Russia Visit: A Preliminary Post-Mortem

"All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it" - Dr Samuel Johnson.

Russia!

by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

This is the stuff dreams are made of! My Russia visit had that magical quality one only finds in memories from childhood journeys. I have not been excited about anything - and I mean ANYTHING - for a long time, but boarding the Aeroflot Airbus A330, and sweeping into the night sky over London to head to Moscow, felt like a reward for a lifetime of efforts. And, being in Russia itself was even more reward as the whole country is a large answer book to all the philosophical, political, historical, military and international relations questions that I have wrestled with over the past 10 years. 

It will take me all of November to write everything of note with regards the trip to Russia, by which time I will probably have gone back again because I loved being in Russia. I have provisionally broken down what I will write about Russia into these four manageable sections: The People, Political History, Economic History, and Military Doctrine. These will be treatise length entries, and I make no apologies for their lengths, as subjects this important deserve such attention. These four categories are also not mutually exclusive, because the Russian psyche does not make such a distinction. Imagine if in “The People,” I choose to discuss Lenin as a historical figure of note, already in discussing him I will be touching on “Political History,” “Economic History,” and “Military Doctrine” because he wrote the book on Russia’s path in all these spheres from 1905 to present day. For Economic History, I will use my visit to the Stalingrad Tractor Plant as a case study for how communism and capitalism have been received in Russia. There are some interesting characters from Russia, one would never hear of if one does not go to Russia: Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov is one such character. That his brilliance is not generally acknowledged in the West, while there are monuments and paintings of him on every street corner in Russia, means I will make a separate entry for him. 

My task is simple really; write all I did to visit a certain place, the things I saw and enjoyed, and the life lessons I learnt so that my reader, if he or she feels so inclined, will make the same trip and improve upon it, and in the process improve themselves. You cannot cross a time zone and fail to learn something new that will improve you.

All the technological achievements under Communism is a subject I will talk about at length.

The Motherland Calls Monument, Volgograd.

The Moscow Metro itself has museum-worthy works of art and statues.

Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov. Adolf Hitler once said about him: "If I had one general like Zhukov, I would have achieved world domination by now."