I returned yesterday from my first visit to Russia — which consisted of a week in St. Petersburg and Moscow — and am struggling to provide some observations and impressions that won’t seem superficial to friends and colleagues in both countries. One reason I’m sensitive about this is that I often meet people in other parts of the world who say to me, quite confidently, “Oh, yes, I know all about the United States: I spent a week in Chicago.” But just as I sometimes joke that New York City is the “center of the Universe,” one of my Russian colleagues remarked at the end of our visit, “Moscow is Russia” … so, even though I travelled through only one of Russia’s eleven time zones, perhaps I did get at least a glimpse of the most important parts of this massive country.

To put my vintage-2008 impressions in perspective, I should also mention that I’m a child of the Cold War, and never expected that I would ever visit Russia during my lifetime. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was certainly aware of Sputnik and the military might of the Soviet Union; and I watched in fascination as the Soviet empire disintegrated into roughly a dozen separate republics and transformed itself into a capitalist economy. But the knowledge was all academic, and removed from my day-to-day experience — just as the news that most Americans read today about events in Baghdad and Tehran is more abstract than real.

But putting all that aside, here are my two basic impressions of the country: first, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is a beautiful city whose history and wide streets and historic palaces and art-filled museums (including the Hermitage, with over 3 million items of art) made me smile with pleasure. And second, Moscow is a huge, throbbing, aggressive, traffice-jammed, breathtakingly expensive powerhouse of a city, with 14 million inhabitants who seem ready to compete with New York and London and Tokyo and Shanghai and Bangalore and every other center of power around the globe. As such, the contrast between St. Petersburg and Moscow was roughly similar to the contrast an American sees between Boston and New York.

But Moscow actually reminded me somewhat more of Las Vegas than New York: much of the downtown area was garish and brightly lit, with casinos doing their best to lure patrons in for gambling; well, perhaps it was a little like Times Square in New York City. Of course, Times Square isn’t a good representation of the entire spectrum of neighborhoods and regions of New York City (especially when one thinks of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island); and in a similar fashion, I eventually traveled through various other parts of Moscow that seemed more residential and settled.

The “expensive” aspect of Moscow was an interesting anomaly: a Westerner staying in a first-class hotel can expect to spend $200 for an average bottle of California wine, and even more for French wine. Breakfast for two in our hotel room was a hundred dollars, and a small can of diet-Coke in the mini-bar was $15. But “average” Russians obviously don’t spend that kind of money, and I could even see the contrast while visiting an icon of American culture: lunch for two at McDonald’s was a little under $9. (There are now a couple dozen McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, and they seem jammed at all hours of the day: when I was there, there were 20 separate lines of people, and each line was at least 10 people long.)

In between the low-cost fast-food economy, and the rarefied world of Bentleys and Mercedes and hundred-dollar bottles of wine (note: the Wikipedia article on Moscow claims that it is the home to the largest number of billionaires in the world), I assume there’s a middle-class society, with middle-class salaries and expenses — though someone did tell me (seriously, I think) that there is no middle class in Russia — and that people are either very poor or very rich. A week’s visit isn’t long enough to get any real sense of proportion about such issues; and even if I could have understood the social/economic demographics of Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have no idea if it represents the rest of this enormous country.

Indeed, I got a brief impression that Moscow and St. Petersburg might well be isolated enclaves, unlike the rest of the country, during a 5-hour train ride between the two cities. The train was punctual and efficient and comfortable, though it seemed a little more drab than the Amtrak Acela that whisks people back and forth between New York and Washington; but what really struck me was the drab nature of the countryside as we rolled along the relatively flat, wooded terrain. After passing through grim suburbs outside St. Petersburg, and then cemeteries and construction sites, most of what I saw (aside from birch forests and stands of pine trees) consisted of small villages along the train track, with tiny wooden homes covered with corrugate-iron roofs. It reminded me very much of the small towns and villages in the interior of Alaska, though I never got off the train to actually see what any of these villages was really like.

Aside from the garish, high-priced nature of Moscow, one of the other unforgettable impressions was the traffic: massive gridlock and traffic jams everywhere, at almost every hour of the day or night (except at 4 AM, when we headed from downtown to Domededovo Airport for our flight home). In many cases, traffic is literally at a standstill for long periods of time; and parking in the downtown area seems utterly chaotic. As a result, many people depend instead on the Moscow metro for local travel; in 2007, it was the most heavily-used metro system in the world, exceeding both Tokyo and New York.

My impressions of Russian culture and people are somewhat haphazard, and quite possibly inaccurate; but I’ll pass them along for whatever they’re worth. First, I was impressed by the complete absence of trash and litter in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps this is because I arrived in Russia after spending a couple days in Bangalore, India — which is quite filthy by comparison. But New York is filthy, too, by comparison: in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I saw no trash, no newspapers blowing along the street, no food-wrappers, no plastic cups. Also: most of the men were relatively unattractive and poorly dressed. By contrast, the women were tall, thin, attractive, stylishly dressed in miniskirts or tight jeans, and consistently wearing high-heeled shoes even in places where it made no sense (it seemed almost impossible, for example, to walk across the cobblestones in Red Square in high-heeled shoes; but women did so without hesitating).

The stylish women, by the way, as well as the frumpily-dressed men, were uniformly young — either in their early twenties, or even younger. I did see a few “babushka” women begging for coins in various places, but I didn’t see any old men; perhaps that’s because the average life expectancy for Russian men is only 56 years. Because of a combination of low birth rates, high abortion rates, alcoholism, stress, and various other health problems, the population of Russia has been declining — in absolute terms — for the past several years, and is not expected to stabilize until approximately 2020.

Also, I found it interesting that almost nobody hesitated to offer a wide range of criticisms and cynical comments about Vladimir Putin, though I couldn’t help noticing lots of plain-clothes police throughout Moscow, with sunglasses and dark-tinted official cars. On the other hand, no one offered any criticisms — or even showed any interest — in the politics or actions of George Bush. For that matter, nobody showed any curiosity about the current U.S. presidential campaign, sports, movies, music, or any other aspect of American culture; and I only saw (or heard) one American tourist during the entire trip (but lots of American, British, and European business people in the hotels where I stayed).

So much for the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg. What about the computer industry, which was my official justification for visiting the country? Again, my visit was too short to form any in-depth conclusions, and I didn’t have a chance to visit any IT organizations or Silicon-Valley-style software shops. But here are the quick impressions I got from meeting and chatting with a couple hundred people in five different presentations that I gave during my visit:

1. Everyone seems well-read, and well-informed about current developments in software engineering, project management, and computer science. They’re hungry for knowledge, and they’re willing to do their homework.
2. For example, virtually everyone in my audiences was familiar with the concept of “function points” as a language-independent metric for measuring the size of a computer program.
3. Also, I was surprised by the number of people in my presentations who said their software organization had received an SEI-CMM “Capability Maturity Model” assessment, and even more surprised by the number of people who said their IT organization had achieved level-3, level-4, or even level-5. It’s not as high as one might expect in India, but significantly higher than what I’ve seen in the U.S.
4. On the other hand, I didn’t see much evidence of tool usage. An informal survey, for example, indicated that far less than five percent of the people in my presentations were using software estimating tools based on models like COCOMO; in the U.S., the figure is typically closer to ten percent.
5. The English literacy rate was much higher than I expected. When I give presentations in most parts of Europe, Asia, or South America, at least half of the audience listens to simultaneous interpreters via headphones; in Russia, roughly 75% listened to me in English, without translation.
6. I saw two Macintoshes in the audience; I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad, or irrelevant — but I found it interesting.
7. There is a very large and active group in Moscow discussing and debating agile software development; I was encouraged by this, and was again impressed by how well-read and well-informed people were on this topic.
8. I learned that while it’s amusing for Americans to joke about being banished to Siberia for various forms of misbehavior, it doesn’t make any sense to Russians in the software industry. The largest city in Siberia, Novosobirsk, is home to a thriving software outsourcing industry, and many Russians consider it a pleasant place to live.
9. Notwithstanding the success of outsourcing firms in Novosobirsk, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, I did not get the impression that Russia is likely to mount a serious competitive challenge to the outsourcing industry of India or China. Historically, Russian programmers have succeeded with outsourcing, especially for customers in Europe; but their salaries have increased dramatically in recent years (partly because of the inflation associated with the oil industry), and the labor rates are now almost comparable with Europe and the U.S. Aside from that, the population of Russia in January 2008 was a mere 142 million; that pales in comparison to the one billion inhabitants of India and the 1.3 billion inhabitants of China.

So … that’s what I saw, and what I learned, during my whirlwind visit to Russia. My wife and I took a couple hundred photographs during the trip, and we’re organizing them into a coherent collection (and removing most of the redundant pictures of Lenin’s Tomb and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square). Once we’ve finished, we’ll upload everything into an album on my Flickr archives; check back from time to time to see if they’re there…