White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  ‘And so?’ I ask again.

  ‘They decided not to go ahead with it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because in a single evening the workers drink their way through more than they were prepared to pay.’

  Today’s Moscow is a gigantic metropolis of fifteen million people, where the cars are stuck in jams even at night. Mani has a twenty-two-year-old cream-coloured Volga, and he can’t get over the fact that in his city there are more S-Class Mercedes cars, the most luxurious ones, than in Germany, a country with eighty million inhabitants, where they are produced.

  But what’s strange about that, when there are about ten thousand dollar-millionaires in Moscow? What is strange is that for almost every millionaire there is one homeless child and ten homeless dogs.

  BLONDIE – THE RABID DOGS

  To get to the metro from outside Mani’s block I have to take a trolleybus.

  Blondie jumped on board through the exit door, to be the first to jump off at the next stop. As I was buying my metro ticket at the window, she was there too. She was behind a newspaper stand, scratching under her foreleg as she watched five helmeted militiamen armed with machine guns. The officers lined up in the narrow passage leading to the escalator, and sifted the human stream passing through it.

  Finally they stopped a bearded man with a dark complexion, pinned him to the wall and started plunging their paws into his large bag. That’s what she’d been waiting for. In two quick bounds she was on the escalator, with me right behind her.

  On the platform she walked indifferently past the girls positioned every few dozen metres with cards saying: ‘Help! My four-year-old son is dying’, ‘My mum’s dying. Please help with her treatment’, ‘Help me to get home’, ‘Help a pregnant woman to survive’.

  She stood under an advert for ‘Putinka’ vodka (‘Tough character, gentle soul’) and yawned noisily. When the train came, she boarded the first carriage.

  With great curiosity we both observed a very young bill sticker, who in just a few minutes between stations plastered our entire carriage in dozens of small, colourful advertising cards. Most of them were aimed at the immigrants who come here looking for work and a livelihood. The adverts offered them help arranging a flat, a work permit, a health-care booklet, a diploma from their chosen college, various professional permits, a driving licence, school certificates and an income certificate, which is necessary for getting credit. But there was also one that said: ‘We give cash to all residents of the Russian Federation in thirty minutes without documents or guarantors.’

  Most of the cards were about getting a residency document, without which, if you are not of Slavonic appearance, it is impossible to live in this city. Shady legal firms arrange shady residency documents in shady hotels and college dorms. Every time I stay in Moscow I myself buy residency for fifty roubles (£1) from one of these firms. It has an office on the main street.

  Posting advertisements in the metro is not illegal either.

  Blondie changed trains twice. At the Prazhskaya station she had a long rest. She removed a sandwich from a waste bin, carefully unwrapped the paper, ate it and dozed off. Then she went up the stairs.

  There, howling with joy, Blondie and another dog completely blocked the way as they tumbled about in the underground passage. They chased each other, tugging with their teeth, and then Blondie rolled onto her back, spread her paws and showed her sister her belly.

  I can’t think of a single Moscow metro station where there isn’t a pack of stray dogs living near the entrance. They stick to these places, because in winter warm air, and in summer cool air belches out from underground. There are often at least ten of them, always very big, strong mongrels. Almost every courtyard, hospital, nursery school and university has its own pack of them too.

  From generation to generation, the Russian capital’s stray dogs teach each other the art of riding the metro without a ticket. Usually they travel for some purpose, not like homeless people, whose aim is to sleep in a train that’s going in a circle.

  In 2001 the city authorities recognized that Moscow is a humane city and put a ban on catching the homeless dogs and putting them down. Instead they had to be caught, sterilized and ‘released at the place of acquisition’, in other words, where they were found. Since then the number of stray dogs has increased five times over, and a trip to the limits of the city, where the packs are bigger and more aggressive, is a gamble with fate. Three years ago one of these packs almost entirely devoured their own carer, but Professor Poyarkov of the Academy of Sciences’ Ecology Institute announced that only thanks to the dogs does Moscow have no problems with rabies, because the mongrels do not let carriers into the city.

  ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life’, says Yevgeny Ilinsky, who is head of what is probably the world’s only organization for the defence of animal rights that is fighting for dogs to be put down.

  PUNK ROCK – COLD-WAR STYLE

  The energy of the artificial sun over Moscow would be a mere spark compared with the fire the Land of Soviets once succeeded in kindling off Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. In 1961 the biggest nuclear bomb in history was tested off this archipelago. It had a power of fifty megatons, equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT, and during its launch it released energy equal to six hundredths of the thermal power of our Sun.

  In those days Moscow was ready for an attack even of that kind – as long as you didn’t emerge from underground, from the metro tunnel, because from the Taganskaya station, for example, you could walk through to the Taganka ZPD, in other words the Transport Police Emergency Command Point, hidden sixty metres underground, which is also protected by twenty-metre-thick concrete walls and a three-ton iron door.

  These are four two-storey underground blocks, in which about a thousand Soviet dignitaries and military people could have survived for three months without contact with the outside world – on condition they observed the internal regulations that are displayed on the wall. Point Eight says: ‘Do not panic.’

  I came here for the birthday party of the daughter of a Moscow oligarch. The Russians contemptuously call these young people mazhory, from a contraction of the words maladoy burzhui meaning ‘young bourgeois’. The birthday girl’s father hired the musicians and the venue for the party.

  I was invited by Sid, aka thirty-two-year-old Dima Spirin, leader of an extremely abrasive punk rock band called Tarakany, meaning ‘The Cockroaches’. Sid is polite, mild mannered and highly knowledgeable, as well as being festooned in earrings and pockmarked with tattoos. He also has skulls and crossbones on his signet ring, hat and shirt, and a fiancée who looks the same. They are the leading Russian punk rock band, but they’re not seeking a major career.

  ‘I like life to be easy, without too much work’, he says. ‘And it has been, ever since I dropped out of school in March 1991 and founded Tarakany. The Soviet regime was still in power, but it had lost its teeth by then. Everyone was doing what they wanted, so the boys from my class and I grabbed a cellar on Arbat Street in the city centre, fitted some padlocks, lugged in our gear and started to play. It was fab. A new life was born in that cellar.’

  Life was also being born in cellars in the small towns outside Moscow. There the boys were pumping iron, sculpting their physiques, sweating buckets, and then finally shaving their heads and going onto the streets.

  They were known as gopniki, from a term for street mugging. They had an allergic reaction to hippies, punks and all shaggies, as well as tramps and the non-Slavonic immigrants, who after the collapse of the USSR started pouring into Moscow in droves.

  Once again things became very bad. Common bandits swelled the ranks of the gopniki and thus, to put it briefly, the famous Russian mafia was born.

  Any enterprise that brought in even the smallest profit, be it a vegetable stall or a rock band, had to have a so-called krysha, meaning a ‘roof ’ or ‘lid’, i.e. protection, for which they had to pay the bandits.

  Only
Alyosha Puliakov, guitarist with the anarcho-punk band Pochta Mongolska – ‘Mongolian Post’ – stood up to them, the man who in 1992 founded Russia’s first rock club, Atrishka. The next year Alyosha was shot and the club folded.

  ‘Nowadays it’s easier’, says Sid. ‘The crime element have gone into the coal and gas business, steel and the arms industry, so we don’t have any contact with them, but the owners of the clubs where we play still pay for protection to this day.’

  There are lots of bunkers like the Taganka ZPD under Moscow, but only this one was put up for auction and sold in 2006. The authorities could no longer afford the repairs.

  CHANSON – BANDIT MUSIC

  Not only rock went underground during perestroika. So did blatna music, in other words criminal, bandit, jail or prison camp music. The communists hated it, because it wiped its feet on Soviet democracy. They only allowed the first festival to take place a few months before the death throes of the USSR, in December 1991, once its name had been changed to the ‘Festival of Russian Chanson’.

  Every Russian taxi or lorry cab has nothing but chanson belting out. The rock stars featured in this chapter sell three thousand records each, the Russian musical elite sell thirty thousand each, and the chanson performers sell three hundred, a million, or three million each.

  The word blatny probably comes from Yiddish, into which it passed either from the German word ‘Blut’, meaning blood, or ‘Blatt’ meaning a page, a sheet of paper, because whenever the bandits in Odessa came to rob the stores of an old Jew or a German, they stuck a revolver barrel in his face and said it was their ‘Blatt’, in other words their receipt or goods delivery document. Thus bandits came to be called blatniye in Russian.

  ANARCHO-PUNK – BATTLEFIELD SYNDROME

  ‘Russia is dying’, says Pit gloomily at the café, as I set before him an Americano and an extremely bourgeois ‘Brabant’ cake with almond flakes on top.

  Then he tells me at length how seventeen years ago they opened the first McDonald’s in Russia on Tverskaya Street. He had stared through the window in horror, as all night long a crowd of exhausted people had thronged outside the place, who were only there to eat a burger in a bun the next morning. That was the first time he thought Russia was dying. He was five years old.

  Pit studied philosophy and theology at Moscow University. He has asked me not to write his name. He and his punk band Ted Kaczynski – named after the US terrorist known as the Unabomber – have gone underground. They only perform at private parties for their fans, and in photos on the Internet they have their faces covered.

  He is only just twenty-two, but he is ‘racial enemy number one’, and for four years he has been living with a death sentence issued by the Moscow fascists. Of course, and not just because his mother is Korean and his father comes from the Caucasus.

  Pit is the icon of all the Moscow punks and members of anti-fascist, pacifist, ecological, anti-globalist and anarchist organizations.

  Two years ago, his address and photograph appeared next to the death sentence on the Internet. Since then not a month has passed when he hasn’t been beaten up in the street by fascists, skinheads, or supporters of the soccer teams Spartak Moscow, CSKA or Dynamo. Nowadays he carries a knife in his pocket.

  ‘In 2001 the Nazis incited war against the punks’, he says. ‘And the blood is flowing, on the streets and during attacks on our clubs and our bands’ concerts. They want to destroy their enemy’s symbols. They also persecute immigrants and tramps, and we’ve been coming to their defence. The punks and all the anti-fascists, who are their allies, have responded in the same way.’

  The most radical fascist rock groups are called Korrozya Metalla (‘Metal Corrosion’) and Kolovrat – the Slavic version of a swastika. The former is closer to the National Bolshevik Party, the latter to the Nazis. They often organize concerts and festivals, for which they have to provide security. Following these events the ‘support groups’ are not disbanded, and in this way hit squads are formed that operate underground. The fascist right wing has especially powerful ones, because it recruits its soldiers among skinheads and soccer fans.

  A recent victim of the war was twenty-six-year-old Ilya Boro-dayenko, whom on 26 June 2007 the national socialists battered with iron bars during an attack on a camp by the River Angara, where ecologists and anarchists were protesting against the construction of yet another nuclear power plant.

  ‘The fascist organizations were born in the mid-1990s’, says Pit, ‘when a huge wave of immigrants poured into Russia. And these people are more savage than Russians are abroad. If harm is done to one of them, they all reach for their knives. They intercepted all the trade in Moscow and created various mafias, hellishly brutal of course, typical of savages.What’s more, they look different and speak a different language, and when the war in Chechnya began, the television showed them killing Russian soldier boys. In my class all the boys belonged to the Nazis. Except for me. As time went by some strange oddballs started appearing – Nazi punks, Nazi Rastafarians, and even Nazi Negros. Their hero is the football hooligan Eskimo.’

  ‘There used to be an ice cream called Eskimo’, I recall.

  ‘Vanilla coated in chocolate. Because he looks black on the outside, but he’s white on the inside.’

  On the other side of the barricade Pit’s friends gained allies in the form of anti-fascist skinheads, red skinheads and apolitical skinheads.

  Pit says his anarchist pals obtained a list of the leaders of the Moscow fascist organizations. Half of them do not have Russian surnames. They are young people from Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the Caucasus, and even from Chechnya, but from the second generation of immigrants, just like him, who do not know a word of their mother tongue.

  ‘And you should see how many Jewish names there are.’

  ‘Why does that interest you?’ I interrupt him.

  ‘Because we can’t understand them’, he replies. ‘If I ask a guy like that, why are you with them when your face is just as dark as mine, he says his ancestors were from Bulgaria, Croatia or Italy. He’d never admit he’s from Baku or Dushanbe.’

  Pit is a neurotic, terrified intellectual with post-traumatic stress syndrome, as suffered by soldiers returning from war. Out of the goodness of his heart he keeps giving me advice for my journey.

  ‘The main rule is not to trust anyone. Don’t talk to anyone on the road, and for God’s sake don’t drink any vodka. Don’t walk about at night, don’t stop near a bazaar and don’t rent accommodation from the women who stand outside the stations. In Russia the people are savage, very aggressive. If the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and night is coming on, go straight into the depths of the forest and pitch your tent there.’

  ‘Winter’s just around the corner.’

  ‘Go into the forest, I say. Go and join the wolves, not the people.’

  HEAVY METAL – WHORES, MUSIC AND BOOZING

  He’s late. An hour later he calls and says he’ll be forty minutes late.

  ‘You’re already sixty minutes late’, I hiss.

  ‘Well, it’ll be another forty.’

  It was another sixty. Two hours late altogether. He came into the café and didn’t say a word of apology. Jeans, green jacket, long fair hair, beard . . . He doesn’t look like a fascist. He doesn’t even have a strong handshake. But he laughs in a hideous way, and when he does his face (in the manner typical of people with paralysed facial nerves) doesn’t change its expression at all.

  Sergei Troitsky, known as Pauk – meaning ‘Spider’ – is the founder and leader of the skinheads’ and fascists’ favourite heavy metal band, Korrozya Metalla (‘Metal Corrosion’). He is forty-one.

  He was eighteen in 1984 when he was refused admission to college just because he had long hair. So he founded the band, although it was the worst time for the then underground rock scene, because Yuri Andropov was in power in the USSR, the former head of the KGB, who fortunately died thirteen months after his coronation.

  Pauk’s
mother is a dentist and his father is a professor of philosophy.

  ‘Doesn’t it bother them that their son is a fascist?’ I ask.

  ‘What might bother them about that?’ he replies with a question, and slurps his coffee noisily.

  ‘In the Soviet Union and in Russia “fascist” has always been the worst insult. Twenty million of your compatriots died at their hands.’

  ‘Even more were killed by the communists, and one-and-a-half million Soviets served in Hitler’s army.’

  But he’s not disgusted by the communists either. He even used to be a member of the National Bolshevik Party (the red fascists), and has played at their meetings, rallies and marches.

  He and his band have just come back from a concert tour of Siberia.

  ‘Fourteen days and concerts in eleven cities’, he tells me excitedly. ‘Boozing until dawn after each performance, then a train, another concert, more boozing, then another train . . . On tour we do our best to drink no less than half a litre a day each. Vodka and various local potions. To avoid food poisoning and nervous collapse, and as a pick-me-up. Whores, music and boozing are my whole life. Those are the most beautiful things in it.’

  In the mining city of Novokuznetsk they were given two tons of coal in sacks by one of their fans. They sold it on the spot for 5000 roubles.

  ‘And after the concert we hired a luxury bathhouse and five whores’, Pauk tells me. ‘In Moscow a good prostitute costs 10,000, but in the provinces you can get a top model for the whole night for 800 roubles (£16). Three of them came with us for the next bit of the tour and danced naked on stage at the concerts. They were stars, but we threw them out along the way because we like to have new ones in each city.’

  Pauk does a lot of concerts in the provinces, because in the capital he has no chance of performing in a large auditorium. His music is not allowed to be played on the radio or television.