The New St. Petersburg

In 1991, the Soviet Union came to an end, in part because its economy had collapsed into wreckage.  The Russian Depression during the1990s was as severe as the American Depression of the 1930s.  But America had President Roosevelt at the helm, and the reliable Constitution as its foundation, whereas the Russians had turned away from 74 years of Communism and now sought to create some new form of government.

Russian factories collapsed; Russian banks collapsed.  Russian workers lost their jobs, and lost their savings.  People with advanced degrees in engineering now stood out in the snow selling shoes that their children had outgrown, books from the family library, and vegetables preserved from a summer garden.

Russians looked with hope—and an offer of friendship—toward Europe and America.  An historic opportunity had arrived . . . for the world to move beyond the Cold War, the dangerous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and the mistrust which had poisoned international relations for half a century.  Now, together, we could build a far brighter future, and a far safer future.

In 1991, I was teaching at the Bodø Graduate School of Business in northern Norway.  In October, we received funding from the government in Oslo to find a university in St. Petersburg—which only months before had been Leningrad—where we could help to develop an entirely new school of business.  The goal was to enable Russian students to learn western economics, which would enable Russia to do business with Europe and the world, and thus become a more prosperous and peaceful neighbor.

My Norwegian colleagues were warmly welcomed by the faculty and students of Baltic State Technical University.  Between October, 1991 and May, 1995, I made a dozen teaching trips to St. Petersburg.

I enjoyed my Russian students so much that I took a sabbatical from Bodø and taught for the full 1995-1996 year in St. Petersburg. After twenty-five years of teaching, that extraordinary year in Russia was the mountain peak of my career.

This short book introduces you to the Russian people. The first three chapters focus on the Russian children, for their experiences provide an honest portrait of the world they live in. And they, not us, will be the people our own children must learn to live with in tomorrow’s world.

Subsequent chapters visit the marketplace, the homes, the parks, and the newly-opened churches in St. Petersburg, enabling the reader to become acquainted with daily life as most people experience it.

Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, the city has been called St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and now, since 1991, St. Petersburg again. A person walking along the embankment beside the Neva River can step on the very stones that the tzars once stepped on, as did Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

St. Petersburg has been history’s stage, and continues to be so today. Step into history. And step as well into the future, waiting for us, together, to build it.