Christmas trees in the Kremlin
Don Dunnington ’97

his summer, I’ll visit that Christmas shop on the boardwalk in Ocean City. But rather than childhood memories, I’ll be thinking of Christmas trees I saw in Moscow last January. Having grown up in Cold War America, Christmas in Russia is an idea harder to get my mind around than summer icicles and sleigh bells at the Jersey Shore.

Yet last Christmas Eve, I received an e-mail invitation to teach at Moscow’s first American University. Three weeks later, I was off to Russia to teach marketing strategy to 33 MBA students.

January is not a time Americans dream of visiting Russia. Indeed, a market researcher I met in Moscow says Americans seldom think of Russia in any season. I had certainly fit that characterization and with little time to study before-hand, my wife, Karen, and I arrived in Moscow with few expectations of what we might find.

The first thing we experienced is all too common to air travel everywhere: two bags failed to make the connection. Over the next two hours we began to fear Soviet-style bureaucracy remains in control of Russia, or at least in charge of Aeroflot’s luggage handlers. It took endless line-waiting and form-filling—everything in duplicate, without carbons—to log our missing property.

The chief clerk at last waved a telex, indicating Aeroflot had found our bags in Amsterdam. They would send them the next day, she pronounced, though I didn’t share her conviction. With my only hope resting in this woman’s hands, I thanked her for her help and especially for her patience with my lack of Russian.

She smiled for the first time and offered something unexpected from a woman old enough to have been born and raised in the fullness of the Soviet era. “God bless,” she said, providing our first hint of how completely Soviet culture has reverted to older, deeper roots in Orthodox Russia. And then, as we left the airport, we were amazed to see Christmas trees in every public park or commercial square, even in the heart of the Kremlin.

My MBA students laughed when I used my experience with Aeroflot as an example of a company that needs better service to compete in the global market. Laughing gave us a break from the hard work of the course. We met three hours every night for two weeks—an entire semester of marketing strategy to be covered in 10 classes. Having completed my MA at Rowan while working full-time, I appreciated the effort they were making to be there every night. Most worked during the day and many were still feeling the pain of the devastating Ruble devaluation of 1998 that saw Russia’s wealth decline by more than 60 percent.

Moscow is an international city, and my students came from Siberia, Georgia, Beijing, Ukraine, Estonia. But what struck me was how global our tastes have become. The major assignment for the class was to develop a marketing plan. One student focused on the seven Moscow-area McDonald’s restaurants. A student from China did his plan for a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. Others considered native Russian enterprises: A start-up coffee distributor believes tea-drinking Russians will discover coffee. And there were students hoping to start a high-style clothing boutique or a chain of ice cream stores.
In my classroom, in shops, hotels, restaurants and supermarkets—wherever I went, I saw the same picture. People in Russia have entered the global marketplace with enthusiasm and are intent on growing their own futures.

So sometime between Memorial Day and July 4 when I make my escape to the chill of the Christmas shop, I’ll say a special prayer of thanks for the freedom that was won for us. And I’ll remember the American fighters who followed, in Civil War, World Wars, Cold War and now the War on Terrorism. In preserving our liberty, Americans have helped to extend freedom across the globe. And come Labor Day, when another summer season comes to an unofficial close and we near the first anniversary of a terrible day we simply call “9-11,” I’ll be reassured by the vision of Christmas trees in Moscow.

Don earned an MA in Public Relations. He teaches marketing communications and Internet PR at Rowan.