Tobin knew movies. He knew about their power and paradoxes, about their ability to move hearts and minds, about their production costs and distribution deals. He knew that Lenin had considered movies to be the most important of all the arts and that Stalin had called them ‘the greatest medium of mass agitation’. He was a London lad – fit, tough and independent-minded – who’d come to Russia on a whim, because of his passion for Sergei Eisenstein and Dostoevsky.
‘I thought I’d learn Russian in a year, read Crime and Punishment in the original, then move on,’ he said when we met at his top-floor apartment. ‘That was in 1993.’
At first Tobin worked as a translator and then a librarian, living in a squat, earning $100 a month.
‘One hundred dollars was a fortune back then. I lived for nothing, drank for almost nothing. You could try anything, do anything. I had a dozen careers. And the women…’ he recalled, his eyes widening at the memories. ‘In the West, Russian women were thought to be either babushkas or Olympic shot-putters. The reality was very, very different. I developed serious neck ache watching girls.’
Tobin fell in love, married, fathered two kids and adopted a further four. He thrived and prospered as editor of the English-language St Petersburg Times and then of a bilingual lifestyle magazine. After the break-up of his marriage, he scooped up a vast Petrograd-side bachelor pad, installed underfloor heating and double door-locks and waxed lyrical on his long, west-facing balcony about life in the Wild East.
Tobin fell into the film business by recording English voice-overs and playing bit parts like the bearded, Kalashnikov-wielding Chechen rebel in War.
‘I’m the one holding down a Russian prisoner’s hand as his fingers were cut off,’ he told me on a mellow evening as the sun set behind the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress (where Dostoevsky had been imprisoned in 1849).
He worked as an assistant director as well. All the exterior scenes of Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film of the last days in Hitler’s Berlin bunker, were filmed in St Petersburg. ‘The production designer was beside himself with excitement,’ said Tobin, not immune to the irony. ‘His German special effects team were thrilled to blow up derelict Russian factories for camera.’ Tobin himself managed the film’s hundreds of extras, all hired locally and all dressed in full Wehrmacht battle uniforms. More than once he had to plead through his megaphone: ‘Would SS officers please stop going to bars to drink vodka between takes?’ He even caught two minor actors – carrying heavy replica machine guns and flamethrowers – popping into town to buy cigarettes.
Tobin also crewed HBO’s Rasputin and Bernard Rose’s Anna Karenina. Both productions were plagued by corruption and theft, as were all international films at the time. On one occasion a Russian fixer sourced a steam locomotive for Anna to throw herself under for ‘the very cheapest price’ of $70,000, enough money then to buy four or five St Petersburg apartments. When Tobin – translating for the producers – told him that there was only $18,000 in the budget for the whole scene, the fixer shrugged and replied, ‘Okay, call it eighteen thousand dollars.’
Later, in the middle of a night shoot, the locomotive needed to be refilled with water. The same fixer commandeered a street-cleaning tanker, telling Tobin to pay him $2,000 for its rental. But at the end of the night, Tobin asked the driver directly what he was owed.
‘One bottle of vodka as agreed,’ the driver answered.
Foreign producers began to cancel films, scared off by audacious thieves and mafia threats. Tobin found himself working more on Russian pictures, including the sequel to Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother, a cult gangster thriller said to be Putin’s third favourite movie (after the series The Shield and the Sword and Seventeen Moments of Spring). In time he took more regular work as editor-in-chief of the English division of the Russian Travel Guide documentary television channel, becoming one of the few thousand Brits[8] who call Russia home, who don’t want to leave, and not only because of the parties.
Russians are renowned for their great parties. Recent revelries have been more reminiscent of the age of Louis XIV than any time in the last century. In St Petersburg two oligarchs staged Midsummer Night’s Dream bashes in a Versailles-like palace. An oil mogul commandeered the national aquarium for a pool orgy, complete with dolphins and mermaid-finned prostitutes. An aerospace billionaire drafted in a dozen ‘dwarfs’, attached them to helium balloons and let them fly. Mikhail Gutseriev, the Kazakh tycoon, bankrolled his son’s wedding to the staggering tune of $10 million. Six hundred guests were chauffeured to Moscow’s Safisa club in a fleet of Rolls-Royces, entertained by J Lo, Sting and Enrique Iglesias, then flown to London for a second private concert with Beyoncé and Elton John. Some hosts balance such profligacy with humour. To mark his company’s birthday, Eugene Kaspersky – the stocky and garrulous founder of the global computer security company – hired a whole train to take hundreds of his employees to Uryupinsk, a remote town some 400 miles south-east of Moscow whose name signifies ‘the middle of nowhere’.
Hence a movie’s end-of-shoot wrap party promised to be an unforgettable extravaganza. At the very least I expected the producers to lay on vintage champagne, dancers and a high-tech circus act or two.
Tobin also loved parties. On our walk to the venue, he reminded me that during the communist years most Russian revelries had taken place in kitchens. The kitchen had been the family’s living room, guest room and debating chamber, he explained. It was the place where Soviet citizens had felt safest; amongst friends, drinking tea, sharing jokes (‘A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anti-communist is someone who’s understood him’). It was also where people hunkered around the radio to listen to banned BBC and Voice of America broadcasts. Sometimes food was even cooked in kitchens. But those days were long gone, said Tobin. No one had the time any more to argue late into the night about the meaning of life or the political subtext of Czechoslovak pop songs. Nowadays people struggled to make ends meet. Almost everyone needed to get up early the next morning for work.
As the elevator was under repair we climbed three flights of stairs, pushed open a heavy door and stepped into… 1969. The apartment – in which cast and crew were assembled – was still dressed for their low-budget period drama. It had been the movie’s main location for a simple Brezhnev-era love story.
On the wall Lenin and Marx, their retouched complexions as flawless as their vision, looked down on the revellers. Around them on the bare white walls hung red balloons and red flags. Red carnations were tied in bunches with long ribbons of the Soviet colours. Clothes lines were suspended across the kitchen and onions sprouted in old mayonnaise jars on the windowsills. Cabbage soup and beetroot borsch simmered on the cooker.
8
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