4/11/98 Sleepless in St. Petersburg From Clearwater Navigator, Winter 1997-98 Our first sight of St. Petersburg from the window of a KLM 737 is a vista of dull green fields interspersed with smokestacks, many of them idle, and the cooling towers of nuclear powerplants. We enter a world where many things, at first look, seem incomprehensible: the alphabet is unreadable, the language bears no similarity to ours, there are men in bulletproof vests guarding the entrances to hotels, and people with PhDs are surviving on $50 a month even though the cost of living is much the same as it is here. It is clear that we have a lot to learn about life in Russia, and very little time in which to learn it. Enter Maria Tysiachniouk, a former sociology professor turned sustainability researcher. Maria, who was one of four Russians visiting the U.S. as part of the same Trust for Mutual Understanding grant, takes it upon herself to make our stay as accurately Russian as possible. We stay in Russian flats, walk everywhere, and ride the subways, trams, and buses. We eat Russian food - albeit better than the Russians normally eat - and keep Russian hours. A normal day seems to start at 9:00 and can easily last until 1:00 am. We soak up as much culture as possible by visiting the Hermitage in the Winter Palace, Catherine the Great's summer palace on the Finland Gulf, the Russian Museum, St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the Naval Museum. Maria tirelessly answers our many questions, and gradually we begin to grasp the alphabet, along with a few phrases and a sense of how things work. Russian culture is an artifact of a very confused and brutal history, and we soon understand that environmental activism must be played by a different set of rules. We visit Irina Ryjova, another one of our four visitors, at her new job. She now teaches an ecology program in a St. Petersburg school, a position she won in part because she had been to the United States with Clearwater. We are beginning to sense that small gifts can have large impacts here. We meet Kostya Nemchinov, Director and cofounder of Neva River Clearwater, at the Marine Technical University Yacht Club. He is joined by Marilyn Barden, a Swedish teacher who conceived the idea of adapting the Clearwater Classroom of the Waves program to the exigencies of the Neva River environment. Together we share food, songs, and stories - a Russian potluck - in a room of the Yacht Club's main building that has been restored by volunteers. As toasts are offered, we get our first taste of the fabled Russian vodka. We are taken for a very pleasant ride on the Neva aboard a small steel fishing trawler. Sasha Lorentsson, who also visited the US for a month last summer, narrates as the landscape of urban Russia flows by, with vast green parks next to ugly factories. As the river flows through St. Petersburg it spreads into an alluvial fan and divides around the many islands upon which much of the city is built. The water seems clean - no floatables, no smell, no color - be we know all too well how deceiving appearances can be. The thick coil of 1/2' anchor line we carried 5,000 miles, through subways and down potholed streets, arrives just in time to tow the Neva Clearwater yawls 74km to the head of the Neva at Ladoga Lake. Kostya shows me the rope locker; it is sparsely furnished with dangling scraps of cordage we wouldn't trust to tie our shoes. Fifty kilometers up the Neva we visit two schools, Kirovsk and Pavlova, which are participating in the Clearwater program. The children gather on a large flat space at the water's edge, and are separated into stations much as American children are aboard Clearwater. Dave Conover leads a Hudson River station; the children are lively and curious, belying the statistics we hear from the school directors: over half of them arrive with no breakfast, and eat neither breakfast nor lunch at school. Some of the parents have "privatized" their apartments in a desperate quest for cash to buy the smooth, seductive vodka. The children laugh at Dave trying to explain how half of the river goes up and down, and the other half doesn't. They ask us about life in the US: "Do you have cats and dogs?" "Do you have houses?" "Have you ever been to New York?" "Are you married?" "Do you like Russia?" Another day we visit a nature school at Vartimyaki, a farm community which once grew high quality produce for the party elites in Leningrad. Threatened with closure, the school became linked with Neva River Clearwater and Marilyn Barden. Today the curriculum includes ecological studies in all subjects and the children take regular excursions through the school's nature reserve across the road. Because of international funding for special programs, the teachers at Vartimyaki enjoy salaries twice the national average. Marilyn has brought donated paint from Sweden, and the halls and classrooms glisten with clean fresh surfaces. Vartimyaki reinforces our growing awareness that small steps go a long way in Russia. Marita, Dave and I discuss funding potential with Kostya, Marilyn, Maria, and others. The landscape abounds with impossibilities. There are good environmental laws, but none enforced. Enforcement is impossible because government, agencies, and police are corrupt. Change at the legislative level is impossible because of corruption, and because individual initiative is futile. Membership as we understand it is unknown because no one has any money, and if they do they assume that a hungry environmentalist will of course use it to buy food for himself. My contention that NGOs should build bridges with the New Russians, an emerging class of entrepreneurs, is dismissed. The New Russians are uncultured criminals, and will never understand philanthropy. We have met with the American Consul, and have been given entree to the International Business Association and an international women's group already considering ecological philanthropy. But making the cognitive jump from thought to action comes hard, largely because too much money can be a serious problem in Russia. It attract criminals, and it attracts the taxman. NGOs are not tax exempt, and must pay draconian taxes on any income over $2,000 a year. We come away reeling from the obstacles, but with a strong sense of the possible; that by focusing on women, both from Russia and the international community, support for Neva Clearwater may be within reach. We might well ask ourselves if it makes sense to spend time and precious resources in support of a small group on a river thousands of miles from the Hudson. Neva River Clearwater is a band of volunteers who, Kostya believes, if paid would soon collapse in envy and dissent. Nevertheless, Kostya is coming to the conclusion that growth is essential, and new ways of managing the Russian cultural infrastructure will have to be found. Just as Clearwater started educating children almost thirty years ago, and in doing so created a Clearwater generation, sensitized to environmental issues, so is the Neva Clearwater group starting a similar process today. Why is this important to Americans? Because the Russian children learning to appreciate nature are going to be the stewards of a postnuclear economy, and will have to deal with stockpiles of atomic warheads and crumbling reactors, each one a Chernobyl waiting to happen.Environmental education in Russia, as a hedge against irresponsible nuclear policy, may be one of the single most critical long-term strategies available for global security.

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