‘Why has Russia failed?’ Andrei asked me, his voice again composed, uninflected. ‘Because of centuries of negative selection: our strongest enslaved, our most beautiful sold, our free thinkers slaughtered and, to cap it all, Stalin’s “effective management”.’
‘Russia hasn’t failed,’ called Katja from the door. ‘You can’t blame the country for your own blunders.’
Our conversation was punctuated by the sizzle of meat and pop of corks. After the kebabs, Andrei joined Katja for another cigarette, standing on the tiny veranda under the vines. Again she put an arm around his thin waist and rested her head on his shoulder. A cloud passed in front of the moon. Shadows brushed the orchard. An unexpected breeze ruffled the checked curtain at a half-open window. I smelt the sea.
Later at the sink, father and daughter washed the fresh raspberries, standing side by side at once joined and divided. As I refilled the teapot, I said I was glad to have caught sight of Gorbachev’s villa, and come so close to Putin.
‘Our leaders – our new elite – are dirt,’ said Andrei in response, his face flushing from drink and conviction. ‘They don’t give a shit about us. They just want to fill their pockets. Their treachery has destroyed our opportunity.’
‘But how could today be better?’ asked Katja, concerned about his blood pressure, trying to avoid confrontation. ‘Crimea is again part of great New Russia.’ She used the term ‘Novorossiya’, an historical term dating back to the Russian Empire and encompassing much of independent Ukraine and Moldova.
‘Russia is great only in its fear,’ answered Andrei. ‘Fear of imaginary enemies. Fear that we no longer know who we are. People fall again for simple answers.’ Suddenly he was shouting, ‘Be patriotic! Be loyal! Urrah!’
Katja hissed at him to be quiet, nodding at the open window. ‘The neighbours…’
I hadn’t noticed any other houses on our approach to the dacha. Certainly there were none within earshot. I remembered how – on my first visit to Eastern Europe – people had retained the habit of lowering their voice around strangers, ever fearful of being overheard by informants.
‘This is your freedom, is it? The freedom to speak one’s mind, as long as it doesn’t contradict the leader?’ cried Andrei. He then turned to me to add, ‘You know, when Donald Trump won the US election, many Russians were relieved. We saw that we were no longer the only fools in the world.’
Into the night we talked of blood and money, of atomised societies and democracy hollowed out by social division and exploited by opportunists. We agreed that time and again ‘the people’ were kicked around like a football between elites. But the storm had gone out of the arguments. We raised our glasses to each other and drained them.
‘Perhaps the world is coming to an end,’ ventured Andrei drunkenly. ‘Perhaps we’re slipping towards a new war, or plague, and all the lights will go out. One thinks this way as one gets older,’ he philosophised, his face now placid, calm, resigned. ‘It was always an illusion that Russians could become part of Europe, but the rhetoric was necessary to give people hope.’
His fragile body seemed heavier than its weight, almost too leaden to move. A broken clock stood on the brick mantelpiece. Electricity cables looped above a pot of dried roses, between an open fuse box and a glass cabinet containing bug spray. He poured more wine and then – as he must have done a thousand times before – tapped the face of the broken clock.
‘Once we thought we had a future, tra la la,’ he said with unexpected levity. ‘Thank God most of us haven’t realised it is gone.’ He lifted his glass and declared, ‘Nostrovia!’ To your health.
I fell asleep to the sounds of their conversation, and of mice rustling in the walls. Some hours later I woke with the rain. Beyond my fretted window it shivered the vines, pearled at the tips of leaves, rolled down the trunks of plum and pear trees. I lay listening in the dim light of the cold room.
A clatter of crockery and the hiss of the coffee maker stirred me out of an inebriated dream. In the bathroom Andrei cursed when he stubbed his toe. The rain grew heavier, beating the petals off the roses, filling an old cast-iron bathtub. The chickens took shelter under a wheelbarrow in the vegetable plot.
On another day we would have hunkered indoors, resuscitated the night’s conversations, gravitated seamlessly from caffeine to spirits. But it was not to be. It was time for me to move on.
The first draft of a new post-totalitarian society was being written in Crimea. Its main author – the man now in Dacha No. 3 – had co-opted soldiers and bikers, orchestrated a sham election and installed a compliant, hybrid regime. Here – as in the rest of Russia – he used the tentacles of state to silence individuals who did not support his story. He worked to rewrite the post-war order that had brought years of peace and stability to the continent.
Katja ran me to the airport, her waterproof whipping against my leg. After I’d checked in for my flight, she said, ‘Balkon, dacha, pomoika.’ Balcony, dacha, rubbish bin.
I didn’t understand.
‘It’s a Soviet expression about never throwing anything away, even if we don’t need it. We put broken stuff out on the balcony, then shift it to dacha, then finally dump it into the garbage. That’s my dear father.’ Then she added, ‘Dinner’s an extra fifty dollars. Cash.’
10
Under the Skin
Underground there is no horizon. Underground the people move in halting steps, move as one, move four abreast deep down beneath the city. The earth has swallowed them, corralled them, imprisoned them. Above ground the world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is all but extinct. The last survivors of nuclear war live on in the largest air-raid shelter ever built, moving through the deafening silence, fearful of the Dark Ones and carnivorous rats, at the end of it all.
Artyom is an orphan, living at VDNKh, the last inhabited station on the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya line. He is the protagonist in the post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel Metro 2033. He is also an avatar in the first-person shooter video game of the same name. Author Dmitry Glukhovsky created the book as an interactive experiment, drawing suggestions from thousands of Russian readers, letting them shape his text. His book mirrors their nightmares: dystopian life, mankind threatened by an evil race, small groups waging war on each other. At the end of an epic journey Artyom obliterates the mutant race, only to realise that appearances lie. The Dark Ones were not evil. Under the skin they were mankind’s only hope. But with their annihilation, the promise of salvation is lost. The world becomes as empty as a derelict metro tunnel.
Three million people read the bleak collaboration online. A further million bought the print edition. Its spin-off survival game sold over two million units and a movie is in the works.
‘I was twelve years old when the Soviet Union collapsed,’ said Moscow-born Glukhovsky. ‘Everything we knew about the history, politics, culture, all our system of values, our entire empire (that seemed eternal, as all empires do), it all was just cancelled by a TV announcement. Overnight. We woke up on the ruins of an empire, on the ruins of our own civilisation,’ he said.
His idea of a dead megalopolis, and beneath it warring metro stations, rose out of the turmoil.
‘We humans never learn from the mistakes of our past,’ said Glukhovsky. Thirty years on, free speech and journalism have again been ‘replaced by blunt propaganda and primitive brainwashing’. Fear has been channelled into chauvinism and xenophobia. Uncertainty has been assuaged by the promise of strong leadership. ‘People in Russia say that they’re happy with Putin, but then they’re being brainwashed day and night by all channels of TV,’ he said. ‘Metro 2033 was just an attempt to sum up my thoughts and feelings of our life in Russia…’