In 1941, Pyotr was studying engineering at the University of Yekaterinburg when war broke out. He volunteered for the war effort and was sent by train to Moscow. However he never made it to Moscow. Halfway through the journey the train stopped for supplies and Pyotr got off to beg some hot water somewhere nearby. The train then departed leaving him behind. This was classed as treachery. As punishment he was sent to the front line as part of the strafnoi battalion. His job was a suicide mission: advance, advance, advance and never turn back. The NKVD he had so devoutly admired were now fifty paces behind him all the way, with machine guns at his back. Pyotr was not expected to survive, but was saved by the severely cold winter of 1941. He got frostbitten on several of his toes. Once these were amputated he was classed as an invalid and sent back to Yekaterinburg, where he continued his studies in university and met his future wife, Iraida Furtaeva (Ira). Nine years later Iraida gave birth to a daughter, Nataliya Petrovna Karbovskaya, my mother-in-law.
d. Aeroflot Flight SU0241. April 16th 2011. Moscow – London
After a long and tearful goodbye I was once again alone and lonely on a plane full of Russians. Before my adventure I had made plans for one trip, and one trip only, as if I was going on some holiday that also included a wedding. The fact was that the wedding had been my own, and as a married man I had to get my head out of the clouds and think seriously about where life was heading and what I needed to do.
As the plane ascended into the sky, and I looked down on Moscow, it became clear that I had not only married a woman, but an entire country. My life, as I had known it, would never be the same again, which was both a good and a bad thing. There were countless things I would miss in the UK: people, places, foods and so on but it was too late to turn back the clock. I didn’t want to anyway. I was now half-Welsh, half-Russian. Nastya would be waiting for me as she had done ever since Paris. It broke my heart to think of the way she had cried in Moscow. To think of all the nights we would have to spend apart; but it couldn’t be helped. My visa had expired. And although I hated the thought of it, I had to go back to go forward.
After hoovering up the contents of my inflight meal, and washing it all down with weak aeroplane coffee, I reclined my seat and relaxed. I loathed leaving Nastya behind but at the same time I was relieved to be back in control of myself again. I couldn’t wait to get back to the UK and tell my friends all I’d seen, and I’d seen a lot. It felt like such relief to be on my own, to be moving away from Russia, which was no surprise considering what had happened the night before.
i. Moscow, Fridge Magnets, and Tactical Nuclear Weapons
We arrived in the early morning at Moscow Domededovo Airport, which is south and some considerable distance away from Moscow. To get to the city we bundled ourselves into the back of a minivan along with several other travellers. This is quite normal – taxis are expensive and buses can take a long time to wait for, a bus-taxi cross is the cheaper option because it can carry about ten people, and it runs much faster than the bus service. We were dropped off at the nearest Moscow metro station an hour later. Before we caught the metro to our hostel, I wanted to stand in the street and smoke a cigarette, a Russian cigarette. I wanted to capture the moment, and there is no better way I know of than to stand still and smoke. Moscow looked practically European compared to Krasnoyarsk. The roads were already busy with people on their way to work and the sun was shining against the office blocks; it made me feel like I was back in Paris for a moment.
When we reached our hostel some three hours later, we were both shattered, having travelled through the night, so we bunked down and fell fast asleep. When we awoke it was early evening. The opportunity to see the Tsaritsyno palace had passed us by. There was only enough time left to do some souvenir shopping and have a bite to eat. Moscow is different from Krasnoyarsk in that there are thousands of restaurants of good quality and kiosks in the streets that sell Western style foods. I will never forget that first slice of pizza after a month in Siberia. It was heaven. We didn’t stop there however, after several slices of pizza we went to a Turkish restaurant and ate ourselves silly. Our hostel and the restaurant were both on Yamskogo Polya Street near the Belorusskaya train station. We had chosen to stay at that hostel precisely because it was so near to it. The shuttle train to Sheremetyevo Airport would leave from there the following morning.
As the evening was descending quickly, we decided to walk to Belorusskaya to make sure we knew the fastest route and because it was likely there would be shops that sold tourist pap. We needed to buy a fridge magnet for my mum and some Soviet chocolate for my dad. To get to the station, we first had to ascend some concrete steps that lead to Leningradsky Avenue. This road is raised as it has to pass over the Moskva-Smolenskaya Railway line. When we reached Leningradsky there were hundreds of people gathered there. They were waiting for something and obviously had knowledge that we didn’t, so we waited with them. A fleet of orange street-cleaning vehicles came and began washing the road. They were only cleaning the stretch of road that was visible to us. There must have been twenty of them. They took it in turns to run in relays and it took about half an hour to wash just a 200-metre stretch, as the road was nine lanes wide. During this time militia came. Not the normal street militia, but highly decorated officers. Many of them walked along the edge of the pavement and took up positions by the side of the road as a preventative measure to stop people stepping out. They didn’t have to say anything as people naturally backed away from them.
When the road was clean, and the militia were in place, we watched in silence as tanks came screaming through, hundreds of them, with soldiers popping up slightly through the turrets. These were followed by a range of military vehicles including mobile surface-to-air rocket launchers, each equipped with no fewer than sixteen barrels. When at least a hundred heavy-armoured tanks, rocket launchers and various killing machines had sped by, we asked a Muscovite what it was all about. We were told that the killing machines we had seen were just a practice run for Victory Day, which is held on May 9th. This display of military might is to celebrate the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union and its allies in 1945. Having seen some footage of Moscow’s military parades before I came to Russia I knew that something was missing. There was no way any kind of military display, even on a practice run, would finish with tanks. I knew something much bigger was coming. The militia and throngs of people prevented me from getting a decent view of the road so I urged Nastya to follow me past Belorusskaya station to the junction where Leningradsky Avenue meets Leningradsky Prospekt. All the vehicles we had seen so far had not travelled the length of the avenue and so I deduced that they must have come from the road next to it. I was right.
When we got to the junction a huge, sixteen-wheeled, fully-armed nuclear weapon launcher was negotiating the corner of Leningradsky Avenue. There were three more behind it. During some later research I found that this machine is known as the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile launcher, which carries a single warhead with an 800 kiloton yield (as a comparison the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 and 21 kilotons respectively). It is quite simply the Godfather of killing machines, and I was stood 10 ft from a convoy of them.