During autumn an American teacher named Dirk had arrived to succeed me as the Pedagogical University’s resident native-speaker English teacher. Dirk shared my determination to sample Chita life largely through the medium of drink and so we soon began hanging around the city’s bars and pizzerias, joined by some of my Russian friends and another recent arrival, Gina, one of two American students visiting Chita for a year on a Rotary Club exchange programme. The other exchange student hated everything about Chita and moaned for months, having apparently applied to spend her year in Belgium or Spain. Coming to Siberia and expecting American-style convenience and luxuries, she was destined not to enjoy herself. Social circles seemed to grow with happy rapidity at times and we soon also became acquainted with Gufi, a young Tajik chap who spoke good English and had been absolutely gobsmacked to encounter Americans and Brits in Chita.
Tajik families tend to be large and close-knit and Gufi had come to Chita to join his successful cousins in business. His job involved running a small, greasy but busy shop selling cheburyek- meat and onions wrapped in pastry and deep fried. A pleasant and generous young chap, Gufi seemed to want nothing more from us than the opportunity to hang around with foreign friends and frequently invited us to a bar run by another cousin where we were welcomed as if we were ourselves family. Tajiks, it would seem, also hold hospitality as sacred and look out for the welfare of their extended families with a keen eye. This is both blessing and curse as Gufi was under pressure to conform to the expectations of his family, especially with regard to marrying a pre-arranged Tajik wife, yet he was part of a support network that was undoubtedly invaluable in Chita. Russians seemed to revere Westerners yet revile their former Soviet cousins from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Meeting Gufi, the way some ignorant locals would treat him made me realise that at times he inhabited a very different Chita from the one I had enjoyed. To me, life was spent feeling fascinated by the stimulating Siberian surroundings, being treated as a welcome guest by Russians and doing the odd bit of work at the uni to keep my flat and wage current. To Gufi, he was in Chita to spend a year or two earning money for his family- business in Russia was good, he told me- but his interaction with Russians was understandably more guarded and he was perpetually alert against danger of mugging, police hassle and general abuse. Indeed, he had been attacked a couple of times, as had a Tajik cousin whose swift use of a bottle on a street corner had saved him from being relieved of cash won in one of the city’s many 24-hour gambling arcades.
Dirk, meanwhile, looked every inch the
foreigner in his thin, arty clothes and with his long, floppy hair. I had
managed to disguise my appearance by buying a cheap fur coat on the Chinese
market- the label said it was made of ‘Rabbit Otter’ but the Russians insisted
it was fake- and borrowing a huge shapka (fur hat) from my boss. Walking
around with three dead dogs wrapped around my head certainly kept me warm.
However, Dirk found it difficult to remain inconspicuous and during his first
weeks in Chita attracted attention from some unsavoury characters. We would
walk into bars and Russians would try to strike up a conversation. If they were
pleasant, I was happy to communicate. If they were odious or incoherently drunk
I would quickly make my excuses but Dirk was too nice a chap to say ‘No’ and
suffered many a dull, repetitive monologue from a smashed local. His Russian
was much better than mine, which seemed to exacerbate the tendency.
A similarly amiable American arrived in
Chita some time in December. Jason had been baptised as an Orthodox monk in
America and had come to teach English in Aginsk, a small town which was the
administrative centre of the Buryat Autonomous Region, 200km or so to the south
of Chita city. I met him as he passed through en route to Aginsk and wished him
luck. A week or so later he was back in Chita having had his front teeth
smashed in an unprovoked street attack. Of course, he was shaken badly and due
to the intransigence of Russian bureaucracy was forbidden to work anywhere
except Aginsk. Naturally he did not want to go back there and so ended up
negotiating a job in Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia, following the same
circuitous Mongolian route that I had previously undertaken in order to
exchange his visa. Jason was incorrigibly cheerful, always up for a good time
and took full advantage of any opportunity to chase the beautiful young ladies
of Chita. It was a joy to watch him breakdance in Chita’s nightclubs, where
Russians uninhibitedly dance whilst observing themselves in mirrors and are
blissfully free of the sneering self-consciousness that afflicts British
nightclub clients.
However, Russian men do not like foreigners
to show off when Russian women are around and it was for this reason among
others that we were fortunate to have made the acquaintance of two Chita likely
lads. Kostya, a former tattooist, and Andrei, a former fireman, had grown up in
Chita and were well known in the city. They had united to form a business named
‘Fridge Master’ (note the Anglicised name for credibility) as repairing fridges
was a pastime which allowed them to pursue their favourite hobby of getting
absolutely leathered the whole time. With Kostya and Andrei around, trouble
from locals was kept to a minimum and Jason was free to enjoy himself. Neither
spoke English but were keen to learn and, as they were very sympathetic
communicators in their own language, Kostya and Andrei aided the development of
my Russian no end. Kostya’s wife Alla spoke very good English and was the only
person I met in Chita who had encountered Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as
they passed through on their round-the-world motorbike journey in 2004. I had
seen TV footage of McGregor in Chita before my arrival in Russia but whilst
some locals said they’d heard and disbelieved whispers of his visit, and most
simply dismissed the prospect of a Hollywood star setting foot in their city,
Alla simply said “Yes- I spent an evening translating for them. They were very
pleasant”.
One of our favourite haunts was a bar named
Bavaria where we could buy pints of decent draught beer for around 60p a throw.
In there I met a chap who invited me to go skydiving above the wintry Chita
wilderness. I had always fancied skydiving and seriously considered it, but
declined because I was suspicious of the jump cost being only fifteen pounds, I
would not have understood the safety briefing and, crucially, most things in
Russia are put together on a half-arsed basis. One evening Jason had been
drinking alone in Bavaria and gone on to meet Kostya, Andrei and Dirk in a
nearby café. He had been followed by a drunken youth whose over-friendly
attentions Jason was too polite to fend off. The youth then picked a fight with
Kostya, unwisely grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. Andrei had been
outside smoking a fag (smoking is forbidden in most public buildings in Russia)
and piled straight in to smash a chair over the youth’s back. The security
guard had witnessed the fracas and booted out the drunken troublemaker. A week
later I was sitting in Bavaria with Kostya and Andrei and the very same youth
came up to them, apologised, was instantly forgiven and everybody had a drink
together. A good example of how Russians tend to get emotion out of their
systems in an overt way and then forgive each other and get on with life,
whereas in Britain we tend to bottle up feelings until we explode and grudges
are often borne.
Gufi was always ready to provide Dirk and I
with a supply of free cheburyeki – handy for Dirk as he had spent his
savings whilst waiting for his visa and handy for me as I cannot cook. Just as
popular a form of fast food was pozi, a Buryat dish of mincemeat wrapped
in pastry, steam cooked and eaten with loudly slurping abandon. I lost weight
significantly during my time in Russia, cut off as I was from the supply of
semi-cooked meal components so readily available in Britain. In my early days
in Chita, Valentina had breezed into my flat and looked through my cupboards,
my nice new fridge and the cupboard in the outer wall which served as a more
traditional refrigerator during the colder months. Not finding any food there,
she asked with concern what I survived on. In the UK, rummaging uninvited
around people’s cupboards is taboo, but I did not mind as Valentina was, as
always, concerned only for my welfare. The truth was that I often depended on
the cheap, if bland fare offered by the many poznaya cafes around the
city, where I could buy a snack for fifty pence or a filling meal for a quid.
A Russian menu is a notional concept, listing
dishes that may or may not have been sold at some point in the establishment’s
history. The quickest way to determine what to order is to walk in and ask what
dishes are available, rather than which are ‘off’, especially since the waiting
staff usually lack the patience to do anything other than respond ‘Nyetto’
to any request for food. Menus often announce a minimum spend per customer and
an obligatory cover charge for any musical entertainment. Live music is common
during evenings in Russian restaurants and dancefloors quickly fill with
revellers of all ages flailing and canoodling in un-self-conscious (and usually
alcohol-fuelled) abandon. I took me a while to twig why menus would invariably
close with a list of cutlery, crockery and furniture apparently on sale, but
soon became aware that I was looking at an exhaustive list of exactly how much
customers are forced to pay for breakages. Needless to say, this list is
usually longer than the list of dishes.
Russian soups are a mainstay of the diet,
representing a way to put together wholesome ingredients in a cheap and filling
manner. Since water is taken from a municipal system which fills it with
unhealthy brown metal residue (or drawn from rivers or wells), boiling water
for tea or soup are the main means by which Russians hydrate themselves.
Russian women tend to be superb cooks, using all types of natural ingredients
to concoct nutritious meals, the Western habit of eating synthetic crap whilst
running from one place to the next having not yet caught on. Salads are often
quite spectacular, in contrast to the bland greenery of our English
equivalents, intricately combining elements such as radish, carrots, mayonnaise
and fish in marvellously tasty fashion. A Russian meal usually involves friends
or family sitting around a table (rather than in front of a television) with a
variety of dishes on the table from which one can pick away at leisure. Always
present is a plate of Russian bread- drier and harder but more filling than our
own British bread- and this is often used to push around food in the same way
that we would tend to use a knife. Indeed, in cafes Russians tend to use only
forks- I once ordered a fried chicken breast and was unable to fathom how to
eat it without a knife, so plonked it on the counter with a smile, stuck the
fork into the top of the chicken and requested “Knife, please?” The strange
foreign behaviour was understood, though eating chicken with a bread knife was
a challenge. Of course, vodka often accompanies more celebratory occasions.
I met only two vegetarians whilst in Chita,
and could only admire their convictions in a society in which most argued that
meat was an absolute necessity in surviving the harsh winters. Whatever they
eat, most Russians are conspicuously thinner than our fattening British
population. This may be because many cannot afford a luxurious diet but is
surely also due to the fact that many Russians choose to walk where Brits may
drive. Public transportation in Chita- taxi buses, trolleybuses and
buses- easily put Britain to shame, and whilst car ownership is apparently
rising dramatically, Russians can be seen walking the streets in great numbers
in all weathers. Local wisdom has it that the body consumes more of its fat
during the colder months, though this may be the effect of sweating heavily as
one walks around clad in several layers of deceased mink and fox.
Western diets are undoubtedly less natural-
Chita was the first city I ever visited that did not have a McDonalds, though
the Golden Arches will inevitably arrive sooner or later. There was a dingy
burger bar selling overpriced, microwaved rubbish to teenagers but fast food
culture in general does not yet have a vice-like grip on Russia.
Tea is drunk as widely as in Britain, if not
more so, and an invitation for tea is actually an invitation to spend a
pleasant couple of hours chewing the cud. Tea without snacks- typically cakes
or biscuits- is unheard of, and the British habit of just drinking tea alone
seems unimaginable to Russians. Across Russia, tea without milk is apparently
the norm, though around Chita the locals pride themselves in drinking their tea
in the ‘Zabaikaly’ style- that is, with milk. Ice cream is also hugely popular
and of good quality, and is eaten at all times of year. I congratulated myself
on having eaten ice cream in mid-winter in a nice warm café, but later saw
several people wandering the streets in minus fifteen temperatures with cones
protruding from their mittened hands.
I missed only a couple of things- sliced
bacon and pasteurised milk in particular- but enjoyed discovering Russian
delights such as sirok (a small bar of flavoured curds coated in
chocolate), kirieshki (beer snacks made of dried bread) and plov-
a Central Asian dish of rice, meat and spices. I ate my best plov
directly from a table top (no plates needed) with fresh garlic in the forest
with Inna and Artur, and on another occasion enjoyed authentic plov
whilst sitting cross-legged on the floor of a flat owned by a very welcoming
Uzbek who had recently returned from a stint working as a sniper for the
Russian army in Chechnya. He showed me photographs of his Chechen camp, rifle
in hand, but I neglected to quiz him too closely- I had only just met him
through another Uzbek friend and did not want to pry into the duties of this
apparently personable killing machine. I made a mistake on the milk front early
on, buying something called Snezhok (‘Snowball’) which was packaged in a
milk carton. It fell into my teacup in one large gelatinous mass and despite
furious stirring would not dissolve for more than a few seconds. My students
found this tale highly amusing. Snezhok, it turns out, is the fermented
Central Asian kefir drink with added sugar, rich in bacteria and
apparently good for the digestion but akin to rotting yoghurt and definitely no
good in tea. The students helpfully bought me a litre of milk in an old plastic
bottle from a babushka sitting on the street vending her cow’s produce
straight from the farm (and frozen solid)- I boiled it repeatedly before use but
in my lazy Western way decided it was easier to go downstairs and to buy a
carton of the sterilised stuff.
Supermarkets have emerged in Chita since the
turn of the millennium but still do not boast the same range of choice as we
have become used to in the West. I would like to report that because of this
absence of convenience food, my cooking skills improved, but alas the extent of
my culinary achievement remained fried chicken and chips. What I would have
given for a source of Danish bacon……
Russians celebrate Christmas on 7th
January, New Year being by far their biggest celebration of the year. The
communists did a thorough job of erasing the religious significance of winter
holidays yet preserved iconography such as Santa Claus (known as ‘Dyed
Moroz’- ‘Grandfather Frost’), decorated trees and the exchanging of gifts.
Towards the end of December, everybody
knocks off work and gets sloshed for a month.
We Westerners decided to celebrate our own
Christmas with a party on 25th December. Interest ran high from
Russian friends and at one point it seemed we would be gathering half of Chita
into a small flat. Then, in time-honoured style, a girl who had vowed to do
most of the organising pulled out at the last moment as she did not want to
share the party with people she did not know. I could have given up in the face
of adversity (many in Chita would have) but was determined to enjoy Christmas
and so with help from others we hastily hired a flat, bought loads of booze and
snacks and went to the market in search of turkey. Turkey proved hideously
expensive, rare as it is in Russia, so we opted for duck- cheaper, not
plentiful but a tasty novelty for most of the Russian guests. The party went
beautifully, livened up by the party games Russians are so fond of playing, the
highlight being Kostya performing a forfeit striptease. We intervened as he was
about to get his arse out.
I spent Russian New Year with Inna and her
family, revelling in their hospitality and at midnight witnessing the Russians
chucking fireworks around her neighbourhood with such abandon that it seemed
the Chinese were finally invading. After Russian New Year came Russian
(Orthodox) Christmas, which seemed to be hardly commemorated, probably owing to
the lasting effect of Soviet policies. After that New Year came Buryat
New Year and after that, Chinese New Year. Each was used by those so
inclined as an excuse for a drink. My good friend Igor made particularly full
use of his holidays, pitching up at my flat in the early hours one freezing
night and pressing his sloshed face against my kitchen window. This scared Gina
stiff- she was sitting there smoking a fag at the time- so I let Igor in (to
the disgust of the vakhtor), he told me how much he loved me (many
times), told Gina she was beautiful (by saying “Wow” repeatedly as he did not
speak English), sat in a bucket of soapy water I’d used to clean my kitchen
floor, collapsed on my bed and finally staggered into a taxi I’d called. My
mother had sent a bottle of beer from England, among other gifts, and to his
delight I gave this to Igor. He swore he would never drink it but would use it
as a treasured ornament, then dropped it as he got into the taxi, but
thankfully it stayed in one piece. The next day, his friend Max rung me to
thank me for the bottle of English beer they had both just drank.
Until late winter, I had enjoyed my second stint in Chita. Mid-winter had seen temperatures as low as –25C during the day and –45C at night but as I had spent most of the period drunk I had enjoyed myself. I had seen some crazy things- a Russian man trying to prove his masculinity by smashing a bottle on his head outside a bar but succeeding in breaking his skull rather than the bottle stands out- but these had usually been amusing rather than alarming incidents. At one point I planned, with my Australian friend Martin, to visit Chara- the major settlement in the north of Chita region. Around 1000km away from Chita itself, this settlement of around seven thousand people was surrounded by nothing much other than forest, mountains, abandoned prison camps, mines and a rather picturesque stretch of desert. Temperatures in Chara were apparently some way below –50C in mid-winter and Martin and I fancied sampling this extreme, though our travel plans were scuppered by the expense of a plane ticket- a train would have taken days as the route would have taken us via the shores of Lake Baikal and there simply were no roads, or navigable frozen rivers, between Chita and Chara. As it turned out, I did not need to go further than my adopted home city to sample the full force of the Siberian winter.
I came dangerously close to damaging myself through freezing on a couple of occasions. On the first, I had accompanied a friend to see her onto a late night trolleybus. I needed a number one or three trolley to get home myself but neither came- it seemed some joker had switched all of Chita’s trolleybuses over to route number two. Trolleybuses in Chita run until midnight and so as the clock approached twelve and the (very probably last) number two rolled by, I hopped on. I knew that its terminus was still a fair walk from home but by now I was seriously starting to feel the cold and just needed a warm bus on which to warm up. As I paid the conductor my six roubles (twelve pence) flat fare, I could barely fish the change from my pockets with my shaking hands. A minute later she returned, kindly telling me to go and sit on her seat as it had a heater beneath. Gratefully, I did so but as the trolleybus disgorged me I found myself only a tiny tad warmer and a good ten minutes’ walk from my flat. Ten minutes as the crow flies, that is, across a graveyard which had long since been abandoned and was now used largely as a fly tip. The problem was that I could not find my way into the graveyard and wasted a good ten minutes or so trudging, by now dangerously cold, between dark blocks in temperatures of around –35C and getting no closer to home. Frustratingly, I could see my own brightly lit block at the top of a hill across the graveyard. By now, toes numb and face losing feeling, I was aware of the seriousness of the situation and resolved to walk along the main roads back into my suburb- a traipse of around twenty minutes but at least a guaranteed way home. I cannot recall why I did not take a taxi- it may have been lack of funds, there may have been none around or it may have been a frozen brain. As I walked down the main road, a bag of groceries I had been carrying split and I ended up hugging it to my freezing chest, partly in order to conserve warmth and partly so as not to have to ditch what I had bought. Shivering, I pulled off a glove with my teeth and took my phone from my pocket. I sent a text to Gina, who lived nearby, to ask if I could drop by for ten minutes just to warm up. Taking off one’s gloves in such temperatures to use a phone is a serious business and has to be done with maximum haste. To my surprise and absolute dismay, she replied to the effect that her Russian host family were asleep and that she thought it best that I did not visit. Of course, I did not have time or energy to engage in a bout of messaging to let her know exactly how serious my situation was, so I merely became more distressed- especially as her host family were always exceptionally welcoming and I’m sure would not have minded my dropping by. These are people who know how dangerous it is to take chances with the Russian winter. Somehow, I made it home, brain on autopilot, one arm stuffed inside my coat and the other clasping the few groceries I had not left scattered in my wake. I trudged the last leg across the graveyard like a zombie and collapsed in my bed, thankful to be alive. Until then I had been somewhat blasé about the cold, but this was a lesson learned.
My second brush with frostbite came a few weeks later when visiting a friend in an outlying village. In full winter dress I approached her house past a rustic scene of piled hay and cows being driven along the road. The temperature was around -20C and I felt comfortable, though later I was to suffer. I looked up to see a backdrop of a field of masts- a high-technology military listening station- with a helicopter noisily patrolling the skies overhead. Again, here was a scene which encapsulated the contrasts of Russia. She lived in a small shack heated by a traditional stove and had to wait an hour or so (in full winter outfit) for it to warm the house whenever she arrived home. As we sat and drank tea there was a loud banging on her wooden door. She told me to pretend there was nobody home as it was drunk villagers celebrating the Buryat New Year and going from door to door in search of vodka. She did answer the next knock as it was a friend of her sister’s- a burly Buryat bloke, but unfortunately he turned out to be absolutely wasted and simply would not leave. He entered, asked for alcohol, asked where the shrine was, blessed himself in front of the stove when he found there was no shrine, and told me five hundred times that he was an ex-military intelligence man who spoke Chinese but not English. Such boring drunks are an unfortunate downside of the Russian experience, and this one was so persistent that he followed us to the bus stop. This was the point at which things began to get seriously cold. As we waited for a ride back to the city, the wind howled mercilessly down the street. In the city, the winter gusts barely made it between the tall blocks but here in the village the unobstructed gale quickly reduced the temperature from a tolerable –20C to an absolutely tortuous low. For the second time in a matter of weeks I found myself playing dangerous games with the Siberian winter. I pointlessly tried to shield behind the corrugated iron bus stop as the wind tore through my fur coat. Shivering, desperate and anxiously feeling there was nowhere to go, I eventually spied a shop and took refuge there whilst a local babushka sat impassively waiting on the street, apparently a great deal more hardy than I. As if it were needed, here was further reason not to envy the life of the Russian villager.
As winter progressed and we spent more time
in Bavaria- seemingly a reputable bar- we came across dodgier and dodgier
characters. One insisted that he was immune from police prosecution and drove us
home at top speed through numerous red lights, the baseball bat in the back of
his car suggesting he was not the most savoury of characters. Many told me that
if I had trouble, I should call them as they were well known and their names
need simply be mentioned in order to reduce troublemakers’ knees to jelly. One
of these types insisted on repeatedly asking me if I was a spy- a common enough
question from Russians to which I had come to reply “Yes- I ring Tony Blair
every night to let him know what is happening in Chita”, a response always
taken in good humour, such was the perception of Chita as a backwater. Another
incident in which two security guards from a local factory badgered Dirk and
Jason into drinking with them whilst on duty, then cuffed them to a chair and
would not release them for fifteen minutes, made me begin to question whether
Bavaria was still the place to drink.
Winter saw a minor health scare as a lump
developed under my right arm. I did not worry unduly until I finally visited
the university health centre (a rather old-fashioned room in the student
accommodation block) with an ex-student kindly helping to translate. My worries
quickly multiplied as the compassionate but fussy health worker told me in
quickfire Russian that I was eating badly, that I should take better care of
myself and that my blood pressure was too high. The latter was a surprise to
me, but it was when she told me to come back the next day to see the surgeon
that I truly started to brick it. Fearing the worst- after all, why would a
surgeon be needed to look at a lump under my arm?- I grabbed another student to
translate and came back later that afternoon, wangling my way into the
surgeon’s office. She told me to take off my top, glanced at the uneven balance
of my shoulders and asked “Do you carry a heavy weight on only one shoulder?”
In seconds, she had pinpointed the problem- I had been carrying my rucksack
incorrectly- hence the lump- and the afternoon of intense worry had,
thankfully, been in vain. Perhaps the word ‘surgeon’ in Russian encompasses a
wider spectrum of medical personnel than merely those who wield sharp knives
over very sick people.
Then came an incident (detailed in the
Introduction) which aggravated my reassessment of my lifestyle of that particular
time. An email I wrote in late January 2006 explains:
“I had an interesting experience t'other night... I wasstanding alone waiting for a trolleybus (11.20pm,-27C) and two pissed up students (boys, both 18 or so)asked me for 50 roubles (a quid). I said I didn'tspeak Russian and didn't understand (though I couldunderstand what they were asking for) and continued toplead ignorant. They realised I was English and askedfor 100 roubles, then one showed me his Russianpassport and student card and said 'Ya RusskieMilitia- I Russian police'. His mate grabbed my coat
and wouldn't let go, so I prepared to run back to thebar I'd been drinking in with friends. Luckily for me,at that moment the real militia drove by and screechedto a halt. The two young lads legged it, but a militiaman caught one and beat him to the ground (stick,fists- couldn't really see). They piled him into theirvan with me. The young lad started to plead with menot to say anything, but the militia man told him toshut up and clubbed him one again. I ended up in thestation for half an hour, being treated well, whilstevery time the young lad made a noise the militia gavehim another whack. The place was full of drunk andhomeless people, like some strange grotty zoo. I hadto come back the next day with a translator to make astatement but I don't want to take it to court as todo so would be a pain in the arse for me and I thinkthe young twerp learned his lesson after a night inthe Chita cells. The militia are notoriously crap andsupposedly tend to ignore muggings if they see them,but they treated me really well, no doubt because I'ma Westerner. Anyway, I suppose this could happen inany city- it's just wise not to walk alone at night, Isuppose.”
On this occasion,
the militia were really good to me- I recall one saying “You like girls?” and
showing me some dodgy hardcore porn on his mobile phone- but I was acutely
aware that had I been Azeri or Chinese, the story would have been very
different. Though the experience shook me up a little and taught me to be a
little more careful about walking alone at night, it also gave me the
opportunity to spend an interesting late-night half hour watching as the dregs
of Siberian society were processed by the underpaid, no-nonsense militia. Russian
policemen have a notorious reputation for corruption, and corruption cannot be
defended, but having seen their working conditions and heard rumours of their
miniscule pay, it is easy to fathom why taking a few roubles to turn a blind
eye here or there becomes perceived as a necessity. Indeed, a few people
informed me with certainty that the father of the young lad who was caught
attacking me would have had to pay to secure his release the following morning.
In late January Dirk left Chita and I found
myself holding down four jobs. In addition to my main job as a lecturer at
Politen[1],
I agreed to give a few classes at the Ped. I also taught English and checked
translations at a local mining firm and had taken on a little consultancy
research work for a German bank operating in Georgia. Whereas a month earlier I
had been carefree, drinking away my holidays, suddenly I was working all hours
and reluctant to walk alone at night. The consultancy work was really being
laid on thick by an arsehole of a German banker who appeared to think I should
work 25 hours, 366 days, for him alone. To top it all, the girl I had been
seeing began to play away rather obviously and, insultingly, thought I was too
daft to twig. The breaking point came on Valentine’s Day when, returning alone
(silly me) from a friend’s flat at 11pm- shortly after kicking out time for
student guests in halls buildings- I was attacked again.
Walking through the dark streets between
wooden huts in my district of Sosnovy Bor, I could see four figures weaving
drunkenly downhill towards me. I thought about taking a long detour to avoid
them but opted to put my head down and carry on. One lurched across and snapped
the familiar “Spichki yest?” This means “Do you have matches?” and is
commonly used to approach strangers in search of either a light or fisticuffs.
I told him I did not smoke, and he grabbed my coat to demand why I did not
smoke. His friend pushed him away, having realised I was not Russian, and told
him not to make trouble for the foreigner. I carried on walking and the
coat-grabber demanded I come back toward him. I looked at his evil spotty face,
assessed the gap between us, and legged it. Being reasonably fleet of foot but
having no stamina, I pegged the block and a half back to my building at around
three-quarter speed. Turning to see if I was safe, I found that two of these
drunken oafs were still in full pursuit so I sped up to maximum, bolted into my
building breathlessly shouting “Criminal country!” to a student sitting at the vakhtor
desk and locked myself in my room. Absolutely exhausted, adrenaline
pumping, I could not sleep for hours and the next day walked into work to tell
my boss that I had had enough. To her credit she was most concerned and called
me out of a lesson to give a statement to the militia whom she had called to
her office. I was taken to the station and to the scene of the trouble, a
statement was taken, and I was asked to look through photos of known criminals
to put together a photo-fit. Russian criminals are the ugliest people I have
ever seen and fair put me off my lunch.
At this point it seemed everything was
derailing quickly, so I decided to rebuild. I broke things off with the
unfaithful girl, shaved my head, told the German banker to stuff it, stopped
walking alone at night, stopped drinking in Bavaria, renewed old friendships
and made a few new friends who I’m confident had nothing to do with Chita’s
gangster underbelly. It worked- as the first signs of the spring thaw began, it
started to seem as though Chita was again a fun place for me to be.
One of my ex-students, Alyona, had been employed as a translator by a local, British-owned mining firm. Her boss was looking for a native speaker to converse in English to her staff and, being one of only a handful of native English speakers in Chita, I got the job at a fairly generous hourly rate. Things went well for a month or two as I spent a couple of hours, three times per week, chatting in English and drinking tea with Alyona and her colleague Yana. Yana was a wonderfully personable Depeche Mode obsessive. I’m a DM fan too but would not go to the lengths she did: at one point she travelled for seven days on the train to watch her heroes play in St Petersburg and then returned the same way, using up two weeks of precious holiday allowance in one go.
I was treated well whilst working at the
firm but was shocked to see the way employees were treated by management. The
boss was a tall and severe power-dressing woman in her late twenties who made
Mussolini look lenient and would take staff into the cloakroom to tell them
that their career prospects would suffer if they socialised with other staff
outside work: quite the opposite of the team-building ethos. I was later
sitting talking to Russian friends and when her name was mentioned I commented
on her dictatorial persona. One of my companions sternly informed me that he
was her ex-husband, and for a moment I feared I had offended him but he then
expressed wholehearted agreement. Her deputy was an odious toady of a chap aged
about twenty and who was clearly determined to exercise his ‘authority’ to the
maximum. Many was the time I saw female employees in tears after ill treatment
by the boss or her lapdog. Russian labour law appears to offer little
protection to employees, and stories abounded of previous workers summarily
dismissed for criticising or making jokes about the boss.
All this was shocking but did not affect me-
the worst aspect for me was having to pick up my monthly payment from a bank
rather than in cash. Most Russians distrust banks, having lost their savings
after the debt default of 1998 and the collapse of the rouble, and I had come
to share their custom of saving my money in a box in at the back of my
wardrobe. The boss woman had said to me haughtily during interview “We are a
professional operation and we like to do things professionally. I think you
should be professional too”, brushing aside my reservations at using the
Russian banking system. My concerns turned out to be justified as every trip to
the bank was a tortuous marathon of miscommunication. I was glad of the extra
cash and happy to converse with Yana, Alyona and office manager Dima- another
decent employee who sensibly avoided confrontation with the boss and her
sidekick. Dima liked to improve his English by reading odd phrases from the web
and one day had us in hysterics by proclaiming, out of the blue, “Fuck a duck
with a Christmas Tree!” I was content enough until one day when Alyona phoned
to tell me that her boss had decided my wages were too high and that she would
only pay me half of what we had agreed for work already done. I had a contract,
I was fuming and when I believe my principles have been trampled on, I can
become quite forthright. I took a taxi bus straight down to the firm’s office,
approached the boss in a reasonable manner and managed to agree full payment of
what I was owed, though she proposed a drastic future wage cut. I politely
walked away and did not return.
[1] I also gave a couple of English classes at Politen to local businessmen- affluent, friendly and enthusiastic types who invited me to go to the forest to shoot bears. I told them I’d like to see a bear in its natural habitat, but would rather nobody shot it. They didn’t seem to grasp this point of view