It was a lucky start to my journey. On my first day back in Russia, I’d landed myself an affable (and dodgy) oligarch who now stepped towards me, laid his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You trust me with your life.’
Then he smiled. I had never seen such ugly teeth. They were like broken rocks.
Thirty years had passed since my last visit to Moscow, at the dawn of a new age. In 1989 Eastern Europe had risen up against its Red Army occupiers and sent them packing. The fall of the Wall was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Seventy years of totalitarianism ended almost overnight. McKinsey management consultants flew in to Sheremetyevo to guide spunky go-getters towards pluralist capitalism. Russia became a member of the Council of Europe. NATO expanded towards its borders, hinting that in time it could join the club. Europeans embraced the idea of a borderless continent, believing that they had changed the world.
In those euphoric days I’d travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Westerners – the forgotten half of Europe. In East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Russia, I’d met people who hadn’t spoken to a foreigner in decades, who opened their hearts and told me stories of lost years, ruined lives and secret policemen. In Czechoslovakia, I’d heard Václav Havel – the imprisoned playwright who’d become president – herald the birth of ‘a Europe in which no one more powerful will be able to suppress anyone less powerful, in which it will no longer be possible to settle disputes by force’. I’d placed my faith in the healing power of openness, compassion and reconciliation.
How could it have been otherwise? My generation had grown up in the shadow of the Second World War, haunted by the ghosts of its sixty million dead. We’d come of age during the Cold War, with half a continent imprisoned behind a wall. Our response was to value individual liberty above tribalism. We couldn’t have borne the loss of more fathers and uncles, to see our brothers die in the name of the old demons. So we celebrated when former adversaries drew back the Iron Curtain. We applauded as East and West Germans danced together in no-man’s-land. Some of us even dared to imagine the end of the nation state.
Now I’d returned to Moscow to try to understand what had gone wrong. Why – after liberating themselves from Soviet tyranny – had Russians surrendered their freedom for Dictatorship 2.0? Why – after that promising dawn – had the Kremlin redoubled its efforts to undermine European unity? And how could so many in the West have fallen for the lies and spin, dragging democracy to this precarious present moment?
My plan was to retrace my original journey, backwards. I would travel from Moscow to Berlin and London, through countries confronting old fears and fresh challenges, divided again by chauvinism and xenophobia. I wanted to learn how refugees, the dispossessed and cyberhackers had been used by nationalists. I needed to understand why Europe’s unspeakable past couldn’t be kept at bay.
There was also a personal reason for my journey. Thirty years ago I’d travelled with the certainty of a young man, living by certain principles, prizing certain values. Over the decades those certainties – those ethics – had sustained me, and I’d continued to live by them as much as possible. But now tolerance, empathy and even the promise of the future were under attack. I had to find a way to keep faith in them, despite the echo of marching boots, and the shadow of Brexit, and the collapse of a European dream.
‘You come to my dacha Saturday,’ said Dmitri Denisovich, more used to issuing orders than invitations. ‘It will be trip you never forget.’
3
Putin’s Pecker
In the wild woods west of Moscow, slender birch saplings leaned together, leaned apart, like elegant dancers swaying to the music of the wind. Beneath them in the dark Russian soil lay buried treasure. More valuable than gold, as seductive as pleasure, it was a prize said to evoke sensations of profound euphoria. Officials denied its existence. Its mention had been purged from the internet. Yet word of every new discovery was whispered between the country’s elite. In nouveau-riche palaces and bulletproof Bentleys, oligarchs tenderly fed it to their lovers, washed down by vintage Dom Pérignon. Oil magnates infused it in vodka to gift deputies of the State Duma. And men died in bloody turf wars fought over its secret copses.
So potent and coveted was this rare subterranean Ascomycete fungus – an irresistible blond truffle that brought on delusions of invincibility – that Russia’s born-again nationalists had named it pipiska putina. Putin’s Pecker.
I’d learned about it from my Russian friend in London. She had exiled herself there, a moneyed non-dom who filled her time with lunches at the Connaught and with Chelsea Centre evening classes: French literature, Italian cookery and Forex Trading for Beginners. She’d joined one of my creative writing workshops, and then another and another, scribbling with breathless urgency about her Soviet childhood, about the vast land haunted by absences and – in an unguarded moment – about the phallus-shaped fungus. On the drive to his dacha, Dmitri confirmed what she had told me about it, adding with his rocky smile, ‘If I tell you more, I must kill you.’
He’d collected me that luminous morning in a pair of black Range Rovers. In the West a businessman might show off his bespoke Savile Row suits but in Russia it’s the number of top-of-the-range Range Rover Sentinels that impresses, as well as bodyguards. Vasya was with us at the wheel of the lead, luxury, armour-plated, all-terrain fortress, said to be able to withstand grenade attacks without mussing a passenger’s hair.
‘But money no longer falls from sky,’ Dmitri admitted with unexpected modesty. Ty chto dumayesh, den’gi s neba padayut? ‘I can afford only basic model.’
Dmitri’s ‘basic’ Range Rovers accelerated into the sweltering traffic, hitting 60 mph in six seconds, pushing me back in my hand-tooled Windsor leather seat. At that speed Moscow unfolded like a flipbook, in a flash of sharp images that simulated an impression of change: newly gilded onion domes, low-slung Maseratis and Little Potato fast-food stalls. In late summer, Europe’s largest city felt like a pressure cooker, shimmering with heat and with its residents ready to explode. Sirens echoed off its Stalinist skyscrapers. Queues of dusty labour coaches idled outside its new building sites. Fuming policemen swaggered across the broad boulevards, their truncheons knocking against their jackboots.
Beyond the tinted windows I caught sight of wrecking balls, crumpled beggars and the bare bronze head of Peter the Great, the eighth tallest statue in the world. A few years ago its sculptor had tried to sell the fifteen-storey behemoth to the United States as Christopher Columbus. When he failed, he repurposed the work as a tsar and flogged it to his friend the mayor. In Russia, as in the rest of the world, it matters who you know.
‘Bush legs,’ said Dmitri in response to my question. ‘I made my money on George Bush’s legs.’
Now I understood why a portrait of the late US president sat on his desk.
‘Sorry for my English bleeding your ears but you are writer.’ He picked a hair off his baby-blue Jaeger cashmere jumper. He could have done without the camouflage khaki cravat. ‘I tell you my story and you write it. Understand?’
I also now had an inkling of what Dmitri meant by ‘one book’.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Russians started to starve. In response the European Community donated much of its butter mountain and milk lakes to the rump empire. The Salvation Army, banned during the communist years, opened hundreds of soup kitchens. And George H. W. Bush flooded the place with chicken.