Thursday, 12 May
While waiting for Marina to come at eleven I sat in the lobby and wrote to the English-language Moscow Times saying how much I had enjoyed being in the city for the recent celebrations. My only surprise — and disappointment — was that Tony Blair had missed the most important date in European history of the last sixty years. Bush, Chirac, and fifty-seven other heads of state had been present. Putin said in a speech that Russia, the United States and France were the Allies of the century, a significant slur on the British prime minister for his absence. Blair had sent Prescott instead, but he had been pushed a little behind the others on the podium in Red Square, as a hint of general displeasure. We left for home before knowing whether or not the Moscow Times had published my letter.
It rained most of the time we were in Moscow, so it was good that the Metro was only a hundred yards beyond the hotel entrance. From Polyarkov station we splashed through puddles with Marina for half a mile or so to the factory outlet of a shop which sold the equivalent of Ordnance Survey maps of most parts of the former Soviet Union.
I had always thought that one of the first signs of democracy was when ordinary people, and foreigners as well, could buy detailed topographical maps of their country. Now, for the first time since tsarist days, it was possible in Russia. Such maps had been top secret documents in Soviet colleges and I was told by a former geology student that when issued for instruction and research he had been threatened with Siberia if he lost them.
A middle-aged woman eyed me from behind a long desk as I looked at displays on the walls and went through racks of interesting items. High-quality maps showed spot heights and contours, towns and villages in their real shapes and locations, and gave details even of cabins in forests reached only by footpath. Large-scale maps of Kamchatka and the Volga delta were available, as well as road atlases of various provinces in European Russia and Siberia. All names were in Cyrillic, but such lettering had been familiar since first learning that alphabet in my teens.
The saleswoman was livelier while totting up a thousand roubles on her calculator. I would have bought a sample of everything in the shop but space in our cases was not unlimited. I fitted the bundles into two plastic bags so that they wouldn’t saturate on our walk back to the Metro.
There was a long queue at the Moo-Moo cafeteria, but some kindly person invited us into line more than halfway to the serving counters, and nobody seemed to mind.
At five — it was still raining — we were chauffered with Marina to a gallery near the British Council where there was an excellent exhibition of photographs, Britain in World War Two, pictures of smouldering bomb damage after air raids, women working in armaments factories or cheerily walking towards them on the street, line-of-battleships, and a Land Army girl between two enormous dray horses. A mythologised era, perhaps, but evidence all the same that Britain too had done everything of which it was capable in the common struggle.
Being asked to open the exhibition with a short speech was an honour not to be refused. After we had finished our stint at a press conference I talked for about twenty minute on life in England at that time, taking the opportunity to apologise for Blair’s absence at the recent celebrations, and saying with tongue in cheek that he should be opening the show not me, though I was very glad to be taking his place — which went down well with the mainly Russian audience.
I mentioned my work as a capstain lathe operator making parts of Merlin engines for Lancaster bombers in a factory run by women and youths like me, with a couple of tool setters held back from the army to supervise. The war was still on, but ended soon afterwards, though I had already enlisted into the Fleet Air Arm. Little could I have realised, on 8 May 1945, that I would be in Moscow sixty years later for the anniversary of the great event.
I remembered that we were given the day off in the factory to celebrate. In the crowded White Horse pub that evening, with my parents and a girlfriend, we saw a hefty woman munitions worker in heavy dark spectacles doing a can-can on one of the tables, flashing her Union Jack bloomers with every high step.
In conclusion I duplicated a press report taken in Morse from our short wave receiver of the time telling the world that Hitler was dead. In those days I could read it fast enough because we had been tutored in the Air Training Corps by an ex-police wireless operator.
The performance went down well enough for me to be asked if I would repeat the message on my key in front of the television camera, and give a short interview. Chatting later with the British Ambassador, I wondered whether he’d disliked the reference to Blair in my speech.
From then on I sat with George who, in spite of the discomfort, looked dashing and confident in his suit and bow tie. He was invited with our British Council friends to a nearby restaurant, where I split from the main group at the long table so that we could go on with our talk.
He said that the change to capitalism from Soviet power meant untold billions of roubles being sucked out of the economy, to the detriment of the country and its poor. There were many things he liked about the new life, but more than enough that he didn’t. The rape of the nation by the so-called new oligarchs was something he could never forgive.
‘You must remember that besides having such rapacious people around, Russia had been exhausted for nearly a century by every conceivable disaster. Even though Stalin died over fifty years ago, and the worst seemed to be over, it was impossible for us to recover because of the Cold War. When the alteration came Russia was ripe for a free for all.’
Nearly forty years had gone by since Kuznetsov had done a runner, so I knew there were many questions I could now ask, especially about what happened in London after the discovery that he was missing. George was happy enough to give details already mentioned, and allow me to take notes on his further observations as well.
We talked a long time, and at the end he told me that he lived in a more modest way than formerly, but was content with his life. He did look with some trepidation on the fact that in a week or so he would be going into hospital for a major operation. On asking what, specifically, was wrong with him he replied: ‘Just about everything,’ implying that it was so serious he occasionally thought he might not come out of the anaesthetic. ‘I’m sure that won’t be true,’ I said, ‘but if you don’t the world will never be the same again.’
He assured me — a touch of the old sybarite — that he didn’t really care, for he was still enjoying himself. In fact his love life was so well arranged that a girlfriend called on him at least once a week. As a matter of fact, he boasted with a wink, she had been at his flat that afternoon, and they had spent a few libidinous hours together during which he’d managed to make love twice.
When he was taken off in the car at midnight by his daughter I had a strong feeling that I would never see him again.
Friday, 13 May
Up at seven I felt almost too done in to face the final day, wanting to stay in bed till it was time for the plane to leave, but Margarita met us at half past nine with a British Council car, to show us around the Kremlin which we hadn’t been inside before.
Long queues at the gate soon dissolved, and rain stopped for a while. We joined straggling bands of tourists by the Great Cannon manufactured in 1595, but never fired. Maybe it would have blown itself and too many bystanders to pieces. Half a dozen cathedrals came next but after the third it was hard to remember what I had already seen, so smothered were their walls with icons. The next interesting place was the Archbishops’ Palace, with numerous glass cases of silver and gold artefacts.