The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (37 page)

Usa, heedless of the streams of ice-

cold water that run on top of the ice,

concealed by a thin crust of snow.

One

time

there

were

six

snowmobiles stuck in mid-river

where they had crashed into water

flowing under the snow and been

abandoned.

Even the two dogs seemed

subdued by the graves, and they sat

in the snow by the snowmobile,

waiting for us to move away.

The mood hung with us back to

the house, and the conversation

continued with Natasha in the

kitchen.

‘If someone comes back from

working on the railway, he’s cold,

he’ll sit and watch television and

drink vodka,’ she said. ‘People are

lazier than they used to be. Or else

now they are wiser, because they do

not do what we used to do.’

She reminisced about the colder

winters of her youth, and the heroic

amounts of work people did to stay

alive.

‘When I was small this was big,

the biggest village of the north,

2,000 people at least in the village

itself, and more in the hamlets

around. Now there’s no one there,’

she said, leaving their fate hanging

in the air, to be filled in by

Alexander.

‘Last

year

eleven

people

drowned, falling out of their boats,’

he said.

Natasha took over again: ‘They

weren’t all found. There was a lot of

water this year and strong winds,

and then there is this as well.’ She

tapped her jaw-line.

Do the women – I tapped my

jaw-line – as well, I asked?

‘They also. Everyone in Russia

drinks now.’

The mood was bleak, as the

conversation rolled on towards the

fate of the country.

‘I was like you once,’ said

Alexander.

‘I

believed

in

improvement and the future. I

condemned this and that and

everything, but I started to change.

Look at your son. He is small now

like a toy but he will become big and

you will care more about how he

will do at school, what he thinks and

so on, and this will become your

main concern. Your own successes

will be less important.’

Young people, he said, had no

concern for the victims of the gulag,

and no interest in the work he does

to try to keep the graveyard

respectable.

‘The younger generation collects

berries on the graves, they light fires.

Yes it happened, they say, these

people died, but it has nothing to do

with us. In March there will be a

new mayor in Inta and he will come

to the memorial cemetery. They

always do. But he will only come

once and never again. That’s what

they do,’ he said.

Did that mean that officials, the

state, had no interest in the graves?

‘The state has no relation to any

of this. They cannot afford to

provide us with gas, but they can

build themselves offices. Everything

is done through the arse, to screw

things up,’ he said, with an

unexpected profanity, the only one I

heard him use. ‘The state makes you

pay. If you don’t have to pay for the

railway, they will make you pay for

the mosquitoes that bite you. They

find a way to make you pay.’ And

that was why the collective farm had

closed, and with it had gone all work

but on the railway. ‘There was no

point in keeping the animals, you

have to make money. You have to

be able to pay for processing and

transport.’

There had been a geological

survey base in Soviet times but it

was found to be unprofitable, so it

was closed and all the equipment

sold off. Now it has been reopened.

‘We realized that in Russia all we

can do is drink vodka and sell oil, so

we need to find more oil. If we run

out we won’t even be able to buy

vodka, so these geologists are back,’

he said.

I asked him whether he was

depressed about being a Russian.

‘I haven’t called myself that for

thirty years. I don’t think about that.

As soon as you think about being a

Russian, you think about not being a

Jew,’ he said. ‘I remember Zinoviev,

the leader of the revolution, had a

Jewish name because people began

to talk about it after 1991, and to

wash all this dirty washing and to

talk about how the Jews were to

blame for everything, how all the

Jews were bad and all the Russians

were good and so on.’

He shrugged. He had escaped to

the pure clean north. He wanted

nothing to do with all that dirtiness.

At four the next morning, I was a

dumpy figure in the cold waiting for

the train south, towards the sun. The

thick clothes and darkness made all

of us on the platform look the same,

men or women, misshapen like clay

dolls.

Alexander told me as we waited

on the platform that ‘before’ 300

children had studied at the village

school. Now there were just ninety. I

thought about that word ‘before’.

Before, there was order. Before,

there were children. Before, there

was work. Before, people drank less.

Before, people lived beyond their

twenties.

In Two Years in Abez, Nikolai

Punin looked out at the grim view of

Abez. ‘If you asked me what hell

looked like, I would describe it just

like that: the total rule of the straight

line and the right angle. No free

spirit was left alive by their

obsession with tidiness, fences and

orderly

footpaths,

all

neatly

maintained and swept constantly.

Who said that hell is packed with

good intentions? Quite the opposite,

there were no good intentions, only

meaningless ones and that made

inmates lose all hope.’

A crowd of railway workers

boarded the train and, although I had

a ticket, it seemed I had to sit in the

cheapest compartment until I got to

Inta, where I could be assigned bed

linen. Hunched in my coat, hat and

scarf almost touching across my

face, I dozed.

The train’s approach to Inta was

heralded by the phone of a teenage

girl on the bench opposite me. There

had been no reception for the two-

hour journey through the forest, but

we were now within range of a

mobile tower in the town. Her ring

tone was a repeated English-

language chorus: ‘I am a sexy girl. I

like you fuck me well. I am a sexy

girl. I like you fuck me well. I am a

sexy girl.’ She grappled under her

coat to find it, pressed the green

button

and

began

a muttered

conversation with her mother. I

wondered if she knew what the

words of her ringtone meant.

The prevalence of such trashy

English-language

culture

is,

I

supposed, another sign of the

collapse of Russian confidence. The

dregs of Anglo-America had been

dumped on places like Inta, and been

taken up for want of anything else

vaguely vibrant. As I waited for us

to

pull

into

the

platform,

I

remembered other examples I had

seen up here. One taxi driver had

affixed a semi-transparent sunshade

across the top of his windscreen with

the English words: ‘Guns don’t kill

people, I kill people’ (I have

corrected his spelling).

Most startling of all, however,

had been a T-shirt – it must have

come from a Sekond Khend – I had

seen worn by a middle-aged man.

Below a picture of a grinning male

face, it bore the boast that ‘Five

billion potential grandchildren died

on your daughter’s face last night.’

What path did that take to get to its

final owner?

When, after Inta, I finally got my

bunk and snuggled down in the

warm, I mused over how it was that

English-language trash culture had

penetrated so far into Russia. After

World War Two, Western writers

feared that Russia’s totalitarian state

would conquer them all, but in fact

the reverse happened. Russia today

is like the opposite of
A Clockwork

Orange
, the dystopian novel by

Anthony Burgess. At that time the

Soviet Union seemed so powerful

that he imagined a future when

Western teenagers spoke a slang

peppered

with

Russian

words:

moloko
for milk;
droog
for friend;

horrorshow
for good. But that is not

how it turned out. It is not Western

hooligans using pidgin Russian as

slang, but out-of-control young

Russians speaking pidgin English.

You see it in the graffiti along the

railway

lines:

White

Pride,

Skinheads, Hooligans.

This penetration began in the

1960s, when the West pioneered

mass fashion and the Beatles.

Russians old enough to remember

talk about listening to foreign pop

music on home-made LPs fashioned

from X-ray film, which was solid

enough to keep the groove, although

it did not hold it for long. But

Western culture still had to sneak

through the chinks in the Iron

Curtain. That meant a random

selection of Western bands and

writers, protected by the communist

state

from

more

vigorous

competitors, flourished in the Soviet

Union when they withered and died

at home. Like flightless birds on an

inaccessible island, bands like King

Crimson, Jethro Tull and Judas

Priest

became

hugely

popular,

expanding to fill evolutionary niches

they had no access to in the West.

Minor band members still play solo

concerts in major Moscow venues

when they might struggle to fill the

back room of a pub in London.

Meanwhile,

bands

like

the

Rolling Stones are all but unknown.

Their records for some reason failed

to penetrate the Soviet counterculture

at the right time. As the train rattled

along, I plugged in the spoken

version of Stones guitarist Keith

Richards’s autobiography, and his

words helped the thought process

along.

‘We were not destroying the

virtue of the nation but they think we

are so eventually we’re drawn into a

war,’ said Keith at one point as he

described his arrest and conviction

on drugs charges.

If Keith thought that his one

night in Wormwood Scrubs was a

declaration of war by the authorities,

he should have looked at what was

happening in the Soviet Union. His

same post-war generation, his Soviet

contemporaries,

full

of

fiery

optimism, attempted to do what he

and his friends did and revitalize

culture, inject it with a bit of

dynamism. The first post-Stalin

dissidents were young people who

gathered at a statue of Vladimir

Mayakovsky in Moscow to read

their poems in the late 1950s and

early

1960s.

They

were

the

equivalent of the bohemians meeting

in coffee shops in Chelsea or in

Greenwich Village.

The Soviet state at first was not

quite sure how to respond. Boris

Pasternak was criticized for his

Western-style novel
Dr Zhivago
, but

he was not arrested, nor did he lose

his country home in Peredelkino, a

village where houses were reserved

for artists and writers.

Two of his disciples – Andrei

Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel –

however, were to be made examples

of. And it was their arrest and