by Tim Moore
Twenty-five years since I closed it, Eastern Europe on a Shoestring still packs a punch when opened at a random page. Back in the pre-internet age, you never went on holiday alone: for better or worse, there was always a guidebook for company. Eastern Europe on a Shoestring – the only behind-the-Curtain print-based hand-holder then available – became an unusually irksome travelling companion on that 1990 trip. Not so much for its yammering doctrinaire rhetoric, tiresome though it was to be told that the CIA were to blame for the brutal Soviet crackdown that followed the 1956 Hungarian rebellion, or that Poland’s Solidarity movement had been ‘defeated by its own excesses’. No, extraordinarily enough, given the flush-fit dovetail between the book’s title and my own budgetary mindset, what really got on our wicks was the author’s unstinting devotion to parsimony. His, though, was an alien tight-waddery, one borne of slavish ideological compliance. Time and again we would arrive after dark in some unhelpfully forbidding socialist utopia, crack open Comrade Shoestring and in the Saab’s frail courtesy light read something like: ‘Timoteyagrad is home to a well-appointed new western-funded hotel, but I’m not even revealing its name because you will naturally want to bed down on a straw-scattered pallet at the Young Weaver’s Co-operative (shared buffet trough, compulsory re-education class on Weds & Fri).’
Anyway, I thought of Comrade Shoestring as I wheeled the MIFA down Limbaži Youth Hostel’s undulating linoleum corridor. A familiar odour hung so heavily in the air that I could almost literally put my finger on it – the evocative blend of old cabbage and young feet that was Eau de Silverdale Primary (1971: a vintage year). The sanitary facilities were an eye-opener, indeed a stomach-emptier. A dog-eared warning about HIV and hepatitis B looked down on a shattered row of sinks, and the shower – oh, the shower – was a unisex, curtainless enclosure that might have last been used to shave a furious bison. As a pre-ritual courtesy this beast had first been allowed to visit the toilets, and to prepare himself a light meal in the communal kitchen. The four-bed male dormitory was imaginatively floored with a yielding crust of paint, accumulated in layers over many decades, though as its solitary occupant I would at least be anointing my intimate complaints without an audience (‘Hey, chapskis – have I missed a bit?’). The startling austerity of the facilities throughout painted Latvia’s youth as a primitive race that shunned toilet paper and soap, drank out of saucepans and spent their evenings pushing bottle tops around a chess board.
Limbaži’s only restaurant was the canteen in the supermarket opposite, which I gratefully discovered was licensed to serve overage youth hostellers with a narcoleptic excess of strong ale. When in the small hours I woke up to offload some of it, I established that the dormitory radiators were stone cold, and that there was thus only one way to ensure that the virus-marinaded laundry strung over them would be even half dry by dawn. This way did not result in further sleep, though it did save me the bother of having to get dressed in the morning.
I had taken the manageress’s frown of greeting the night before as her way of telling me I was too old for this place; in the cold, damp light of day I saw she’d been trying to say this place was too old for me. Wringing her hands uneasily she summoned my only two fellow guests, a pair of sombre young girls, to translate a retrospective welcome (‘She say I hope you very enjoyed your stay and sorry for kitchen’) and the bill, a sum I had to ask them to repeat: ‘Is five euro and seventeen cents.’ (As a postscript to this experience, after the Wall came down Comrade Shoestring appears to have abruptly devoted himself to island-hopping in the South Pacific.)
I once interviewed a Latvian luge champion, shortly before descending a section of the track at La Plagne under her instruction, and smashing my watch to bits in the terrifying process. Her existence forewarned me that I could expect Latvia to prove rather hillier than its predecessors. How extraordinary that with over a quarter of this monstrous ride under my wheels, I had yet to tackle an extended series of inclines and descents; how predictable that I should flounder in the face of novelty.
The uphills, in truth, were straightforward enough. Despite that record-breaking programme of under-preparation, my aged body was serving me remarkably well, with the saddle sore in retreat and my knees emerging from a bad patch that had admittedly endured for over a thousand kilometres. The protracted downhills, though, presented an alarming reminder that I had yet to master – in fact, yet to even employ – the press-back-on-the-pedals coaster brake, a now compulsory supplement to the lever-operated front-wheel slow-me-down. My only previous experience of this continental apparatus, both brief and distant, had seen me wobbling to a series of unsatisfactory halts against Amsterdam’s street furniture and pedestrians; barrelling erratically coastwards down Latvia’s dry-tarmac luge runs, the uncomfortable equivalent targets were oncoming traffic and the spittle-flecked jaws of farm dogs. The knack, which I discovered without ever effectively mastering, was to stand up in the saddle and plant one’s full weight down on whichever pedal first approached the apex of its revolution. This procedure necessarily involved a delay while said pedal rotated to said position, which to my mind seemed a fairly fundamental drawback: ‘Ooh, a sudden emergency! How terribly exciting. Don’t go away, I’ll be right with you.’ As it was I only once came a cropper, and that was my fault for trying to take a ride-by snap of two storks having it off in a field.
I approached the Latvian capital Riga through its bracingly old-school commercial hinterland, a lone shopping cyclist dwarfed by shipyard cranes, stripy chimneys and the soaring, grimy flanks of oil tankers and bulk cargo vessels. It was like riding through the pages of some Soviet Ladybird book, How it Works – Centralised Economic Planning or The Story of Marxist–Leninist Achievement. Riga has a Russian mayor and a fifty-fifty ethnic split, and the city exuded a familiar redolence: shambolic traffic management; sinister, shuttered-up concrete edifices with fractured forecourts and a lot of rusty aerials on the roof; clanking old trams and unshaven pensioners playing alfresco chess in the muddy central park. You know a city is in trouble when beggars hassle touring cyclists for change.
A number of bare plinths had evidently been relieved of colossal representations of Soviet heroes, but I was intrigued to find a lavishly mutton-chopped bust identified as one George Armitstead, who had improbably served as Riga’s lord mayor from 1901 until his death eleven years later. That night I read up on the extraordinary tale of this Yorkshire jute merchant’s son, who was educated in Zurich and Oxford, worked as a civil engineer in Russia and wound up almost single-handedly transforming Latvia’s capital into one of the Baltic’s greatest cities, indeed the second largest metropolis in Tsar Nicholas II’s vast empire. In a single prodigious decade Armitstead built Riga’s tram network, its sewage system, its Parisian-pattern boulevards, three hospitals, thirteen schools, museums, the national theatre, the city zoo and Europe’s first garden suburb. The tsar was so impressed he fruitlessly beseeched George to become mayor of St Petersburg. What a very exciting part of the world this was back then, a copper-bottomed land of opportunity for seaside developers, merchants and ambitious English engineers. How bright the Baltic burned in its turn-of-the-century heyday, and how quickly it burned out. Nine years after Armitstead died in office, Latvia declared independence from Russia; a mere twenty years later it was on the bomb-cratered road back to occupation.
It seems the Russians just cannot keep away from their favourite Baltic state: that night I stopped at Ju¯rmala, a resort where all the old tsarist dachas were being restored by oligarchs on the hunt for nostalgia and a wealth-laundering foothold in the Eurozone. The hotel receptionist who revealed this also told me – or more accurately warned me – that the only open restaurant would be full of them. ‘It’s strange, they have really much money but they never smile.’ Why is this so often the case? It certainly was at the beachside restaurant, a try-hard establishment with square black plates and sporting-trophy glassware, offset by a completely wonderful view of the serene Baltic sundown. All around me sho
rt, round men with tall, blonde wives gazed through each other and across the gilded sea with dead eyes, bound together in pampered disdain. The only guest with any rightful claim on misery was the cyclist gazing down the menu’s right-hand column of numbers in mute horror. And even he cheered up after his second vase of lager.
Latvia’s wandering coastline occupied me for longer than I had hoped. It was partly my own fault. The first serious navigational mishap of my trip pitched me onto a busy motorway; I laboriously reeled in a chugging JCB and was pulled along the slow lane for an hour in its hydro-carbon slipstream, not quite in the right direction. Every time I caught a glimpse of sea through a gap in the pine/dune continuum, I plunged gaily through the forest, eager to fulfil a mind’s-eye dream of riding along the beach; every time my wheels soon sank immovably into the sand, and, less gaily, I trudged back to the road. Rattling into Roja, a gloomy former naval base, I made the forgivable mistake of smiling at a woman giving a small boy a lift on her handlebars: the next morning, after my night alone in the converted Soviet quartermaster’s stores, a familiar face presented my breakfast pancakes with a fancy-that beam of happy surprise, and followed it with a ninety-minute rundown of her hopes, dreams and woes in accomplished but alarming English. Pleasing as it was to hear myself encapsulated as ‘a happy and great sport person’, the ensuing comparison obliged me to make my excuses: ‘My husband is a closed person with no emotion, he does not like Sinead O’Connor or understand my sand sculptures.’
In the Soviet years she would have had even less fun explaining her artistic pastime. Roja stood at the foot of the Kolka Peninsula, an area so profoundly sensitive that border troops raked its many beaches every night, checking them at dawn for tell-tale disturbance. The entire promontory, all 900 pine-plastered square kilometres of it, was a military exclusion zone: the eponymous small town at its shark’s-fin tip still bristled with observation towers and few-windowed buildings of military aspect, and when I stopped to take a few snaps, a couple of old chaps on a bench stared hard as if committing my face to memory. How difficult to rein in that instinct, drilled in over long decades, to rush across, push me to the ground and stamp my camera to bits.
It isn’t hard to see what attracted the Soviet top brass to Kolka. The cape looked out over a yawning expanse of NATO waters, yet remained so remote that not a single road pierced its forested vastness. Not until the Russians built one in the 1950s, a secret trail so epically broad that a huge stretch of it doubled as a military landing strip. The aerials and watchtowers went up and the peninsula was effectively sealed off, to the considerable disadvantage of the Livonians – Latvia’s founding fathers, an ethnic group that had been a major player in northern Baltic trade and fishing for hundreds of years. There was nothing Stalin enjoyed more than a spot of cultural repression, and his unusually thorough programme of deportation to the Gulag, enforced assimilation and restrictions on trade and movement had already squeezed the Livonian community into a clutch of settlements along the coasts of Cape Kolka. The exclusion zone all but finished the job: today there are just 182 registered descendants of the people whose knightly order supplanted the Teutonics, and once held sway across the whole Baltic region. Only thirty of them speak Livonian, a clearly splendid language whose alphabet boasts thirty-nine letters, of which more than a quarter are variants of A and O.
The lonesome road down from Kolka’s tip was another plumb-line, pine-lined Baltic gust factory, its bitter blasts shoving treetops hither and thither. Though mostly hither: once again I hunkered down over the handlebars, knees akimbo, as a boorish, jostling head-gale taunted my all-round inability to cheat wind. Woooo-hooo, just look at you, with your stupid upright shopping bike and your windsock snood and your Dumbo pogies. WOOOO-HOOOO!
For hours there was nothing but trees and wind, not a house, not a hut, not a bench. I lunched straight on the tarmac, squatting down on a bridge over a peaty river, brown as Bovril. At the end of my element-defying cheese-roll construction project, a shiny new four-by-four pulled up and lowered its window. The driver wore a stern look and a fishing hat festooned with colourful trout flies. Chewing hard I rose to communicate; after failing in Latvian and German, he eventually passed judgement on my picnic in slow, deliberate English: ‘What you do here is not so beautiful.’ With that he hummed his window back up, though not quite fast enough: my lunatic guffaw redecorated his headwear with a windborne spray of spittled food.
The next vehicle trundled by ninety minutes later as I was doing something even less beautiful up against a derelict guardhouse. I didn’t care, indeed I barely noticed. To the detriment of my footwear, my wide-eyed, open-mouthed focus was fixed on the ghostly structures I had spotted distantly clustered along the weed-pierced concrete road that led away from the guardhouse. I wheeled the MIFA towards them in a state of neat awe; it would be two hours before I wheeled it back out.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Never thought I’d see the day again, but here it is: I AM EATING LUNCH WITH MY GLOVES OFF.
I shall always be grateful that throughout my blighted late-teenage years, four cans of Kestrel lager could be procured for 99p. The early 1980s was a time to blot out horrors in bulk: Norman Tebbit, Torvill and Dean, the kids from Fame and the ever-present threat of Armageddon. How grim to have lived through an age when nineteen million of my countrymen watched Blankety Blank, and slightly more – 40 per cent of the adult population – were resigned to a thermonuclear war occurring within ten years. It is difficult to convince my children, who are now the age that I was then, just how deeply ingrained the fear of annihilation was in those days. In fairness, it’s proven tricky to find an educational middle ground between the Sheffield-melting apocalypse so horrifically depicted in the BBC drama Threads, and that Frankie Goes to Hollywood video of Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Chernenko wrestling together.
I don’t remember being distracted by the imminent possibility of all my skin sloughing off in fiery strips until I was fifteen, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Thereafter, almost every month saw the world vault some new stepping stone on the road to mutually assured destruction. The Americans elected a president who called the Soviet Union an evil empire. The former head of the KGB took up the Soviet reins and broke off negotiations on arms control. Nuclear deployments sidled ever closer to the Iron Curtain on either side, like some holocaust-tempting game of What’s The Time, Mr Wolf? A trigger-happy Russian fighter pilot shot down a South Korean 747 with 269 passengers and crew aboard. Rocky Balboa punched a giant Communist unconscious. The Americans invaded Grenada. I acquired a second-hand Missile Command arcade machine, and spent several hundred hours failing to defend six cities against a relentless hail of incoming warheads, greeted every few minutes by the most haunting, shattering Game Over sequence in history: a stroboscopic, red-white detonation that faded into the screen-filling words THE END, projected atop the annihilated husk of a lost world. What a traumatic time to come of age. Like I say, I drank a lot of Kestrel.
And that, in a roundabout fashion, was why I walked up the empty, rubbled streets beyond the guardhouse carrying rather more baggage than the filthy old crap that filled my panniers. Because around me, soaring up from a mess of broken glass and shards of sanitary ware, stood an array of windowless white hulks that had for thirty-four years housed 2,000 Russian scientists and military-intelligence officials.
Latvians now call this place Irbene, but they didn’t call it anything when the Soviets were here. Even the Russians referred to their off-map un-city only by its codename Zvezdochka, or Little Star. The locals weren’t allowed in, and without rarely granted permission, the Russians weren’t allowed out. Everything the staff and their families required lay within its heavily guarded 400-hectare perimeter: a kindergarten and school, a post office, shops and leisure facilities. Beyond the ruins that once housed all these, up and over a lofty dune that I now breathlessly crested, loomed the extraordinary object that Little Star was built to service: there,
high above the Eurasian boreal treetops and tilting its giant rusty face at the heavens, stood the largest radio telescope in northern Europe.
My mood was perhaps a little histrionic. There were never any missiles at Little Star, a complex built for weapons-grade eavesdropping. In fact, no one really knows precisely who or what Little Star spied on, beyond a general assumption that it tracked and decoded satellite signals, aircraft movements and telecommunications. The Russians certainly aren’t about to throw any light on the matter: they didn’t even admit to the base’s existence until 1993, a year after Latvian independence. The following year, with Little Star still off-limits, KGB engineers painstakingly decommissioned the site. They stripped the staff buildings bare, packed up and removed all documentation, and demolished two smaller radio telescopes. The 32m whopper was seemingly just too huge to destroy – its turning mechanism alone weighs 60 tons. Instead, the engineers disabled it, pouring acid on the operating motors and cutting electrical cables.
All the same, this was my most potent encounter yet with the Cold War: a vast secret lair hidden away in a remote forest, where 2,000 spies and technicians diligently scoured the heavens for tell-tale transmissions that might, in some distantly vague or directly urgent fashion, incite the imminent destruction of humankind. What a terrible situation the world got itself into back then. And – my dominant reaction as I gazed up at the telescope gantry from the foot of its mighty concrete plinth – what a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and money this whole business had been.
By 1980, the arms race was a marathon run at a full sprint. On an average day – one single day – the Russian military production line churned out a nuclear missile, a fighter jet, and eighty tanks or heavy guns (as a former assistant to the Soviet defence minister rather poignantly noted: ‘We built so many weapons because they were one of the few things we could build well.’). It is generally estimated that by the Eighties, defence accounted for a dumbfounding 40 per cent of the Soviet Union’s budget – vastly more than it had been in the approach to the Second World War. The Americans were not to be outdone: in his first presidential term, Reagan spent more on defence than the combined cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
