Ghost Town

National Review, March 27, 1998

Stalin, behind Lenin, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

You wouldn't have wanted to live there, but the Evil Empire was fun to visit. Every empty shop was an ideological vindication, each dismal meal the basis for a grimly amusing anecdote. The tourist could play Dissident (Visit an oppressed church!) or Spy (Lurk outside the Lubyanka in a raincoat!). And what about that air of menace? You could be tailed by the police, harassed by goons, or even, if you were very, very lucky, get caught in a KGB sex trap. Everything was forbidden, and thus enticing. Pointlessly, but excitingly, train stations could not be photographed. Nor could bridges. Take that, Mr. Reagan! And as for bringing in Samizdat? Try explaining freedom of the press to the suitably surly ("You want to make trouble in our country?") border guards as they confiscate The Hunt for Red October. These were people who wanted to bury us. And they were not going to apologize. And they still aren't. Which is why, even now, Moscow remains the place to go for a sinister, Stalinist thrill. To be sure, there have been changes, but many of the old Soviet ways persist. That Russian talent for the gothic and the just plain weird has also survived. And so will most visitors.

Even if, as true nostalgics should, they check into the Hotel Ukraina. Not the usual Intourist concrete block, the Ukraina is one of the six Stalinist wedding-cake skyscrapers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. It is a grimly lit and exuberantly totalitarian hulk, festooned with crumbling concrete stars, hammers, and sickles. Other Cold-War relics can be found inside, including seedily threatening security men, a jolly mural of Soviet Ukraine, and, incredibly, a group of earnest Americans over to talk "people to people" about peace. In a few years, the Ukraina will be a place of luxury and pseudo-sophistication filled with New Russians and old investment bankers. But that moment has not yet arrived. Like Russia itself, this hotel is in transition, and the journey can be a little rough. Which is why it is better to dine elsewhere.

Ukraine Hotel, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Just down the road, in fact, by the cheerfully unrenamed Barrikadnaya (Barricades) Metro station. Le Gastronom is one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Located at the bottom of another Stalinist tower, it promises yet more dictatorship chic. Vast, dominated by overlarge chandeliers, over-officious security men, and clumsy marble pillars, it is a Cecil B. De Mille, nose-pressed-to-the-window idea of how the rich should live, something all too suitable for the Stalinist bureaucracy and the morbid tourist. It's bogus, unfortunately. Gastronom was a food store, not a restaurant. Stalin never ate there.

Nor did he dance his cares away at the nightclub called Titanic. In his day, the evening was for arrests, not discos. Now there is a nighttime scene as shifting and evanescent as anything found in Manhattan. If a bit tougher. That explains the airport-style weapon detectors at the entrance to many of the better spots. In New York they may be the sign of a bad high school. In Moscow they herald a great night out.

And having them may be prudent. At Titanic, notes one English-language paper, "you won't get laid, but you might get shot." But then this is typical of an expatriate press only too pleased to wear its "aren't we tough to be in Moscow" credentials on its sleeve. Amid the stock prices and the guides to eating out, the pages are filled with entertaining summaries of recent scandals, crises, and crimes. Cannibalism seems unusually popular at the moment. Perhaps the restaurants are to blame.

The determined tourist can also visit the sites of earlier, more traditionally Soviet atrocities. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria's Moscow mansion, for example, still stands. These days it's the Tunisian Embassy. Tunisian diplomatic intrigues take place over the network of cells in which Beria's victims were tortured, raped, and murdered. For the Tunisians have left the basement much as they found it. The cells are dank and sinister, accessible by dark stairs and gloomy passages. "I don't believe in ghosts," explained one diplomat.

That's strange, as Moscow is a city where the dead don't always know their place. Hitler's jaw is on a shelf in the archives of the Russian Counter-intelligence Service and, some say, can be viewed for a fee. Meanwhile, at Moscow's Brain Institute they have Lenin's brain, sliced into 31,000 pieces and carefully preserved on microscope slides. Famously, the rest of the old Bolshevik's remains remain in their mausoleum above ground, as embalmed as the attitudes of his supporters. In the Duma they continue to talk of the proletariat, imperialism, and the Glorious October Revolution. Outside, where the Lenin Museum used to be, unpleasant old people still gather, Stalin banners in their hands, anti-Semitic pamphlets in their pockets. A tape of some of Stalin's better speeches can be bought for $1.

Outside the old Lenin Museum, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

An even less reliable record of the past is available down the road, at the Lubyanka. K, G, and B have been replaced by more tactful initials, but the old yellow building still holds secret policemen and a small museum that details some of their achievements. With a few gaps.

Elsewhere, Moscow could do with a few more gaps, particularly where statues are concerned. For all the changes, the hugely increased freedom, and the chance of a greater prosperity, this is still too much the city of the Soviets. Its buildings, its monuments, its manners and morality still deliver that old malevolent charge. Looking at the St. Petersburg of the 1830s, the waspishly reactionary Marquis du Custine snidely noted that it was "barbarism plastered over." Well, at least someone had tried.

It would be more difficult to say the same of the Moscow of the 1990s. Lenin still enjoys his public spaces. Lenin in iron, Lenin in concrete, Lenin as statue, bas-relief, or painting, thoughtful, brave, and wise. His victims? They get a bare rock taken from the site of the first Gulag. It sits across from the Lubyanka, just a few minutes' walk from a monumental statue of Karl Marx.

That comes as no surprise. To be fair, some streets have been renamed, and a Bolshevik statue or two taken down, but for the most part the relics of the ancient regime survive alongside, or under, the shiny construction of the new era.

And so Stalin's Metro, the showpiece that actually worked, continues to function. Its escalators still thunder at alarming speed down past marble torn from a cathedral. And the idols still stand in its halls: Red Army men, workers, and peasants reminding you that the State will prevail and that, yes, the train will arrive soon. And it just might.

Into the Vortex

National Review, Dec 22, 1997

Center for the New Age, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sedona, Arizona

It was time, explained the man in touch with an angel, to follow the joy and the excitement. I could take the sensible approach and leave by the door or I could choose excitement.

Why not scramble out through the window? Why not choose joy? Because I write for NR, that's why. I used the door.

Besides, he was exaggerating. We were in Sedona. And in Sedona it sometimes seems that there's nothing much that's very sensible. But that's unfair. Roughly halfway between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, it is a nice little town with plenty of Norman Rockwell trimmings: an Elks lodge, air cadets, even a good diner or two. People come here to retire. At an elevation of 4,500 feet, Sedona enjoys a pleasant climate. It also boasts long meandering canyons, punctuated by massive sandstone outcroppings. Permeated with rust, their colors shift through the day, turning a deep red as the sun sets.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

It is the red rocks that draw the tourist crowds. And not only tourists. Back in the early 1980s there was a revelation. The rocks were exposed. They were not just lumps of rusty sandstone. They were vortices! There had been rumors before. But the full details are reportedly given to a Page Bryant, a psychic, by "Albion," a being. A vortex is a "power spot," a point where you can plug into the earth's electro-magnetic field and boost your own psychic energy. Got it? Many did, and they came to live in Sedona. There have been disappointments, of course. Bell Rock was supposed to float off to Andromeda in 1987. It is still here.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

And so is the New Age community. In force and, some say, backed up by spaceships. Vortex energy is UFO catnip. This is a place where Contact is old news and Men in Black is a home movie. Naturally, a saucer crashed here (in 1994, apparently) but this is no mere Roswell. That town has two paltry UFO museums and some scrub masquerading as a crash site. No aliens have come calling since 1947. Perhaps they prefer Sedona —and not just for the vortices. The Arizona town can offer better scenery and a metaphysical infrastructure that supports more than ufology.

Red Planet Diner, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

So, if you want to visit a vortex, there will be someone to help. As an earthling, it is best to go on an inspirational tour. You can circle a medicine wheel, and chant thanks to the Great Spirit. It doesn't matter if you don't know the words. Everyone else seems to. "From Pagan Worship," explained a friendly lady from Indiana, matter-of-fact!y. Souvenirs? Sedona is a spiritual supermarket. There is enough here for the most demanding of metaphysical shoppers. Books, of course, and psychic tchotchkes for every purpose—candles for that meditative moment, crystals for healing, an inner-self manifestation bowl for, er, inner-self manifestation. The approach is ecumenical. You worship it and they will sell it. A statue of Ra? Or a pair of Birkenstocks? No cult is too strange.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Or need too obscure. In Sedona there's a "lightworker" for every purpose, someone to tell your future and find your past (life, that is). And auras can be photographed (mine was red, slept too near a vortex).

In a way, this is just an updating of an old tradition, nothing more sinister than the old gypsy woman telling fortunes. But the New Age is now. It echoes and reinforces our pancredulity. When everything is OK and people believe that nothing can really be proved one way or the other, that's not much of a challenge. Our entrepreneurial mystics know this. They understand their market. They flatter our self-esteem.

While feeling our pain. The gypsy's caravan has become a clinic. This is a New Age for victims. The hocus-pocus has to "heal." Witches must be Welbys, psychic Kildares tending our inner children. And sorting out our cholesterol, while they are at it. There's a lot to do, but angels apparently can help out. Even the dolphins will have a go.

But, if Flipper flops, don't panic. Sedona is on your side.

Center for the New Age, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

There's Alpha Body Relaxation Therapy, Aromatherapy, Axiationa! Therapy, Color Therapy, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Regression Therapy, Reiki Therapy, Trager Therapy, Trigger Point Therapy, Vibration Therapy, and Coning. Coning? Used in Atlantis, apparently. Cotton strips are dipped into an herbal beeswax mix, rolled into a cone, and left to harden. The broad end of the cone is then set on fire. Smoke spirals down the cone and out through its tip, which is in the patient's ear. The idea is to draw physical and emotional debris (which, this patient noted, was black and gooey) out into the cone.

And why not? Atlantean medicine may have had a lot going for it. It is, after all, ancient. And that plays well in the New Age. Science doesn't. The New Age prefers the old ways. Particularly if they can be traced back to cultures where people wore robes or, best of all, were Native Americans. Except for an enlightened few (steps forward, lightworkers!), modern Americans find it difficult to accept this. Or so it is argued. Luddite, elitist, self-importantly self-hating. And where have we heard this tone before? Did anyone say EPA?

Carol Browner would fit in here. As a priestess perhaps, worshiping the Earth (or Gaia, as she is more respectfully known). For the New Age will be feminist. Judging by Sedona, at least, its psychics and its shoppers are mainly female. Women, we learn, are especially caring, intuitive, spiritual; all around better people than another sex I could mention. But then, in an era of soccer matriarchy, this is little more than conventional piety.

To be sure, Sedona can also be guaranteed to see some unconventional piety. But nothing too onerous. At a women's spirituality conference this past fall, there was plenty of ritual and ceremony, but also, as advertisements made clear, a focus on "optional nurturing activities"such as . . . "shopping, napping etc."

Napping? Someone should keep awake in case the Goddess shows up. That's the Goddess to you, figurehead of a supposedly "woman-centered" prehistory. Some say she may be returning to her domain. Far-fetched? Not if you believe that a small town in Arizona is built near the site of a great Lemurian city. Is the Goddess Gaia? Perhaps. But there is another candidate, a woman of great influence. And strange powers. A woman who can communicate with dead First Ladies.

Bill, be very, very careful.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Loch Roswell?

National Review, September 15, 1997

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

You don't believe that a saucer crashed at Roswell, New Mexico? After all, there were, they say, witnesses. Sort of. Military men, a rancher, maybe some archaeologists. Well, to the folks over by Loch Ness that is nothing. They have got a saint, Columba no less, who allegedly saved a swimmer from a "savage beast" in the loch over a thousand years ago.

And it doesn't stop there. The legend survived, and so did the monster—or its descendants—to reappear before John Mackay and his wife in March 1933. Interestingly, they were the proprietors of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, which overlooks the loch. Other sightings soon followed. The world press picked up the story, and the Drumnadrochit Hotel filled its empty rooms.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

The sightseers have never really gone away. Drumnadrochit is today still Nessteria's epicenter, visited by well over one hundred thousand people each year. That's not bad for a little Scottish village. To find it, take the hopelessly inadequate A82 west from Inverness. Be prepared to drive slowly behind tour buses, and wait until you see that Barney profile and long green neck rising from the waters. Not inappropriately, it's a fake, a concrete creature wallowing in a Pond Ness rather than the more majestic loch nearby. Nevertheless, it signals arrival at the "Official" Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Centre.

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

Official it may be (who says?), but it is not alone. The Original Loch Ness Visitor Centre is just down the road. Relations between the Loch Ness pair are not too good. Asking at the Official for the way to the Original is as well received as asking a Montague for directions to the Capulet place.

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

After all, why go elsewhere when the Official Centre is, it claims, the home of the authoritative exhibition? It is certainly impressive, a multi-media presentation with spooky music, "authentic relics of the search" (if not of the monster), clever illuminations, and tantalizing talk of creatures that may, just, perhaps, have survived the Ice Age. Showroom dummies with ZZ top beards are dressed as ancient Celts. Was the monster their folk memory of dragon-prowed Viking longships? Other mannequins, similar faced but with late disco-era hair, prefer to be more scientific, crouching in a bathysphere or standing on the deck of a research vessel. They stare out blankly - at the tourists, who gaze vacantly back.

Perhaps they should go and see the movie at the Original. There's speculation, scenery, and a good collection of eyewitnesses. A sturdy lot they are too: a priest, honest-looking men in tweed caps, slightly old-fashioned rural faces out of an episode of Miss Marple. Exactly the sort of people that Agatha Christie warns us not to trust.

And how right she was. The Loch Ness story is a handbook of human error, more damaging to the notion of eyewitness evidence than Johnnie Cochran. Some people see what they want to believe. An otter becomes a monster's neck, a wave a plesiosaur's wake. Others just make it up. Baron Muenchausen should have settled in Drumnadrochit. He'd have found plenty of hoaxers only too pleased to lend his tales a hand. Or a hippopotamus foot (the 1934 "tracks"). Even the "Surgeon's picture" (the famous one, with what looks like an umbrella handle coming out of the water) was probably a model attached to a toy submarine. Or so says one confession. Which may itself be a hoax.

But there have been serious attempts at research as well, if often of a rather British kind. Cameras have gone adrift and negatives been lost. American money has been asked for (and criticized). Nevertheless, the loch has been surveyed, scrutinized, and sonared. And little has been found. To be sure, there has been an ambiguous photo or two, even a mysterious echo, but little more - Less conventional approaches have done no better. Everything has been tried — psychics, a wizard, bacon. All failures. Perhaps an earlier exorcism was to blame.

We may never find out. The science may be against Nessie, but proving a negative (in this case, that the monster does not exist) is never easy. And the nature of the loch does not help. More than 800 feet deep, 24 miles long, and a mile wide. Loch Ness contains the greatest volume of fresh water in the United Kingdom. The waters themselves are dark, stained with peat. Visibility is poor. To some, underwater photographs from the 1970s can show a flipper, a gargoyle-like head, or "anal folds." To others the pictures merely reveal a tree stump or other debris. But, in Loch Ness finding nothing proves nothing. No one has even been able to locate the remains of the one monster that is certainly there: a mechanical Nessie sunk, tragically, during the filming of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

If Sherlock cannot find the beast, neither, probably, can we. And that is just fine with Drumnadrochit. The tourists will keep coming to the centers, the restaurants, the shops, and the pubs. They will buy their "monster" ices at the Coffee House and their groceries at Nessie's Nessessities. At the Nessie Shop, the bagpipe muzak will continue to play. There will be T-shirts to buy, plesiosaur-shaped shortbread to munch, and "Monster's Choice" whiskey to drink.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Serious? No, not very. And this Is how It should be. Whether she exists or not, Nessie is indeed a survivor, a relic from an earlier, better era. Mysteries used to be fun, tales for late at night. We enjoyed believing them, even if we knew, deep down, that they were not really true. From the Yeti to Eldorado, they brought fun to millions, but were an obsession of only a few. Now, with rationalism under fire, we want more from our myths. They have to mean something and be, in some way. real. Yet proper research is far too much trouble, and may lead to a disappointing result. So we turn legends into a pseudoscientific, paranoid cosmology, with a Roswell just another focus for a vague, superstitious unease.

Lucky Nessie has escaped all this. She swims on, Moby without Ahab, an enjoyable outing, a pleasant fantasy. And only one conspiracy theory.

Just what was the real reason for Inverness-shire County Council's refusal, allegedly on zoning grounds, to allow the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau to maintain its headquarters at nearby Achnahannet? We should be told.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Frozen Future

National Review, September 1, 1996

James Bedford, on his way

The stroke of death," claimed Cleopatra, "is as a lover's pinch." Well, perhaps: if you are about to be deposed and taken captive. But for most people the arrival of the grim reaper is a tragedy, a disaster, and, in this most advanced of countries, something of an insult. We eat broccoli, we transplant hearts, but in the end people just keep on dying—more than two million of them each year. Other civilizations have claimed that nothing can be done, but for us to accept this seems, well, un-American. Each death (other than those of the executed, of course) represents a technological failure, a rebuke to Uncle Sam. But it ain't over till it's over and, some say, an answer is at hand. Yankee ingenuity has done it again and come up with cryonics. Put simply, this involves deep-freezing the recently deceased in the hope that some cure for what killed them will be found in the future. The idea is not new. Benjamin Franklin wanted to be "immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time [when he could] be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country."

It was not to be, but Franklin's dream, at least, lived on, to be revived as "cryonics" in the early 1960s. Cryonics: It's a goofy name and a wildly optimistic idea, but one suited to its era. It was the age of the Jetsons and the transistor, a time when science seemed to be sweeping all before it. Freeze people? Why not? James Bedford agreed, and on January 12, 1967 this 73-year-old psychology professor was frozen ("suspended") shortly after his death. Cryonics had found its Henry Hudson, perhaps even its Columbus. Doctor Bedford is, after all, still with us and "apparently" in good shape, ending up with the cryonicists of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation after many years in a mini-warehouse.

This is only appropriate. Alcor is the industry leader. Its Scottsdale, Arizona, facility is home to 32 "patients," almost as many, it estimates, as are held by its three competitors combined. These numbers exclude the occasional freelancer as well as the two Canadians interred in the permafrost, but that, says Steve Bridge, Alcor's likable president, "is just cold burial."

Cyronics is much more than that. To start with, it's a lot less sedate. There is no time to linger weeping around the deathbed. Instead, an Alcor Emergency Response Team will spring into action with CPR support to maintain blood flow to your brain in an attempt to reduce ischemic damage. Your body is rapidly cooled down and unless you have chosen to die in Scottsdale (which is best) you will be put into a special traveling pack (make sure it doesn't leak—this can cause trouble with the authorities) after a procedure involving preservatives, ice, and Maalox. On arrival, a glycerol-based solution will be pumped through your system to reduce the tissue damage caused by freezing. Once you are thoroughly perfused you are ready to be cooled down to -196 degrees Celsius. Oh, there's just one other thing. If you have elected for "neurosuspension" only, this is the moment that they cut off your head.

"Deep cooling" then follows, at the end of which you are lowered head first, or head only, into a large stainless steel cylinder. There, in a quiet back room in Alcor's suburban office block, you await your destiny, a cryonaut in an unmarked metal can, kept cold by occasionally replenished liquid nitrogen. Pére-Lachaise it is not, but then it is not meant to be. Scottsdale is no final resting place, but a way station on the return to life. Or at least that is the idea.

But how good an idea is it? Conventional cryobiologists, the people who freeze sperm or the odd body part, are skeptical. They point to the extensive cell damage associated both with death and the degree of cooling required for a whole body or even a head. As their Darth Vader, Arthur Rowe of NYU's School of Medicine, has explained, "believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow." In addition, even if enough cells can be revived, it is also far from clear, to say the least, that the patient's mind would have been preserved.

Well, if cryonics is another junk science, its practitioners differ from the parapsychology crowd in one crucial respect: the claims they make are fairly modest. As one Alcor leaflet is careful to say, "we don't know if what we are doing will work." They can, and they do, point to signs of real progress in cryopreservation, while touting a future nanotechnology as the key to repairing damaged cells in, say, the next "5 to 150 years." Even today, they note, we regularly "revive" people who previous generations would have abandoned. Meanwhile, James Bedford sleeps on, and no frozen dogs have yet come back from the dead (that's an urban legend, as is, while we are on the subject, the freezing of Walt Disney). Will Alcor succeed in the end? Talking binarily, Steve Bridge reckons that the odds are "either one or nothing," which sounds better than the New York State Lottery.

The trouble is that betting on cryonics is rather more expensive. There are annual dues to pay and when the, ahem, moment comes, a neurosuspension will set you back $50,000; "whole body" will cost $120,000. Alcor's 390 living members don't seem to mind. Much of the money goes into a patient-care fund, which is essential. Illiquid cryonicists can, as history shows, lead to liquid patients. Alcor itself is not-for-profit and looks it. The facility is spartan, the decor basic (framed pictures of the suspended), the staff underpaid.

To understand what motivates them look no further than the USS Enterprise proudly displayed in one office. These people are science's samurai, gung-ho garage tinkerers in the Orville and Wilbur tradition. The only doctor on the premises is dead, although they do have a veterinary surgeon and a nurse or two to help out. Steve Bridge himself is a librarian by profession. "I know where to look things up," he says brightly. Rationalists by inclination, most cryonicists are not religious. Their faith is the future, an Asimovian dream of scientific progress, often accompanied (this may ring a bell with Newt watchers) by a strong libertarian streak, a blend, in short, of Ayn Rand and Captain Kirk.

Ayn Rand herself "knew about" cryonics (but, no, she's not frozen either). As she would have predicted, officialdom has done its best to be difficult, notably in Riverside, California, where a series of absurd events led to Dora Kent (or at least her head) becoming the movement's Rosa Parks. Meanwhile, right-to-die issues bubble ominously below the surface. The final stages of a disease can destroy the very cells that Alcor is trying to preserve. So, argued one cancer patient, why not end things more quickly and allow the cryonicists to get to work? He lost his case, which reached a California Appellate Court and, fictionalized, an episode of L.A. Law, but, happily, survived.

So, doubtless, will cryonics. And so it should. Its devotees may seem a little nutty, and so pro-life that they want another, but that's their call, even at $120,000 a throw. It will probably never work, but, as cryonicists see it, what is the alternative? As Steve Bridge puts it, "The nice thing about life is that you never know what is going to happen next. The problem with death is that you do know what is going to happen next. Nothing."

And then he smiles. Confidently.

Revenge of the Nerds

National Review, July 28, 1996 

BUFFALO Midsummer. A thousand years ago our ancestors danced around bonfires and, doubtless, slaughtered a maiden or two. These days we like to think we have moved on. True, the scandinavians still throw a good Midsommar, but even there virgins are not sacrificed, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Progress, schmogress. For all our science we still live, as Carl Sagan puts it, in a demon-haunted world. Naturally, there have been changes. The nearest soothsayer is only a 900 line away. Of course we no longer think that ghouls will steal our offspring--but give those creatures space ships and we will believe they are abducting children, carrying out ghastly experiments, and, for all we know, spoiling the crops. Scratch away our sophisticated veneer, and the New Age very quickly goes dark.

All is not lost, however. The epoch of Shirley Maclaine has its opponents, and one thousand of them recently gathered outside Buffalo. The occasion was the first World Skeptics Congress, a four-day-long-discussion of "Science in the Age of (Mis)Information" sponsored by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP does what its name would suggest. Over the past twenty years it has encouraged the exposure of a sorry sequence of spurious spacemen, cranks, and charlatans. CSlCOP's fascinating magazine. Skeptical Inquirer, sells around 50,000 copies across the world, but none, probably, in any supermarkets. Much of the Congress covered familiar ground. Aliens, junk medicine, and psychic detectives all took their knocks, Patriots will be glad to know that this nonsense is not just an American problem. China seems obsessed by Pseudo-Qigong (don't ask), but, hey, that's a country with fifty million Communists, and they will believe anything. Perhaps the Chinese should turn to India, to the monomial Premanand, for help. Confusingly, Premanand's style was high guru (flowing white hair, beard, orange clothing) but his message was not. The fakirs are fakers, and in an entertaining talk Premanand demonstrated just how they do it.

This would not have been news to Skepticism's stars, many of whom were on display. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke, preceded by a Darwin impersonator. Magician James ''the Amazing" Randi was on hand, outwardly unscarred by years of litigation with Uri Geller. In between drags on, appropriately enough in this anti-witchcraft crowd, a Salem, Aviation Week and Space Technology's Philip Klass was signing copies of his UFOeuvre. Full refunds ("not just the royalty") were promised in the event of a proved landing.

More surprising was the appearance of X-Files creator Chris Carter as a guest speaker. With his compelling stories of the occult and the alien, often filmed in a pseudo-documentary style, Mr. Carter might have expected a rough ride. He need not have worried. The Skeptics were a pushover, clever to be sure, but with more than a hint, shall we say, of the school chess club about them. They never stood a chance against the sly cool of Chris Carter, media wizard and surfer. Besides, most were fans, shocked only when their guest revealed that he had never watched an entire episode of Star Trek.

Anyway, The X-Files is fiction, nothing more. Much more serious, in the view of the Congress, was media response to paranormal "facts." The wildest claims are accepted at face value, turned into documentaries, and shown on prime time. A scientist may be asked to comment, but for about thirty-seconds, most of which ends up on the cutting-room floor (this may sound familiar to conservatives). In part, this is inevitable. The paranormal is fun. An alien autopsy is great TV, rather more exciting than four chemists gathered round a Bunsen burner. ''What we need," said one speaker, 'is LA Science." He should not hold his breath.

Some knew what to blame: Commercialism, or at least its alleged surrogate on earth. Mention of the name Murdoch generated slightly forced laughter. Murdoch the bringer of joy, the destroyer of words. Scientific types, the skeptics see themselves as high-minded, spelling-bee sorts of people who still give money to NPR. TV was meant to be the great educator: McNeil, not Oprah; Kunta Kinte, not Beavis. Instead, ran the argument, commercial pressures have led to a debased medium, serving only to fuel the prejudices and superstitions of a degenerate mob.

It's a neat explanation, but it is only part of the story. Intellectually, after all, the mob has always been in poor shape. That's why it is the mob. What has changed is the attitude of the opinion-forming classes. Temple University professor John Paulos highlighted part of the problem. The Kaczynski-haired Paulos is, as the title of his most recent work suggests, a mathematician [who] reads the newspaper and, as his acerbically insightful talk made clear, he is not impressed. Numbers are bandied about, he says, but with little understanding even in the media's more upmarket corners. It is not difficult to agree. All too often Right Data are replaced with numerical assertions that are left unchallenged and unanalyzed by a press too slovenly, innumerate, or biased to care.

To the Skeptics, an honest bunch looking for objective, critical thought, this must be anathema. The Joe Fridays of philosophy, all they really want is the facts. Instead they find themselves in a subjective, post-modern world. In the past their fight was straightforward and pleasantly elitist, the enemies trailer-park science and bayou religion. Now the problem is among their own, within the intelligentsia and the academy. History has been abolished, to be replaced by the study of alternative myths, while science itself is suspect, a product, allegedly, of white male power.

Ironically, much of this rubbish comes from the Left, once a reliable source of support for Skeptics, particularly on religious matters. Skeptics, to say, the least, arc unlikely to be great churchgoers, and there was a time when that could imply a sort of leftism. No immortality—except for the Rosenbergs. CSICOP itself has close ties to CODESH (the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism), an interweaving visible even at the Congress's bookstall. The alien and the paranormal were on display, but so were the great thinkers (Voltaire, Darwin, Kevorkian), the Bad News Bible, The Trouble with Christmas and, most shockingly of all. Lessons of the Locker Room: The Myth of School Sports. Is nothing sacred?

Not much, probably, to many of the Congressgoers. But should that imply a liberal tilt? In an era when the First Lady communes with the dead, conventional political afllliations can truly be said to be breaking down. When what one speaker described as "preposterism" rules, the rationalist can no longer rely on traditional allies. True, the Congress felt vaguely liberal. Naturally enough, the Religious Right took a pounding, and, at a guess, most attendees would still vote Democratic, if a little uneasily. The voice of the Old Left could still be heard in some of the speeches and in a feeble anti-Rush Limbaugh joke or two, but it was fading away, just (to take Matthew Arnold somewhat out of context) another pan of liberalism's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

Thirty years ago the stupidities of the Sixties pushed many social scientists into neo-conservatism. Today's junk intellectuals with their crystals and their shamans, their ludicrous universities and their "politics of meaning,'' may do the same for the skeptical and the scientific. Rationalism can then complete its reconnection with the thought of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, a journey which must take it rightward, if never to Ralph Reed. This should be welcomed. Skeptics may be an ornery lot, but their search for that objective truth is somehow very American. Indeed, it is as American as the apple pie that Eve never baked.

Out of the great unknown

The Baltic Independent, November 24, 1993

STRANGE AS it may seem, Algirdas Brazauskas is not a household name. As citizens of a continent-sized superpower, Americans have never felt the need for information about other, much smaller, countries such as those on the Baltic, thousands of miles away. The US media generally reflects this lack of interest and, it its own way, does its best to add to the confusion. Take, for example, the most basic question of all. Where are the Baltic States? For fifty years they were nowhere, erased from the map and lost in the vast mass of the Soviet Union. Now Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (or rather Lat., Lith., and Est.) have finally returned to the maps used by American newspapers and TV, but as nomads. Ignoring all international treaties, Latvia becomes Estonia and Estonia becomes Latvia. Meanwhile Lithuania lurches towards Belarus, ignoring the threat posed by a ballooning Kaliningrad oblast.

Outside the émigré community and a few specialists, Americans know little of the Baltic States, Arvo Pärt  may have his listeners and Jaan Kross some readers, but Baltic culture remains something of a mystery. Larger bookshops might stock phrasebooks for the languages of Southeast Asian hill people, but not for the languages of those remote tribes inhabiting Tallinn, Vilnius and Riga. Avowedly, Baltic products other than dusty piles of amber in “Russian”, shops, are equally difficult to find.

Amusing as it may be, American ignorance of the Baltics is not without its dangers for a region very dependent on Western support. For example, “the Baltics” are repeatedly muddled up with “the Balkans” (Slovakia and Slovenia are faced with a similar problem) and at times it seems that this confusion has also coloured, if only subconciously, the American media’s response to the question of the Baltic’s Russian population. There is little real awareness of the region’s history and it is not unusual to see discussion of “Eastern European nationalism” that draws little distinction between, say, Serbia and Estonia. This, of course, can then be exploited by a Russia all too ready to describe Baltic citizenship laws as a form of ethnic cleansing.

Such talk is well received by America’s liberal intelligentsia with their guilty nostalgia for the Pax Sovietica. Meanwhile their old adversaries, the cold warriors, who in the past could always be relied upon to take up the cudgels for a “captive nation” are hopelessly divided as to how to respond to a Russia that is no longer an evil empire.

All is not lost, however. Memories of Baltic resistance to Soviet rule from 1989-91 have not entirely faded and there are still many here who wish the republics well, even if they do not know exactly where they are. Ever larger numbers of American tourists are returning from a Baltic increasingly touted as an attractive if still somewhat off-beat, destination. In addition, not all the stories coming from the region have been negative. Economic reform, particularly in Estonia, has attracted favourable attention and even The New York Times recently felt free to talk of the “Baltics’ new glow.”

Further positive reports can be expected if the Baltic States can show that they are heading in the direction of the free market and liberal democracy. As these come about, Americans will increasingly come to think of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as Western and (perhaps an obscure) part of their world, rather than Eastern. This would not exactly constitute a security guarantee, but it would be a good second best. Besides, the Clinton administration is not in the business of offering guarantees to anyone, but that is a different story.

Back to Normal

National Review, November 1, 1993 

Tallinn, August 93  © Andrew Stuttaford

AFTER JFK or Moscow's Sheremetyevo, the airport in Tallinn is something of a shock. Passport inspection takes no more than a minute (visas are not required for an increasing number of Westerners), and customs is a quick walk-through. Taxis are plentiful, and the drive downtown is easy. In short, for the Western traveler all is normal—and that is just fine with the Estonians. Mart Laar, the cheery 33-year-old historian who is now this Baltic state's prime minister, explains, "We are trying to build a normal, open European society." Pointing to the physical and psychological devastation left by fifty years of Soviet occupation, Laar warns that this will not be easy. "We didn't promise the very good life, the very big and quick success. . . . The only thing I promised was an enormous lot of work." Undaunted, Estonia is pressing on with radical free-market reforms. These are currently the work of the Center-Right coalition led by the Isamaa (Fatherland) Party, but most parties seem to support the free market. Socialism is widely seen as a failure, and disagreement mainly concerns the details and pace of reform.

Raekoja Plats, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

The early fruits of these reforms can already be seen in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. Restaurants and bars abound, and, to those familiar with Moscow's chaotic sidewalk retailers, Tallinn's shops are impressive. Other private businesses are appearing, with success usually evidenced by sleek mobile phones and even sleeker receptionists. The streetcars wear Coca-Cola's colors and "erootika" has long since replaced Pravda on the newsstands. From grey concrete suburbs to grey plastic shoes the Soviet inheritance is still visible; but, overall, the visitor is left in little doubt that this is a city rapidly rejoining the European mainstream.

Pikk, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

The consensus behind the economic reforms also reflects the current composition of the electorate. This is dominated by ethnic Estonians, despite the fact that today they account for only some 60 per cent of the population of 1.5 million. The preponderance of ethnic Estonian voters stems from the fact that the franchise at the time of the September 1992 elections was in effect restricted to citizens (and the descendants of citizens) of the independent, and largely homogeneous, Estonia annexed by the USSR in 1940. This has led to an electorate inspired and brought together by a common culture and history. In particular this electorate remembers the independent Estonia that emerged from the ruins of the Russian Empire in 1918 after centuries in which the Estonians had been dominated by (as one Tallinn museum glumly concedes) "German, Danish, Swedish, and Russian conquerors."

The development of the Estonian republic was far from smooth, but, by the time of its reconquest by Moscow in 1940, Estonia's per-capita income was roughly on a par with that of Finland. This is essential to understanding the drive behind today's reforms. Things may be difficult today, but Estonians can at least look back and see that it is possible to build an independent and prosperous Estonia.

In the two years since regaining independence in August 1991, Estonia has made extraordinary progress toward its goal of establishing a "normal" economy—despite suffering a (relatively modest) share of the post-Soviet disorder.

Tallinn, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Most importantly, perhaps, in June 1992 Estonia replaced the ruble with its own currency—the kroon. The kroon was linked to the Deutschmark at a fixed rate of 8 to 1. Devaluation is prohibited by law. The kroon is fully backed by Estonia's hard currency and gold reserves. The Estonian Central Bank, Eesti Pank, may issue new kroons only in line with increases in these reserves. Eesti Pank is not allowed to lend to the government, nor may the government run a deficit. In 1992, a year of deep economic crisis, the government's budget surplus was equivalent to 1.7 per cent of GDP, an achievement beyond the ability of most Western governments. By June 1993 foreign-exchange reserves had tripled, and even an initially skeptical IMF was impressed.

Tallinn, August 1993 @ Andrew Stuttaford

A "normal" money is the first step to a "normal" economy, and the kroon is, in the words of Eesti Pank's governor, "good for anything, from the latest model of Western car to a call girl." The contrast with the recent past is striking. In the dying days of the ruble, inflation was running at an annual rate of over 1,000 per cent. There was rationing, and many products were unavailable for those without hard currency. Inflation is now 40 per cent, a very good level by Eastern European standards, and falling. Goods have reappeared in the shops and are available to all, foreign or local, although to the average Estonian they remain expensive. To be sure, change has been far from painless. GDP has fallen by over 40 per cent since 1989, real disposable household income fell by more than 50 per cent in 1992 alone, and unemployment is many times higher than the official figure of 3 per cent. Estonians themselves, however, do not appear unduly downcast by this turn of events. Rather, they appear to relish their liberation from the lunatic Soviet economy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the economy has bottomed out and that, particularly in Tallinn, the private sector is showing real growth, much of which is not reflected in the official statistics. This is almost certainly true of the service sector, while so far as manufacturing is concerned, it is interesting to note that energy consumption has fallen by far less than would be suggested by official figures of falling production. Equally, one small indicator of the real development of the Estonian economy may be found in the fact that, throughout Eastern Europe, only Hungary has, per capita, more cellular-telephone subscribers.

Times remain hard, notably for the heavily indebted state businesses, and maintaining a sound monetary policy has not been easy. Nevertheless, Eesti Pank's tough line has already survived a commercial-banking crisis. Despite pressure, the government appears to be adopting a similar approach to economic policy, resisting, so far as possible, a regime of bail-out and subsidy.

Tallinn Town Hall, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford 

Prime Minister Laar clearly rejects protectionism and, as Economy Minister Toomas Sildmae explains, with a well-educated work force and wage rates a tenth of those in Western Europe, Estonia wants trade, not aid. More generally, Sildmae sees his job as creating "the framework for the normal development of business" rather than managing that business. The hope is that the private sector will take up the slack left by the retreating state sector.

Privatization is obviously critical to this, but, as is typical in Eastern Europe, it has not been a smooth process. There are the usual allegations of corruption and "spontaneous privatization," although there seems far less evidence of this than elsewhere.

Attempts to provide restitution for former owners unlawfully expropriated in the 1940s have also led to delay. Mart Laar defends this in terms that would astonish the United States Congress. "Western countries have forgotten that the basis of their economic system is [private] property." Laar feels that it is impossible to have an effective free market without restoring the value of property. Therefore, he wants to show that it is possible to give property back to its rightful owners—even after fifty years. There is more to this policy, however, than the restoration of incentive. Put simply, it was made clear to me in a number of conversations with different officials that the government wants to return this property because, morally, it is the right thing to do.

Pikk Jalg, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Despite the delays and difficulties, much of small business is now in private hands. In the important agricultural sector, the collective farms have been broken up. Overall, Economy Minister Sildmae estimates that 40 per cent of industrial production is now outside the state sector.

The larger enterprises continue to be a major economic problem, however. Although a surprising number have been sold, and more will be, others are clearly doomed. There is a general view that many of these factories are "too big for Estonia." They were built to satisfy the needs of the now-collapsed Soviet command economy, and, in the words of one official, they "are not exactly world class." Perhaps most seriously, they are largely manned by imported Russian workers and thereby combine the Soviet period's disastrous economic and demographic legacies.

THE FIRST Estonian Republic was a consciously ethnic state, home for a small nation denied self-determination for nearly seven hundred years. This was reflected in the racial mix; ethnic Estonians made up some 90 per cent of the population. Today's figure of 60 per cent is a direct result of the Soviet annexation, which led to massacre, deportation, and emigration, followed by a period of sustained Russian immigration.

Toompea, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

There has been some Russian emigration over the past two years, but Estonians seem to recognize that there can never be a return to the old homogeneous republic. The new citizenship laws reflect this. In essence, most Russians will be eligible for permanent resident status. A substantial number are also immediately eligible for Estonian citizenship and many more will become so after a period of residence. Russians will enjoy full social rights, and there will continue to he access to Russian-language schools. Applicants for Estonian citizenship will have to pass a fairly basic language test; with little more than one million Estonian speakers worldwide, such a requirement is understandable.

Nevertheless, this has been a difficult period for Estonia's Russians, many of whom have lived there for decades. In the Soviet era there was no need to learn Estonian. Few Russians had any real consciousness that they were living in another country. Literally overnight this population found itself "abroad." Despite this, Mart Laar feels that ethnic relations are improving. "The hate that existed five years ago is gone."

Certainly this appears true in Tallinn, where Russians make up about 50 per cent of the population. Lenin Boulevard is no more, but Russian-language street signs remain unmolested. More of a problem are a number of towns close to the Russian border. Their inhabitants are predominantly Russian, moved there by Moscow to man the large factories that no one now wants. Narva, the largest of these towns, still displays a statue of Lenin and has politics to match. Poorly informed, somewhat apathetic, and with little visible economic future, the people there have proved relatively easy to manipulate by a Soviet-style leadership. It is primarily to this population that Laar is referring when he says, "The main problem that we have with the Russians is that they are not Russians. Most of them are not feeling themselves as Russians. They are feeling themselves as Soviets. ... If they become Russian all the problems are solved."

Tallinn, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Undoubtedly it is more complex than that, and it is surprising that more Estonians will not consider transferring Narva and its problems to Russia. Nevertheless there are signs of hope. There is certainly ethnic tension in Estonia, but it has led to less violence than in, say, Germany, where the standard of living is far higher and the immigrant population is comparatively small. Russian opinion also appears far from monolithic, not least, perhaps, because many Russians in Estonia are well aware that they are economically far better off than their counterparts in Russia itself.

Ethnic relations in Estonia are never going to be easy. To Estonians their Russian population will always be a living reminder of the Soviet occupation. Equally, transformation to minority status will be difficult for the once imperial Russians. Nevertheless, if Estonia is left to itself and its innovative economic policies succeed, there is a chance that a modus vivendi can be found.

The problem, as always in this part of the Baltic, is that Estonia may not be left to itself. Six thousand Russian troops remain there, including a sizable detachment in Tallinn itself. In increasingly threatening terms Moscow has made it clear that further withdrawals will be dependent on what it deems to be fair treatment of Estonia's Russian population. This is in line with a general shift on Russia's part toward greater assertiveness in protecting what it feels to be its interests in its "near abroad"—the republics of the former USSR.

Red Army 'liberator', August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Much of this is no more than saber rattling, reflecting an increasingly complex political situation in Moscow. Nevertheless, the continued presence of Russian troops only serves to polarize opinion in Estonia. Equally, threats of external intervention give nothing but encouragement to hardliners on both sides.

Even with its current problems Estonia is (as I was repeatedly told) no Yugoslavia, but, if Russia continues to meddle, that is what much of the Baltic region may become.