Last Boat to Astrakhan: a Russian Memoir 1990-1996 by Robert Haupt
Sydney: Random House Australia, 1998 ISBN 0091837359
The early death of Robert Haupt took from the scene an insightful, free-thinking and knowledgeable journalist and TV presenter that I always enjoyed reading and watching. What I didn't know was that he'd written this book, which was published shortly after his death in 1996. When I saw it for sale in my local second-hand bookshop for $4, I picked it up, and I'm very glad I did.
For many years Haupt was a newspaper correspondent based in Moscow, and this memoir, based around a trip down the Volga from Moscow to Astrakhan, is in turns insightful, funny, and a sad reflection on what the people of that country have had to live through for centuries.
Haupt uses his trip, undertaken in 1995, to show us how Russia was on a hinge of history, between the "old world" of Communism, and the "new world" of....well, it wasn't quite clear at that stage, but the crony capitalism of Putin's Russia was beginning to emerge - there are very many prescient paragraphs in this book, but the ones about Yeltsin's re-institution of some of the Tsarist ceremonials are in some ways chilling to a twenty-first century reader.
Haupt has a lot to say, generally in a very pithy way, about the failure of Communism, from it's naive belief that people wanted to work for the sake of working (pointing out the idling and drunkenness that abounded in Soviet factories, versus the ingenuity and busy-ness of Russians fixing their Lada or Moskvitch), and how an empire built on fear can never "reform" without collapsing.
He looks back at Tsarist history as well, with his descriptions of the Golden Hordes at Kazan and Samara, and the markets of Nizhny Novgorod giving the reader a wider view of how Russia developed and came to be.
He intersperses his broader views with a description of the cruise itself, which in many ways was the last hurrah of the Soviet way of tourism meeting the new demands of the "new" Russians, with an amusing description of the "mutiny" of the passengers after their itinerary is changed without notice or consultation, and the cruise company's ham-fisted attempts to pacify their customers.
As it turned out, Haupt was aboard the last boat that sailed all the way from Moscow to Astrakhan, as the Moscow Canal became too full of silt to enable the entire journey to be completed on one boat soon after he finished his cruise.
For an insight into the Russian mindset, Russian history, and for an amusing journal of a no-longer-to-be-taken journey, Last Boat to Astrakhan delivers. Recommended.
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