Lost and Found in Russia

  “If we’d stayed on in Novosibirsk we’d never have learned these things. Life was too easy. Yes, we were earning good money. We were living in this nice flat. We had everything a person could want. But there was nothing to do—nothing but drink kefir and listen to the air-conditioning. Besides, it wasn’t really honest, the money we were making there. Do you remember? Igor thought up this brilliant wheeze for advertising the houses the company was building. We set up this competition for children to draw My Dream House. We used the winners in our ad campaign. The paintings were wonderful. But it wasn’t honest—it looked as if the company was really going to build those dream houses. Which couldn’t have been further from the truth!”

  I was sleeping in a hut across the yard from theirs. As I went to bed I noticed an unopened crate of vodka bottles stashed under a table in the corner of the room. So Natasha was still drinking. How come she was looking so happy, so healthy, then? How come they were publishing The Messenger, but giving it away? How were they earning any money? Nothing quite added up.

  However, I had cleared up an old mystery. Over supper I asked Igor and Natasha about those rumors running around Novosibirsk when I last visited them. Rumors of a leak at the plutonium factory near their flat. Were they right? Yes, it was a bad leak, they admitted. Natasha, who was marinated in alcohol, was unaffected. But Igor, who did not drink, suffered badly. His teeth fell out soon after my visit.

  After I turned off the light the sound of digging started up, quite close by, in the next-door garden. Now and then a torch flashed. On and on the digging went. What could they be doing, I wondered as I drifted off to sleep.

  THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY

  When the cock crowed at dawn next day, the household was already stirring, to my astonishment. My friends had been confirmed night owls. The morning sun slanted through the window into the tin basin as I washed my face. My question about the moonlight digging made Natasha and Igor laugh: “They must have been burying something they’d stolen,” said Igor. “You’ll soon find nothing here’s the way it seems!”

  After breakfast, Natasha and I set off for Sevastopol. The couple never left home together now, not since the burglary, when all their computer files relating to The Messenger were wiped. It was a warning: someone wanted them to know they were being watched. But Igor was not going to miss us: Volodya had left behind a fat file for him and he sat up late into the night reading it. There was a gleam in his eye; he had his material for the next edition of The Messenger.

  Heavily laden with passengers, the communal taxi labored uphill toward the port. As we reached the summit, I could see why this southwesterly point of the Crimean peninsula was so bitterly fought over for the last two thousand years. The city stood on a series of headlands divided by profound inlets. They were superb natural harbors. Along their banks lay the rusting hulks of the old Soviet navy.

  From one headland we boarded a ferry to the city center on the next. Natasha stood in the prow, wind in her hair: “How good it is to get out. I adore wandering.” Then she thought for a moment: “Yes, I know what you’re thinking—I hope I have mastered the restlessness. But I can’t be sure.”

  In the sea-bright air the low, white-painted buildings of Sevastopol sparkled. Set back from tree-lined streets, garnished with neoclassical touches, they were punctuated by elaborate war memorials and unexpected glimpses of the sea. After the German army besieged it and left it in ruins in 1941 Sevastopol was awarded the status of a “hero city.” The architects from Leningrad rebuilt it on the old lines of the nineteenth-century naval garrison. Until the end of the Cold War it was closed to foreigners. Today, its dingy Soviet-style shops were still decked out with obsolete products.

  There we met up with Volodya, who showed us around the city. With his old-fashioned military courtesy and self-deprecating competence Volodya was good company, but so unlike Natasha and Igor that it was hard to imagine how life had thrown them together.

  We visited the huge stone rotunda which housed a panoramic depiction of another yearlong siege of the city, this time by France, Britain, and Turkey in the Crimean War of 1854–1855. There was little in the panorama’s account to remind us that this siege ended in defeat. Perhaps that was as it should be. History called it a defeat. But the city survived and remained a Russian stronghold, home to the imperial navy.

  One civilization after another fought for mastery of this peninsula. The greatest of the caravan routes from China ended in Crimea. It was from this southwesterly anchorage that the cargo was dispatched to the markets of Europe. Under the Greeks, the city-state of Chersonesos flourished here. Today people were clambering over its fallen columns, carrying their picnics across its paved forums to the beach beyond. After the Greeks, the city fell to the Romans; then to the Huns, Byzantium, and Kievan Rus before becoming a Genoese trading colony. From one of these Genoese enclaves in Crimea, the city of Caffa, the Black Death entered Europe. The Mongols razed the city when they colonized the Eurasian landmass at the end of the thirteenth century. Long after their empire was broken they remained in their khanate in Crimea, continuing to harass Muscovy from the south. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the Russian army managed finally to dispel this threat.

  By that time Russia was desperate for an outlet to the south. The empire needed to secure a southern port for trading, as well as a navy to protect itself. When Catherine the Great wrested Crimea away from the Turks in 1783 she had dreams of reviving the Byzantine Empire, with her grandson Constantine as emperor.

  The Turks were not alone in being alarmed by those ambitions. The British and French had imperial territories to defend. So in the middle of the nineteenth century, all three powers came together to destroy Russia’s Crimean fleet once and for all.

  A century and a half later the fleet was still there, if rusty. The big question now was whether Russia’s navy really would agree to leave Sevastopol peacefully in 2017. Despite its white paint and brave show, there was an air of tubercular romanticism about the city. Although a mere 1.5 percent of Crimea’s population spoke Ukrainian, this was Ukraine now. The Russian officers, the sailors, and the large supporting civilian workforce stranded here with their rusting hulks were pawns in the larger political game being played around them.

  The city was virtually ungovernable, Volodya said. The last elected mayor died in mysterious circumstances. There had been no mayor at all since then. To the extent that it was being run at all, Ukraine’s President Kuchma and Russia’s Ministry of Defense did so directly, but pulling in opposite directions. In the vacuum in between, criminal gangs acted with impunity, running protection rackets, drugs and arms deals and murdering anyone who stood in their way.

  When Volodya was brought here from the Afghan front the doctors pieced him together and he reengaged on this new battle-front. He served as the navy’s commissar in Sevastopol, in charge of welfare. Being honest and energetic, he was popular, far too popular for the town’s administration, who sacked him. So he ran instead for Sevastopol’s Duma. The election brought him so many votes that it looked inevitable he would become chair of the Duma. That was when his chief rival accused him of bribing voters with vodka. This was an unlikely charge, as Volodya did not drink. It was rendered even more implausible by the fact that he was accused of bribing voters in six different places at once, as 120 witnesses offered to testify. He was allowed neither to challenge the case in court, nor take office. As Igor warned me, nothing in Sevastopol was the way it seemed.

  It was at this juncture that he happened to meet Igor and Natasha, whose fortunes were also at a low ebb. Igor, observing that Volodya needed a new power base, proposed that they start an organization to support the welfare of the “former people,” Russian ex-servicemen and-women. Many of them were now in desperate straits, needing help to adapt to civilian life. That was how the League of Officers came into being.

  This unlikely relationship seemed to work. They made up for one another’s deficiencies. Volodya, for all
his leadership qualities, lacked a higher education. My clever friends had more education between them than they knew what to do with. In that corrupted scene, they shared one vital quality, honesty.

  The League of Officers now had some seven hundred members, and The Messenger was its newspaper. In fact, it was not really a paper, more a series of in-depth samizdat reports, a guerrilla publication which appeared irregularly, when something needed saying. Some five thousand copies would be published, given away free. This way, as Volodya explained, it could not be closed down by having crippling taxes imposed on it. Nor could Volodya be accused of taking bribes.

  The Messenger played a significant role in the life of Sevastopol. It was the only publication not directly controlled by the local administration. Notionally, Volodya was its editor. Rumors about the paper were rife: it enjoyed powerful backing and was produced by a staff of thirty. In fact, it was entirely written by Igor and Natasha. Their names appeared nowhere, and they received no salaries for their work, only gifts. This was deliberate. Anonymity was their only protection. For since they had no institutional backing, they ran the danger of being casually eliminated if their identity leaked out.

  • • •

  Here in Crimea, the couple appeared finally to have found a place where their personal dramas were drowned out by the larger crisis going on around them. Yet experience made me cautious. There was always that dark force in Natasha that kept her dancing to a music the rest of us did not hear. That dance had carried her from the inner circle of the Soviet aristocracy to the status of penniless outcast. It had kept the two of them spinning around Russia like tops, full of fine intentions which did not materialize, unable to shake off their trouble, to settle down and become part of Russia’s new middle class.

  The sun was long over the hills by the time Natasha and I arrived home. Igor was looking pleased with himself: in our absence, he had produced a draft of the new edition. The file Volodya left him contained a record of the correspondence between a local businessman, who was an ex-officer, and the head of the administration. The businessman wanted to supply gas to Sevastopol, supplanting the ancient Soviet system, which was in a state of collapse. The letters documented the bribes that the administration demanded of the businessman. He refused; he knew that if he gave in, he would be vulnerable to arrest at any time. From then on, the administration would be able to milk him dry.

  My friends were excited: the new issue of The Messenger was going to be explosive. It was the first time a businessman was prepared to go public on the issue of bribes. Igor had spent the day substantiating the story; they had to be totally sure of their facts, for The Messenger was only as good as its reputation. Tonight, Natasha would rewrite Igor’s draft. It would be on the streets within a few days.

  ONE SMALL MEND IN THE PAST

  Natasha and I spent the afternoon traveling by ferry and bus around the promontory, exploring the battlefields of the Crimean War. We climbed up to an old Genoese fort on the gentle green hills above Balaklava. Down below, in the perfect little harbor with its graceful swan-necked outlet to the sea, a few old buildings on the waterfront were done up, and people were sitting out in the shade of umbrellas. But this idyllic, almost Mediterranean scene was spoiled by a rusting metal floating dock and a string of rusting naval vessels which hogged the waterfront. On the far side of the harbor you could see the gateway to the submarine base which the Soviets had hollowed out of the rock.

  During the Crimean War it was from this little harbor that the British kept their troops supplied. Up that valley in front of us, under fire from Russian guns on either side, the Light Brigade galloped their horses in the charge commemorated in Tennyson’s famous poem:

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die.

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  A disheveled man offered to sell me two buttons he dug up in the valley below; buttons from the coat of a British Hussar who had doubtless died there. “It is magnificent, but it is not war,” as the marshal of the French troops described the historic charge with unkind precision. By winning the battle, the Russians prevented us, the enemy, from advancing on Sevastopol from inland. But they had not saved the city for long.

  Natasha was fun to explore with, an unending source of irreverent information. As we sat on the hillside, she expressed her delight at being free of the house, where she spent long days alone with Igor. So I made a suggestion: why not use her excellent language skills to organize English-language tours for schoolkids around the historical sites of Crimea? The idea appealed to her. But when we got home Igor took me aside and warned me off pursuing it: Natasha was not strong enough, he said. Fleetingly, I wondered what his motive was, but not for long. Igor was the one holding things together now.

  When we first met, Igor was a caged bear, maddened, incapable of holding down a job. Natasha seemed like the resilient one. But perhaps that always was an illusion. This gifted woman was a Russian Orestes. She had taken on herself the role of scapegoat, carrier of the sins not just of her family, but of the herd. It was far too heavy for any one person to bear.

  When Natasha and I reached home that evening, covered in fine white dust, we walked over the hill to bathe it off in the sea. The late-afternoon swimmers were leaving and the red sun danced on the water toward us. Up on those green hillsides despoiled by the concrete and metal graffiti of state socialism, Russia’s great oil companies were stealthily buying up the seafront, erecting forbidding, high-walled dachas, cementing today’s national tensions into Crimea’s future.

  • • •

  Leaving Crimea was proving difficult. Although I was a legitimate visitor, it transpired that I could not just go and buy myself a train ticket to Kiev: Volodya was going to have to “procure” a ticket for me. When he did, he refused to let me pay, which left me wondering how to repay his kindness.

  I consulted Natasha and Igor. “It’s not things that he needs,” replied Igor. “But there’s something you could do—put the poor servicemen of our League of Officers in touch with some British organization.” I thought about this. Who to suggest? Language was one problem—few people in Crimea spoke English, and Russian speakers in my country were rare. British servicemen perhaps—but as Russia grew steadily more anti-Western, making that connection might be misconstrued. “You’re telling me there’s no one in England who’s interested in us?” Igor said provocatively. Nonsense, I told him, and told them about something I had never mentioned before. I described how we had organized Bookaid, how people from all over Britain had given us more than a million English-language books, which we had sent to the public libraries of Russia and its former republics. I admitted that I had not talked about it before because I found it too painful when people ascribed some ulterior motive to us. “Ulterior motive? Heaven forbid!” exclaimed Igor sarcastically. “You just wanted to teach us how to live!” Then I got really angry.

  The silence that followed was long and awkward. Then Natasha moved the conversation onto safer ground: “I bet you can’t guess the most important thing you ever did in Marx. You probably don’t even remember—it was that evening you talked to my English pupils. That evening changed their lives—no, I’m serious. You treated them like equals. It made them see themselves differently. The encounter changed them. Because of you, because you kept their hope alive, they went on to study languages at Saratov University—all of them!”

  I was grateful to Natasha for her intervention. In the past, when Igor was in attack-dog mode she would sit back and enjoy the spectacle. She was gentler now.

  • • •

  The following evening, when we were sitting in the shade of the camouflage, the couple finally started talking about themselves.

  Natasha and I had just returned from visiting Inkerman, the site of another of the great battles of the Crimean War. There, at massive cost, the Russians staved off what might otherwise have been the allies’ easy conquest of Sevastopol. It too
k a year for our incompetently led, disease-ridden, bloody siege to prevail. At what price? In the end, the Russian fleet lay scuppered, their territorial advances were temporarily halted, as they were today. The French came away with what military glory there was; the Ottoman Empire was shored up for a little longer. But the war cost even more lives than the American Civil War. As for the British, the greatest gain was that the filth, disease, and terrible neglect of the wounded prompted Florence Nightingale and her pioneers to lay down sound principles for modern nursing.

  When they first arrived in Crimea, Igor and Natasha lived in the village of Inkerman. It lay at the end of a deep inlet whose mouth was guarded by Sevastopol. Natasha and I took the ferry down the inlet from the “hero city,” along a lovely, rocky coastline despoiled by spent machinery, rusting hulks, abandoned floating docks, and gaping sewage pipes. “We loved it here,” said Natasha as we walked inland from the boat. “We lived in the dormitory settlement of a power station that was closing down. The buses had stopped—not profitable! So we had to walk everywhere—we developed these Herculean thighs. Our best friend was this great black dog called Jack. It was he who showed us around the Inkerman caves.”

  Without Jack they would never have found the concealed entrance to a vast underground military complex which was tunneled out in the 1930s. The dog led them to it. “There it was, with all its own factories and houses. We thought it was abandoned at first, but we were wrong! There are people still living down there—whole communities, schools, and shops. We got chased out. People say there are vast arms dumps down there.”