We glided downhill without helmets, the balmy air soft on the skin, the wind running its fingers through Katja’s hair. On the handlebars fluttered ribbons: the red, white and blue of Russia and the orange and black of St George. Orange and black – the colours of fire and smoke – were the only military decoration to have been preserved throughout both tsarist and Soviet times.
At first Foros was a disappointment, revealing itself as a ramshackle settlement of crumbling pavements, walls and yawning watermelon vendors. At the water’s edge dozens of ‘temporary boathouses’ – so called to sidestep planning regulations – had been converted into five-storey villas, their wire fences blocking access to the sea. A decade earlier hired hands had toted machine guns along the public beach, but now the late-season holidaymakers knew the rules, and clumped together on a far stretch of stony shore.
There were no signs to direct us to Dacha No. 3, of course. A local man advised us to look out for its terracotta roofs. Another said that the main villa’s roof was green. We were told that the complex had been built in a year, its construction workers and staff housed in a specially built apartment block. The cliff-top dacha was said to have a grand living room with sweeping views of the coast, indoor and outdoor swimming pools and an elevator to the sea.
‘Police and sharpshooters still patrol it,’ volunteered a fruit seller, his wares spread out on cardboard by the local park. Katja translated that its grounds were encircled by a mesh security fence ‘that a mouse couldn’t get through’.
Mikhail Gorbachev had changed the world, then the world turned its back on him. In 1985, the year in which the dacha was built, the US military had ramped up its budget to bankrupt the USSR. Moscow had raced to match American weaponry, squandering an unsustainable third of GDP on its military. At the Foros dacha, after the Red Army’s devastating defeat in Afghanistan, Gorbachev had told Raisa, ‘We cannot go on living like this.’
Gorbachev had wanted to slash the military budget so as to concentrate on economic and social reform. At their 1986 Reykjavik summit, he told US President Ronald Reagan, ‘I am convinced that if you and I have different ideological ideas, that is not a reason for us to shoot at one another. On the contrary, I am convinced that, in addition to political relations, purely human relations between us are also possible.’
Gorbachev’s courage – and his realism – led to him and Reagan signing the most important nuclear arms agreement of the Cold War. His domestic policies freed political prisoners and permitted private ownership for the first time since Lenin’s New Economic Policy. But his reforms were rejected by reactionaries and exploited by opportunists.
On a sweltering Sunday in August 1991, five black Volgas drove over the pass and down to the gates of the dacha. Gorbachev was not expecting visitors, let alone high-ranking Communist Party hardliners. His visitors told him that they opposed his reforms. They invited him to join them to save the Soviet Union. When he refused they arrested him.
At dawn the next day a column of tanks rumbled down Moscow’s broad Kutuzovsky Prospekt to surround the Russian White House. But rather than surrender, Boris Yeltsin walked out of the building and climbed on top of one of the tanks. He denounced the hardliners’ attempted takeover, then hijacked it to propel himself to power. His bold gesture was calculated to look good on TV. Three days later the coup collapsed with hardly a shot fired. Come the end of the year Mikhail Gorbachev was history, the hardliners were under arrest and Yeltsin was president.
Katja and I biked up broken lanes, skirted the ruins of a sanatorium and came to grinding stops at looming rocky barriers. I knew that the dacha complex had been built with its own power and water supply, both of which were backed up with duplicate systems. I guessed that it would also have had a top-notch communication network. On the outskirts of town, at the foot of Mount Mshat-Kaya, we spotted a high tower bristling with antennae. We left the bike beneath it and crossed the coast road towards the sea. We found traces of an old path. Katja walked ahead, telling me to keep quiet. We skirted a rocky hummock, stepped out of a shallow ravine and came face to face with a soldier.
‘This path is closed,’ he said in Russian. He was armed.
‘We’re going for a swim,’ Katja said, taking my hand as if we were naughty teenagers off on a jolly jape. I kept my mouth shut.
‘This path is closed,’ he said again, not amused.
Beyond him I saw the tops of cypress and redwood trees. I caught sight of terracotta roofs and covered walkways. I spotted a naval frigate at anchor in the glittering bay. I also saw that it was time to go back.
‘Konechno, ne volnuites’, ukhodim,’ said Katja. We’re leaving, don’t worry. We turned on our heels. Jasmine and lavender scented the air. Two policemen waited by the Kawasaki. Again Katja talked us out of trouble. Along the coast we spotted the dacha’s access road, blocked by three police cars.
‘I thought the dacha was empty these days,’ I shouted to her as we sped away.
In town we stopped at a bar to ask questions. Nobody told us who was staying at the dacha but everyone knew.
‘Helicopters come and go,’ said the barman, refilling our glasses, admitting nothing, revealing everything. ‘We can only guess who rides inside them.’
‘Do you think he is there?’ I asked Katja.
‘If so, we welcome him with open arms,’ she replied with a sudden, giddy laugh. ‘He is a hero of the people. He has given us back our Motherland.’
‘So he did get the dacha,’ I realised, aloud.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Dacha No. 3 – along with Crimea – had become part of independent Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin had eyed the complex for years. Somehow it came into the ownership of the Kremlin-friendly state bank VTB[3] and Putin began to summer at Gorbachev’s former holiday home, until its dubious acquisition was revealed in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Putin’s visits came to an abrupt end. Then, a couple of years later, he managed to take back the dacha, along with all of Crimea – by force.
‘If you really are interested in history, I’ll take you to meet my father,’ said Katja as we climbed back on her bike. ‘He is history.’
Our headlight picked out the gleam of blackbirds rising through the twilight to roost in high trees. An ancient Lada, its open trunk stacked with freshly picked sweetcorn, rattled by roadside grape vendors. In a dusky field a solitary cow tugged at its tether beneath a vast billboard. On it Putin beamed alongside the new Kerch Strait road–rail bridge. The billboard’s patriotic text made no mention of Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, the president’s childhood friends (and former judo teachers) who’d been awarded the $4.36 billion construction contract to link the peninsula and Russia.
Beyond the billboard was the Night Wolves festival ground. Here every summer the notorious motorcycle gang re-enacted the Second World War. In pyrotechnic fantasies and high-octane motorcycle stunts, ‘heroic’ Red Army bikers battled ‘heartless’ Wehrmacht BMW riders before taking on goose-stepping ‘pro-Western’ demonstrators. In last year’s performance the Statue of Liberty even made an appearance, spewing a fiery retch of dollars ‘to poison, separate and kill the Slavic peoples’.
The Night Wolves had special ties with Putin, who’d ridden a Harley-Davidson trike onto the stage at the inaugural show. They’d supported his annexation of Crimea, patrolling its streets alongside the unmarked Russian soldiers. They’d fought in the Donbas War. They parroted his nationalistic narrative, running down liberals, homosexuals and other ne’er-do-wells. ‘Wherever the Night Wolves are, that should be considered Russia,’ declared its leader Alexander ‘The Surgeon’ Zaldostanov, who ran the club as if it were an auxiliary of the state.
3
Vneshtorgbank or VTB was no ordinary bank, according to the