Russia's Good for a Smile or Two.

"When you were there, did you notice that people don't smile?"

Andrea and I paused on a hilltop above the Salt Lake valley, the place where in 1847 Mormon pioneers first laid eyes on their future home about 20 miles and a few thousand feet below.  "Not really." I zipped up my fleece. "Why?"

"My brother served his mission there a few years ago. He said people would stop him on the street and ask him what he was smiling about."

I wish I could dismiss this unscientific conclusion, citing an unreliable source with visions of blond zombies with Prozac-incuded smiles wandering about, but I couldn't.  I had heard the same thing two weeks ago cruising down the Moscow River on one of the Radisson Royal Hotel's  river boats.

9 p.m., 80 degrees outside, shots of paint thinner scented vodka all around, Gorky park and thousands of promenading youth off the starboard side of the ship, and Sharon from California, glass in hand: "Have you noticed how nobody smiles around this place?" She makes a sweeping gesture with her wine glass over the ship's railing.

A wedding party on a boat, with a private DJ and guests in untucked formalwear, speeds by, blocking  the extended sun-glow of northern summer.

While the wedding ship passes, five guests gathered around a little roof-top table pause between "yeah," and "hmmm,"as if requiring further evidence.

I expected Moscow to be a city dominated by decaying apartment blocks, stray dogs, and drunk men pissing in alleyways. Sure, its got plenty of that, but at it's core is a 19th century, imperial city, reminiscent of a chilly Vienna.

My first night in town I eat dinner on the roof-top of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow overlooking Red Square and the Kremlin. Around 10:00 p.m., with an hour of sunlight still to go, I wander across the street for a tour.  Event though the Soviet Union collapsed over 20 years ago, I can't get over the shock of actually being in Moscow.  Here I am with Lenin and Stalin entombed to my right, and St. Basil's Cathedral directly in front of me.

I'm the youngest member of the group. I lived through much less of the Cold War than my colleges smiling and posing for pictures around me.

Five leggy blonds in high heals and tinsel party hats stop next to us and begin to sing a lively tune. "It must be a stag party," Karen, from Philadelphia, conjectures.  Cyril, a gregarious Brit, is entranced and wanders over motioning for a photo. Giggling, the girls accept and pose arm-in-arm with him, blushing.

Across the way, lovers kisses under the shadow of St. Basil's. Countless others stroll around the cobble-stone expanse hand-in-hand.

Monday morning I attend meetings at the Renaissance Moscow Monarch Centre Hotel, where I am staying. The air conditioning is spotty in the ballrooms.  After two hours of vendor meetings my head hurts and I sound like a frog.  I think about skipping lunch to nap before my Kremlin walking tour at  13:00.

Then, unannounced, I hear Tchaikovsky over the speakers. Five ballerinas flutter in from stage right. They leap in circular patterns reminding me of Matisse's La Danse. But unlike Matisse, whose dancers  are bound to the pain and carnality of life on the ground--and dance in spite of it all, Tchaikovsky rockets his ballerinas into the sky, one effortless smile at a time.

It seems a natural transition for a nation obsessed with ballet, to send the first human into outer space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

That night, after touring the Radisson Royal Hotel, a newly-opened behemoth built into a grand Stalinist government palace, the group walks a few hundred meters from the porte cochere to its private quay on the Moscow River.  A Navy brass band, comprised of pensioners, greets us with "Those Were the Days,"* "Besa Me Mucho," and other sing-a-long tunes.

Standing at attention in front of the band, a young ruddy- cheeked majorette, who I imagine to be the granddaughter of one of the tubists,  hypnotically thrusts a tasseled mace into the air with her right arm. Her smile is on the brink of a laugh. With a grin on my face, I stand admiring the band before boarding the boat.

On a downbeat our eyes meet and I dare hope her smile is for me. On the upbeat she is gone, her eyes locked back on the horizon.

- - -

5:00 a.m. the next morning I stand in front of a Plexiglas and metal cube and hand my passport to a government official. She thumbs through my passport, finds the Russian visa, stamps it, files my departure papers and hands it back. She does not smile. It's early. I'm fine with it.


*"Those Were the Days" is a song credited to Gene Raskin, who put English lyrics to the Russian song "Dorogoi dlinnoyu" ("Дорогой длинною", lit. "By the long road"), written by Boris Fomin (1900–1948) with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii.