Introduction to Russia: The New Age

Twenty years ago, I visited Russia for the first time. That trip, and the place, changed my life and redirected my career in ways I never expected.

In the summer of 1992, I was working as a reporter in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail Metro Department and Dr. Virginia Simmons invited me to report on the West Virginia Governor’s Honors Academy being held at (what was then) West Virginia State College. The academy was a summer program for top students from around state. That particular year they were fortunate to have a Russian teacher joining the faculty along with two young Russian students as part of an international exchange program. Following that visit, the West Virginia Department of Education was asked to bring a group of educators to Russia, specifically to Kaliningrad, Russia, to help the city government rebuild its education system. Their text books were useless and their instructional system was outdated.

Remember, the Soviet Union only officially ended on December 25, 1991. The Russian people were struggling to recover from the dissolution of a system that had controlled every aspect of their lives for more than 70 years. I recall hearing many Russian friends say “We were told for 70 years that we had the best of everything. Now we find out we were lied to.”

Dr. Simmons asked me if I wanted to go along on that first trip to Russia. I thought about it for about half a second before taking out a loan against my car and signing up for the trip. My boss at the time, Diane Lytle (now Wallace) at the Metro Staff was kind enough to allow me to go. They weren’t going to pay for the trip, but she kept me on the payroll with the understanding that I would publish stories when I got home. That was exactly what I wanted to do so it worked out perfectly. I was the only journalist on the trip. I had a couple cameras, a rag tag collection of film (slide film and black and white negative film) and a lot of wide-eyed innocence. At the time, I’d never been out of the United States and had never been on an airplane.

The trip affected everyone tremendously. When we got home, we all ran into the problem that our friends didn’t want to hear about Russia nearly as much as we wanted to talk about it. We ended up having a couple parties to get together and share pictures and memories. Probably the most significant result of that first trip was the creation of a nonprofit foundation, called the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, with four areas of focus: education, culture, business and community. Dr. Simmons was the president.

That April we pulled off something that we shouldn’t have been able to do. The foundation hosted a visit from the Russian Presidential Orchestra around West Virginia with a final concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. It was the first time the orchestra had ever been outside of a Communist country. Consider the logistics of getting 70 plus musicians to concert sites all over the state, along with feeding them, housing them and promoting a series of concerts with just a couple months to put it all together. In hindsight, we were crazy. But, we pulled it off and got it done, largely thanks to Dr. Simmons and her attitude of not accepting “no” as an answer from anyone. West Virginia University and Dr. Phil Faini (Dean of the College of Creative Arts) were instrumental in this effort, with their knowledge of moving large groups of musicians around.

The Russia and West Virginia Foundation has organized more than 400 exchanges since 1993 for everyone from teachers to students, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cosmetologists and architects. A Russian sculptor worked with a sculptor from West Virginia and they erected a statue at Haddad River Front Park in Charleston. Several Russian folk music groups have toured in the United States and the music group The Esquires toured Russia, even ending up on Russian national television. There have been dance exchanges both ways alongside humanitarian efforts including arranging for a young Russian girl to have brain surgery to remove a tumor. It literally saved her life.  Russians have opened businesses in American and Americans have opened businesses in Russia.

True to its core, the Foundation has coordinated efforts between universities to write and publish books, public school teachers to publish a comparison of standards for the first through third grades, and nearly 100 exchanges with Russian and American students, with upwards of 25 students at a time visiting the opposite country for as much as month, staying with host families and studying language and culture. Other students have lived in Russia for up to a year while several Russian students have attended university in the United States beginning with Dmitri Saveliev. There are even 4-H programs in Korolev because of the Foundation.

Through Kaliningrad/Korolev’s connection to the Russian Space Program, Fairmont State University created a special Space Scholar program where students worked at various space-related sites and projects in the summer. Several groups of students attend the NASA Space Camp on United States Information Agency (USIA) grants.

I returned to Russia in March of 1994, this time with Dr. Simmons and Dr. Ted Calisto. They were doing more lecturing on educational processes and I was photographing everything I could and conducting interviews. In August of 1994, I did two things on the same day. 1. I quit my job at the newspaper 2. I opened an exhibit of my Russian photographs from those first two trips.

Just a few days after leaving my job, I left for Russia for the third time. This time I planned to stay for three months. I had my own apartment and a few days a week I went to School 11 and talked to English classes to let them practice. That trip was followed by another month-long trip in May of 1995. I took one more trip to Russia in April 1997 and then my career took off in other directions and I didn’t go back until 2008.

Flash forward 11 years and I was able to work out an opportunity to go to Russia and re-photograph many of the same people and places I had visited in the 1990s. Fortunately, through the foundation, we had stayed in contact with many of those people. On my return, after talking to dozens of people and exploring a number of different opportunities, and again with the assistance of Dr. Simmons and the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, I was able to put together a photo exhibit of my work that ended up being displayed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 2009.

My work was part of a larger exhibit of art designed to bring people together organized by a nonprofit group in Myrtle Beach called the Global Awareness Project. One really interesting side benefit that came from that was the group decided to recognize the Russia and West Virginia Foundation in its annual calendar. They commissioned an artist to paint a picture that would represent all of the work done by the Foundation. The artist used two of my images as inspiration for the painting. It was featured for the month of July in the 2010 calendar.

After the success of the exhibit in South Carolina, we were able to take the exhibit to Moscow, Russia; Charleston, West Virginia and Bordeaux, France and back in Myrtle Beach in 2010.  You will find the 30 images, along with the Russian and English captions from the exhibit, at the end of this book.

Dr. Simmons, Ginny to everyone who knows her, was responsible for most of my opportunities relating to Russia and has had a profound influence on my career and my life. She opened doors for me I really never expected to see opened. Case in point, the opportunity to exhibit my work in Russia and France came about because Ginny met some Russian film producers on a trip to Russia in 2009 (immediately after the Global Awareness Project exhibit). She told them about my work and they invited me to exhibit my photographs at two film festivals.

What follows is a collection of stories, notes, blogs and photographs I made while traveling in Russia and working at home. I hope you find the stories and events included in here as interesting as I did when I was living through them. I remember saying in the 90s that it would take Russia 25 years to catch up to the West. They did it in less than 15.

For the record, the Russia I am talking about is not the Russia of government, policy and diplomacy. I am talking about the Russia of the people.