‘Do you like fiddling with engines?’ asked Grisha, when I asked him to help me buy one.
‘No, I hate it’, I replied sincerely.
‘Then you’ll get to like it.’
I found Grisha on the Internet. He’s a member of the Ulaz fan club. Four of his friends have paid for their passion with their lives, because they tried sleeping in them with the engines on. Grisha runs a small garage for club members on the outskirts of Moscow.
It’s very hard to find a decent Lazhik in Moscow, because they’re only for the army, for working in the forest or for agriculture. Luckily during my search it turned out that one of the club members wanted to sell his car.To my mind it wasn’t cheap – 170,000 roubles (£3400), but Grisha knew it was in good condition. It was a 1995 vehicle on old-fashioned springs like a horse-drawn chaise, but three years earlier Grisha had changed its entire chassis and body for a brand new one, given it bigger wheels, a steering wheel from a smart Volga, put in new disk brakes and added a rare luxury in these cars, which are about as nimble as wheelbarrows – power steering.
The main thing was that Andrei, the owner of the Lazhik, agreed to sell it to me on notarized power of attorney, which means that for three years I’d be able to drive it on his number plates. If I wanted to reregister the car in my own name, I’d have to spend at least two weeks standing in queues at various offices.
I beat Andrei down another 10,000 roubles, we each drank a glass of vodka to seal the deal, and I drove the car round to Grisha’s workshop so he could get it ready for arctic conditions. The notary, MOT and new insurance cost me 8000 roubles (£160). I gave Grisha 24,000 (£480) for spare parts and necessary materials.
My Ulaz had no safety belts, so I had them installed. In the European part of Russia no-one, including the militia, obeys the law about wearing seat belts, or the one about driving with your lights on at all times.
I also wanted to have a radio with a CD player, as I was going to spend several weeks behind the wheel, and a place to sleep instead of a back seat. I had to have the second battery installed together with an extra heater (which we took from a Volga), and have the metal floor lined with warm foam, the bonnet insulated and the cold air vent from underneath the engine covered. Grisha also used a gadget from a Lada, thanks to which the engine in my car was to inhale warm air, and fitted a new starter motor, because they’re extremely good at breaking down. I took the old one in case it did go wrong, and a spare fuel pump.
I was supposed to collect the car on a Wednesday, but they hadn’t even started to work on it by then, and when I went to the garage on Friday a giant man the size of a bridge support with a thug-like face clambered out of a small red sports car and chased me out of the yard. So I call Grisha, and he cries down the phone that it’s a tragedy and he can’t talk to me now. He explains that he’s behind with the protection money he owes the gangsters, and now he’s running about town, trying to borrow some cash.
I picked up the car on Sunday night. Grisha took 9000 roubles for his work (£180), so, ready to go, the car had cost me 201,000 roubles (£4020).
Finally he gave me instructions on how to service the Lazhik. Every day I start by checking the oil level, the brake fluid and the coolant. Each day I drive on a different battery, so they take it in turns to charge up, and I ignore the fact that I can’t switch off the heating (‘It’s winter, isn’t it?’), that the fuel gauge doesn’t work (‘You’ll have to shine a torch into the tank’), that the spare wheel is much smaller than the others (‘You’ll make it to a tyre repair shop somehow’), that the third gear works very badly when coming down from fourth, and that the horn doesn’t work, without which I feel disabled.
Do you know what a micro-second is?
It’s the fraction of time between the appearance of a yellow light and a horn sounding behind you. That’s a joke foreigners make about Russian drivers, who honk like crazy.
SKATES
Nor do they ever switch on their lights as long as something is visible, and they never dip their headlights, not even when you do. The bigger car has priority. And when they change a wheel, they like to burn the ripped tyre – they have a stinking bonfire instead of a warning triangle. Most of them never undress in the car, but drive all day long in their overcoats and fur caps.
Russians die on the roads like flies. In 2007 more than 32,000 people lost their lives, as many as in the entire European Union, which has three-and-a-half times more citizens and six times as many cars. Every couple of kilometres there’s a symbolic grave on the hard shoulder. It’s usually a small metal plinth with a star on top, or an openwork pedestal made of welded reinforcing wire, like a stand for flowers from the 1960s. According to the Russian custom, there’s a bench and a small table with a vase bolted on to it next to many of the graves, with artificial flowers in it. Sometimes a driver stops there and leaves a lighted cigarette for his pal, two or three spares, and sometimes a small bottle with a drop of vodka left in it, which is sure to be what killed the guy.
I set off from Moscow on 24 November 2007. On the very first day the CD player broke. It couldn’t withstand the dreadful bumps, because the further east, the worse the road. Then came Kazan, and Ufa; Asia began at the Urals and the climate changed radically. The temperature fell by more than ten degrees. I drove around Chelyabinsk, crossed Omsk and Novosibirsk, and stopped in Krasnoyarsk. I turned directly south to Khakassia and Tuva. Two weeks later I came back along the same road to Krasnoyarsk and sped south-east to Irkutsk.
I had already driven 1700 kilometres. It was a few days to Christmas, so I left the Lazhik at a parking lot, the batteries with Losha, my friend in Irkutsk, and flew to Poland.
I came back a month later. Ahead of me was the hardest, iciest stretch of road, or rather roadless wasteland. And February – the coldest month.
Circling around Lake Baikal I reached Ulan Ude. I wanted to cross this sacred sea of Siberia, which contains more water than the Baltic, by hopping over the ice, but it only starts to freeze solid in mid-January. I got there on 2 February. The locals categorically advised against crossing the lake, but I did put on the skates I had brought halfway round the world, and played ice hockey with the lads from Sludianka. And out on the ice I saw the most unusual Lazhik in the world. It had a hole cut in the floor for ice fishing, and there was a smoking pipe sticking out of the roof from a coal-fired stove. A Siberian vebasto heater, you could say.
From Ulan Ude I drove to Chita, beyond which the normal road ends, the tarmac, human habitations and civilization. For over 2000 kilometres to Khabarovsk there’s nothing but mountains, marshes, snow and taiga.
In 2007, on the ‘Dark Roasted Blend’ blog, Internet users from all over the world selected their choice of the most dangerous roads on Earth that have claimed the most lives. Of the six roads on their shortlist, three were in Russia. One of these is on the Caucasian border between Georgia and Russia; meanwhile I had the opportunity to get a taste of the other two. First of all in Moscow, because one of them is the 4.5-kilometre Lefortovo tunnel, which runs under the river and leaks, and when the temperature drops below freezing it gets as slippery as the ice hockey rink at the Luzhniki Olympic stadium.
The other road of death that I drove along branches off from my route beyond Chita but is no less charming. This is the highway running north to Yakutsk. ‘Highway’ is definitely an overstatement. It is a narrow, winding track, muddy in summer and snow-bound in winter, which runs along an eternal stretch of icy ground without a scrap of tarmac. I travelled it as far as the city of Tynda, then made my way on from there, across the taiga, to visit some friendly reindeer herders.
In the spring of 2006, on the middle section of the road to Yakutsk, thawing snow trapped several hundred cars. Even the caterpillar-tracked vehicles sent to rescue them got bogged down in the terrible mud. After several weeks desperate people were pointing guns at each other and fighting over food.
I reached Khabarovsk towards the end of February, from where I had only 770
kilometres of fairly good road to go to Vladivostok, where I finished my journey.
SNOW
You can eat on the road at a bar or a cafeteria, but that doesn’t mean they have cakes, liqueurs, coffee and tea there – more like chops, borscht, herrings and vodka. The word blinnaya on a sign doesn’t mean they serve blini there, bulochnaya doesn’t mean bulki, bread rolls, and shashlichnaya doesn’t mean they have shashlik, though it’s possible.
In a zakusochnaya you might have a problem getting zakuski – snacks or appetizers, but they will serve soup and main courses.
They’re usually shabby huts, barracks, or oversized kiosks. The further east, the nastier they are. Dirty plastic tablecloths, greasy forks, nowhere to wash your hands, and to relieve yourself you have to go outside.
Take for example the zakusochnaya near the small town of Yerofey Pavlovich in Siberia. Behind the building there’s a huge, seething rubbish heap and a barrel cut in half. There’s rubbish smouldering non-stop in both halves of it. Next to it there’s a bog that no-one ever uses. Of the two evils they prefer to go near the rubbish heap.
Who has not stood here! This one didn’t drink much today, because he left a very yellow hole in the snow. Surely a peregonshchik – literally a ‘race-across-man’ – who bought a Japanese used car in Vladivostok and is now racing west to get home in it. They’re always in a great hurry, they rarely stop for something to eat and drink, and they sleep in their cars. Meanwhile this guy over here had been driving for ages and hadn’t pissed in a long while, because his hole is big and deep. Sure to be a dalnoboyshchik – a ‘distant-battle-man’ on a long route – what we’d call a long-distance lorry driver. They’re professionals, they eat and drink on the move and they don’t like stopping either.
This one was here when the wind was blowing – or else he’s an artist, because he likes making patterns. But he was definitely well tanked up, rather unsteady on his feet. Almost every driver likes to have a drink with his dinner here. In the wilds between Chita and Khabarovsk there’s a 100 per cent chance they won’t meet a militiaman on duty. There might be one driving privately. Here’s the mark he leaves – straight, disciplined, and if it has a bend in it, it’s at right angles.
No-one travels alone across Siberia. The peregonshchiki drive in groups of several cars to help each other in case of a breakdown. Often, if one of them has a soldier or militiaman friend, they pay him to travel with them, armed and in uniform. He protects them from the bandits and the militia, because as everyone knows, guys in uniform always have a common language.
And over here a woman must have squatted down, because the hole’s been made at a large angle. A woman is a rarity here. Sometimes she’s keeping her husband company so he won’t fall asleep on the way. The peregonshchiki, especially the professional ones who buy cars for resale, are mostly young, unmarried men. Here’s the mark he leaves – he has made his hole two-and-a-half metres away from where he was standing.
And this one’s the opposite. He’s got a prostate problem and has pissed on his own boots. He must have a sitting job, or else he’s not a young man any more. Maybe a professional driver, or a reporter.
Everyone on the road takes some emergency ‘iron rations’ with them. For years I’ve been using hunter’s sausage, but dried to an extreme state. It’s as hard as wood, so you can’t just bite it, but you can chew it slowly. The Russians are fond of dried fish, which remains edible for several years. In Siberia I saw lorry drivers who carried a supply of calories and protein in the form of so-called struganina. They keep it in their tool chest or with the spare wheel, because it’s a big, raw, frozen fish; depending on need, they carve bits off it with a large knife like a piece of wood, then dip these shavings in salt and pepper and eat them quickly. Defrosted struganina is impossible to swallow, and only a dog would devour it without vodka.
BED
I tried to end each day in a sizeable town where I could find a hotel. If night came upon me in the middle of nowhere, I slept in the car or drove to the nearest village, looked for a house with flowers in the window and asked to stay the night. Russians love helping if you ask them to. They hardly ever do it of their own accord.
East of the Urals there are no decent roadside motels. I slept at three. They rent beds in two or four-person rooms by the hour. It’s forty roubles (80p) for one hour, but you have to pay in advance for at least six. If you sleep for longer, you pay the rest afterwards. You stow your luggage and the car battery in the sofa bed you’re lying on, so you’re not worried about getting robbed while you sleep.
Meanwhile the Lazhik stays in the parking lot. It was on the road for three months, and it only spent one night outside without protection, not counting the few when I slept in it. There was always someone guarding it.
Just like most of the cars in Russia. What an army of people is needed to guard everyone, everything and everywhere! Because it’s not just cars. They guard houses, people, gardens, crops, forests, woodland and farm animals . . . Tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of men do nothing but keep an eye out, stay on alert, guard, watch over and mind to make sure other men don’t steal whatever it is they’re guarding. Millions of security guards, caretakers, watchmen, sentries, minders – born, trained and educated just in order to guard objects.
If I ask five Russian men what they do for a living, one of them is almost sure to reply that he’s a driver, and two that they work in security.
Not counting the militiamen.
MIENTY
The militia is an army of one-and-a-half million people. Statistically for every hundred citizens of the Russian Federation there is one militiaman – four times as many as in Poland.
And the gaishniki (GAI is the State Automobile Inspectorate), or traffic police, are a more hated, despised profession than the tax collectors from the Bible.
The Prosecutor General has calculated that the earnings of state officials from corruption are equal to one third of Russia’s budget. This means they drain about 125 billion dollars out of the public in the course of a single year. A vast amount of it goes to the militia, especially the traffic section. Their staggering impunity, rapacity and corruption are legendary.
In a city or beyond it, at a crossroads, a roundabout or on a straight bit of road you might very often encounter a lone militiaman who has driven there in a private car, quite often outside of working hours, to check drivers’ documents. He’s often a gentleman of advanced age, an officer, a colonel even, but he’s marrying off his daughter, changing his car or buying a flat, so he’s in urgent need of money.
There’s no power in the world strong enough to get out of his clutches. If the mient decides you’re going to pay through the nose, you haven’t a chance. (A mient is a cop, and in Russian that term is more or less as contemptuous as ‘cop’). You may be sober, your car may be roadworthy, your documents may be in order and you may not have committed a violation, but in that case you’ll pay because your car looks shabby, or you’ve got a dirty number plate.
If you’ve just come out of the carwash, the militiaman takes your documents, tells you to wait in the car and goes off to inspect other cars. After fifteen minutes you’re seething with rage, so you intervene, to which he replies that you were meant to wait in the car. There are already several others like you waiting on the hard shoulder. After another fifteen minutes you take 500 roubles out of your wallet and put it in his paw ‘to say goodbye’.
More refined methods have to be set up in advance. Outside the police station there’s a STOP sign, where you have to stop for your documents to be checked. The militiaman doing the checking stands ten metres further on. So you obediently stop next to him.
‘Why have you committed a violation?’ they always ask.
‘God forbid! I haven’t committed anything’, you explain.
‘You didn’t stop at the STOP sign.’
‘But I have stopped.’
‘The sign was back there’, he says, pointing.
A brib
e for this sort of violation costs 1000 roubles (£20). I don’t know how much an official fine costs, but no-one in Russia ever pays them. When I express surprise, even the drivers, the victims of the militiamen, say that it has to be like that because they earn very little. It’s true. The authorities keep their pay at the lowest level, because they know they can manage for themselves.
Between Chelyabinsk and Omsk I met Marat, a Kazakh from Petropavlovsk. He was drinking tap water at a roadside bar. He was dead tired, desperate and hungry, because he hadn’t eaten for two days. He had bought a car in Hamburg and was driving home on German licence plates, and with every kilometre his supply of money for the journey was melting away. He had been economizing on food, until finally he had stopped eating altogether. Before Chelyabinsk he had tanked up the car for the very last time.
‘And outside Kurgan I kneeled before a militiaman and begged him to show mercy’, the tearful Kazakh told me. ‘I’ve got nothing left. I showed him my wallet, my empty pockets . . . There was no mercy. He took my jacket and the empty wallet. At the next few police stations I gave away the spare wheel, the jack and my personal belongings, and at the last checkpoint I unscrewed the side mirrors so they’d let me through.’
I fed Marat and topped up his petrol, but personally I can’t complain about the Russian militiamen. They always helped me, showed me the way and gave me good advice. Four times they caught me on violations, for example turning around on a bridge, but each time I managed to wriggle out of it. I just had to tell them exactly who I was, why I was alone, what sort of car it was, where I had come from and where I was going. This made such a dazzling impression that they let me spend the night in the car at their post, in other words at one of their permanent traffic checkpoints, set up at toll gates and crossroads. Another time they escorted me like a guard of honour to a hotel in town and drove my car to a warm covered parking lot for me.
White Fever Page 2
