From Russia with Love (and Vodka): A World Cup Travelogue

My first twenty minutes in Moscow: thirty-six hours of no sleep, an Uber that used the central reservation as an overtaking lane, and me stumbling into daylight in a Strip Tees Aaron Mooy tee with absolutely no idea where I was or which direction anything was in. Standard arrival.

Within three minutes, three different people had stopped to help with the metro map. One of them — could have been a graphic designer, could have been a bouncer, probably both — drew the route on his own palm like a man who'd run out of paper years ago and adapted. He smiled when I said "spasibo" in an accent that made it sound like a completely different word. He didn't point at the platform. He walked us to it.

Cold? No. Not even slightly. These were people who just wanted an excuse to talk to someone. The stereotype was dead before it had unpacked its bags.

I'd mentally prepared for cabbage. That's not a joke — I'd genuinely made peace with three weeks of beige food and had packed expectations so low they were basically underground. What I got instead was one of the better eating trips of my adult life, which I mention partly because it's true and partly because I'm still slightly annoyed nobody told me.

Saint Petersburg first: salads so delicate and considered they looked like someone had spent the morning on them, which they probably had. Then khachapuri — Georgian cheese bread, technically, but really just the platonic ideal of bread — at a table where I'd been braced for something the colour of a filing cabinet. Kazan: smoked fish and pickled things that would embarrass a Copenhagen natural wine bar. Sochi: a seafront café with grilled vegetables, tzatziki, olive oil. I genuinely checked we hadn't drifted into Greece.

Russian food isn't stodgy. It's just not Instagram-friendly, so nobody talks about it. Their loss.

Vassily looked like the kind of man who gets cast as the villain's henchman — broad, quiet, the sort of stillness that makes you wonder what he's thinking. He was, it turned out, a secondary school teacher from Moscow with extremely specific opinions about how vodka should be consumed.

Opening night. Russia vs Saudi Arabia. Half the city seemed to be in the same bar. Vassily materialised, put shots in front of us, and raised a hand before we could drink. There was a technique, he explained. Breathe in. Sip. Breathe out through the nose. "This way, no hangover." He said this with the gravity of someone passing on classified information.

He was lying about the hangover. But he spent the next three hours introducing us to people, paying for rounds, and treating us with the easy generosity of someone who'd decided we were worth knowing. Which, if you think about it, is the best thing a stranger can do.

Later: Ivan and David, a couple with excellent English and apparently bottomless goodwill, who materialised from the crowd and spent the rest of the night dragging us through Moscow — rooftop bars, basement bars, at least one venue that appeared to be someone's kitchen — announcing at each stop that we were their guests and that guests do not pay. We didn't pay. We got home very late. I have thought about that night many times since.

Moscow felt genuinely progressive. The city Ivan and David showed us — their Moscow, the one that existed in rooftop bars and basement clubs and the confidence of people who'd decided they weren't going to apologise for who they were — felt like somewhere that had moved past the old version of itself. You could believe it. I did believe it, for most of that first week.

Then Saint Petersburg. A bar so faithfully recreated from Melbourne's laneway scene — Edison bulbs, ironic signage, bartenders who looked like they'd cycled there — that I briefly forgot which continent I was on. Then a chant went up during the match. I leaned over to a Russian beside me. "What does that mean?" He paused. "It's… homophobic." He said it quietly, the way you say something you didn't choose to have to say.

The bar kept going. Same noise, same energy, same faces. The crack was invisible unless you'd been told where to look. Russia is changing, and the people I met in Moscow were proof of that. But it's changing unevenly — in places and circles and generations — and Saint Petersburg was the reminder that progress isn't a straight line or a guaranteed destination.¹

Moscow at night looks like it was designed by someone with an extremely high opinion of Moscow. Red Square is so aggressively beautiful it's almost confrontational. St Basil's Cathedral — which I'd seen in a thousand photographs and assumed I was prepared for — is not something you can be prepared for. It's the kind of building that makes you wonder what the architect was on, and then makes you grateful they were on it.²

Saint Petersburg felt like Copenhagen that had done a semester abroad in Stockholm and come back with better taste. Kazan — the Tatar capital, mosques and Orthodox churches fifty metres apart, both thriving, nobody finding it remarkable — was young and confident and genuinely surprising. Sochi was a beach resort that had briefly hosted the Winter Olympics and was still slightly confused about its identity, in a charming way.

Samara, fine, was a grid of Soviet-era blocks that looked like someone had designed a city by describing it over the phone. But even there, strangers smiled at us, insisted on photographs, and offered beer. Grey cities don't do that.

I had a set of rules I'd never been taught and couldn't source: don't make eye contact with the police, don't go out alone at night, don't accept drinks from strangers, don't get in unmarked taxis, and — this one was oddly specific — don't photograph anything that looks official. I wrote none of them down, which tells you how seriously I took them.

The tournament was immaculately run. Security was everywhere and felt like nothing — present, professional, entirely unthreatening. At no point did anyone attempt to extract money from me, confiscate my passport, or suggest I was in any kind of danger. The whole thing worked with an efficiency that made some Western tournaments look shabby by comparison.

The closest we came to an incident was when my mate and our two new Danish friends — who had excellent instincts about football and catastrophic ones about public statuary after midnight — decided to climb a monument in Samara. The officer who found them sighed like a man counting down the days to retirement, said something none of us understood, and walked away. That was it.

There is one stereotype about Russia that I can confirm without hesitation: the taxis. Every ride was an act of faith in something — physics, fate, the structural integrity of a 2009 Lada. Seatbelts were decorative. Speed limits were suggestions. Lane markings appeared to be advisory at best.

But the Sochi ride deserves its own entry in the record books. Match day, Australia vs Peru, we'd booked a car from our hotel — which we'd had the foresight to book several kilometres from the stadium — and set off with thirty minutes to spare. Plenty of time. The driver, a man of serene self-confidence, chose a road that turned out to be completely gridlocked. He sat in this traffic for a while, came to some internal conclusion, and stopped the car. Via Google Translate, he informed us that this was where the relationship ended and we should get out.

Behind me, my travel companions had not noticed any of this. They were inflating kangaroos. Full-size inflatable kangaroos, in the back of a stationary Russian Uber, twenty-five minutes from kick-off. I conducted what I can only describe as an emergency bilateral negotiation through a phone screen with a man who had already emotionally checked out of the journey. Eventually — and I genuinely don't know why — he restarted the car. We made it. Just.

Russian fashion is not fur hats and tracksuits. I want to be very clear about this. The cities — Moscow especially, but Saint Petersburg not far behind — were full of people who dressed with a specificity and confidence that made me feel underdressed in a way I hadn't anticipated. At the barber in Moscow, I sat next to a man with the most extraordinary Buffon tattoo I've ever seen on a forearm. Fully rendered. Technically impressive. The kind of thing that takes commitment in every sense of the word.

The Strip Tees, though, held their own. In Red Square, a man stopped to look at the Mile Jedinak Supreme Leader tee — Jedinak as propaganda poster, because he is the Supreme Leader and Strip Tees understood this before most people did — and asked who it was. "Central Coast Mariners legend," I said. "World Cup penalty hat-trick." He nodded slowly in the way you nod when something has been explained to you and you're still not entirely sure what it means. We shook hands anyway.

At the Propaganda Museum, the Mooyakovski tee — Aaron Mooy as Soviet-era futurist icon, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type — earned a long look from the attendant and a single word: "brave." I choose to read that as a compliment.

We'd left the Denmark tickets embarrassingly late. The only thing left by the time we looked was a hospitality package that cost approximately three times a reasonable amount and included a private box, food, champagne, and what turned out to be an unlimited supply of prawns. We treated all of this like a challenge.

It also transpired that we were sharing the box with Denmark's answer to Fatboy Slim. We had no idea who he was — not a clue, didn't know him from a bar of salt — but our new Danish friends went slightly strange when he walked in, the way people go slightly strange when someone genuinely famous appears in an unexpected setting. We nodded along with the composed authority of people who absolutely also knew who this was. We did not.

When Jedinak stepped up for the penalty — calm, unhurried, already certain — I was holding a glass of champagne next to a man whose name I still don't know, surrounded by Danes who had briefly lost the ability to be cool.³

Which is, in the end, what the box actually bought us. Not the champagne, the taste of which I couldn't tell you. Not the prawns, of which I could give you an approximate number. Four Danes going quietly to pieces over a DJ, in a room built for people who are never impressed by anything. You can buy the luxury. The fun turns up on its own, or it doesn't.

I want to be clear about something upfront: I was respectful. We were all respectful. Nobody goes to another country as a guest and starts demanding that strangers account for their government's foreign policy over a beer. That's not travel, it's an interrogation. So the conversations about politics that did happen, happened because people wanted to have them — and what they said was far more interesting than anything we'd been led to expect.

The first thing I noticed was not a conversation at all. It was a gesture. I have a habit, as anyone who knows me will confirm, of walking around with my phone out listening to podcasts. In Russia, on several occasions, I noticed people near me glancing down at the phone — circumspectly, quickly — then away. Not paranoid. Not hostile. Just checking. Making sure I wasn't filming them. In public, in broad daylight, at a football tournament, people were quietly double-checking that the foreigner wasn't recording them.

That told me more about the ambient political temperature than any newspaper article had.

And then there were the Putin t-shirts. Not the tourist market stuff — the unironic strongman mugs and fridge magnets that exist in every country's souvenir economy. Something stranger. Putin's face appearing on t-shirts around the city in ways I couldn't entirely decode. Were they mocking? Celebratory? Genuinely ironic, or the kind of irony that's actually just sincerity wearing a disguise? I honestly couldn't tell. Which is, I suspect, precisely the point.⁴

What they were absolutely willing to talk about was the transition. One conversation in particular has stayed with me — with an older man whose English was careful and deliberate. He described waking up one morning in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union dissolved, and being handed papers. Papers that told him the flat his family had lived in for decades — state-owned, allocated, always technically someone else's — was now his. Just like that. One morning not owning it. The next morning, owning it. He looked at me as if still slightly baffled. "We did not know what to do with it," he said. "We had never owned anything."

That story contains everything: the disorientation of a system collapsing, the strange vertigo of sudden ownership, and underneath it, a generation who had to reinvent their relationship with property — and freedom — essentially overnight. It also explained the older Russians I met who still spoke of the Soviet era with something that wasn't quite nostalgia but was adjacent to it. Not longing for the ideology. Longing for the certainty. The younger people we met felt entirely differently — open, restless, looking outward. Same country. Completely different planets.⁵

I had assumed I would need Russian. Not a few words for politeness — full Russian, Cyrillic and all, because apparently nobody over there speaks a word of English and you will wander the streets communicating exclusively through mime and desperation. This turned out to be, like most of what I brought with me, only about forty percent accurate.

Moscow and Saint Petersburg were fine. Kazan was harder. The Tatar capital — a genuinely different place culturally, with its mosques and Orthodox churches sitting a few hundred metres apart with magnificent mutual indifference — had fewer English speakers, and the ones who existed were more likely to be twenty-two and working in hospitality than, say, the man at the train station who handled our tickets with the calm authority of someone who had never needed another language in his life and saw no reason to start now.

The point is: you manage. Russian isn't necessary. What's necessary is patience, a willingness to look faintly ridiculous, and a phone with a full charge.

Here is what I actually remember most from Russia, which is not a goal or a result or even the taxi. It's the moments between the football. Mexican fans in sombreros dancing with German supporters who had stopped caring about their own team's implosion. Russian ultras sharing beers with Japanese tourists and finding, to everyone's surprise, a common ground consisting mainly of beer and enthusiasm. Senegalese drummers and Australian kangaroo inflatables and the entire population of Iceland making a noise that should not have been possible from a country of 340,000 people.

For three weeks, none of the other stuff mattered. The politics. The headlines. A lifetime's accumulation of received wisdom about what Russia was and who Russians were. All of it — suspended, or at least temporarily irrelevant, replaced by something noisier and warmer and considerably more fun.

That's what a World Cup does when it works. It makes the country it's in feel briefly like a place that belongs to everyone. Russia, for three weeks in the summer of 2018, belonged to everyone. We just happened to be there.

Not once. Sochi in June felt like Queensland — thirty-two degrees, the beach full, people swimming as though the country's entire reputation were somebody else's problem. Twelve myths had already gone. This one went down on a deck chair, in the sun, in a pair of shorts I had packed apologetically and worn every day since.

I came home broke, slightly broken, and very glad I'd gone. Three new friends named Igor — all different, none related, which says something I'm still not sure how to articulate about Russian culture. A suitcase that smelled of borscht. Memories I've already told too many times at dinner parties and will continue to tell regardless.

Would I go back? Without question. Would I bring electrolytes? Absolutely. Would I stay closer to the stadium? Probably not. Some mistakes are load-bearing.