Moscow Calling Read online

  MOSCOW CALLING

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  Books

  Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine

  The Second Russian Revolution

  Preachers of Hate: The Rise of the Far Right

  The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia

  Translations

  A Prisoner in the Caucasus (Lev Tolstoy)

  Taras Bulba (Nikolai Gogol)

  The Glade with Life-Giving Water

  Dmitri Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times

  Fifty Russian Artists

  Building a Prison (Vladimir Kornilov)

  Girls to the Front (Vladimir Kornilov)

  Music

  Harmonies for One

  First published in 2017 by Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Angus Roxburgh 2017

  The right of Angus Roxburgh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publishers.

  ISBN: 978-1-78027-492-8

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press Ltd, Malta

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Prologue

  1. On the Devil’s Horns

  2. A Russian Englishman

  3. My Arbat University

  4. Who Is Last?

  5. Oh! Bananas!

  6. Forty Degrees

  7. Here Comes the Sun

  8. To Red Lighthouse

  9. The Unpredictable Past

  10. Strange Encounters

  11. Cold War Walls

  12. Not Any Other Country

  13. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  14. Goodbye to Moscow

  15. Back in the UK

  16. Lemonade Joe

  17. Into a Whirlwind

  18. More Light

  19. The KGB Makes Friends

  20. The KGB Closes in

  21. Baltic Rebirth

  22. Triumph and Tragedy

  23. The KGB Gets Me

  24. Spitting Live Frogs

  25. Turning off Gorbachev’s Lights

  26. Humiliated and Insulted

  27. No Static at All

  28. Siberia: The Shaman’s Curse

  29. Katastroika

  30. Chechnya

  31. The Fear of War

  32. Life is Getting Better, Comrades

  33. What Kind of Russia?

  34. Watching from a Distance

  35. In the Kremlin

  36. ‘Foreign agent’

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Illustrations

  Angus and Neilian with Seryozha and Volodya in their Moscow apartment

  Volodya aged four with his mother and aunt and the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin

  Garik and Inna Basyrov

  ‘Couple’ by Garik Basyrov

  A crowd gathers to watch me performing on a ladder . . .

  . . . and how the piece to camera appeared in the report

  Filing a report by satellite telephone from Chechnya

  Russian troops pose in front of the destroyed presidential palace in Grozny

  My friend Nikolai Vorontsov with Boris Yeltsin in front of the Russian parliament during the 1991 coup

  My children, Ewan, Duncan and Katie, on the BBC car near Red Square

  Ewan playing under Lenin’s watchful eye in 1989

  Soviet soldiers raise the Red Flag above the Reichstag in Berlin at the end of the Second World War

  Yevgeny Khaldei, the photographer of the Reichstag picture, reunited with the then 18-year-old soldier who raised the flag, Aleksey Kovalyov

  Consulting the shaman in Siberia

  On a plane with the man who might have been president, Boris Nemtsov

  . . . and meeting the man who did become president, Vladimir Putin, at a Valdai Club dinner

  Prologue

  THIS IS THE BOOK I have been slowly writing in my head for the past forty-odd years. Little did I suspect, back in 1970, when I first closeted myself in the school library for hours on end to teach myself Russian, that the rest of my life would be shaped by a country of which, at the time, I knew very little. It was communist, had put a man in space, and had athletes with see-see-see-pee on their shirts. That was about it. Oh, and everyone was scared of it.

  But it was none of these things that first ignited a Russian spark inside me. No, it was a beautiful tawny wooden box that sat on my bedroom table, a Pye wireless set, with five valves, eight wavebands and four Bakelite knobs, which I twiddled ceaselessly, entranced by the world’s languages, voices and music. As a teenager, I lived a double life, half-hippy, half-nerd. I spent much of my time playing guitar in a rock band and glued to the side of a girlfriend through the rain-soaked summers of north-east Scotland, vainly trying to bring some of the Woodstock spirit to my home town. The rest of my time I spent in front of that Pye radio set, mind-travelling around the world and marvelling at all the languages I didn’t speak. I wrote to scores of stations asking for QSL cards (proof that I had listened to them and sent a reception report) and pinned them to my wall, next to the posters from The Beatles’ White Album. The communist stations showered me with cards, magazines and brochures. Prague, Warsaw, Sofia, Bucharest, Peking – I knew the sound of their languages and the odd-looking typefaces they used in their publications long before I understood anything about their politics. And Moscow . . .

  The signal from the USSR was the clearest and most powerful on the ether. Inexplicably, the very sound of it made my heart jump. The ten-note call-sign pealed like frozen iron bells being struck on a black winter night. At the start of every broadcast a voice would declaim: ‘Govorit Moskva!’ Just two words, but they quivered with emotion: ‘Moscow calling!’ Then a choir struck up a Russian song that haunted me almost as much as the spine-tingling opening bars of Good Vibrations. I didn’t know then, but I know now, that the song was a classic piece of Soviet propaganda. Here’s a rough translation:

  Wide is my motherland

  Full of rivers, fields and trees.

  I know of no other country

  Where people breathe so free.

  The station – Radiostantsiya Rodina, or Radio Motherland – broadcast in Russian and was mainly targeted at what it called ‘our compatriots abroad’. I had no idea what was being said, but I luxuriated in the euphony of the language – its dark, soft, sexy vowels, the clatter of its consonants, the susurrus of its fricatives and sibilants, the music of its intonations. Folk songs spirited me to Siberia. Readings of poetry, even if I understood no word, left me breathless at their beauty. Perhaps my subconscious was telling me: lips that produced such heavenly sounds surely had to be kissed. I sent off for the booklets that accompanied the station’s Russian lessons.

  Meanwhile, in an Edinburgh bookshop I bought what must surely be the most unsuccessful textbook ever published. Titled Teach Yourself Russian through Reading, it aimed to plunge learners straight into the delights of Russian literature – to wit, in the very first chapter, a passage from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Thus the first Russian sentence I ever tried to learn was: ‘When Prince Andrew entered the study, the old pr
ince in his old-man’s spectacles and white dressing gown, in which he received no one but his son, was sitting at the table writing. He looked round.’ From such texts one was supposed to ‘assimilate’ Russian grammar, and by the end of lesson one we’d done reflexive verbs, past tenses, possessive pronouns and several conjugations – and learned interesting phrases such as ‘The splutters flew from his creaking pen’.

  I struggled on for a few more pages, but was thankful when the Radio Moscow booklets finally arrived, and I was soon practising more useful sentences such as ‘Hello, my name is Viktor’, ‘This is my house’, and ‘My mum is a crane-operator’.

  It was the language itself that attracted me at this stage. The love of literature came later – indeed, at school any hint of it was expertly snuffed out by our English teacher, a gargoyle of a man called Mr Watt, who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Killer’. (Had I been English I might have recognised this as a rather amusing pun, but as a Scot, given to pronouncing the ‘r’ at the end of the word, the joke only dawned on me many years after leaving school. At the time I thought he existed only to beat small boys and kill their interest in books.)

  The USSR insinuated itself into my mind in other ways too. When I was seven Yuri Gagarin flew into space. A year later the West was on the brink of nuclear war with Russia during the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet national anthem kept being played at the Olympic Games. Some of the most colourful postage stamps in my Stanley Gibbons Swiftsure album were marked CCCP, and showed men in welder’s goggles, women with sheaves of corn, athletes, sputniks, the hammer-and-sickle motif, and an earnest man with a goatee beard, gripping the lapel of his overcoat – whereas our stamps in those days rarely depicted anything but the Queen’s head.

  I came from a politically engaged family – my parents were active in the Labour Party – but I knew little about the realities of the Soviet ‘workers’ state’ . . . until 1968. That August two boys from Czechoslovakia were staying with my family for a couple of days before they went off to camp in Perthshire with the Scottish Schoolboys’ Club. They were a year or so older than me (I was 14), and when they spotted my shortwave wireless they excitedly tuned in to Radio Prague. To their horror it was broadcasting a stark announcement that the country had been invaded by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops and that the reforming ‘Prague Spring’ government (thanks to which the boys were able to travel abroad) had been overthrown. The joy of two lads looking forward to a fortnight in the Scottish Highlands drained from their faces as they heard the announcer call upon the Czechoslovak people – including their parents, back in Prague – to remain calm and not to provoke the occupying forces into causing bloodshed. We heard the announcers’ voices falter, and the rattle of gunfire as Soviet tanks began to shell the radio building. Now I had another reason to learn Russian. What was communism? Who was Brezhnev? Why did they invade other countries?

  A year or so later I had learned enough to persuade my school to assign me ‘self-study’ hours in the library (there was no Russian teacher) so that I could prepare for an ‘O-Grade’ exam, and perhaps go on to study Russian at university. After two years of memorising declensions and imbibing Radio Moscow, I found the written examination easy – but when I opened my mouth at the oral test I realised it was the first time I had ever spoken Russian to another human being. Only then did I discover how important it was to emphasise the correct syllables in Russian words: a misplaced stress could change the meaning altogether, or simply make your words unintelligible. An ‘o’ sounded differently depending on how close it was to the stressed syllable: so moloko (milk) was pronounced muh-la-kó . . . how marvellous! I couldn’t wait to get to university, and have a proper teacher.

  I studied Russian at Aberdeen University, and for a year in Zurich, where I also searched in vain for the exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was said to keep his memories of Russia alive by pacing through the snowy forest on the Zürichberg, near my student dorm. Finally, with my degree in my pocket, I was ready to set off. Something was hauling me away from Scotland like the tugging tide of the North Sea, and it was Russia.

  1

  On the Devil’s Horns

  IT WAS OCTOBER 1978, and the coldest Moscow winter in a century was just revving up. Sadly, the district of Moscow in which we were going to spend it was only half-built. Our apartment was so new you could still smell traces of the plumber’s last swig of vodka.

  Soon there was ice creeping across the double-glazed window. Across the inside of the double-glazed window. The bolts holding the frame together had merely been placed loosely in the holes, allowing Siberian gales to whistle through the gaps between glass and wood. Apparently that crucial final step, where you take a spanner and turn the bolts clockwise, was an advanced-level skill not included in the Soviet builder’s manual, so the first thing we had to do was buy some tools to finish off the work. Cupboard doors also needed straightening, and flapping electric sockets had to be attached securely to the walls. The drainpipe under the sink in the bathroom was sealed with an old rag, and leaked for months until we learned how to bribe a plumber to fix it. A three-rouble note – a tryoshka – seemed to do the trick for most odd jobs, though since this was almost exactly the price of a bottle of vodka there was no point at all in calling a plumber after about eleven o’clock in the morning, by which time he might have drunk his way through several odd jobs already.

  The flat was provided, free of charge, by my employer, Progress, the Soviet Union’s foreign language publishing house. I had landed the work in April, after doing a translation test while in Moscow with a group of language students. I also fell in love with one of the students in the group: like me, Neilian was Scottish, and equally fascinated by Russia. In September we got married, and set off for a year of adventure in Moscow. We were rare specimens in those days – foreigners who came to the heart of the communist world not as diplomats or businessmen or journalists, but to work for a Soviet organisation, with none of the perks that most Westerners enjoyed – just for the sheer joy of learning Russian and experiencing a forbidden place.

  Vadim, the weasel-faced head of Progress’s foreign relations department, met us at the airport with a driver. Our route to the apartment seemed to take hours. Vadim tried to scare us with talk about bears and wolves in the forests we travelled through. (Why we even travelled through forests remains a mystery to this day.)

  On arrival, Vadim showed us up to our one-roomed apartment. ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘On the devil’s horns,’ said Vadim with a strange cackle.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yasenevo,’ he said.

  I was none the wiser. ‘Is that in Moscow?’

  Vadim hesitated. ‘Mmm, yes,’ he said. ‘More or less.’

  The room contained a table, a couple of bottle-green patterned armchairs, and a matching sofa which folded out to become our bed. It was identical to many Russians’ flats we would visit, apart from one extra accoutrement – a small metal plate which we discovered later under the wallpaper just above our bed. This appeared to conceal a microphone. Over the next two years snippets of our private conversations would make their way back to us courtesy of the army of perverts with language degrees employed by the KGB to snoop on foreigners’ bedrooms.

  Vadim left us with 50 roubles to tide us over until I received my first pay – 200 roubles a month, which at the official exchange rate in those days was about £200. Two hundred roubles went quite a long way. (The average Soviet wage was 170 roubles.) Over the next months we would be able to buy curtains and a strip of carpet (both chosen from the tiny selection of unconscionably ugly state-approved styles), a TV, a record-player and eventually a refrigerator. For now, there was no need for that: like many Russians, we hung our butter and cheese outside the window in a carrier bag. But come spring we would need one.

  Our priorities on that first evening were a cooking pot, a packet of tea, some bread, and a few vegetables or meat for our first meal. But within seconds we realised we lack
ed the most essential item for life in these parts – rubber boots. It was not just our apartment windows that had not been finished off: the pavements and roads had not yet been tarmacked, and the 400-metre walk to the universam (universal store, or supermarket) was a swamp. By the time we reached the shop our shoes, indeed our ankles, were coated with thick mud. The floor of the supermarket was a sea of sludge, despite the best efforts of a very old woman in a charcoal overall and felt boots who dragged a black rag around with a stick, slopping the mud from place to place.

  The shop somewhat resembled a Western supermarket, in that it had rows of shelves, but they contained almost nothing but cans – mainly conserved fish and meat – and identical oatmeal-textured paper bags which could be distinguished only by searching for the word written on them with a Biro: rice, sugar, flour, semolina. In the section marked ‘milk’, squishy pyramid-shaped plastic bags of milk were leaking onto the floor. The section marked ‘meat’ was bloodstained but empty. The section marked ‘vegetables’ sported several cage trolleys containing a few muddy potatoes, carrots and onions. Sparrows were flying about under the ceiling, chirping away as if they hadn’t noticed that the woods they used to nest in had been chopped down and replaced with a housing estate.

  An assistant appeared from a back room wheeling another trolley, filled to the brim with huge pale-green cabbages, like a mountain of skulls from Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The supermarket had appeared to be almost empty, but now a horde of women appeared from nowhere and descended upon the trolley like a plague of locusts. First I saw the headscarves, then the flailing elbows, and suddenly the entire space was heaving with brown coats. As the cabbages vanished I had a cartoonish vision of the trolley stuffed with upside-down women scrabbling for the final one, their legs sticking up in the air like a packet of French fries. Within seconds the trolley was empty, bar a few tattered leaves, and the lucky shoppers were emerging from the dust cloud with smiles on their faces, while fights broke out among the losers. One woman who had a cabbage clinched under each arm was physically assaulted by a member of the losing team, and the supernumerary one was snatched away from her. My wife, who had merely been observing the fray with her jaw ratcheting towards the floor in disbelief, was verbally abused by a woman with an enormous puce face under a fluffy wool hat, who shouted: ‘I know you’re a foreigner. Why should you get one? Just go to the devil!’