Spring has sprung in this land that W.S.Churchill once describedas“an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a mystery” - or words to that effect.
What the fuck was he on about, I wonder?
Another observer of Russian mores - one Madame de Stael, I think - said “Russia is a land of secrets, where there are, however, no secrets.”

I think I might just know what she was getting at.

When I arrived here in 1989 the USSR was in its death throes, though nobody knew of this at the time. The parlous state of the Soviet Ship of State notwithstanding, those fun lovin’ lads n’ lasses in the KGB were still going full steam ahead in their sworn undertaking to defend Soviet internal security. One of their chief activities at that time was to latch onto any small incident, no matter how trivial, in which a Westerner was involved, in the hopes of magnifying said incident out of all proportion, thereby enabling them to put the frighteners on some poor bastard so as to blackmail him or make him more amenable to any shady proposal that they may at some time suggest to him.

Twats!

April 11, 1990. My birthday. Voronezh, central European Russia. Perestroika is in full swing. There’s fuck all in the shops and Gorbachev has cut down on vodka production and sales and hiked its price. Everybody is really fucking well pissed off because they can no longer get pissed up. And everybody’s skint - bar yours truly! Being a student at Voronezh State University, I was getting a grant off the Soviet Union to the tune of 400 RUR a month. The average grant received by Russian Students at that time was 30 RUR!

The only bright note at that time was the Lambada. Russia was undergoing a Lambada craze. All bastard day you could hear its strains, see its videos on the TV. Lads used to stand with permanent hards-on, ogling at the TV screens in cafes and bars, totally gobsmacked at the raw sexuality of this dance.

FUCKIN’ DISGUSTIN’!!!

So I decide to book a banquet at the newest hotel in town. I paid top price and ordered the best grub and invited my best Russian buddies and the nicest pussy in town. There were about 40 guests in all. It was the best party anyone could ever remember and it cost me 36 quid in total - a king’s ransom for Russkies then!

Everyone got steamin’ and everyone was dancing the Lambada like it was going out of fashion. Around 11 pm, the cops started drifting in. It used to be lights out at 9 pm, those days. Thinking I was a foreign businessman and not a student (I hate fuckin’ students, me!), they didn’t quite know what to do, but they were none too happy because people were CLEARLY ENJOYING THEMSELVES!!

Then I made my big mistake. It was Easter Saturday and suddenly I come over all religious and decide to go to midnight mass, as I’m a sucker for Russian Orthodox Church choirs. As soon as I had cleared the scene, the cops came in heavy handed on the boys and the shit really hit the fan. Knives were drawn, dogs set loose, twattin’ sticks were twattin’ and warning shots were fired as the cops read the riot act. Many arrests were made. I was arrested the following morning just after I’d got me leg over in a sobering up exercise.

Although they codded on that they were detectives, it soon became clear that my interrogators were boys from the KGB. Slowly, slowly they began to up the intimidation stakes. I had to make a confession that I’d “organised acts of hooliganism” - a serious offence in the USSR. I’d get a year for that if I confessed, as the judge would be sympathetic for my avoiding time wasting, they told me. They gave me a statement to sign. It was written in Russian. I demanded a translation. That’d take several days, they rejoindered. The interview had so far been in English by means of a translator who spoke in Dickensian English. The British Embassy here always advises that if you get in trouble, never sign anything and demand an interpreter. And if it be the case, you should also never let them know you can speak Russian.

Making no progress, they started being smarmy: “We can see you’re an intellectual…” “Clearly, you are an English gentleman…” and, believe it or not, “We do so admire your Mrs. Thatcher…”!

In the end, they began to lose their rag. “ Listen,” they said, “if you don’t sign this, you’ll end up getting 5 years.”

“Five years!” I say. “What for?”

“One year for organising hooliganism, another for causing criminal damage, another year for threatening the manager, another year for threatening the police, and finally,” added the chief joker and the smarmiest of them all (there were 3 of them), “one year for rude and immodest dancing.”

“I don’t get you,” I said disbelievingly, “What are you on about? I can’t dance to save my life!”

“You were dancing the Lambada,” says snidey chops with a sneer.

“Yeah, like the whole of Russia has been doing for the past year?” say I, “So what’s the big deal?”

“But you were dancing the ENGLISH Lambada!” he concludes triumphantly.

“Fuck me!” I think, “Salt mines here I come!”

So then I drop bollock number two in this saga. I say to them in Russian, “Well, if I get banged up here for five, I’ll come out speaking fluent Russian!”

They go fuckin’ berserk! “You can speak Russian!” they shout. “Why didn’t you tell us you can speak Russian?”

“You never asked,” I say nonchalantly.

Snidey chop’s face turns puce. “How much of our conversation could you understand?” he shouts at me.

“About 70%” I say, lying through my teeth. I’ve got them on the defensive now. The ball’s in my court.

They suddenly metamorphose into Mr. Nice Guys. They tell me I’m free to go for the time being, that they’ll have a talk with the investigatory judge to see if they can get me off with a year in jug - or even with only a fine. They say they’ll telephone me in a few days.

A few days pass. My best mate, Ivan, puts me in the picture. He tells me they’re just trying to put the frighteners on me and that I’d done very well - so far. “They’ll ask you for a present, next,” says Ivan, “Give them nowt. And don’t agree to meet them alone. Always have at least two witnesses if you must see them. Best not arrange to meet them at all. Just keep on fuckin’ them off and then they’ll get pissed off and leave you alone. But if you start dancing to their tune, they’ll never be off your back.”

And this is just what I do. A few days later, snidey chops rings. He tells me the room number of a hotel where he and his two other stooges wish to “interview” me again. “And don’t forget,” he says, “the day of the interview is my birthday!”

“Fuck you!” I think, and on the day of the meeting I don’t turn up.

Another day passes. Another phone call. It’s my friend snidey chops again. “Did you forget about your interview, Woden?” he says.

“No,” I reply.

“So why didn’t you come, Woden?” he enquires, adopting a hurt tone.

“Listen,” I say, “there’s no way I’m going to take part in secret meetings with you and your colleagues. The only possibility of my meeting you is on condition that I have present with me at least two witnesses.”

“You haven’t told anybody about our proposed meetings, have you?” he hisses.

“No,” I lie, “not up to now.”

“Good,” he continues, adopting his smarmy tone once again. “And why all this talk of ‘secret meetings’, Woden? We don’t want to hold secret meetings! Just don’t tell anyone about them.”

Amazed by the Orwellian doublethink of the KGB, I agree to meet them again, but once more, I don’t turn up.

I heard nothing more off them after that.

They call themselves the FSB now. (Federalnaya slyzhba bezopasnosti - Federal Security Service) I wonder if they’ve changed tactics? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Woden The God

Not long after I had decided to settle down here in Moscow, I bought a biography of Joseph Stalin. I had gone into a bookshop on Tverskaya Street simply to browse and, quite by chance, had called in on the very day when sales of the biography had begun. The author of the book was there, signing copies of his work. Neatly arranged on several long shelves were stacked copies of his latest work, and in front of the shelves stood two very bored shop assistants. They were both young and beautiful.

Russia has a surfeit of beautiful women. Most Westerners, I believe, think that all Russian women are dowdy, fat, frumpy peasants who have become prematurely aged and embittered as a result of their relentless struggle to live and simply to survive in ‘the Evil Empire of the East’ (as an erstwhile president of the United States and former Hollywood B-movie actor once described the Soviet Union). This stereotypical Femina Sovietica was partly the result of the fact that the wives of Soviet Communist leaders were, in the main, dowdy, fat, frumpy peasant babyshki. However, Western propaganda is the chief reason why this cartoon-character, stereotypical Russian woman existed and, to a large extent, still exists now. In the simple world of simple, unthinking folk ‘good’ means ‘beautiful’, ‘bad’ means ‘ugly’. For the ‘West’ read ‘good’; for ‘Russia’ read ‘Evil’! Ergo -Westerners are beautiful and Russians are ugly.

Interestingly, before the Russian Revolution - or to be more precise, before ‘The Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ - Westerners considered Russian women to be the desirable, exotic, ‘semi-Asiatic’ creatures that they indeed really are. Moreover, to a fortunate few Westerners resident in the former Soviet Union (including myself) this judgement is acknowledged fact. This can be easily ascertained by anyone who has time to browse through the baleful appeals for Russian wives written by American businessmen and which appear daily in the Moscow English language press ‘Lonely Hearts’ columns.

But I digress; two exceptional beauties stood motionlessly before me like two life-like mannequins in some expensive Paris couturier’s shop window. Hanging on the bookshelves in this section, which was solely devoted to the sale of the new Stalin biography, were two cards showing two different prices.

“How much does the biography of Stalin cost?” I asked.
“Can’t you read?” snorted one of the krasavitsa contemptuously.
I hesitated momentarily, quickly trying to compose in my head a suitable sarcastic and pithy response. All that I could muster was: “I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my glasses.”

No doubt recognising by my accent that I was a foreigner (my enquiry about the price of the book must have been made in flawless Russian - but then, you ask the price of things every day!), her attitude immediately changed.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” she said, genuinely apologetically.
“And besides,” I added, “there are two prices shown on your shelves.”
“Are there really?” she said, turning around to look at the bookshelves.

Her interest in me was now being shared by her workmate who, until then, had shown complete indifference to me, my enquiries - to everything and everyone! She had remained standing there motionless and magnificently beautiful, utterly contemptuous of all around her. My surprise at the shop assistant’s downright rude reply quickly turned to anger. This anger rapidly became more intense as the two young women began openly to fawn upon me quite simply because I was a Westerner. The shop assistant’s vulgar response to my polite question had abruptly extinguished all my other thoughts. I wanted to say to them: “Is it too difficult for you to be polite? Why are you so bloody rude to me? What have I done to you that causes you to be so nasty to me?” I said nothing. They told me the price of the book and by screwing up my eyes and peering intently at the price tags on the shelves, I pretended that I really did have difficulty in reading them at that distance. I bought the book.

Outside I began to think about what I should have said to the two bad mannered young women. “I should have asked them why they were so uncultured,” I thought to myself, composing a Russian sentence in my mind. ‘Nekyltyrno!’ I thought in Russian - a favourite Russian pejorative meaning far more than ‘uncultured’, having in addition overtones of ‘vulgar’, ‘uneducated’, ‘base’…

And so seething with anger, whilst at the same time composing a grammatically perfect Russian sentence expressing what I should have said but did not, in fact, say to the two rude young women, I proceeded down Tverskaya towards the Kremlin.

How many times have I become so irate in this country over such boorish behaviour exhibited by the natives? How many times must I fume and rage over such meaningless trivialities concerning manners, etiquette, and normal, so-called ‘civilised’ behaviour? I have chosen to live in this land. I have lived here for several years now. I ought to have become accustomed to all of this alien behaviour. However, I have not.

I am a foreigner here; I am an Englishman. Is that the reason for my irritability over this matter? Do I, as a foreigner, have the right to impose my mores onto those who have been raised in quite a different society to that in which I was reared and educated?

Russians, like all other nations, have stereotypical images of the natives of other lands. In common with every one else, it seems the Russian idea of a typical Englishman is personified in the form of the master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s most famous character is for most Russians the epitome of Englishness. Holmes is a tall, slim, handsome, English gentleman whose eccentricity only adds a certain piquancy to his perfect charm, good manners, and gentility. He is a highly educated, shrewd, percipient and intelligent man. Above all, he is cultured. Holmes, the typical Englishman, is, in short, everything, which most Russians hold themselves not to be. Russians even sometimes take some pride in the fact that they are personified by the bear - a rough, shambling brute of a creature, which at first sight may appear to be a stupid and docile beast but which in reality possesses tremendous strength that can be used aggressively to a terrifying degree.

Several years ago I was returning on the night train to Moscow from the city of Voronezh, a journey of some three hundred miles that lasts for twelve hours. It was mid-winter and the temperature was minus 25?C. Before going to sleep, my Russian travelling companion (who was my first Russian woman friend) had told me not to converse with any passenger who might enter our six-berth compartment during the course of our journey. The reason for this advice was to avoid any possible confrontation with the carriage guard. I had purchased my ticket under false pretences, travelling incognito as the spouse of my companion. This subterfuge was simply undertaken to avoid the fare demanded of Westerners. Russian citizens and foreigners pay different tariffs on the Russian railway system. If the guard had discovered that I had deceived her, there may have been hell to pay. On entering the carriage at Voronezh railway station I had, therefore, not said a word, silently carrying my ‘wife’s’ suitcase, and playing the role of the strong, silent, dutiful spouse.

At about three in the morning the train made a scheduled stop at some God-forsaken spot in the middle of nowhere. The weather had been deteriorating all night and as I gazed out of the window from my upper bunk, I could barely discern a handful of people struggling along the platform manhandling their luggage in a raging blizzard. I had been unable to go to sleep. I have never been able to sleep on a Russian train. In winter, it is always too cold for me to sleep and in summer too hot. As the train slowly pulled out of the station into the pitch-black, snow-swept night, a man in his sixties entered our compartment, which up to then had only been occupied by my companion and me. After he had removed his gloves, fur hat, scarf and heavy, winter overcoat, I could see that he was wearing the uniform of the Soviet Railways. He was probably a locomotive driver returning to Moscow after completing his work schedule. He did not remove his ‘valenki’, felt boots worn in winter and which are, in my opinion, the best kind of footwear for Russian winters. He did not lie down on the free bunk that he had chosen as his own, but simply sat down and, seeing that I was awake, began to converse with me. “Zdravstvyitye!”, he said. I replied likewise. He continued to converse with me about our journey to Moscow, the weather - about everything in general and nothing in particular. In short, he behaved like a typical English gentleman, being continuously gracious and polite and showing no indication whatsoever of any irritation that he may have felt towards my almost monosyllabic responses to his enquiries and observations. Our strange conversation continued for along time until finally the elderly Russian railway worker finally posed the question that I had long been expecting.

“You’re not Russian, are you?” he said.
“No.”
“Are you from The Baltic States?”
“No.”

There was for the first time during the course of this almost one-sided conversation a momentary silence on the part of my interlocutor.
I felt embarrassed. For a little while I pondered whether to reveal to him the truth of my identity. In the end I confessed:

“As a matter of fact, I’m English.”
“English!” he said, with great surprise. “English!” he repeated with an air of disbelief. “English! England!! Such a cultured land!”

We both fell into silence and eventually went asleep facing each other on opposite bunks in a sitting position as the train slowly jolted and rattled its way across the snow-swept Russian heartland northwards towards Moscow.
Much later, as the train was approaching the outskirts of the capital, my companion awoke. After first greeting her and introducing himself, the Russian railwayman informed her with barely veiled excitement: “Do you know, our sputnik is English! What a wonderful, cultured people! Such a cultured society! How awful it must be for him to be here in Russia! Compared to the English we Russians are so…so, well…so uncultured!”

That same female travelling companion later lived in sin with me in St.Helens. At that time I was studying as a postgraduate at Manchester University. I, therefore, had to often leave her alone for the greater part of the day in my former residence situated in the now infamous Clinkham Wood drug ghetto. One evening I returned home to find her in tears. It seemed that she had decided to take stroll around the Dam in the afternoon and had been confronted by gobshites wagging it from school. They’d demanded cigs off her and, on hearing her accent, wanted to know where she was from. On learning her nationality, they’d said her:

“Fuck off back to Russia, you foreign slag!”
“Woden”, she tearfully asked me, “what does ‘slag’ mean?”

Such friendly folk, St.Helensers!

Woden the God