Katja and I rode into the dark and onto a rough track. When she cut the engine, the night was quiet and still. We crossed an orchard knee-deep in summer-scorched grass. In its light the rising moon caught fruit trees flecked with lichen, abandoned ploughs and a hand-built hut backed by a rank of willows. Its upper windows were surrounded by jigsaw-cut fretwork. Peculiar metal tools hung from nails hammered at haphazard spots in the tongue-and-groove wall. A split oil-drum barbecue glowed on the porch. Katja stepped around it and pushed open the back door.
‘In our dacha there are only two rules,’ said Katja’s father in welcome as we entered the chaotic kitchen, holding out his hand, handing me a brimming wine glass. ‘Live every night as if to wake the dead, and wake no one but the dead in the morning.’
‘And never discuss politics,’ added Katja with a knowing laugh, the uneven floorboards juddering as she dropped into a chair. ‘Unless you want to sleep in the shed.’
Katja’s father, Andrei – a tall and unusually thin sexagenarian with tousled grey hair – had been waiting for us. Katja had called ahead, telling me that he hungered for conversation since his retirement from Moscow. Dinner with him appeared to be an optional part of her tour package, for an inevitable extra payment.
Dachas – real dachas – tend to be either inherited village houses or log-walled cottages built on 10 x 10 plots gifted to the party faithful by Khrushchev. At least half of Russia’s city dwellers own or have the use of one, growing potatoes, pickling cucumbers, collecting berries and apples. Katja’s father had acquired his in 1991, in exchange for a second-hand video recorder.
‘How was that possible?’ I asked.
‘Nothing in this country can be understood without context,’ he replied.
No educated Russian can answer an historical question without mentioning slavery, serfs or the Great Patriotic War. Within five minutes Andrei had mentioned all three, explaining that his grandparents – Katja’s great-grandparents – had been ‘well-off’ peasants who’d owned a nearby plot of land and a cow. Both were taken from them during Stalin’s murderous collectivisation. To survive they’d lived off berries scavenged in the forest.
‘They lost a cow but their son became an officer in the Red Army,’ shrugged Katja, cutting across the conversation, stirring it up even before finishing her first glass. ‘That strikes me as progress.’
‘As you will have gathered, Stalin – who was feared during his lifetime – is now revered by some people as “an effective manager”,’ smiled Andrei from the grill. Some people obviously included Katja. ‘Please excuse my daughter,’ he added. ‘Every family has its cockroach.’
She stuck out her tongue at him, adding with another laugh: ‘When the forest is cut down, wood chips fly.’[4]
‘Charming, no?’ said Andrei with an amused air of defeat, like a man sharing a joke on his walk to the gallows. ‘Let me refill your glass.’
The wine was red, heavy and Georgian. On the kitchen counter, platters of home-made, salted suluguni cheese rounds, scattered with handfuls of tarragon and mint, teetered atop thick hunks of Armenian bread. Pork kebabs, marinated in oil and lemon, sizzled on the grill. Andrei’s blotched and stained sweater appeared to have been marinated as well. It hung off him as if off a coat hanger.
In 1991 – when Russia’s assets were up for grabs – Andrei had traded a VCR for a forty-nine-year-lease on the local cooperative’s orchard. On it he had built the holiday dacha by hand, scavenging materials from an abandoned Pioneer camp. He’d turned a broken-down bus into his barn, repurposed its tyres as flower beds. He’d made an outhouse from an old phone booth. Empty wine and beer bottles were used as bricks, laid horizontally and cemented to make a glassy kitchen wall. At the end of each summer day, he’d biked Katja – then a child – to the seashore to play in the rock pools. When she was in her teens, father and daughter had tombstoned – jumped feet first – off the high rocks at Cimiez into the sea.
‘People were so happy in those days,’ he reminisced with such sincerity that at first I took him at his word, ‘…when we lived in the world’s largest open-air prison.’
Katja helped to prepare the meal, curling her arm around him from time to time. Over the appetisers I learned that he had moved to Moscow to study history at university, an especially difficult subject as the past was always changing, he said. He’d then worked for Radio Moscow for over a decade, writing and presenting a weekly English-language magazine programme on Russian life, until Putin came to power. A new producer had then instructed him to replace his endearing home-grown tales with criticism of foreign countries. When he refused he was fired, like many other independent-minded journalists and presenters who wouldn’t toe the line. Few of them ever worked again.
‘What could I do? It’s life,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I try to see the funny side.’
‘What funny side?’ railed Katja, sudden anger in her voice. ‘You could have kept your pension at least. But no, you threw it all away, didn’t you?’
Andrei made no reply, instead he raised his hand to silence her. It was an old argument, obviously, one that had been thrashed back and forth on many evenings. He held his glass up against the candlelight and tilted back his head to taste the wine in small mouthfuls.
‘Thirty years ago Russians were gifted freedom for the first time in history,’ he reflected after a short pause. ‘We hadn’t fought for it. Few were ready for it. No one understood that it had to be protected. So now we have lost it.’
‘Tell me what we’ve lost, Papa?’ asked his daughter, her voice softer now, yet determined to make her point. ‘I do what I want. I buy what I want. I have my motorbike. I am free.’
‘Free?’ Andrei replied in the same strange amalgam of tenderness and cynicism. ‘My child, you, me, we all are slaves. Russians have always been slaves.’
As they spoke I watched their unusual dance, Katja moving with quick little steps to fetch a plate or bowl, to shut a window or door, to guide Andrei to a chair. She looked after him, as she’d told me earlier, ‘doing his cooking, cleaning and laundry like any other girl’.
At the grill he said that once, Venetian and Genoese traders had built Europe’s largest slave market in Crimea. As late as the thirteenth century, tens of thousands of Slavs had been trafficked away across the peninsula to Italy, Muslim Spain and North Africa. Later the Ottomans took over the trade. Andrei even claimed the word Slav had the same root as slave.
‘Humiliation,’ he said, his throat tightening, his breath suddenly short. Flames leapt as fat dripped onto the coals. ‘Humiliation lies at the heart of our Russian identity. It is the root of our arrogance and our insecurity. Slavs have always wanted to be part of Europe, to be treated as equal, but we feel ourselves to be its second-class citizens. That leaves us with only two choices, either we subsume our identity or inflate it through pro-Slav nationalism.’
‘Drop it, Papa,’ said Katja, trying to hold her tongue. She drew away from him to light a cigarette, placing herself apart from her father even though they were separated by no more than a thin partition wall.
4
In some quarters the victims of Stalin’s many purges are known as ‘Stalin’s chips’.