Artyom was one of my few male students, a chap who had helped me settle into life in Chita by inviting me to spend time with him and his classmates outside the university. Around March time he invited me to visit his hometown of Krasnokamensk for a weekend. It was apparently quite local- sixteen hours or so by train, down southeast towards the Chinese border. Founded in 1969 as a company town and closed to foreigners during the Soviet era because of its importance as a uranium mining centre, now with 60,000 or so inhabitants, it sounded the ideal place for a weekend sojourn.
The day before departure, we
presented the necessary documentation at Chita station and bought third class (platzkart)
train tickets. Our train departed early on a Friday evening and a small
sendoff committee, after making sure we were suitably laden with beer and
cooked chicken, gathered on the platform to wave us away. This was my first
experience of platzkart travel and I was immediately struck by the
friendliness of the wagon attendant, whose attitude was in pleasant contrast to
that of the second class staff I’d encountered when travelling from Moscow. In platzkart,
six couchette-style seat/beds are crammed into an open space which in
second class would hold four people in a closed compartment. The atmosphere is
quite convivial, and the usual Russian mistrust of strangers appears to be
tempered by the necessity of sharing cramped quarters for such long journeys.
Russians are among the most hospitable of people and sharing of food between
travelling companions is an expected and accepted norm. We rolled down the
frozen river Ingoda and into the high hills surrounding Chita, a foreground of
tumbledown wooden houses and giant abandoned industrial installations set
against a backdrop of endless pine forests. After three hours or so we stopped
at Mogoitui, a small town in the Buryat Autonomous Region that sits
geographically within Chita region but is politically a completely separate
unit. Artyom disembarked for a fag and, wrapping up against the late winter
cold, I joined him on the platform. He translated the frequent tannoy
announcements as warning passengers not to buy any of the produce offered by
local hawkers, reasoning that this was probably because the age of the meat
pies (piroshki) and battered lumps of cat meat (cheburyeki) was
indeterminate. This being a shuttle between Artyom’s hometown and Chita, the
regional centre, he encountered many old friends on the train, most of whom
were intrigued by the prospect of an Englishman bothering to visit their
outpost. One old friend, however, seemed somewhat surly as he smoked with
Artyom on the platform. He informed me that Krasnokamensk was better than
Chita, because of the people. Politely, I asked why. Eyeing me suspiciously,
spitting dismissively and tossing away his nub end, he uttered the word “Dobri”
before sauntering off. Ironically, given his demeanour, this means ‘Kind’.
As night fell I watched another
of Artyom’s old friends perform a series of card tricks. The magician then
helped me make my bed for the night, explaining that his military precision and
speed in bed-making manouevres had been learned in the army. The lad was only
in his early twenties but had clearly already been through the obligatory two
years of military service. I settled down to try to sleep but, owing to the
coughing and hacking of a tubercular old chap a couple of beds away, and the
constant stream of drunk peasants who loudly hop on and off the train
throughout the night as it stops at isolated rural settlements, kip was not an
option. Dismissing these people as drunk peasants may seem harsh, but since
they were clearly drunk, and clearly peasants, I believe my description apt.
Daylight revealed that we had
now passed from the hills onto the steppes, which in March were little more
than expanses of brown wasteland. The train track was lined with rubbish tossed
from the wagons but beyond this stood a land which seemed largely untouched by
man, stretching to either horizon and interrupted only by the odd low hill.
Some areas were being burned in preparation for agriculture, but with
temperatures still well below freezing and not a green shoot in sight, the
scene brought home how short the growing season actually is in this
southernmost stretch of Siberia. An old woman, dewy-eyed, commented that she
always felt she was approaching home as she reached the steppes.
In mid-morning, we pulled into
Krasnokamensk. The station is on the edge of town, so we hopped onto a bulky,
knackered old Soviet bus with a gigantic driver’s cab and began a short journey
into town. One of the most immediately striking features of this man-made oasis
of civilisation is the abundant water piping which runs, suspended above the
ground on struts and insulated with dirty and ragged material, to and from the
power plants sited on the edge of the settlement. I had heard that
Krasnokamensk was much cleaner than Chita and though initial impressions did
not tally with this view, there was a noticeable difference in that litter was
far less abundant, pavements looked as if they may have been swept and trees
were whitewashed as a precaution against insect damage (or possibly drunk
drivers). Krasnokamensk is not picturesque- it is essentially a town built by a
mining company during the 1960s, in the middle of a gigantic and inhospitable
steppe, using prefabricated concrete. For years the centrepieces of the town
must have been a large concrete shopping precinct, a large concrete cinema and
a war memorial made of a World War Two tank. These had now been eclipsed
somewhat by the impressive, if incongruous presence of a large modern Orthodox
cathedral, plonked in among the tower blocks. Murals celebrating the towns 35th
year lined the main roads, adding a splash of welcome colour.
Alas, my immune system had
simply not been ready for platzkart and I had been feeling progressively
worse since crawling out of my couchette. By the time we alighted from the bus
in the middle of town I was hacking and spluttering and, lack of sleep not
helping, feeling like a dead man walking. As I entered Artyom’s flat and
greeted his mother, a larger-than-life, enthusiastic woman with regulation
Russian red-dyed hair, I just wanted to sleep. Or die. However, Artyom was
ordered to take me straight to the chemist, where we bought medicine and fended
off the attentions of a drunk local who simply could not believe there was an
English chap in town and wanted to discuss Manchester United. From the chemist
we went straight to Artyom’s old school to keep an appointment he had made for
me to meet the students learning English there. Feeling half-dead, I walked
through the prim school and found myself standing in front of an extremely
crowded classroom full of silent teenagers. I answered a few of the usual
questions, Artyom interpreting, then agreed to go for the obligatory tea with
the teachers. As I left the classroom, the shy teenagers suddenly became rabid
groupies and I was mobbed and asked to write a few words in English on the
exercise books of each. I struggled politely through the tea and cakes offered
by the extremely hospitable and friendly staff and finally made it back to
Artyom’s for a kip. Throughout the weekend his mother kept up a welcome supply
of the usual Russian fare: piroshki (pies that resemble doughnuts with
meat, potato or cabbage fillings), miniature sweets and pickled cucumbers. As
custom dictates, a pot of water containing a large amount of tea leaves was
kept cold and this was topped up with boiling water to provide hot tea as and
when required.
Keen to entertain their guest
despite his deteriorating physical condition, I was given a Zhiguli (Lada)
tour of the town by three of Artyom’s old schoolfriends. All three were quiet,
intrigued to see a foreigner in town but typically hospitable and greeted me
with the handshakes obligatory between Russian males upon meeting. Andrei,
somewhat laddish and clad in leather jacket, tracksuit bottoms and leather cap,
owned the Lada. Zhenia was a pleasant and educated type, eager to learn about
England, and Misha was a huge fellow wearing pretty much the same attire as
Andrei and nicknamed King Kong, though only when his back was turned. The way Andrei and
Misha dressed was typical of Russian males- dark, inconspicuous clothing that
appears universal at first glance but I was later to find out that groups of
male friends alter their clothing subtly to differentiate themselves from other
groups. I did not notice this tendency until it was pointed out to me a year or
so after my arrival, but indeed small gangs of friends would wear matching fur
hats, matching leather hats, matching thick woollen hats, matching jackets or
similar types of trousers. Bright colours were rare. Also popular among the
chaps were ridiculously long, pointed shoes: I marvelled at how anybody could
climb stairs in these, and seeing the more garish white variant would often
bring an incredulous smile to my face. We bought some
beers (driver Andrei sensibly declining) and began to cruise around
Krasnokamensk’s dusty boulevards. At one point Zhenia pointed to a school and
told me that it was a special institution for children born disabled because of
the town’s high radiation levels. As the first signs of dusk descended, we
wandered around the deserted square in front of the cinema and photographed
ourselves posing in front of the tank which commemorated the sacrifices of the
Great Patriotic War. In Britain, we tend to favour crosses as monuments, but in
a Russia still recovering its religious symbols, military hardware is
considered more apt. We ended the evening drinking vodka in Andrei’s flat, the
spirit not aiding my feverish condition. A typical Russian student meal of pelmeni
(imagine ravioli without the tomato sauce) was complemented by generous
offerings of kolbasa (smoked sausage) and a Ukrainian delicacy named sala,
which is pretty much just lumps of pig fat. I tried the sala out of
politeness but to this day cannot see the appeal Russians see in chewing lumps
of saturated lard.
The following day, my health
still not having improved, we embarked on an outing to a local beauty spot for shashlik- barbecue, Russian style. A few
of the locals were joining us, some of them middle-aged women who were
apparently viewing this excursion as a rare treat. A family friend turned up in
a minibus, provisions were duly crammed in among conversations about who had
recently zipped across the Chinese border to buy what, and off we went,
followed by Andrei in his Zhiguli. As
we drove out onto the snowy steppe I spied through the frosty window an eagle,
perched on a fence. This magnificent bird seemed incongruous in a setting so
apparently devoid of life, but the locals were not impressed by this apparently
run-of-the-mill sight. The local beauty spot was a frozen lake outside the
town. As our convoy rumbled off the road and down to the indeterminate line
where land ended and lake began, Artyom informed me that he had spent many
contented childhood holidays in cabins on the banks of the lake. This place was
evidently very different during summer. As ever, the shashlik kebabs were excellent, though the honey and pepper vodka I
was force-fed with assurances that it would cure my budding bronchitis and keep
me warm did not deliver on its promises. As we crouched around the fire, Andrei
played Western dance tracks loudly from the back of his car. At one point, the
surreal nature of my situation did strike me- here I was in remote Siberia, on
the banks of a frozen lake, coughing like a sick old man, and trying to explain
in Russian that MC Hammer was now a Christian preacher. Artyom took the
obligatory photos of me wandering out across the frozen lake- the first time in
my life I had done so- and after a few more frankfurters it was off for a tour
of the vicinity.
We drove through what seemed
like a moonscape of snow-covered rock and mine tailings. First stop was a
gigantic hole in the ground where mining had obviously taken place for years.
Lorries left at the bottom of this massive, apparently disused quarry looked
like Lego toys from our vantage point. I asked what had been extracted here and
was answered “Polymetal”. I went to lean on a metal railing and Artyom’s
mother grabbed my hand, instructing me with serious concern not to touch
anything. I suppose ‘polymetal’ implies the mining of mixed metals, but
it’s a good guess that most of those metals were uranium taken for the nuclear
weapons programme. After all, Krasnokamensk did not even appear on maps during
the Soviet era due to its strategic importance. The hole WAS huge, nonetheless,
its size a source of pride for the locals.
Next stop was a rock formation
which we had to drive through some very rough terrain to reach. The minibus was
quite new and the driver evidently made a bob or two out of shuttle trips in
and out of China, but he seemed unconcerned at the effect on his van as we
rattled and bumped through a barren gorge filled with scrubby grass. The rocks
were reasonably high but for beauty barely compared to what my home county of
Derbyshire has to offer. Nonetheless, I purred my admiration, gritted my teeth,
put my bronchitis to the back of my mind and followed Artyom’s mother’s
boyfriend Victor on his cat-like climb up the slopes. We were followed
enthusiastically, if tentatively, by the collection of prattling babushki who obviously considered this
remote location a paradise in relation to their hometown. After this, Victor showed us his self-built dacha. Often translated as meaning
‘country house’, the word dacha can indeed refer to the types of large
rural mansions inhabited by top political figures but is more often used in
Russian to denote the small wooden buildings and allotments on which food is
grown. Many families have dachas on plots ringing the towns, and spend
long summer afternoons toiling to grow enough produce to squirrel away in jars
for the long, barren winter. Victor explained that the area covered by the dachas around Krasnokamensk was greater
than the territory covered by the town itself. In the Russian context, where
people lived crammed together in high-density housing and were largely free to
use the vast expanses of often-useless land as they saw fit, this made sense,
but in Britain it would be unimaginable to devote such space to allotments.
Especially if a row of mews houses, a bypass or a furniture superstore could be
shoehorned in there to make somebody a few quid.
We returned to Artyom’s flat to
find that Sergei, one of the pupils from his old school, had been calling
relentlessly, keen to invite the Englishman to his flat. After seventy six
calls we caved in and agreed to pay him a quick visit, explaining that I was far
from healthy at that moment. Upon arriving in Sergei’s home, we were
overwhelmed with hospitality. A giant cake with a large icing Michael
Schumacher was presented and medicine offered for my coughing. As I sat with
tea and cake, gazing around the typically cramped yet clean and cozy
surroundings, Sergei’s grandmother grabbed my head and started trying to pull
it from my shoulders. Was she ex-KGB and keen to murder the foreign spy?
Thankfully, it turned out that she thought a good, forceful neck massage would
relieve my bronchitis. A little warning would have been nice but it was a
welcome example of the compassion Russians can often show unexpectedly,
eschewing the taboos of physical contact and personal space we have built up in
the West and just getting on with something that will make another person’s
life a little better.
After Sergei’s we dropped in on
the faimly of one of my students in order to deliver some of the gifts she had
sent from Chita. Her father was a local policeman- quite a character, with a
bushy Cossack moustache. His wife seemed mildly concerned that her daughter’s
English teacher was by now red-faced and coughing uncontrollably. Keen not to
bring a plague into their midst, we quickly made excuses and walked back to
Artyom’s, where Victor put on a Pink Floyd cassette. I enthusiastically
complimented him on his musical taste, which caused him to immediately offer me
the tape as a gift. I was to learn a little caution in this regard: compliment
a Russian’s possessions and they feel obliged to give them to you. Touched as I
was by the generosity of this man to whom a Pink Floyd tape must have been a
valued possession, I managed to politely decline.
The following day, Sergei’s
father came round in his large Volga saloon to give Artyom and I a lift to the station, deliberately crushing
our hands with his farewell handshake, presumably in order to demonstrate his
masculinity. Artyom had been loaded up with gifts to bring back to
Krasnokamensk students now studying in Chita. During the journey back
northwards we stopped for a time at a little village named Urulingui. Me being
keen to gain a first-hand glimpse of Russian village life, we buttoned up our
winter clothing against the wind that howled down the exposed streets and went
for a wander. The village, with the exception of a stone schoolhouse and some
kind of brick factory, consisted exclusively of wooden huts in desperately
rundown condition. Agriculture was apparently the mainstay of the economy here,
though evidently not in March. On this particular early evening, the only
people on the streets were a couple of drunk men staggering around and the odd
villager riding past on a lovingly maintained motorbike. Motorbikes are, Artyom
assured me, among the most prized of village possessions and it would indeed
later often strike me that the neatly buffed appearance of many of these
machines was in stark contrast to the decaying surrounds. We passed a shop
named ‘Dribbling’, a word which Artyom recognized in neither Russian nor
English, and Artyom photographed me as I demonstrated the English meaning in
front of the shop sign.
By the time we arrived back in
Chita, my coughing was incessant and lasted for another fortnight or so. During
this time I was overwhelmed by the kindness of Inna, who regularly visited with
hand-picked herbal remedies and pots of honey sent from her family in the
Ukraine, and Valentina, who came to my flat with a pot of mustard and
instructed me to take off my top. As she administered her treatment, my phone
rang. Excusing myself, I answered to hear the voice of my grandfather- the one
and only time he called me in Chita. “I’ll have to call you back, Grandad- an
old woman is smearing newspaper in mustard and putting it on my chest”, I
explained. He sounded quite enthused by the prospect.
Within a week I had a cupboard
full of medicines, all donated by concerned students, colleagues and friends.
If I had taken them all, I would have died. Inna and Artyom took me to the
doctor, who prescribed a course of treatment which I chose to follow (declining
all herbal remedies and peculiar Russian folk cures). The doctor insisted I be
X-rayed, which turned out to be a disquieting experience. The staff led me into
a room with what looked like a huge old torture device, told me to strip to the
waist, legged it outside, pressed a button which caused the room to light up,
then told me not to have another X-ray that year. Alarming, to say the least,
but thankfully the results revealed that I had only bronchitis, which would
soon pass.
When people asked me what I
thought of Krasnokamensk, I would respond “Very interesting”. This was not a
euphemism but a genuine response- I had honestly found my visit to this
hitherto closed company town, struggling to reinvent itself after its strategic
importance had ceased, fascinating. Physically beautiful it was not- at least,
not in March- but the human kindness I experienced there went a long way toward
explaining how people lived fulfilled lives in this most remote of backwaters.
Krasnokamensk was to hit the national headlines in 2006 when super-rich oligarch and Abramovich peer Mikhail Khodorkovsky was banished to spend an eight-year sentence in one of the town’s prisons. The local and national press were filled with stories of how he would not be afforded special treatment. Clearly, the Russian government were keen to place this enemy of the state as far away from his Moscow power-base as possible, and Krasnokamensk seemed the ideal spot. Nowadays, given the number of foreign journalists visiting to see the supposed modern-day gulag where Khodorkovsky is incarcerated, foreigners are presumably no longer a rare sight in Krasnokamensk.
Russian drivers are crazy. It took very little time for me to
learn this. They do not wear seatbelts and if the passenger chooses to use
theirs, it is taken as a slightly insulting criticism of their driving skills.
Driving with a mobile phone jammed in one’s ear is unfortunately accepted
practice[1].
In Britain, if a pedestrian steps into the road, drivers will slow or stop, or
at the very least take evasive action. In Russia, the attitude is more
primeval- the driver has the car and is therefore more powerful than the
pedestrian. If the pedestrian is dumb enough to get run over, it’s their own daft
fault. At some point in the past somebody did paint zebra crossings across some
of Chita’s streets but the idea is not that drivers should stop if somebody
sets foot on them- rather, that pedestrians should cross only at that point-
when there are no cars speeding towards them- and that the pedestrian MAY have
some grounds for an insurance claim, should they be mown down here rather than
on the open road. There are also some traffic lights with the red/green man
system to signify when pedestrians may cross, but it seems trolleybuses have
priority and are not bound to stop if the green man is showing. I asked Russian
friends how blind people avoided being run over, as even at the few crossings
where the lights actually made some noise and were not broken, they were still
likely to be hit by a trolleybus. The response was always a shrugging “They
walk around with someone”. Independent living for blind people is not yet an
option in Russia.
I am young(ish) and slim, if not particularly fit. I can run if
the green man suddenly turns red and I’m about to be demolished by a revving Moskvich.
Old people, however, simply cannot cross a road in the short time during which
the average Chita green man flashes. Like the lack of working lifts in tower
blocks and the treacherous ice that grips the pavements for most of the year,
this is just another reason why old people simply stay at home and have to be
looked after by relatives.
Fairly regularly, the traffic lights near my institute would
break. I would spend ten minutes or so observing open-mouthed as, rather than
slowing down, people ploughed through at top speed in the hope that others
would fearfully yield before them. Then I’d get scared and go back inside.
In Russia, the amount of alcohol one may legally consume before
driving is zero. To be fair, most drivers seem to observe this and it seems
more sensible than the “I can just have one more and not be over the limit”
culture that prevails in the UK. However, there are of course many exceptions.
One quiet afternoon I was walking down a main road in the centre of Chita when
I heard an almighty crashing sound. Seconds later a car gingerly drove past me,
front end smashed in. Walking further, I could see that the driver had careered
into the side of the road, trashed his vehicle and, since (thankfully) nobody
else was involved or had seen the incident, he had driven limpingly away. I
sniggered a little, mentally disparaging his abhorrent drink-driving, but then
realised that had I been in the spot where he had left the road, or had he
veered off further down….. it did not bear thinking about.
It was always interesting to view the mix of absolutely
knackered Soviet bangers and newish Japanese cars racing around Chita. A taxi
may have been a smart Toyota or an old Russian Moskvich with a cracked
windscreen and slashed seats that looked unlikely to take anybody anywhere, but
taxi fares were the same regardless. I asked friends if there was a test of
vehicles’ roadworthiness and was told that, though cars must be tested once per
year, a few roubles stuffed into the hand of a compliant mechanic for the
relevant certificate was cheaper than actually repairing a car. And how it
showed. Old Soviet lorries were particularly gigantic and noxious, as were
military troop carriers which resembled old, small, dark green portakabins
perched precariously atop lorry chassis, old curtains shielding the windows, a
cartoon-style tiny chimney belching smoke from the top of the cabin and the
legend ‘People’ emblazoned on the outside in Russian. Japanese cars retailed at
around Western prices and used cars were apparently often imported from Japan
via Vladivostok on the Pacific coast and driven a couple of thousand miles to
Chita. Markups were apparently large on these vehicles and so I enquired as to
why more people were not driving Japanese imports across from the east. The
reason, it turns out, why only a few are brave enough to trade this way is that
travelling on the large, unpoliced stretches of road between Russian cities can
be dangerous and bandits often extort money from drivers of cars which are
obviously intended for trade, or indeed steal the cars for themselves. Thus
most traders travelled in convoy with armed guards. Such enterprises were
presumably big enough to attract the attention of local mafias all along the
route, and no doubt profit was further eaten up by greasing the appropriate
palms.
I know not whether road rage is more or less common in Russia
than in England but I nearly fell victim to my own boorish behaviour when one
day a beat-up Russian jeep swerved quickly out of a side road, horn blaring,
and nearly mowed me down. I flicked a V-sign, quickly realised that this
favourite British gesture is not understood (explaining this to students always
raised a laugh) and lowered my index finger to give a more
internationally-understood response to the driver. He screeched to a halt, and
from the passenger seat came a slim but well built chap of around forty who
bounded across the road, loudly remonstrating in Russian. “Ya ne ponemayu”
(‘I don’t understand’), I shrugged, trying not to show intimidation in the face
of his manner and tone. He grunted in confusion, so I repeated “Ya ne
ponemayu”. He said something else, his anger subsiding all the while to be
replaced by confusion at having encountered this alien being in the midst of
his small Siberian town, and I assured him again that “Ya ne ponemayu”.
He muttered, turned away and loped back to his waiting friend to continue their
careering progress through the city’s dusty streets.
Traffic accidents are unfortunately rather a common sight in
Chita, and rumours abound that drivers of the marshrutki taxi buses make
use of certain substances to keep themselves awake during their long shifts,
though in my experience these chaps are among the more skilled drivers on the
city’s potholed roads. Russians often claim that drivers are worse in China,
and my own experience tells me that Mongolia is crazier than Siberia- Ulan
Bator seems like a bunch of five-year-olds let loose in dodgem cars.
Whoever is the worse, I would not drive in Russia- not simply
because of other drivers’ behaviour but also because the traffic police seem to
have the right to flag down any driver, anywhere, for anything, and check their
documents on the spot. I fear that as a Westerner I may be viewed as a walking
cash machine but Michael Shipley informs me that this is not often the case.
Indeed, my presence worked to our benefit on one occasion when Inna’s husband
Artur was stopped on a road just outside the city for speeding. It was 8th
March- ‘International Women’s Day’ in Russia- though Russians are baffled to
learn that the international nature of this gift-and-flower-exchanging-fest
does not extend to the UK. Having pulled Artur’s Toyota over, the police made
him wait shivering outside their regulation blue and white Zhiguli. He
apparently proceeded to inform them that he was transporting a visiting
Englishman and that if they gave him a ticket, that Englishman would tell the
Queen. Surprisingly, they bade him Happy Women’s Day and let him go, though I’m
inclined to believe that their lenience was due more to amusement at Artur than
to fear of excommunication by Buckingham Palace.
One
late winter day I was having my usual afternoon kip when I was awoken by a
typically loud banging on the outside lobby door. Reasoning that it probably
wasn’t anybody in search of me, and that anybody who did want me could simply
phone to be let in, I rolled over and ignored it. The banging persisted,
however, and it became clear that I was not going to get any more sleep until I
let the culprit through the door and into our lobby. Donning enough clothes to
look respectable, I staggered out, unbolted the door and was confronted by two
young ladies, one Buryat and one attractive young Russian. Irate, I berated
them loudly in English- “Can you knock a bit bloody harder next time?” They
gaped at me in surprise as I turned and stomped back to my room. The occasional
rant in English was a therapeutic release during which I could say what I liked
without fear of my tirade being understood. Ten minutes or so later came a
knock at my door. Sure enough, the two girls had decided to make friends. I had
calmed down by now and stood chatting at the door, able to communicate in my rudimentary
Russian that I was a teacher from England. They explained that they had come to
visit the grandmother of Yuliya, the Buryat girl- a kind old lady on my floor
to whom I occasionally said ‘Zdravstvuytye’.
Olga, her Russian friend, was a stunning and talkative girl who insisted they
both come in for a cup of tea. Powerless to resist, in they both came and we
whiled away a couple of hours chatting and generally getting acquainted. We
exchanged numbers and they promised to visit again. As there were already a
number of Olgas in my phone book, I stored this one as ‘Olga Weird’ and it is
this name that she assumed thereafter in my thoughts. She was not too pleased
to learn about this later but took it in good humour.
Over
the next few weeks, Olga was to visit a few times, always bringing a female
friend. A safe precaution, I reasoned, as visiting the flat of an odd foreign
stranger alone would not be the wisest of moves for such a young stunner as
she. Of course I found her attention flattering but as I was seeing a girl
named Ksenia at the time, and Olga herself claimed to be spoken for, we did not
take it further….. for a time. Soon, she came to me to tell me that things with
her boyfriend were finished and that she wanted us to be together. In Britain, a
28-year-old chap and a teenage girl are seen as a suspect pair. In Russia,
nobody blinks an eye. I told her that I wanted to stay with Ksenia, and Olga
continued to visit on the odd occasion. I was constantly frustrated by her
habit of arranging a time to come around, then simply not turning up, but I was
soon to find that this was reasonably common behaviour with some Russians. In
the UK, waiting at home is not too frustrating as we have so much
English-language media to keep us entertained, but in Siberia, there are only
so many Russian-dubbed American reruns you can observe whilst thumbing through
ancient English texts from the local library.
Things
ended with Ksenia in a typically odd Russian way. A week or so prior to our
breakup, I had been playing outdoor football with a group of thirty-odd
Russians on a sandy pitch. The snow had recently melted and I stopped during
the game to take stock of the fascinating setting- an urban park, free of grass
as Siberia is other than during the summer months, surrounded by decaying
Soviet blocks but against a backdrop of spectacular, bare, high Siberian hills.
Keen to prove myself as an all-action player in the traditional English
midfield mould, I tore around the pitch with gusto, including the scoring of
rather a daft own goal, but at one point as I attacked an aerial ball, I
clashed heads- hard- with my friend and teammate Maxim. I came off the worse
and, seeking to prove that Englishmen don’t stop the game for the slightest
injury as do Russian Premier League players, I crawled off the pitch to
collapse, ringing head in my hands. A few minutes later I came back on and
completed the match but my head still hurt and my headache grew worse as I lay
on my bed at home. I suspected concussion and in England would have sought a
little medical advice but, uncertain of Russian procedures, I decided to take
it easy for a while in the hope that the pain would subside. I texted Ksenia to
explain what had happened but she seemed unconcerned and, angry at her not
offering to come around and comfort me (though I had not actually asked her
to), I went to sleep (very) early.
A
week or so later, Ksenia disappeared off the radar. She answered my texts but
informed me that she had suffered a personal crisis. She refused my offers of help
but promised to come to my flat, sometime that week, to explain what had
happened. Of course I was worried but I simply had to offer support by text
message and wait until she was ready to see me. Sure enough, one evening Ksenia
turned up at my door- just as two friends/students were leaving. They had been
unaware I had a girlfriend and gaped and giggled as Ksenia awkwardly entered.
She explained that she had been the victim of a street attack when walking home
from the shops late one evening through a short but notorious dark alleyway
near her home. Two or three men had grabbed her, stolen her food, drawn a knife
and tried to rape her. She could not remember precisely how, but she had
escaped and had spent the previous couple of days with her father- a local
military man- as he tried unsuccessfully to find the culprits. I had heard of
Chita’s unsavoury reputation but until this point I had been enjoying myself
with my carefree lifestyle, thinking that street crime was something that only
affected other people. Suddenly, my own girlfriend had been attacked and I had
not even found out until days later. Filled with sympathy and concern, I stood
to hug her but she pushed me away. I said I understood why she would be
uncomfortable with touching a chap again just yet, but she told me to sit down
as she had something else to say. It was then that she informed me that she was
finishing me in favour of Maxim- my good friend with whom I had clashed heads.
I knew Maxim had been keen on Ksenia, especially since an odd episode a few
weeks earlier. He had invited friends, including myself and Ksenia, to a
Chinese restaurant to celebrate his birthday. Me being a teacher and unsure
whether a relationship with a student (not one of my own students but rather a
student at the same university) would be nilzya (forbidden), we had kept
things under wraps and decided to both attend the meal but to behave as if we
were only barely acquainted. A strange but enjoyable evening ensued during
which Maxim danced with Ksenia a few times and she and I conversed politely but
did not display affection in front of the assembled friends. It turns out that
Maxim had been pursuing her relentlessly since that time. As he simply did not
know about Ksenia and I (and probably does not to this day) I bore no
resentment of him. This was the first occasion on which a girl had actually
finished things with me, rather than vice versa or simple intervention of
circumstance, and of course my pride was hurt a little. However, I had not been
able to support her during her moment of crisis (though I had tried), and I
appreciated the honest way in which she said that nothing had happened but that
she had feelings for Maxim and wanted to be with him, especially since I was
planning to leave Chita in summer. We parted amicably, remaining friends, and
Maxim and Ksenia were still together when I finally left Chita over a year
later. Though I was not chuffed at having been given the boot, and the irony of
having not been open to others about our relationship leading to Ksenia hopping
it with one of my best friends (with whom my clash of heads had led to my
considering finishing things with Ksenia anyway…. etc etc) was not lost on me,
I resolved to get on with things.
A
day or two later I texted Olga and, after a couple of false starts, she turned
up at my flat with a friend. She soon felt comfortable with visiting me alone,
and we spent one memorably pleasant afternoon watching DVDs and kissing, though
I had to cut things short to meet a group of my students at a Chinese
restaurant in Chita’s infamous Ostrov district. When I entered the restaurant,
the all-female group could sense that something was not quite right and that I
was somewhat on edge, though I could hardly explain that this was because I’d
spent the previous three hours or so caressing a young Russian goddess and was
frustrated at having had to cut our afternoon together short.
I
had tried to explain in my text messages to Olga that I was now a free man but
(she claimed) her phone had been stolen. I showed her the text I had written
and her eyes bulged. I later learned that this was not because of any joy but
because the message included the phrase ‘Ya hochu tibya’- literally
translated as ‘I want you’. In English I may have said ‘I want to be with you’
but I did not know enough Russian to write this at the time. Whilst the phrase
‘I want you’ can have sexual connotations in English, in Russian it is
completely unambiguous. Olga thought I was propositioning her unashamedly. She
ummed and aahed a little, left and then barely came back after that. She did
visit on my birthday in late May to deliver a present of two packets of
caviar-flavoured kirieshki (bread snacks, about 15p per pack and the
favoured food of poor students) and then invited me to meet up on her birthday.
This is when I found out she was shortly to turn eighteen. Her tender age
surprised me slightly, but in truth I’m not sure I could take the moral high
ground either way, as I knew she was
probably too young for me.
Upon
returning to Chita in autumn 2005, I sent a text to Olga to let her know I was
back in town. She seemed pleased and proposed we meet up. Then she told me she
had married during summer. This bombshell led me to conclude that either she
had had a whirlwind romance since May and had quickly tied the knot- not
impossible in a society where girls are still expected to marry young and
mothers are considered too old for their first child at 25- or that she had
been stringing me along all the while and had had another, steady chap in the
background. Knowing what I know now about Russian attitudes toward
relationships (or perhaps I was just naïve about the ways of the world)- the
second scenario is by far the more likely. I saw her briefly in the street
once, hugged, took a look at her wedding ring to confirm she wasn’t spinning me
a line, and gave her a wide berth after that.
Romance in Russia
In England, I’m just another bloke. In Russia, I’m an object of curiosity. In Chita, there is an abundance of single young girls and an apparent shortage of men. The males tend to be less than handsome whilst the women are often stunning. I loved living in Chita.
Whilst I found it much easier to get together with girls in Russia than in England, where a girl is likely to view any attempts at communication as harassment, forging a more serious and lasting relationship was a problem. Of course, I never pretended that I would stay in Chita forever- perhaps I should have done- and as a result I my affections were often toyed with by girls who would appear serious and then ditch me for a Russian bloke at the drop of a hat.
Russians have the wonderful custom of approaching each other and asking “Mozhno poznokomets?” This phrase, meaning “May I get acquainted?” is often heard as young lads approach young ladies. The lady or ladies may simply refuse, in which case the chap simply moves on, but often a response of “Da” can lead to sitting together for a few drinks. The point is, the male seems to lose no face by being rebuked, as girls seem not to mind the attention and will not turn up their noses as seems common in England. This strikes me as being a custom which would have saved me much heartache during my teenage years.
Over my time in Chita I realised that many social attitudes mirrored those I had heard about in Britain before the transformation of the sixties. People still marry young, being pressured heavily by families to tie the knot and start producing kids as soon as they raise the cash to leave the parental home. Women still see their choice as being between a professional career and the home, working habits not yet having fully developed to accommodate the working mother. Many women, nonetheless, hold down jobs whilst managing their homes, many Russian men being notoriously idle and prone to drinking. This may seem a gross generalization and is indeed unfair to many of the industrious and bright Russian chaps I met, but there also seemed solid grounds for the oft-repeated view that Russian men, leaving their mother’s bosom to be looked after by their wives with no period of independent living between, often do not grow up. Feminism is seen as a peculiar Western idea and even the most capable of my female students would tell me that the role of women in society should be different to that of the man. Single women are expected to make themselves as attractive as possible in order to attract a man, and evening-style makeup is favoured at all times- the domineering boss of a small firm returned from London and expressed to me her surprise that some British women wore flat shoes and “some did not even wash their hair!” Young women tottering along broken pavements is often a sight commented upon by visitors, and the contrast in beauty between many of the girls and their stark environment was striking. Unfortunately, the insular racism of many harks back to less enlightened times in the UK, though this is usually reserved for ‘Chorni’ (‘black’) people from the Caucasus or Central Asia, whose skin is actually olive, and to the many Chinese people present in Siberia. Attitudes toward Chechens are nothing short of shockingly prejudiced, the state-backed media not helping matters.
Infidelity also seemed alarmingly rife. I must confess that I was guilty of this sin myself for the first (and only) time whilst in Russia, being too weak to resist the novelty of attention from a beautiful woman. Perhaps I’m naïve and such behaviour is every bit as rampant in the UK, but it seemed as though married people thought nothing of the vows they had taken and would hop into bed with anyone before returning home to a partner who thought little of doing the same.
I often weigh up which
situation I would rather be in: as in Russia, enjoying attention from women yet
with the perpetual heartache of being treated as a toy, or as in England, where
I’m just Joe Average. Russian life involved many emotional ups and downs,
unlike my British existence where things are decidedly steadier and I have more
of an idea of what is going on. Time and again I realise that I prefer the way
things were in Russia, and this is probably yet another reason why part of me
longs to return to the wild east. Shallow, eh?
[1] On a related note, to the woman in Belper, Derbyshire who yelled “Woss it gotta do wi you?” at me when I put an imaginary phone to my ear as she turned her 4x4 across the busy, almost-blind junction between Bridge Road and Field Lane with her mobile jammed in her fat neck, I’d like to say “I am the pedestrian whom you shall one day kill”.