attempts to explain sounded like a cross between Confucian sayings and schoolkids’ brainteasers: “It’s not printed out, but you can read it anywhere.” Or, “Our partners in San Francisco put it on their computer, but it can be seen on anybody’s computer if they know how to find it.”
In Novosibirsk, I asked one woman whether she minded being identified by her real name. “It’s not going to be published in Russia, right?” she asked.
“In theory, it can be read by anyone in the world,” I told her. “They just have to plug their computer into a box called a ‘modem,’ then plug that box into a telephone line, then make the computer dial a specific number—”
“Stop, stop, stop,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Russians will never figure that out. Write what you want.”
Against the odds, Gary and I were able to check our e-mail regularly on the 1995 trip, as long as we were in an apartment with a functioning telephone line (not always a given). But phone calls home were a different beast. Prepaid phone cards weren’t yet widespread, so every couple of weeks, we’d stop by the local Soviet-style Telephone and Telegraph office, where we’d stand in line, hand an employee a slip of paper with the phone number we wanted dialed, then race into one in a long row of phone booths when a flashing light signaled that the call had gone through.
By 2005, communications in Russia had leapt forward. David and I were spoiled for choice: we could go online at ubiquitous Internet cafés, or by using prepaid Internet usage cards, or through services such as Russia Online, which had local dial-up numbers in all but two of the cities we visited. DSL, cable Internet, and Wi-Fi had also begun popping up, though this was rare outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. Phone cards made it easy for us to call home, usually for pennies a minute, and of course we had our satellite phone for more remote areas, such as when we were floating out on Lake Baikal or strolling through a field of cows in a Buryat village. Uploading photos still took time, though, especially since we were now sending multimegabyte pictures instead of the compacted 25 KB photos from the first trip.
On the third trip, communicating would be ridiculously easy. I’d be able to post photos and videos instantly with my iPhone to any social media site I liked. I could call home for free via Skype, and text friends and family for free using WhatsApp or Viber. Yet I was still curious how much it would cost to make calls, send texts, and upload photos through a regular cell phone connection, so I called my carrier, T-Mobile.
To my surprise, the customer service rep told me that under my existing cell phone plan, I could text, FaceTime, and use unlimited Internet data throughout Russia—no Wi-Fi needed. The only service that would cost extra was making and receiving cell phone calls, which would be charged at ten cents a minute. I couldn’t believe my luck; how could all these international services be essentially free? Was there a catch? I asked the rep what their coverage was like in Russia, assuming that it must be pretty spotty to justify such a deal. “Hold on,” she said, “I’ll look at our map.”
“Ah,” she said after a moment. “Yeah, it’s not great. There are whole big parts of Russia with no coverage at all.”
2
This same friend later informed me that, according to a U.S. foreign service officer he knew, I should expect to be followed by Russian security agents during my trip. This seemed unlikely, but what did I know? I hadn’t been to Russia in ten years.