Finneran: Borscht Baby, Borscht

Friday, August 09, 2019

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Borscht PHOTO: Liz West/Wikipedia

We were in St. Petersburg and it was almost lunchtime.

Our guide and translator was Natalia. She’s a teacher during the school year, supplementing her income by providing tours to visitors during the busy summer months. She was delightful in conversation and very knowledgeable regarding Russian history and its rulers.

The must-see sites of St. Petersburg can become very crowded during tourist season and without Natalia we would have been overwhelmed. The sheer size of The Hermitage, Catherine’s Palace, and Peter’s Summer Palace is staggering. And the collections they house---paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture---defy description. A visitor could easily spend an industrious and fruitful month in each place and still barely scratch the surface of such precious collections.

The word vast comes to mind…………………………………but, back to lunch.

Natalia had a suggestion and my wife Donna immediately rose to the challenge of a hot summer day in Russia. We went to the House of Vodka! I kid you not. There’s even a “Museum of Vodka” attached to the restaurant. And you know the phrase “when in Rome do as the Romans do”……….so when in Russia we decided to do what the Russians do……a shot of vodka to start lunch and another shot of vodka to finish.

Donna had twisted her ankle in Helsinki and we were doing a lot of walking so she viewed the vodka interlude as medicinal, engaging in a form of Russian national healthcare. Needless to say, after two strong shots of vodka she was prepared to march and, if necessary, to fight Germans along the way. I was surprised that she did not break out singing the Russian National Anthem and playing high-level hockey.

As for me, the vodka was fine, but the borscht was better. What a meal, fit for a king or even a tsar. I suspect that a Russian winter is fairly easily navigated with those two Russian essentials at hand---borscht and vodka. If you’re ever in the House of Vodka, get the borscht.

Our trip had started in Berlin, hard by the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. Berlin is not a pretty city. It is not Paris or Vienna. It is not Prague or Budapest. There’s a certain grimness to the city, possibly due to the horrifically grim role initially played by Nazi Germany, then further enhanced by the post-war construction of the Berlin Wall. It’s an unspeakably evil ideology which embraces walls, guard dogs, barbed wire, and machine guns in order to keep a population in political bondage.

We visited a small museum next to Checkpoint Charley in what was the “American sector” of Berlin and there we were reminded of just how degraded and deadly a divided Germany proved to be. For lovers of freedom, East Germany and the Russian sector of Berlin were utterly foreboding. Indeed, in my lifetime, the most stirring and meaningful words uttered by a President of the United States were Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gorbachev to “come to Berlin Mr. Gorbachev and tear down this wall”.

To watch that speech in that museum to freedom lovers was a reminder of America the good.

And while I loved the borscht and Natalia and St. Petersburg, it’s really nice to be home.

God bless America.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio