Welcome to Russia

Three puffy-faced young drunks, arms encircling each other’s shoulders for comradely support, slowly pirouette – first one way, then the other – defying gravity and amusing the ladies behind the counter of the Moscow Airport Information Center and Meeting Point, until the bollocks Bolshoi crashes to the floor with loud oaths. Welcome to Russia!

One of the Information ladies, deciphering my odd gestures and Amerikanski babble, was kind enough to phone my host to come pick me up. And so he appears, Sasha Cheparukhin, the stocky, unshaven, serious-faced manager of Huun Huur Tu, the Throat-Singers of Tuva. Yawning and apologizing for oversleeping (they all flew in together from a concert in Finland last night), he steers me out into the cool Moscow dawn to where his sweet-faced mom is waiting patiently behind the wheel of their blue Opel compact. Polite words and smiles, then hit the road, traffic already heavy pre-rush hour. “This will be impossible in a couple of hours,” Sasha mumbles from the back seat. It’s already barely possible… exhaust fumes, gray blocks of Kruschev-era apartment buildings. But blue sky and sun threaten to lighten my jet-lagged mood.

In a comfortable Breshnev-era apartment complex, Sasha and his mom at home, with tea and fresh strawberries for breakfast, then it’s on to my hotel. “It’s not really a hotel,” Sasha warns me darkly. “When you look at it, you won’t think it’s anything. But it’s much cheaper than what you will find anywhere in Moscow.”

The city has gone mad with oil and gas wealth. Hotel rooms start at $300 a night. The streets are choked with brand new Toyota SUVs, Suzuki and Lexus, or Porsche Cayenne, the favored wheels of Russia’s young rich. “It’s crazy. Everyone from my graduating is a millionaire,” Sasha says. “Three of them – no, four – are billionaires.”

Impresarios of World Music are not reaping such rewards, however, so Sasha has stashed the four members of Huun Huur Tu on the southwest edge of the city in a sort of hostel at a sports complex built for the 1980 Olympics. I seem to recall the US boycotted that one, and as we drive up to a very strange jumble of oblong structures eroding out in the middle of nowhere, all marked by the Olympic symbol, I’m thinking: This US citizen has no such choice. But Russia is full of surprises, as Napoleon once said.