1989 (16 page)

It would be another year before my Russian was up to understanding the full idiomatic and syntactic richness of the obscenities that spilled forth from the little fat man with arms like tree trunks who barrelled out of the driver’s cab. (Nearly all Russian swear words, I would later learn, are, thanks to Genghis Khan and his hordes, derived from the Mongolian words for the body’s private parts.) I gathered he was not pleased. Not pleased to find us parked ‘in the middle of the road’ where he might have ploughed straight into us had he not thought to do something as rash and energy-wasteful as turn on his headlights. Not pleased either to find the reason we were there was because we – and he – had literally come to the end of the road.

He ummed and ahhed a bit, spat on the ground a few times, uttered the names of a few more Mongolian body parts, and then shrugged and made to get back in his cab. If he was a top-level KGB agent trained to tail Westerners in deep cover, then he deserved an Oscar for his method-acting portrayal of an ignorant, half-drunk, foul-mouthed member of the lumpen proletariat who didn’t give a bent kopeck for two namby-pamby Westerners and their fancy little car stuck in the mud.

‘We can’t move,’ I bleated. ‘We need to get to Minsk.’ At this stage even a lift in the back of his stinking lorry seemed an attractive option.

‘It’s that way,’ he shrugged, indicating the inaccessible bridge ahead as he climbed back into his cab and started up his grumbling engine. ‘Just follow me,’ he grunted, leaning out of the cab as he pulled level with us.

I was about to point out that this was not exactly the easiest thing in the world as we were stuck fast and there was no road, when I turned and saw in the glare of his headlights, a good metre higher than ours as he passed, that there was in between the lumps of
snow-covered
concrete what appeared to be a track. And as mercy would have it – or maybe because the weight of the truck had changed the frozen contours of the mud – I rammed home second gear and the snow chains caught. And we pulled, lurchingly, bumpily, with sounds that suggested God only knew what damage to suspension and chassis, out of the rut, following in the illuminated path taken by our unlovely lorry driver as he heedlessly rattled, occasionally at alarmingly improbable angles up what would perhaps one day be a motorway slip road but right now resembled a frozen obstacle course around the tank traps of El Alamein. And then the lights went out.

Somewhere just before reaching the brow of the incline, he turned his headlights off and fell back on the use of mud and
slush-covered
sidelights that offered no more forward illumination than a single candle in a hurricane lantern. In all my subsequent three years in the Soviet Union I never saw an industrial, public transport or even private vehicle that ever used its headlights properly. I don’t mean full beam, but even just dipped. Whether the average Soviet citizen simply didn’t believe that by the mere act of driving, he was charging his battery – who knows, maybe on some vehicles it didn’t! – or whether it was somehow believed that they were saving fuel, or whether headlights were deemed a privilege only for the party elite, who flashed them relentlessly when roaring at high-speed along the priority lanes reserved for their Zil limousines, I never really knew. It was just a fact. Something you came to expect and not argue with. Like so much in the Soviet Union. Dimly lit streets required dimly lit cars. It was part of the atmosphere. As if they were following
Hollywood
stage directions.

We got to Moscow. In the end. Arriving at Minsk in the small hours of the morning, then on the next day via Smolensk and mind-numbingly beautiful vistas of broad snowfields littered with giant black crows, silver forests of birch trees, sparkling golden cupolas of onion-domed churches, and huge foul-smelling black
cloud-belching industrial plants. When we finally pulled into the courtyard of the little block of flats that would be our new home – official address: Sadovaya-Samotechnaya 12/24, but known
universally
to its mainly Anglo-Saxon inhabitants as ‘Sad Sam’ – the Reuters bureau chief looked up almost dismissively and said, ‘Oh well, better late than never I suppose.’

Over the nearly three years we spent in Moscow the Cold War reached a new icy nadir. Relations between the Kremlin and the West plummeted to a low unknown since the Berlin and Cuba crises. Leonid Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, had been ambassador to Hungary in 1956 and played a crucial role in coordinating the Soviet invasion. He returned home to become head of the KGB and had been a leading light in advocating the brutal suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. His promotion to the top job was greeted with despair in a Poland still labouring under martial law.
Washington
saw him as a fittingly sinister head for what President Ronald Reagan now termed the ‘evil empire’.

A few months later, in September 1983, we reached one of those bleak moments when the awful reality of the superpower standoff came home. Soviet fighter pilots shot down a South Korean airliner which had – allegedly because of a navigational error – strayed into prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka peninsula, home to some of Moscow’s missiles sites. All 269 passengers and crew were lost. The ‘evil empire’, it seemed, was living up to its reputation. Soviet
spokesmen
were unrepentant, blaming the US for using civilians as ‘shields’ for its espionage activities. Conspiracy theories abounded, not least among journalists, given as a breed to black humour who noted the aircraft’s James Bond designation: KAL 007. In the meantime, our feeling of isolation, as ‘enemies in a strange land’ was intensified when the Soviet state airline Aeroflot was banned from landing in almost all Western countries who at the same time ordered their national airlines to suspend flights to the Soviet Union. Although there was still the option of the long drive or overnight train journey to Helsinki, there was a feeling among the foreign community of being trapped in the lion’s den.

During this period I took some memorable journeys to the outer
reaches of that den, notably – in a not wholly vain search for some ‘light relief’ news features – to the coldest inhabited place on earth, a remote Siberian settlement called Oymyakon. It took the best part of two days to fly there, a journey of some 5,000 miles via Omsk, Tomsk and Yakutsk, a metropolis of 250,000 people literally in the middle of frozen nowhere. We landed out of an azure sky looking down at oceans of pine forest that stood up like iron filings manipulated from below by a magnet, into the grey blue fug of frozen exhaust fumes that marked the city. There were still two more flights, first to the regional centre of Ust-Ilimsk, then on in an antiquated
turboprop
Yak-16 where we sat in bucket seats facing each other along the fuselage, heated by something resembling a giant hair dryer. Most of the other passengers were dressed in sealskins. The pilot and
copilot
looked like something out of ‘Biggles goes to Alaska’, big men with thigh-high fur-lined boots and fur hats with the flaps flapping. I asked one why we had to sit around for two hours before we took off. ‘Temperature,’ he replied in the monosyllabic way men of action have – especially Russian men of action – ‘we wait until it is warmer.’ ‘How warm?’ ‘Above minus 50C.’ ‘Oh, why?’ ‘Earlier – the wings crack.’ It was good enough reason for me.

My photographer on the trip was a Russian called Lev – Reuters occasionally ‘borrowed’ local staff for non-controversial stories. He took some memorable snaps of me ‘cuddling’ dead rabbits that local Yakuti tribesmen had trapped and left sitting, apparently as pert and ready to bound off across the snow, outside their yurts to be skinned and eaten whenever they chose to bring them ‘in, out of the freezer’. Lev had previously been foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s
personal
snapper, he boasted. Which made me realise I was now also just ‘two handshakes’ away from Josef Stalin. As links to
twentieth-century
tyrants went, I had done the double!

Back on the Cold War front, a memorable
Time
magazine cover named Reagan and Andropov jointly ‘Men of the Year’, showing them standing back to back, like adversaries about to take part in a deadly duel. The American television correspondents meanwhile were engaged in a battle of their own: trying to get their domestic anchors to pronounce the new Soviet leader’s relatively simple name properly. Almost unanimously US newsreaders had taken to calling
him
Andropov
, putting the stress – vitally important in Russian – wrongly on the first syllable. One of them, a Canadian working for CBS, devised what he thought was an ingenious – and for the state of superpower relations terrifyingly apt – mnemonic: ‘You go to the edge of the cliff … And-DROP-off.’ Needless to say, it didn’t work. It was a problem that was to recur.

Even after flights abroad were restored, the sense of oppression remained. The entire top floor of the Sad Sam building was under lock and key, and known to be reserved for KGB monitoring
equipment
. Phone calls to the West had to be booked hours in advance. Although under the Helsinki Accords, that back in 1973 had seemed to usher in a new era of détente but were now de facto defunct,
television
companies had unfettered rights to broadcast news
material
, in practice it didn’t happen. The BBC, CBS, NBC, ITV, ARD – almost all the Western television news channels – had Moscow correspondents, but to send their material in those pre-portable
satellite
days they were obliged to use the facilities of the Soviet state television transmitter at Ostankino in northern Moscow. If their film contained matter that the Soviet authorities didn’t like – interviews with the famed dissident Andrei Sakharov were a classic example – when it came to transmission time, the satellite link inexplicably collapsed, or some other ‘unavoidable’ technical failure occurred.

The result was an unexpected ‘perk’ for the spouses of other accredited correspondents: the birth of the ‘hand-carry’. Because they too were in possession of that – for most Russians –
unimaginable
luxury, an unlimited multiple entry and exit visa, they could, literally, leave the country in a hurry. So whenever a TV company had a hot scoop that they reasonably feared might not make it out over the Soviet-controlled airwaves, they simply bought an instant business-class ticket and handed it, along with the tape and a ‘thank you’ of $100 cash to whichever spouse was head of the queue and had the time and inclination for a hand-luggage-only excursion to London. They were met at the other end by a TV company
chauffeur
who took the tape to the studio before depositing them at a West End hotel. Next day they were picked up again and taken back to the airport, though not before most had spent their $100, usually in Harrods food hall, though on one occasion the British wife of
an American correspondent memorably brought back a vast
takeaway
curry. Who had thought heaven was chicken tikka and bhindi bhaji?

These trips were frequent enough that before we finally left, my infant son, born a little over a year after our arrival, had
accumulated
more then 25,000 miles of British Airways flying time. Before his second birthday. But if our private lives had been marked by the happy event of a birth, work was an unremitting death watch. Andropov had not been a well man when he took over. Instead of a dynamic change from the slurred speech and stumbling gait of the senile Leonid Brezhnev, the new man in the Kremlin was more often on a dialysis machine in the Central Committee’s private
hospital
. Andropov had suffered from kidney problems for years but they were now acute.

Within months of taking the top job he almost totally disappeared from view, leaving keynote speeches to be given by other politburo members, eagerly watched by those of us who styled ourselves – like Connie in John LeCarré’s
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
trilogy –
Kremlinologists
. We would hatch theories as to what speech on which occasion, which nuance and what announcement of policy gave hints as to who might be next in line of succession to the
all-important
role of general secretary of the Communist Party.

The American correspondents had barely managed to get their New York anchors to pronounce the Soviet leader’s name
properly
, with the stress on the second rather than first syllable when Andropov finally dropped off. His body was laid in state according to tradition for Soviet leaders since the death of Lenin in 1924 in the Hall of Columns in the Trades Union House, once a club for Tsarist noblemen. The Red Square funeral of this most unloved of late Soviet leaders was held on February 14th, 1984, Valentine’s Day. He was succeeded, however, by yet another dead hand: that of an ageing Brezhnev acolyte, Konstantin Chernenko. If anything it was a step backwards, but not one that looked like it would last long. Chernenko needed an escalator to be built to get him to the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum for Andropov’s send-off. He barely managed to stammer his way through the eulogy in a wavering voice. He had no sooner come to office than there were rumours that he was
hospitalised with pneumonia. The Soviet Union’s supply of elderly leaders was gradually running out. Sooner or later – and the way things were going it looked like sooner – there would have to be a switch to a new generation.

Even so, there were still a few of the older generation lingering in the corridors of power hoping for a chance to step into the big office, if they didn’t fall off their perch first. As a result every
Kremlinologist
in Moscow was constantly on the watch for changes in
television
programming – a switch from regular broadcasts to classical music was a surefire indicator someone big had snuffed it – or for Red Square being closed off at an unusual time (a preparation for a funeral). In November 1984 the defence minister Dmitry Ustinov, who had been in the job for eighteen years and was already in his mid-seventies, was added to the communal at-risk list after he failed to turn up at the annual Red Square parade to commemorate the 1917 revolution.