“Voronezh?” said the Russians I asked, incredulously. “Have you any idea what knuckle-headed louts live in the provinces? You are a cultured person. Of course you must go to Moscow.”
I talked to people with business interests in Russia. “Well, Voronezh is somewhat—how to put it—off the map,” they hedged. “If you go to Moscow, you’re likely to end up with some useful contacts.”
I was not convinced. I wasn’t going to Russia to make contacts. My mind was finally made up, however, by a girl I met from the Russian department at another university.
“I’m going to Moscow,” she said. “Are you coming too? Oh, it’s going to be such fun. A whole bunch of my friends are coming, we’ve got the maddest ideas. We’re organizing a ball! You absolutely must come. We’ll all be living in the same hostel, so I’ll know where to find you.”
“Actually, I’m going to Voronezh,” I said politely. Isn’t this how all important decisions are made?
“An average-sized city (pop: 1 million) situated on the banks of the river Voronezh, 8 km north of its confluence with the mighty river Don,” the Voronezh information leaflet began. During the weeks of preparation for my journey, this pompous, bossy document was my bible. “It lies some 500 km SSE of Moscow, on the border between the forest and meadow region of middle Russia, and the southern steppe. The soil is famously fertile, owing to the prevalence of black earth. The potato is the major crop of the region and among the finest in all Russia.”
“The correct clothing is essential,” the leaflet continued, “as in winter the temperature falls to minus twenty and more.” A sports shop sold me a pair of fur-lined boots a size too large and a down-filled coat that, they said, was suitable even for a hanging bivouac. (They showed me a photograph: a climber dangling from a snowy peak in a terrifying, Goretex sling.) “In summer the temperature can reach as high as forty degrees. In the autumn Voronezh is rainy and muddy.” Three suitcases were already full, but the leaflet blithely went on. “Necessities will be hard to find.” In went two saucepans and a frying pan, plates, mugs, cutlery, coffee, teabags, tomato paste, dried milk, dried mushrooms, dried soup, a Christmas pudding, vitamins, stock cubes, Marmite and ten packets of Sainsbury’s luxury nut selection. I bought a year’s supply of toothpaste, soap, tampons, shampoo, toilet paper, aspirin, Band-Aids, antibiotics, and a sterile surgical pack with a full set of syringes and a drip. I bought presents, without knowing whom they were to be for: tins of Earl Grey tea, Union Jack ashtrays, postcards of Princess Diana, and a joke nose on elastic. When I’d got these home, I went straight out again and bought bleach, a padlock, cockroach powder, contraceptives, a rape alarm, a scrub brush, a pair of flip-flops and an allen wrench (which was necessary, apparently, for opening the windows on Russian trains). I never actually remembered to take it with me on a train ride but it had a talismanic value. Surely I was ready for every possible situation now that I had an allen wrench.
“Prepare yourself,” the document concluded, “for a year in a remote and underdeveloped city. The mail takes six weeks to arrive. To make an international telephone call, you must wait at the central telegraph office for several hours. There is little entertainment other than that which you make yourselves.” A stereo, a backgammon set, and a sandwich toaster joined the pile. To qualify, books had to be more than five hundred pages long: The Brothers Karamazov, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Master and Margarita, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and several weighty biographies filled another bag. At the last moment, my friend Emily decided she couldn’t bear to suffer from her bad back for a year, and packed up a double futon, five feet square, made by the blind in Dundee. We each had a baggage allowance of twenty-two kilos; between us, what with the futon, our luggage must have weighed more than a hundred. And then the tanks rolled into Moscow.
August 19, 1991: 11 A.M.
In Moscow the weather was still and humid. On the BBC I watched the Special Forces soldiers surrounding the television center, their faces tense and shiny with sweat.
At about four o’clock, tanks arrived outside the Russian parliament building, known as the White House, where Boris Yeltsin and his supporters had established themselves. For a quarter of an hour the tanks pointed their guns at the White House, engines running. There was only a small number of people watching, and yet the tanks hesitated.
Suddenly Yeltsin walked out of the White House. Alone, without bodyguards, he approached one of the tanks and clambered on top of it. He shook hands with the soldiers inside and turned to his spectators.
“Citizens of Russia,” he shouted. “The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power… . We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état…” The crowd cheered. I swallowed the lump in my throat and wished furiously that my mother could see this, the death of Soviet power.
At the end of the month, Emily and I got together and celebrated. The Soviet Union had fallen to pieces. Ukraine had declared its independence from Moscow on August 24, and Belorussia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan had followed. The Communist Party had been dissolved. Officials who had collaborated with the coup were under arrest, Party property was seized, and Pravda, the Party organ, was closed down. Gorbachev was unemployed. Yeltsin was trying to reform the system and there was a mood of wild optimism on the streets.
None of this momentous news, however, was the main cause of our joy. Emily and I drank red wine at her house and played a song called “Red Army Blues” by the Waterboys. “Took a train to Voronezh,” the lyrics went, “it was as far as we could go.” We had our visas. In a week we’d already have arrived.
2
Hostel No. 4
They’re light-minded… mercy sometimes knocks at their hearts… ordinary people… only the housing problem has corrupted them.
Hostel No. 4 teemed with activity, most of it verminous. Cockroaches swarmed through the building unchecked; they inhabited the central heating system and the warm, juddering refrigerator motors in every room. In the kitchens were piles of rubbish two feet high that rustled in the dark. The lightbulbs in the toilets were always being stolen, making the fauna in there difficult to identify, but the occasional shouts of horror from people picking their way through the darkness were testimony to its existence.
The human overpopulation was equally intense. There were at least three and often closer to six people to each room, in which we slept, worked, partied, ate, drank, sulked, wrote letters, cooked, smoked, and hung out our washing. In Room 179, which Emily and I shared with Ira, a kind, velvety-eyed girl from a town in the Voronezh region, our belongings were thrust under the beds and into two thin, coffin-shaped cupboards by the door. The refrigerator chugged like an idling truck. The locally made television, which Ira turned on as soon as she woke up, crackled and buzzed. The brand-new orange wallpaper peeled gently away from the walls, and the rug we bought at the Univermag, the department store, gave off puffs of red and purple powder at every tread.