Mervyn fell in with a couple of bold spirits who had taken advantage of the atmosphere of licence the festival had created to chat to foreigners. One was a devilishly handsome young Jewish theatre student called Valery Shein, who wore jaunty caps and striped shirts, and his quieter cousin Valery Golovitser, an intense balletomane a couple of years Shein’s junior. The three young men walked down Gogolevsky Boulevard, locked in intense and earnest conversation about their respective lives. When Mervyn’s all-too-brief week in Moscow ended, they swapped addresses. It seemed unlikely, to all concerned, that the miracle of the festival would ever repeat itself, or that Mervyn would ever be allowed back. The prospect of the two Valerys ever having the opportunity to visit Britain was so remote as to be laughable. In a sense, they were right. Moscow was not open to a mass influx of foreigners again until the 1980 Olympics.
But the following year, 1958, Mervyn heard of a job opportunity in Moscow. True, it was in the British embassy, and he would have to live the hermetic life of a diplomat, sealed off from the real Russian life that he had tasted during the festival. But the job, a humble one in the research department, would at least get him to Russia.
The post was applied for, arrangements were made for a sabbatical from St Antony’s, and in due course a formal letter of acceptance on Foreign Office notepaper arrived in Mervyn’s college pigeon-hole. He bought an extremely heavy dark blue overcoat in the Oxford Co-op in anticipation of the hard Moscow winters, which I still wear to this day. And some time in late summer Mervyn took a can of black oil paint and sat down to mark his handsome new steamer trunk with the neatly printed words ‘W.H.M. Matthews, St Antony’s College, Oxford, АНГЛИЯ’, the last word in bold Cyrillic letters, leaving no doubt as to the trunk’s destination.
People, detached from their homes and set loose in the world, drift till they find the places that fit them. By the end of my first week in Moscow in April 1995, I knew that I had found my place in the city’s rampant, filthy raucousness. I thought: either this is the real world, or there is no real world.
The Russia I knew had caught a viral dose of the century’s chaos. It was long in incubating, but suddenly, almost without warning, the whole rotten edifice collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy and dysfunction. For Russians the shock of the implosion of the system which had sustained their every physical, spiritual and intellectual need was far more profound than anything the Soviet system had ever thrown at them even the Purges, even the Second World War. Both those horrors, at least, had easy-to-understand narratives. But now they were hit by something entirely inexplicable – not an enemy, but a vacuum. They had nothing but their Russianness to fall back on, the intense experience of being Russian which pulled them together like straggling soldiers in a blizzard.
People reacted in different ways. Blinking like earthquake survivors, some quickly found their new God in money, sex, drugs, nationalist fantasies, mysticism, charismatic religious sects. Others rediscovered the stern and ancient Orthodox God of All the Russias. Some, possessed by aimless frenzy, thrived on looting trinkets and scraps from the ruins. Others, who would soon become the country’s new masters, ignored the scraps and went for the treasures.
And yet, with so many jeopardies inwardly stalking them, most Russians still lived their outward lives on spec, on spiritual credit. In other countries a trauma of this magnitude has ripped society apart and plunged it into decades of soulsearching. But in Russia the twin forces of fatalism and apathy meant that the country reacted with little more than a collective, resigned shrug and slogged on with the painful business of staying alive.
I came to Moscow desperate. After graduating from Oxford, I had spent two years of hapless wandering in the generation expat hinterlands of Prague and Budapest, drinking strong coffee by day and cadging pints of beer from American girls by night. I was trying, though not very hard, to write, which brought me eventually to besieged Sarajevo on a freelance reporting trip with a borrowed flak jacket and a rucksack full of blank notebooks. I found the thrill I had been seeking by riding UN armoured personnel carriers past piles of shattered concrete and the beautiful, boyish debris of my first war. I walked down unlit streets filled with people strolling on a summer’s night like the damned in a Gustave Doré engraving. I read The Brothers Karamazov during a bout of shelling, imagining myself in communion with the darkest forces of the world. But then I saw a child shot dead by a sniper as he ran across a road, picked up off his feet by the impact of the bullet and thrown down lifeless like laundry tossed from a basket, and felt a surge of revulsion at my own voyeurism. On my return to Budapest I decided I could no longer face the Bohemian folly of café society, and began to seek something bleaker and more hard-bitten.
A few months later I found myself standing on the rainwashed pavement outside a McDonald’s in downtown Belgrade counting change for a hamburger and chips. I was unsuccessfully stalking a man called Željko Ražnjatović, aka Arkan, one of the most notorious warlords of the Bosnian war, who had retired from his career of marauding into a soap-star lifestyle of unrestrained kitsch, football fanaticism and mafia violence which I thought would make a good magazine piece. I stalked him at the Red Star Belgrade football matches, I stalked him at his home and his office, I visited his former pet tiger cub mascot, now grown huge and morose in a cage in Belgrade Zoo. Good material it may have been, but I was finally out of money, and there was no sign that Arkan was willing to talk to me.
I called my mother in London from the Belgrade Press Club (whence I discovered one could make international calls for free). She told me that a local English-language paper in Moscow, to which she had encouraged me to apply during one of my periodic bouts of jobless idling in London, had offered me a post as a staff reporter. It was time to get a job. Time to go to Russia.
I had visited Moscow several times before: as a small child with my mother, and later as a teenager with my father when he was allowed back into the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. I’d never liked it much. I always hated the lack of privacy in my aunt Lenina’s two-room apartment and I was constantly irritated by the stream of self-righteous advice and correction which Russian old women consider their right to mete out to youngsters. I found the hospitality overwhelming, and the effusiveness of everyone I met embarrassing. Elderly friends of my aunt’s were recruited to troop me round museums and theatres, and their teenage grandchildren tasked with taking me to dilapidated Soviet amusement parks and to listen to street singers on the Arbat. I was shy and fogeyish, and found my young companions’ open adoration for all things Western uncomfortable – all the more so because I hated pop music and discos, which seemed to be their idea of nirvana. Above all I found the place impossibly claustrophobic, not least because my Western clothes made me the object of unabashed stares wherever I went – or so it seemed to my selfconscious sixteen-year-old self.
In the summer of 1990, after finishing school, I was finally allowed to go to Moscow alone. I found a summer job as a translator at the British embassy thanks to former students of my mother’s who worked there. Like my father four decades before, I found myself employed in an office in the former stable block behind the old Kharitonenko mansion, ferrying piles of visa application forms and occasionally being trotted out to pose as the vice-consul whenever angry visa applicants demanded to speak to a real, live Englishman. I was eighteen years old. I learned croquet from the sons of the chargé d’affaires on the immaculate lawn of their residence just off the old Arbat, and hired an official black Volga sedan to pick me up at my aunt’s apartment and transport me to work in the mornings.