St. Petersburg trip with Tampere summer grad seminar group

I want to work backwards from now sometimes, to talk about Finland, Russia, Austria, and the Czech republic.

We spent two and a half weeks in Finland, from Aug. 4 to August 25, with a few days off to St. Petersburg in Russia. I was helping organize and conduct a three week seminar for global media studies and international relations grad students with two Finnish professors, Kaarle Nordenstreng and Mika Aaltola, both of Tampere University. We had eight students from University of Texas, four from the University of Minnesota, and half a dozen from Tampere. Here is photo of the group in St. Petersburg. Sandy and I are on the right, Kaarle Nordenstreng just to my left, then Dean Graber, Denis Kennedy, Mika Aaltola, Patrick Michels, Seth Lewis, Anna Tuusa, Kevin Wang, Carlo Costantini, Tony Nadler, (then front row left to right), Joon Lee, Helena Virkkunen, Eeva Hurmalainen, Ashley Warren, Tania Cantrell, Jamie Lynn Robitaille, Kristine Weglarz. (Matt Danielo is missing, taking the picture.)
We are standing in back of an amazing church, Our Savior on the Spilled Blood (the blood of Czar Alexander II, who was blown up on the spot by a revolutionary's bomb. You can see it to the left.

This field trip to St. Petersburg came at the very end of the program. We wanted to compare the Scandinavian countries we had looked at in Finland with a nearby, but very different example.



So we visited a couple of newspapers and a television station, got an interesting briefing from the Finnish consulate--I guest we were all honorary Finns for the trip--they said to call them if we had problems.
We also had a couple of briefings and lectures about post-Soviet, Russian media from Russian media professors in Finland and there in St. Petersburg. They were named Russlan and Svetlana. You can see them at the right. In front of the main St. Petersburg television channel, which we visited.

Contrary to popular opinion, the insides of television stations are not that photo- genic, but the lobby of this one had some amazing stuff from Soviet/Russian television broadcasting history. Old cameras, old television sets.
Just to the left is one of the first television sets made in the USSR, according to the matron minding the lobby. If I understood her correctly, the lens in front of the set was to magnify the size of the image. It seems like the old equipment is there to entertain you as you wait for your appointment, which wait could be lengthy. Not that much has changed in some ways.

In some ways, it was quite spooky for me to go back to a place were I had last visited in late December 1970, as part of a group of U.S. students visiting the then USSR as part of an official tour put together by Sputnik, their youth travel agency. As an impressionable college student who was being exposed to Marx as something other than the grandfather of the bogeyman, I was curious to see what "really existing socialism," as its supporters called it, looked like. Put this in the context of me getting very caught up in the mobilization against the Vietnam War during my freshman year (19669-1970) at Stanford. Meeting people who were very excited about Marxism as a more humane alternative to capitalism intrigued me, as did some economics and political science courses. And by the time of spring 1970, even my German language class turned into a seminar at Marxist theory about half of the time.

I spent fall 1970 and winter 1971 quarters at Stanford in Vienna, where one of my main goals was to study the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. I kind of halfway knew already I wanted to eventually do some serious time on the ground study of some other part of the world-- how a kid from rural Idaho came to have that thought in his head will be the subject of future posts of an even more historical nature-- and I thought this might be a place to start. Look at the most different thing available and work from there. So with several other Stanford students, including Debbie Maranville who I was going out with in Vienna, and a bunch of random Italian students, we went off to Berlin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Budapest--mostly on trains but also one really scary Soviet Aeroflot flight where I saw a guy on the wing with a bolt driver tightening things down just before we took off.

It started off right with me getting strip searched, grilled and terrified at Check Point Charley in Berlin. (Sandy and I went back to Berlin last year--so a flashback on that later, perhaps-- all that is left of Checkpoint Charley are some photos. The Germans have pretty well erased most of the visual evidence of "the East" or "the socialist time". However, the visuals of Russia have not changed quite as much. Our Soviet era hotel now had the McDonalds above at right built in to its side, and they had tacked on new windows in front of the old ones??? But the other photo above left is the same old Soviet era building for what seems to be their equivalent of the national security agency, conveniently located, apparently near President Putin (former KGB director)' s summer home.

St. Petersburg, to be continued