Watch ordinary Russians in the 1980s and you’ll understand the rise of Putin

I suppose my point was that I had been convinced that the Russians were horrible people by all the stuff I had read in the West up to that point.When I actually had to interact with them in the flesh, I found that the Western stereotypes of Russians that we had been given were all wrong.

On my first morning in Moscow, I asked the hotel concierge for my passport. She asked what I was doing that made that necessary. I said 'I'm going into the City. Don't I have to have it on me if somebody asks me for my papers?' She burst out laughing and said 'You don't need your passport for that. But you can take it with you if you want.' I replied 'No, don't worry about it then. It'll be safer here with you than with me.'

But they DO think differently. One area that I discovered was in the deal-making process. Westerners tend to make deals quickly, and then try to find loopholes in that deal AFTERWARDS to reduce costs to themselves. Russians are painful for Westerners to make deals with as they will debate all the various points of difference, even tiny ones, BEFORE the deal is struck. Sometimes, there is no deal made. However, any deal that is struck with Russians will be followed both to the letter and the spirit of that deal.

An example of this is that gas supplies were being made to the Europeans for years and years under existing deals that were in place, even as more and more sanctions were placed on the Russians by the Europeans.

I only had one interaction with the police. I was walking across Red Square when a cop car pulled up and they blew a whistle at me. I had no clue. Then a another pedestrian said to me in English, "You have to walk between the marked lines." I had been walking just anywhere on the roadway. And it is a 'roadway for vehicles', not a 'square for pedestrians' to go where they like. I suppose the cops thought it'd be too much paperwork to charge me with jay-walking.