I think I would have jumped out of the cab and walked to my destination! I couldn't handle all of that smoke. Looking forward to your next blog to find out what kind of trouble you caused at Red Square. I can only imagine!!!

This is great. So visual! Almost (not quite) like I'm there. I really, really hope you find what you're looking for. Maybe you need to venture out of the city, or down some side streets. You're bound to stumble into some trouble in an alley...

As I read your blog, I am also readin the headlines at the right column..."Race to reset: Moscow and Washington rush to beat arms treaty deadline," I look forward to the next installment if that story and yours....

Vincent tells us of his of his childhood in the USA of the 1970s and the perceptions of Russia that this gave him, and he contrasts these perceptions with his surprise at seeing what present-day Russia actually looks like. What he marvels at is the disconnect between his fragmentary and wrong beginning perceptions of the first instance, and his survey of a superficial Russian cityscape in the second instance. However, there are no contradictions within reality itself, because reality is real. Someone who lived through the actual material poverty of the Marxist Soviet Union and through the personal fear and insecurity of a Marxist police state, through the disorientation of its collapse, through the chaos of the Yeltsin years and on into the steadily restored authoritarianism that Putin and Medvedev are stamping on today’s Russia would probably see no inconsistencies at all between then and now. The present is exactly what has grown out of what has been done in the past. It is pretty much what and how one would expect it to be, given the realities that have shaped it. Just as Vincent apparently recognises that in the past he was given a vision of bygone Russia aspects of which were superficial at best and inaccurate at worst, he should be alert to the potential danger of now projecting a similarly impaired vision of contemporary Russia.

FOR MARZIPAN Sure, there's a little tongue and cheek going on here, but that's kind of the point. The perceptions of my youth were one or two dimensional, like a comic book version of Russia, or then, big bad USSR. That perception still exists in the minds of many Americans I know and will take years to shed, trust me on that one (perhaps you saw the most recent Indiana Jones movie when Harrison Ford barks, "I hate Russians" Pure stupidity but stupid people buy into that kind of thing). Thus my desire to write a blog with the trite title, The Cold War Kid...We were enemies for so long and now we're not (at least not really...) I guess what I'm getting at is this: Is the Cold War really over? Or is is just put on hold for a while? Is there evidence it still exists in Russia? Does the US resent a successful Russia and conversely does Russia inevitably want to see the US fail? Russia and the US balance the globe and I'm not sure we can do without one another inevitably. It's a new terrorist playground out there. Perhaps when I get back to the states, I ought to do a blog devoted to finding out if there's evidence in the US that the Cold War is still alive and kicking...