Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  The man presiding over this disintegration was Ayatskov, the notoriously corrupt Yeltsinite governor of Saratov province. Putin’s attempts to remove him had so far failed. He was the man whose corruption Anna started investigating all those years ago when he was the city’s deputy mayor, before learning that her stories were being spiked because he had bought up the paper she was working for.

  For years, the law was after him, but he enjoyed protection high up in the pyramid of power. One prosecutor began a trial case against him for pocketing millions of dollars on some deal involving American combine harvesters. But that was suspended. Meanwhile, every street kiosk in the city paid “rent” directly to him. The most visible display of his wealth was the Wagnerian castle he built himself out in the country, and the private plane which flew him to it.

  Anna, who covered such cases in her capacity as law correspondent, was welcoming. With her boyish figure and monastic bob, she looked barely older than when we first met. She was less awkward and better dressed now. But a light had gone out behind her eyes. She looked huddled over somehow, as if some string holding her up had been cut.

  Last time we met, I was so proud of her. She had come into her own. She was using her interviews to explore the extent to which each person is responsible for their past, and that of their country. She was helping her readers expand their sense of the rights and responsibilities which attached to them as individuals, rather than the state. When I left her I was feeling, yes, this is how that civic space needs to be built in Russia; it will take time, but one day, surely, it will end up being realized in a new contract between the rulers and the ruled.

  That felt like a long time ago now. I knew Anna too well to expect from her a straightforward account of this missing period. Only when she told me that she had stopped writing poetry altogether did I realize quite how depressed she was. For her poetry mattered more to her than anything.

  One day I went into her office at Saratovsky Arbat and sat reading back copies of the paper while she worked. The paper was more than usually parochial. Anna’s articles were mostly about crime, but they were dull, with little of their old ambition.

  I tried not to be disappointed. After all, Putin had come to power announcing in his Open Letter that “the stronger the state, the freer the individual.” To anyone old enough to remember Soviet-speak, the message was clear and only a little more prolix than the three slogans of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth:

  WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

  One of Putin’s first moves when he came to office was to close down Russia’s two remaining independent media empires. The press took the point: as in Soviet days, its role was not to stimulate individuals to think for themselves, but to support central government in the task of keeping order, making Russia great again.

  Anna was living in a couple of rooms in a slum on the city limits. It had no flush lavatory, no hot water, and no carpets. A dim bulb hung down from a wire in the high ceiling, like an unripe pear. Trucks shook the windows as they roared out of town on the main road. But Anna loved her flat, which had enabled her to leave the hostel and keep a pet at last. Lucy, her black cat, was her intimate now. When she came home at night, Lucy would bound out from among the rubble to meet her, like a dog.

  Anna had turned her energies inward. Of an evening, she would lie on her bed, Lucy on top of her, reading works by Russia’s great religious writers, so long banned. Or she would go and visit Father Michael and the nuns who ran Saratov’s Catholic church. Her face lit up when she talked about the elderly Irish priest and his group of happy, dedicated nuns from all over the world. “They’re lovely people—I really enjoy their company.” There was an unspoken “but” at the end of this sentence. Although I was curious, I knew better than to ask.

  • • •

  Anna’s life was beset by problems. She was about to become homeless again, for a start. In her desperation to get out of the hostel she had recklessly traded in her one possession, the flat in Marx, for five years in this slum. Now, long before that period had elapsed, the son of the woman living in her flat had turned up, claiming his right to live in his mother’s flat. Anna, law correspondent though she was, had not thought to legalize her house swap.

  What was she going to do now? Buying was not an option. Even in the rough part of town a small flat now cost around $7,000. As an experienced journalist, she earned relatively good money—twice as much as a teacher, five times as much as a nurse. But it was not enough to save. Mortgages were extortionate, and to get a loan required two people from the province to stand surety. None of her friends would risk that: what if she fell ill? This was why people took to accepting bribes. But Anna was condemned to honesty.

  She had professional problems, too. Some Chechen who lived in Marx had complained about an article of hers, some weapons having been found at his home. The accusation had released her buried anxieties, left her with a morbid fear of misrepresenting anyone in print. No wonder her articles were so dull.

  Where was the passionate, eccentric woman I had come to visit? I was sure she had not changed. But she was in hiding. Reading her diary was an act of desperation, though I reassured myself that Natasha had long ago told me how Anna used to leave her diary out, in order for me to read it. When she went to work it still lay there, on her writing table. For three days I just looked at it. On the fourth I picked it up: “No! I haven’t crossed over from Catholicism to Orthodoxy,” I read, “or the other way around. I remain both, and neither. Catholicism has given me a lot! I feel much more comfortable in the Catholic Church than in the Orthodox one, but when I want to confess I go to the Orthodox Church. And as I wait for my confession I feel tormented, terribly tired from all that standing, from all those hours listening to a language I don’t understand a word of. Tired, too, of taking part in something I don’t understand. I feel tortured, angry, but I don’t go back to the Catholic Church. Well, perhaps I will, as a guest. That I can do.”

  That voice, the voice of the real Anna, was so alive that I felt as if I had been eavesdropping. Guiltily, I closed the diary and put it back. But I had read enough.

  I sympathized with the struggle she was having with Orthodoxy. After the end of communism people’s thirst for spiritual answers was so apparent: who were they, and what did they believe in, if they weren’t communists? The Orthodox Church did not appear engaged with this crisis. Yes, the Church had too few priests, and they were sorely undereducated. But it seemed to me that they could at least have translated the prayers and liturgy into modern Russian, or given newcomers translation sheets. For anyone walking into the church off the street, as Anna had done, the prayers and liturgy were incomprehensible. I tried to find out why the Church was doing nothing about this, but the answers seemed to me unsatisfactory, evasive. All I knew was that a priest in Moscow got into trouble with the Church authorities for holding his services in modern Russian.

  However, as I learned more about Orthodoxy I began to see how much my concern with understanding marked me out for the Westerner I was. It landed me in the thick of the great ongoing theological battle between the two branches of Christianity, Eastern and Western. Over the centuries, theologians of the Western Church grew more and more preoccupied by wanting to understand divinity, to grasp it in words. But the Eastern Church insisted that the fact that God could not be understood was the point: rationalism was not an appropriate tool for the discussion of God. Slowly, as my travels brought me up against the limits of understanding as an approach, what once bothered me about Orthodoxy started to interest me more and more. For this Church regarded itself as the guardian of a tradition which was proof against attempts to modernize it. It was a proper mystery, one with which each person had to contend on their own, in their struggle to contemplate the mystery of God.

  I could not talk to Anna about what I read in her diary. But next morning, as I got up, I was thinking about the frustration with the language and rituals
of Orthodoxy which her diary expressed so vividly. The theological divide between Rome and Byzantium had its correlation in the cultural divide between Westernizers and Slavophiles. As long as I had known her, Anna had been quintessentially a Westernizer. Intellectually curious, she must have begun her spiritual explorations by wanting to understand more about her faith. It was hardly surprising that where the Orthodox Church would not, or could not help, the Catholic Church engaged with her need. As time went on, she must have started to realize that what she was looking for went deeper than understanding. So here she was, caught on the ancient theological divide between Christianity’s Eastern and Western traditions; between her need to understand—kerygma—and her longing for religious experience, which cannot be grasped with words, dogma.

  Anna’s bathroom was a good place for such reflection. Washing in it involved standing in the bath, leaning over a bucket, and dipping one limb after another into cold water. As I dried myself I considered the journey Anna and I had been on since the early 1990s. How dismissive we would both have been if anyone suggested that one day this mystery would come to have more meaning for us than understanding.

  • • •

  Anna broke her self-imposed silence about politics only once. For a moment, her passion flared out like gas from an oil field. We were walking in Saratov’s “Victory Park,” a monument to the city’s days as a hub of the armaments industry. The bluffs around us were adorned with rusting tanks and heavy artillery. “Make no mistake—what’s happening now is the re-Sovietization of Russian life,” she burst out unexpectedly. “Take the press—there is no freedom of speech left. Putin’s clever—typical FSB man. He didn’t make a great announcement that would have brought the intelligentsia out against him. He just set about picking off the independent voices one by one. And people don’t react. Partly, they’re just tired. Partly, they know it won’t do any good. It’s not that I don’t mind anymore—far from it. There was a time when I was almost hysterical. But I’ve had to accept that nothing I can do is going to make any difference. We were very naive, you know, during glasnost—we really thought we could change something.

  “I’d like to think that the next generation’ll do better,” she went on. “You just can’t tell. For a start, they’re not remotely interested in freedom as an idea. They want to be successful, personally, and they’re prepared to work for it. They won’t become political until some bureaucrat gets in the way of their ambition—if then. Take Polina,” she said, referring to Tatiana and Misha’s older daughter. “By the age of fifteen she was grown up, focused on her ambition. She worked all the time—never took days off. At her age I was all over the place.”

  No wonder Anna was in despair. The Yeltsin years were now generally regarded as those of Russia’s humiliation. But I knew better. She and Misha between them had demonstrated to me better than anyone the way hope ran through that chaotic time like a bright thread. Thanks to them, I had begun to see the 1990s as a time of incubation, when people were starting to think and act for themselves. It had not seemed absurd to imagine that when things finally settled down, the order that emerged might be one where a critical mass of Russians would begin to understand why it was important for Russia to develop a civil society, with an independent press and judiciary, a place where the rights of individuals mattered. Anna had staked everything on that. While Putin’s regime had brought stability, it had killed off her hope that she would see a civil society develop in Russia within her lifetime.

  I came away feeling wretched about our friendship. In the years after the fall of communism I had felt a-little-bit-Anna. But we had met at a time when the pendulum of Russian history was pointing westward. Now it had swung away, toward autocracy. Anna’s life as a prominent provincial journalist was tied to the swing of that political pendulum. From now on, we were going to have to make an effort to bridge the divide. There was the added problem that anything I wrote might make life awkward for her.

  MY DREAM HOUSE

  Over the years I had sent letters and messages to Novosibirsk, but there had been no response. Natasha and Igor had vanished without trace. I found them through Anna. She had received an e-mail from Igor out of the blue, with some information he thought would interest her. “And did it?” “Huh!”

  The couple were somewhere in Crimea now, on the Black Sea. I had invited myself to stay with them. The departure hall of Moscow airport was full of Russians who seemed to consider it normal to be going abroad with the family on holiday. They were leafing through glossy Russian magazines entitled Limousine and Property Today and their children were wearing brand-new track-suits and listening to iPods. But these beneficiaries of Moscow’s boomtime were not rich. They worked as bookkeepers, chauffeurs, and chefs. Crimea was cheap and did not really count as “abroad.” Indeed, it had been part of Russia until 1954, when Khrushchev, in a quixotic gesture, bequeathed it to Ukraine, his native land. Until the Soviet Union broke up that had not made much difference to Russia. But now it was a phantom limb: it felt like part of Russia, though it was not.

  On the flight I tried to imagine what had become of Natasha and Igor. Would they have joined the thrusting new economy of my fellow passengers? When we last met in Siberia, the couple had come through many an ordeal and equipped themselves with business skills. I tried to imagine them living a prosperous, middle-class life by the sea, but this seemed unlikely. The forces shaping their lives were stormy and unpredictable, and this move suggested that Natasha was still running away from her past, from the mother who haunted her dreams.

  Natasha was there to meet me at Simferopol airport. Her snub-nosed Slav face under that thick mop of curls was burnished by sun, and her eyes were sparkling. She was jumping up and down with excitement. By her side was a smartly dressed younger man who walked with a bad limp. Hmm, so she had finally left Igor. “Oh no, it’s not what you think!” she said quickly. “Meet our dearest friend and colleague—Volodya, hero of the Afghan war.”

  As Volodya drove south out of Simferopol, Natasha told me his story. A much-decorated young colonel, he had been brought here straight off the battlefield in Afghanistan, almost dead from his wounds. By the time his convalescence was over, Crimea had become home. The community of retired Russian servicemen was large, for Russia’s navy was still based here. After the Soviet Union fell apart, the government struck a deal with Ukraine that until 2017 they would go on renting the facilities of the naval base.

  The low rolling hills over which we were driving were so dense with color that we might have been in a landscape by Derain, or the young Kandinsky: purple fields of lavender, vastly overgrown, gave way to golden slopes of wheat, ripe for harvesting, then to ropes of green vines stretching out of sight. The usual litter of rusting frames and posts, half-built concrete sheds, and fencing could not mar the improbable beauty of the place.

  Once, said Volodya, the wine was good and the trade in lavender oil lucrative. But the collective farms that had kept the Soviet naval bases supplied had fallen apart. The soil was so rich it produced three harvests a year. The food kept growing, but there was little market for it now. By the roadside men and women were selling tomatoes; raspberries, cherries, and strawberries; and vegetables, ridiculously cheap.

  Natasha was talking about the politics of Sevastopol and some project that she and Igor were doing with Volodya. As she talked, something fell into place: the same instinct for trouble which led the couple to move across Russia into the eye of a political storm in Marx was surely at work again in their move down here. For Crimea, fought over for centuries, was today locked in a battle invisible to the outside world. It had become Ukraine’s Hong Kong: Russia’s empire might have fallen, but the Russians were still here, and their navy, too.

  Such was the political impasse between Ukraine and Russia that no one was in charge. “We live in the present, a present that’s stuck in the past. You can’t get anything done—not even buy a train ticket, let alone get a phone line or a passport. Not unless you know som
eone, or have money to bribe them. There are Afghan-war heroes who’ve been waiting twelve years for a phone line! It was really hard when we came here—we couldn’t find work at all. And if we hadn’t met Volodya we’d never have managed.”

  When the sea came in sight Volodya turned down a track and threaded his way between plots of land lush with flowers and fruit trees. In each, a little house had been cobbled together out of scavenged bits and pieces. The car pulled up in front of a couple of concrete huts with tin roofs, standing in a maze of weeds. Behind the fence, two dogs leaped around, barking in delight. Igor was standing, as upright in his bearing as ever, beaming at us. He was tanned and handsome. The mustaches which still curved down on either side of his mouth were still black and elegantly trimmed. But his hair was white now, and his front teeth were gone.

  We sat and drank fruit juice in the shade of a pergola improvised out of army camouflage. After Volodya left, I looked inside the hut. It was simply furnished. To my surprise there was hardly a book to be seen. On Igor’s immaculately tidy desk there was a computer, and even an Internet connection. Thanks to Volodya, Igor said with a grin, they were producing a newspaper again—and they called it The Messenger, like the last one. This time they were distributing it free.

  “As you can see, they’ve gone, the possessions. It seems we had to lose everything. One more time. We had to learn how to live all over again. The dogs taught us to get up at dawn and go to bed when it got dark. At one point we even had to sell our books—including the English ones. Just to stay alive. We lived on buckwheat porridge for a month. It’s funny—food was always something I’d taken for granted. Then we understood how little you need to live on. And how good it made us feel. So light and free!” Natasha’s words spurted out like uncorked champagne.