by Guy Martin
He looked like just a normal bloke; you wouldn’t have any idea he did such extreme, hardcore stuff. He spoke a bit of English, much more than my Russian, which still doesn’t extend much further than hello, so we spoke through a translator.
He had an iPad and showed me some of the hardcore rooftopping he’d done in Vladivostok, on the tops of bridges, also without any safety equipment or harnesses. I quizzed him, asking if he was just doing it for Facebook followers, but he wasn’t; he likes doing it and does it for the buzz, taking pictures to show where he’s been. I could see the similarities between him rooftopping and me road racing. The fact that it could kill us both was part of what made us want to do it. In his game, you have to be concentrating or it’s curtains. You can get fairly well arrested for it, too.
Kirill told us he used to live in a flat with his mate, who was also a rooftopper. You can get away with a lot of it; you might get a small fine for trespassing, as long as you don’t do anything political. Try anything that the authorities think is provocative and they are after you. Kirill’s flatmate climbed up somewhere and painted a Ukrainian flag over the Russian hammer and sickle. There are big divisions in Ukraine between those who want the Russians to have more of a hand in running the country and those who want it to stay totally independent, and it led to a crisis when Russia annexed Crimea, placed in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine, in 2014. There’d been trouble in Ukraine in 2004 when an opposition leader and presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned, but survived. So, the Russian secret service is touchy about anything Ukrainian.
After Kirill’s flatmate posted footage of himself online rooftopping and painting the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine over the Russian hammer and sickle, the FSB came around to their flat, but only Kirill was in. He hadn’t been political and said he wasn’t involved in the incident, but the FSB were after anyone they could make an example of, so they searched the flat, found some drugs and locked him up for a year and a half. He didn’t want to talk about it; you can only imagine what it must be like in a Russian prison for a young bloke who’d been fitted up.
I also met another rooftopper, called Angela Nikolau. We met in SIXTY bar on the 62nd floor of the poshest skyscraper in Moscow. She won’t have been 25, and got a load of modelling contracts out of doing what she does and sharing it on social media. She’s been used for laptop and phone adverts and travel companies have sent her and her boyfriend – who is also a roofer, as they also call them – around the world to climb buildings and make films and photos for them. Again, like Kirill, I thought she was doing it all for Twitter followers and all that, but she loved it. She says she was going to stop rooftopping so often, but she still loved the buzz of it. When her grandparents see photos of her on the top of buildings, she tells them they’re fake, that the pictures have been Photoshopped, so they don’t worry about her.
When you’re on a job like this, away from home, the crew are together for the whole time, meeting early in the morning, working together all day and eating together at the end of the day. Except for a couple of people who are full-time for North One, the rest are freelancers who get booked when there’s work. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but there can be an exponential ball of arse-kissing when all the crew eat together at the end of the day and I don’t like that, so sometimes I go off and do my own thing. I tell them, I don’t just disappear, but I leave the hotel and find somewhere to eat on my own. They’re all good lads and lasses, but I need to get out on my own for a bit. I never got too far from the Moscow hotel, but I would go for a walk, a few roubles in my pocket; spot a restaurant somewhere, a bit oddball if possible; point to something on the menu and have a cup of tea or a beer. The tea was good, Russian caravan tea. I love people-watching, and that’s easier when you’re on your own. I love that no one knows who I am, no one gives a fuck who I am. I can just watch the world go by. There are nights I eat with the crew, but not every night. It’s healthy to have a bit of your own time. Everyone needs that.
The next day we went to Star City, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and the Russian space museum where we were shown around by a young bloke called Dimitry. He was only in his early twenties, but what a clever bloke.
I’m fascinated by the Russian space race. I love the story of how much the Americans spent on developing a pen that would work in space, and the Russians just took a pencil. That says a lot about the Russians, to me.
Dimitry explained that the Russians sent more than 47 dogs into space in different missions, only 20 of them coming back. I heard that the Russians used stray dogs, from the streets of Moscow, because they would already be toughened up from living on the streets and used to harsh temperatures. The Russians successfully sent up two dogs in 1951. I say successfully; they got out of the earth’s atmosphere, into space, but didn’t make it back alive. It proved that a mammal could survive the launch and leaving the atmosphere.
Laika is the most famous of the Russian space dogs, because she was the stray that became the first living creature to orbit the earth in space when she was sent up with Sputnik 2 in 1957. Even though it was seen as a success by the Russian space agency, she died in space, from overheating. Both the Russians and Americans had been experimenting with mammals in the early days of space exploration since the late 1940s, when the United States sent up Albert II, a rhesus monkey, in June 1949. He didn’t make it back. His name gives you a clue, but Albert I wasn’t cut out for successful space travel either.
Laika is the animal nearly everyone names if they know owt about four-legged cosmonauts, but Belka and Strelka were the first two dogs to return from space alive, in August 1960. The Americans had more luck. Gordo the squirrel monkey made it all the way to space and back in 1958, but died when the return capsule’s parachute device failed. What a bastard! Then, in 1959, a couple of monkeys, Able and Baker, made it back and survived, but Able died in an operation to remove a sensor. Baker lived on to the age of 27.
Dimitry took us through every area of Russian space travel, from Sputnik to the present day and their involvement with the ISS, the International Space Station. The USSR was the first country to put a man in space, on 12 April 1961. They kept talking about Yuri and, for a while, I thought they meant the spoon bender. Sorry, that’s Uri.
Yuri Gagarin was a hero of the nation, son of a bricklayer, who worked loads of jobs to get enough money to earn his pilot’s licence. He was only in space for an hour and a half. I say ‘only’, but no one had done it before, so after you, mate. He died in a fighter jet training crash, just short of seven years later, that many folk still think is mysterious.
Dimitry also told us about a Russian cosmonaut who spent the longest uninterrupted length of time in space: Valeri Polyakov was up there for 437 days, over 14 months. (Valeri was a bloke, by the way.) And he also told us that cosmonauts come back five centimetres taller than when they left because the lack of gravity in space means their joints and spines aren’t compressed. The height increase doesn’t last for long, though.
The last day of filming in Moscow was in the Metro, and what a beautiful place it is. Moscow’s Metro is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Lenin started the job and Stalin finished it. They planned it as an example of how advanced the Communist Soviet Union was. The stations are beautiful, like art galleries, cathedrals or ballrooms, with marble-lined walls, massive chandeliers hung from arched and vaulted ceilings, huge mosaics on the walls and hundreds of statues.
The Russian people supplied the labour, and were worked brutally hard to make sure it was finished on time, but it was the British who supplied the know-how. Stalin got a load of British engineers in to design his underground, because the London Underground was the first, and, at the time, biggest underground network, but then the Russians didn’t pay for any of the work. You can’t build an underground system beneath a major city without getting to know the ins and outs of the place you’re tunnelling under and this wasn’t good in a place as paranoid as Stalinist Russia.
The NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, who were the secret police before the KGB, were used by Stalin to arrest anyone he had it in for, and they took in loads of the British engineers on suspicion of spying, just because they’d made it their business to know the layout of Moscow. I don’t know how they could plan to build an underground system without that research. Anyway, they got away relatively lightly. They were tried before being deported to England, not sent to Siberia. That was back in 1933.
The materials used to build this massive engineering project came from all over the USSR, including the steel, cement, marble and granite. When you’ve got a land mass the size of the Soviet Union you don’t have to import much from outside.
Stalin wanted the folk of Moscow to be convinced, or fooled into thinking, what a great regime they were a part of on every journey to and from work. He wanted to show that the Soviet underground was better than any in the West, so no expense was spared. Being Communist Russia, there weren’t any adverts for soap powder or tobacco, like there would have been at King’s Cross Underground in the same era. Instead, there are hundreds of works of art, all in the style known as social realism. It’s a style showing the Russian people looking healthy and happy and staring optimistically into the future. Ordinary people like farmers, industrial workers and schoolchildren are the main subjects, pictures of the people at work in the fields, showing the country working together for each other, men and women. It’s about the present and the future, not the past, to make people feel that it might be bloody horrible now, and you’re short of food, but keep working, comrades: this is the future.
I thought filming for a whole day on the underground would be a bit much, but it is massive and was dead interesting. We were hopping on and off trains, going here and there. No one was gawping at us, no one was paying any attention at all. The first time I had to film anything in public, seven or eight years ago now, I felt awkward, but I’m used to it now. I’ve got over feeling like an idiot. I can just get on with it, but it is easier if no one, except the crew, is looking on.
Misha was guiding us, taking us to various places, sometimes leaving the stations and going out onto the streets. We didn’t go to Russia to see the outside of the FSB headquarters, what was the KGB HQ, or any military stuff. We weren’t there for the politics. We’d done a bit of Red Square and the Kremlin and that was enough. We wanted to see what made the place tick. We wanted to show the positive side of Russia, not the same old stereotypes.
When we’re filming, I don’t have a script. I never do. If you’ve seen my programmes, that won’t surprise you. On a day like this Misha fills me in on the history, then James, the director, will ask me questions on camera and I’ll explain what I’ve been told, picked up, seen or thought about.
One bronze statue stuck in my mind. It was in the Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Revolution Square, station and of a soldier with his arm around a dog. Loads of Russian folk who walk past it rub the dog’s nose for good luck, so its snout is shiny. There are said to be 76 bronze sculptures in this one station alone.
What with hearing about Laika and the other space dogs, and seeing this statue, I was already beginning to miss my two Labradors, Nigel and Steve.
The final bit of filming for the day was for me to meet the owner of a ZiL, the presidential transport, a Cold War-era limousine. Misha arranged for us to meet the bloke, who called himself Vladimir. I don’t know if he was an oligarch, but he wasn’t short of a bob or two, and we know Vladimir wasn’t his real name but I wasn’t going to push it. I could tell by the way he dressed, his presence, that he was definitely a doer. So I ended up doing a lap of Red Square in a ZiL. It was mega.
That night was our last in Moscow for a while. We were never far from ten-foot icicles and you’re deafened by the noise of studded snow tyres, but we’d been right in the heart of Russia and had no bother at all. The traffic is bad, worse than London, but, then, Moscow has a bigger population, over 12 million compared to less than 9 million in London. Walking around Moscow on my own didn’t feel dangerous. There were no funny looks. I never felt threatened. I liked the place.
CHAPTER 13
‘Arsehole checker, that was his full-time job’
DAY FIVE OF the Russia job was a travel day, flying from Moscow to Archangel, near Murmansk, nearly 700 miles north-west of Moscow. We didn’t have any days off, we were either filming or travelling every day on this nearly four-week trip.
We landed in the afternoon and I did a piece to camera (PTC in TV jargon). James, the director, has the programmes planned as best as he can in advance, but we also have to react if something happens. As I’ve said, nothing’s ever scripted. James has been doing it a long time, so he’ll know if the programme needs an extra bit from me to help tie things together, and those are when I’ll be asked to do a piece to camera. Not all of them are used, but it’s better to have them and not need them. This one was about the Arctic convoys from 1941 to 1945, because Britain and Russia were allies in the Second World War. There were 100 ships and 1,000 men lost taking supplies of tanks, planes, tractors and food to the Russians through the back door, so they could defend themselves against the Germans moving east. Archangel and Murmansk were the main ports the convoys were sailing for, but the German navy and Luftwaffe knew it and would try and pick them off.
The main reason we’d travelled up there was to visit the partly state-owned Archangel diamond mine. Misha had been working hard to keep things on track because the plans were changing all the time. Places we were told we could visit changed their minds or said we couldn’t have the access they’d already agreed to. We didn’t know for sure, but we all felt it was down to the diplomatic problem over the Salisbury poisoning and things weren’t quite as we expected when we rolled up to the mine, but James and Misha managed to work things out.
I was told this place was the biggest diamond mine on the European land mass, but I didn’t realise Russia was part of Europe and when I said that people looked at me like I was a dickhead. I found out later that Russia is split into two anyway – European Russia and Asian Russia, and there’s a lot more of it in Asia, so I wasn’t being totally stupid. Anyway, it’s the biggest diamond mine in Europe, because it’s west of the Ural Mountains, the range that splits Europe from Asia.
We drove to the mine on the morning after flying there. All the rivers and lakes in the area were frozen, with cars driving on the ice. A boat was frozen in. I wondered how long it had been stuck there. It was minus 20 here, much colder than Moscow had been. This was the only time I felt I didn’t really have enough clothes with me, but I was all right. The crew had brought a load of cold-weather clothing, and I could’ve had it all bought for me, but I didn’t, because I’m hard. I had my Pikes Peak woolly hat.
Archangel was the nearest town to the diamond mine, but it was still three hours’ drive away, so it’s pretty remote. The mine has its own power station. The people who work there do shifts of two weeks on, two weeks off. There’s a sports hall, a swimming pool, a bar and a shop. It’s a well-catered-for place.
The mine is open-cast, a big hole in the ground, not underground like you might think when you hear the word mine. They use a big Bucyrus crane, with a big Caterpillar V8 in it, that excavates in a certain way that claws the ground and loads the dumpers in fewer movements. Ruston-Bucyrus was a joint British-American company, with the British side based in Lincoln. It’s just Bucyrus now and they make these massive diggers.
It maybe took six bucketfuls to fill the bed of a 90-ton dumper truck; 90 ton is what it can carry, and I got to drive one. I had 92 ton on the back and set off driving out of the mine. Even though it was the biggest thing I’d ever driven it felt very familiar, probably less complicated than my John Deere tractor. It’s that big you have to keep an eye on a few screens, displaying camera angles positioned to help the driver see the corners. It had the choice of four gears, but it was a CVT system, constant and variable, with a hydraulic system that worked off oil pressure. When
the engine got to this speed, it changed gear automatically.
On average, they reckoned, you get one carat of diamond for each ton of dirt that comes out of the ground. A carat is 0.2g. It’s not exactly trying to find a needle in a haystack, but it isn’t far off. They’ve refined the process, though.
There’s no human contact until right at the end of the process. The 90-ton load gets tipped into the graders, where it is puckered up, until it gets sorted, then X-rayed and scanned by an ultra-violet light. Any diamond in there shows up under the ultra-violet light. There’s an air system that blasts that certain part of rock out for further inspection. That piece goes through another heating process to get all of the moisture out of it, then into a clinically clean room where nine people are sat, dressed like surgeons, with hairnets, sorting through the rocks and stones they hope contain diamonds.
Obviously when the air blasts what it recognises as a diamond out of the mixture of rock and dirt there’s only a small percentage of diamond; it’s also taking normal rock with it. These folk are sorting the shit from the diamonds. The gems look like dirty glass at this point, all different colours: yellow, blueish, white.
I got all togged up to help look for the diamonds. You get checked in and checked out. You have your hair, earholes and arsehole checked to make sure you haven’t hidden anything. All the windows are sealed so nothing can be dropped out. You have to get your shoes cleaned wherever you go. You put your shoes, still on your feet, through these machines to make sure you haven’t hidden anything in the grips in the soles, and those machines are sealed so no one can hide something on their shoe, knowing the machine will find it, thinking they can just get it out of the cleaning machine later.
Everything was immaculate. The workers searching for the diamonds were lining up the stuff they were sifting through like I’ve seen people in films line up cocaine before they snort it. But they’re doing it real fast. It’s mostly women, with only one bloke in there the day we visited. And they have to get their arseholes checked on a daily basis, during the two weeks on of their shift pattern, too. There’s a bloke whose job it is, arsehole checker, that was his full-time job. The folk who worked there weren’t small. There were a lot of places to hide a lot of things. They ran a fine-tooth comb through my hair.
