Tucked way down the list of my morning National Public Radio news was a tidbit that made it to the top of the BBC’s online headlines: Russia, its finances afloat on a vast sea of oil wealth, has restarted long-range patrol flights by bombers, a practice it gave up (when the country was broke and couldn’t afford the fuel) 15 years ago.

By now most of us have seen far too many effects of geopolitical lumberings on our travels, whether we’re American and wish we could take a beach holiday in Cuba, or if we’d like to follow in Colin Thubron’s steps hiking quietly and alone across Lebanon. The US invasion of Iraq ruined for many years my slow wheedling to get my husband to take a long trip through the Middle East.

While I of course acknowledge Russia’s right to do whatever the heck it wants with its military (and spend its oil money faster than Americans can guzzle it in their SUVs), the statement by Russian president Vladimir Putin that the move was “in response to security threats posed by other military powers” was an obvious waving of the cliched huge red flag (pun intended) in front of the American military-industrial complex, which loves to manipulate the minds of American voters so they can finagle more money out of Congress to “protect us.” (Am I showing my politics? Oh, dear.)

Having grown up in the 80s under the yoke of “the Reds are all coming to kill us so we have to spend lots of money on idiotic, pointless weapons,” while having schoolmates make jokes about my Russian father’s heavy accent and the probabilities of my watch being a KGB microphone, I had hoped that the end of the Cold War, along with increased travel and that master crasher of all cultural barriers, the Internet, would mean that the next generation of children wouldn’t grow up fearing the Bear of the East.

When I was a child, the prospect of meeting my grandparents, or my aunts, uncle, and cousin, much less of ever seeing the city my father had grown up in, were laughable impossibilities. We were in America, they were in the Soviet Union, tough luck. Then the stupidity fell apart, and in 1991, just before the Yeltsin’s coup, we moved to Moscow and I began a relationship that has been a defining factor of my life for over half of it. Year before last I spent two months studying Russian during a bitterly cold winter in Moscow, when it snowed every day and I loved it, and last year I spent three weeks giddily wide-awake during St. Petersburg’s steamy White Nights summer, attending a unique literary seminar and eating regular dinners with a family I had hardly known (the photo above was taken on one of St. Petersburg’s canals last summer, near midnight).

I’d begrudge giving up the opportunity to visit Russia regularly just because politicians and warmongers need to flex their muscles and throw money into their corporate friends’ hungry maws to build weapons. More than that, I’d seriously begrudge it if my soon-to-be-born son had to go through his childhood missing the crucial connection to his world and identity as I did. I hope we’re not headed down the same path, but the Russia-US relationship has hardly verged on friendship since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having the two countries’ leaders wave their parts — I mean military — at each other to see whose is biggest is not going to help.

Related posts:

1. Suzdal, Russia’s hidden jewel
2. The Sri Lankan Handball Team: When Travel Isn’t a Choice
3. Birth of Travel Journals
4. Writers, get yourselves a ticket to White Nights in St. Petersburg

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Antonia projects, Europe travel, travel stories, travel websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.