Further to my post last week concerning Russian drinking habits, I thought readers might be interested to read a handful of impressionistic sketches of the country and its people. They’re drawn from my experiences studying, traveling and working in Russia during the 1990s. Whilst I found the place fascinating, I always felt glad to leave. The weather, corruption, bureaucracy, crime, disorganisation and inequality make it a tough place to live and work. But what really wore me down was the deep-seated cynicism and paranoia that permeates the culture.
These sketches happen to have some topical interest as last week saw Russia very publicly accused of being a ‘mafia state’ the day before its selection to host the 2018 World Cup. I’m ambivalent about this latter success – happy for the Russians but concerned about what it might do for their corrupt and malevolent government.
Incidentally, these bits of writing turned out to be the beginnings of a novel, which I finished earlier this year. To slip into would-be publishers’ blurb for a moment:
Set in London, the Cotswolds and St Petersburg, Region of Sin is a novel of excitement and intrigue where corruption, international finance, espionage and terrorism intertwine to fatal effect, and where only love can offer redemption.
Surely irresistible! If anyone is interested in helping me publish it, please get in touch.
Walking back to my hotel in Nizhny Novgorod in the early hours. It’s too cold to smoke and the snow’s so thick on the ground the only way to get around is to walk down the middle of the road, jumping into a drift when a car or lorry swishes by. I turn into the street my hotel is on and in the dull, white glow of the street lights see a gang of workers clearing debris left in the wake of a snow-plough. They’re using extra-wide brushes that look like robust, supersize windscreen wipers. I get closer and see they’re little old ladies, leaning into the brushes, putting all of their modest poundage into shifting lumps of ice and snow. They’re so wrapped up they look like badly-rolled carpets, stumpy and bulging. As I walk past I look into one of their brown, walnut faces, not unlike my grandmother’s. The eyes are impassive.
I’m sitting in the boardroom of a Russian bank, in the second day of negotiations concerning the split of fees on a bond deal. We’re down to who gets the last few basis points. It’s Friday afternoon and we’re booked on a plane back to London that evening. But we’re not moving; we’re arguing in circles. Suddenly, the double doors swing open and in struts the boss: short, pale, curly-haired, snub-nosed. He starts shouting in Russian, gesticulating angrily. I don’t understand it all but I can tell he’s swearing and delivering some sort of ultimatum. He struts back out. My colleague and I go into conference: he’s said that if we don’t fold, our employer will never do business in Russia again; he also advises us that it would not be in our best interests to spend the weekend in Moscow. We call London, fold and are on the plane that evening.
I’m staying with a family, as a lodger, whilst I do a language course. My landlady, a young, single mother, who shares the two-bedroom flat with her son, brother, father and, temporarily, me is generous and caring. She asks me if she can host a dinner for me and a couple of friends, one of whom has come over to pick me up a couple of times and has got on well with her. I gratefully accept. The night of the dinner arrives. My two friends are female academics, both fluent Russian speakers, and the dinner passes convivially. After a few vodkas everyone starts talking more freely. We move – inevitably – on to The State of Present-Day Russia, and my landlady and her brother inform us they hate the Jews. They were behind the Revolution and also the collapse of the Soviet Union. They run international finance and through that the big Russian enterprises: if only Russia could be free of them, all would be well. My two guests are Jewish. Both look Jewish and one has an unmistakably Jewish name. We move swiftly on, still friendly. The next day, feeling I should say something, I tell my landlady my guests were Jewish – she shrugs her shoulders. I tell her I’m an eighth Jewish – she pats me on the shoulder, breaks into a consoling, indulgent smile and says “But Gareth, you are one of the good ones”.
I’m in a provincial Russian hotel. It’s only moderately dirty. Every night there’s a raucous cabaret that goes on until about midnight. Sometime after the music dies down there’s a knock on the door. Insanely (as I later reflect), I open it. A short, slab-faced man faces me. He’s wearing a skiing jacket and swaying. He demands dollars. I say I haven’t got any. Rather desperately I inform him I’m staying here as a guest of the Governor. He appraises me, seems to make a decision and walks away down the corridor. I close the door and lock it. When I check out the next morning, he’s next to me in the queue. He doesn’t meet my eye.
I’m in Ufa, capital of the Bashkortostan Autonomous Region in the Urals. For reasons that escape me, it’s shortly before dawn and a colleague who’s been here before asks our driver to take us to a certain square. We pull into it just as it’s getting light; it’s open at one end. Looking east it’s apparent that we’re on the highest point of a river bluff, high up on the edge of the fault line that divides Europe from Asia. We look out over the drop, past an enormous, thrusting man-on-horse statue – an ancient Bashkir proletarian hero. Ahead of us, into the smoky lemon light of the dawn, stretch Asian steppes flat-lining into the horizon. I’ve only ever experienced such visual depth when looking into the Grand Canyon. It’s like peering at the moon.
Wonderful vignettes, these. The dinner-party anti-semitism one is profoundly disturbing.
So far, I have gained all my knowledge of contemporary Russia from reading The Dabbler. This means I have built up a picture of the country as an enormous holding pen for cold drunk psychopaths.
Another super post. The impression forming is that nothing changes as the centuries pass, a desperate squirming heap with a few unpleasant people on top for whom power means ruling by fist and fear. Wars are much easier when people shrug their shoulders. Shudder. It does make one realize how very lucky we are, where we are. I wonder whether travel, history or journalism, non-fiction anyway, is a lot easier to place with publishers than a novel, at least as a first book. Maybe first catch your agent?
Riveting Gaw, from our very own Moscow correspondent, nothing worse than a Bashkortostan in the Urals. Lapse into Victorian vernacular and we may have a budding Turgenev.
Thanks all. I sometimes think Russia is better experienced through its great novels and films! On the other hand, I did have some good times there, as indicated in last week’s post and the final one of these sketches – it’s just that the bad things seem to stick in one’s mind more.
Mark, I’ve approached a number of agents and think I’ve been quite close to being taken on, having been asked to submit the entire manuscript. But they all tell me it’s a tough market out there for first books. One of them also said the book needed to be 20,000 words longer to hit the thriller benchmark size of 90,000 words (not that the books of John Buchan, one of my inspirations, were this long…).
‘The smoky lemon light’. ‘like peering at the moon’, I love the way you paint the sky. And the old ladies ‘like badly-rolled carpets’ – disturbing and vivid prose. Like worm, my knowledge of Russia is also being expanded Dabbler-style, so many thanks for this.I look forward to reading your novel once it’s published.
Am I the only one who has this picture of Gaw, Alan Bates-like, cashmere overcoat on shoulders, trilby perched on two hairs, whistling a Jack Buchanan number, pursued by Coral Browne making out shopping lists and a bandy legged Russian pooftah, all being followed by a black Zavod imeni Likhachova occupied by two suspicious looking leather coated heavies. They all disappear into GUM, except the car of course.
I visited five times in the very late eighties (Moscow, Leningrad and Murmansk) and even though glasnost was in full swing and I was protected by officialdom and diplomatic status, I found it an eerie and forbidding place with a prevailing feel of danger lurking around the corner. The flight out to the West always felt like liberation from a POW camp.
The experience caused me to despise Western fellow-travellers at a much deeper and visceral level. It’s one thing to fight an intellectual duel through books and journals, quite another to walk streets enveloped in grey hardship and fear and pronounce them worthy of admiration. But even though the glory days of Western apologists for Stalin were long passed, I still saw plenty of it. My first trip was accompanying a half-dozen M.P.s to a parliamentary conference. One was a leftish liberal of European birth who fancied himself a profound thinker much above the tree-chopping Canadian rabble. One evening we decided to take the subway to the theatre to see their famous artistic stations. We never found them, but we were hemmed in tightly by throngs of dowdy looking people staring at their feet, not saying a word to anyone and doing everything they could to make themselves invisible. Silent as a funeral. After about ten stops of reflecting on what horrors would ground down a whole population, I heard the M.P. say to his colleague:: “You can tell these people are very deep.”
Thanks Susan. I like your style: ‘once it’s published’!
Malty, I aspire to look like Alan Bates in that play in about twenty years time (very good play it was too, wasn’t it?). And I’m more of a sheepskin hat or tweed cap man myself. Only the Alan Bates of this world are able to wear a trilby with confidence nowadays.
Peter: Great story! Sadly Russia is still profoundly damaged by its Soviet experience. The Soviet system destroyed notions of honesty and truth as much as anything – and they’re a lot more difficult to reconstruct than flats and factories.
GAW, your writing (here and elsewhere) reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels.
That is, in case you haven’t read his books, a good thing.
I haven’t read them but my wife has read Gorky Park, which she thought was good. Thanks Skip!
Wonderful vignettes. Too good not to be published.
What illusions I had that it would all be fine post-89. Hah. The one and only positive thing you could say about visiting in Soviet times was that, as a foreigner, you could walk the streets without any chance of being mugged. But it was definitely a banging head against wall kind of experience (so nice when you stopped – or, rather, left.) And the Slavic obsession with the international Jewish conspiracy is just endlessly sickening – but nothing seems to stop it. I think you three should have tackled the woman at her dinner table on the night though. Shame might just possibly have made her reconsider expressing such noxious rubbish.
Toby: thanks, let’s hope so!
Z: yes, we should have. I should probably write up why we didn’t one day.
You were probably sensible not to – my husband and I may have bonded by getting offside with various obnoxious Slavs but I’m not sure any other positives came out of the experience. The funny thing is just about everyone else we know who learnt Russian seemed to develop a huge love for Slavs and embrace every aspect of the life as well as the culture. While you can’t go past some of the writers, I have rarely met quite so many sinister and/or drunk and/or bigoted and/ or insert other derogatory adjective and/or quite often just plain domineering and boring people in any section of humanity as among that particular section (oh hell, now anyone I know who is of that persuasion is going to turn on me and eat the Christmas cards they were about to send, regurgitate them, insert them in the envelope and add a little note to say that, despite my blue eyes and fair hair, they knew all along that I was really a filthy Jew, and then post these offerings to me, to arrive just in time for Russian Orthodox Christmas – but hurray, Australian customs will detect the unsavoury morsels and decide that, having been previously digested, they should be classified as vegetable matter and therefore destroyed rather than delivered.) So, be damned, proud, revengeful Slavs, I shall not be deterred from making my unhinged and bigoted remarks.
Blimey.
Oh dear, they must have cut back on Customs staff – the first one’s just arrived.
Wonderful stuff, GAW.
Thanks Ian. And whilst you’re here, I wonder whether you would consider contributing to The D? If you have the time and inclination, your 6 Clicks or 1p Book Review (or anything else you fancied) would be great. You can email us via the Contact page.