Next door, Angel’s workshop was as brightly lit as a dentist’s surgery. Half a dozen tattooists – all male – bent over their clients, shaving off body hair, disinfecting skin, cutting patterns and swabbing away blood. Full-length mirrors were bolted to every surface. Loud music pounded from hidden speakers. In an adjoining room female clients were marked with roses, dragons, mandalas and rising flames.
‘For them a tattoo is different,’ explained Angel. ‘It is like a last lingerie, the last thing to be exposed to a lover. For women tattoos are a secret.’
I warmed to him, to his cornflower eyes, to the compassion that he failed to hide away. After our talk I sat for a time in the workshop, writing up my notes, thinking of Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro 2033, the protagonist Artyom spots a tattoo on the elbow of a subterranean soldier. It depicts a radiation-deformed bird with two heads, spread wings and hooked talons. In Glukhovsky’s dark future, real birds no longer exist.
At the end of my visit I asked Pavel Angel if he had ever tattooed such a creature on a client.
‘Dozens of times,’ he answered with a laugh. ‘It’s the Romanov eagle, although not deformed, yet.’
11
Lies Lies Lies
I wasn’t spending my last day in Moscow with Dmitri Denisovich, no matter how much I fancied another sliver of Putin’s Pecker. I needed to keep my clarity, with feet on the ground and pen on the page, and his story was finished – or so I thought – unlike that of the Great Patriotic War.
It was Saturday and the museum was deserted. Not a soul idled in its Hall of Glory, beneath the towering ‘Soldier of Victory’ bronze. No one lingered in the Hall of Remembrance and Sorrow, under the vast web of glass beads that symbolised the tears shed for the dead. On weekdays ranks of schoolchildren were marched between dioramas of the Siege of Leningrad and Battle of Kursk, blinded by laser blasts and deafened by high-volume wartime effects. Teachers urged their charges to ponder the Nazi death camp displays. Born-again patriots donned Red Army uniforms to be photographed in front of the shattered Reichstag. Day-tripping pensioners picked up paired souvenir busts of Stalin and Putin in the basement gift shop. But come the weekend, the public chose to stay away and so the escalators were turned off and the canteen shut down.
After the shoot-’em-up popularity of Patriot Park, I’d expected the official war museum to be packed with punters. But as my footsteps echoed through the empty galleries, I realised that most ordinary Russians wanted to forget the Second World War, if only their leaders would let them.
For rather than come clean about the manifold distortions, the Kremlin rehashed the old communist myths: fascism had served Western capitalism, its leaders had been the tools of big business, the Red Army had repelled the invaders with little help from the Allies. It also worked to exploit the conflict for a new generation, as memories faded along with the last of its veterans. At every Victory Day parade since 2012, for example, younger Russians had been encouraged to carry wartime photographs of their forebears. Those who did not have their own could pick one up – conveniently mounted on a placard – at local supermarkets. Some twelve million Russians – including Putin himself – participated in the last March of the (so-called) Immortal Regiment, keeping alive the idea that Russia remained under threat. It was a cynical propaganda coup dressed up as patriotism, calculated to inflame old fears and animosities.
After ten minutes in the deserted cinema, where archive footage was freely intercut with modern re-enactments, I’d had enough. I went for a beer.
I found a neighbourhood pub in an alley between two blocks of apartments. On the screen behind the bar, CSKA Moskva battled Bayer Leverkusen in a Championships League match. A clutch of young men – in hoodies or black T-shirts, with hair shaved or worn short on back and sides – punched the air every time the home team took a shot on goal. At first glance they were not so different from supporters of Man United or Real Madrid. But as I watched I reflected on their tragic history, as victims of their own rulers more often than their neighbours. Lenin and Stalin had killed almost as many Russians as Hitler (naturally the figures are disputed). Nevertheless, their most recent successor has schemed to darken another generation’s ideals, preparing them for more sacrifice and loss, selling them the lie that conflict was inevitable.
I noticed the waitress only because of the time she took to clean the adjoining table. She was watching the barman, waiting for the football match to distract him. When the Moscow team was awarded a free kick, she turned to me and started to chat. She had recognised me as a foreigner of course. When I complimented her on her English, she volunteered, ‘I also speak Russian, Turkish and some Korean.’
‘You should work as a translator or interpreter,’ I said, ‘not in a bar.’
‘Only Russians can get such high-qualification jobs. We Uzbeks must take, how do you say, menial work.’
‘But what if you see an ad in the newspaper?’
‘It will specify that a Russian passport is necessary. Or that will be the first question in the interview.’
Uzbekistan has spent most of the past two centuries tied to Russia. Its citizens don’t need a visa to enter the country, the waitress told me. A migration permit gives them the right to work and more than two million Uzbeks live in Russia, according to the Federal Migration Service. At home there are no jobs for them.
‘No Uzbek comes to Russia to stay,’ she said. She had almond-shaped eyes, a round wide head and a small but kindly mouth. ‘Here I make about ten thousand roubles a month. If I could make three thousand roubles a month at home, I would not come. Even if I could make only one thousand, I would stay.’ Three thousand roubles was about $45, which she sent home to pay for her brother’s education. ‘I would like to earn something more, if you understand me.’ She glanced over her shoulder and added, ‘Russians do not like Asians. They call us zverki. Meaning little beasts. Dumb beasts.’
CSKA Moskva scored the equaliser, the supporters leapt to their feet and the barman caught sight of the waitress. A sudden stiffness infused her movements as she started to wipe down my table.
‘I would like to have a better life,’ she said.
‘Abandon intelligence all ye who enter here’ should be inscribed above the gates of Moscow, wrote Pushkin, paraphrasing Dante. It was the Day of the City, a Soviet-era celebration when Moscow feted itself. There were concerts on Poklonnaya Hill and along Tsvetnoy Boulevard. At Patriarch’s Ponds fans of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita dressed up as Pontius Pilate, the devil or talking cats. Revolution Square descended into a bacchanalian ‘Slavic feast’. Near Barrikadnaya metro stop a sanitised version of the city’s history unfolded in a parade of classic vehicles: horse-drawn tsarist carriages, Bolshevik armoured cars and – most extraordinarily – Stalinist Black Raven vans into which actors dressed as KGB thugs herded weeping civilians. Meanwhile, in keeping with tradition, Putin met the capital’s newest brides on Red Square. The young women glowed with modesty for the assembled cameras. Only later did it transpire that the brides were models, hired for the day by the Kremlin press office.
Thirty years ago Christopher Hope, the South African novelist and poet, was drawn to Russia by ‘the quality of the lies’. In Moscow! Moscow! he wrote of ‘lies so lush, so many, sprouting overnight among the mossy, rooted feet of official spokesmen’. For Hope, the lies had created ‘a society steadily falling apart: run your fingers over it and you’d feel the widening stitches. In the night they snapped one by one.’