Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  Then, pointing up the hillside to a place where the smooth green slope broke up like a cubist composition, Natasha went on: “And that’s where they blew up another underground town in 1942, to stop it falling into German hands—it was still full of people, our own people! They gassed them to finish them off. And it was the Germans, the enemy, who set about rescuing them! Our people only admitted that three years ago. There are survivors still alive—we met some of them.” Yes, this had been a leitmotif of my travels—this daily reminder of the contempt of those with power for those without it.

  “We used to spend whole days up here with Jack,” Natasha continued. “It’s been the animals who showed us the way, always the animals. One day when we were walking around here we came on this great big crow, far larger than any we’d ever seen. It didn’t fly away, just turned around and gazed at us. When we got home I looked up the crow in a book of mythology. It said that in cultures all over the world the crow means a meeting. What do you know? On the following day we met Volodya!”

  Natasha and I walked to another cave community which Jack showed them. This one was in the high white chalk cliffs behind the village of Inkerman. Time and conquest had exposed the interior of layer after layer of eroded caves on the pale cliff face. Here and there in sheltered corners frescoes still clung to the rock. People had clearly been living in these caves since long before recorded history. But the visible traces of habitation dated back to the eighth and ninth centuries, when icon-loving monks from Byzantium had fled the iconoclasts and taken refuge here. Following Jack’s path, we walked to the entrance to the catacombs, but it was sealed off now with a metal gate.

  Around the corner a recent breach blasted in the rock led to a white quarry. The remains of searchlights betrayed that it was once worked by the Soviet slave army, part of the Gulag. I went into a small whitewashed working church to light candles for the victims. Natasha waited outside: “I won’t come in—I feel awkward in church. Don’t know why.”

  Later, when Natasha was telling Igor about our day, he interrupted her at this point: “I know why you wouldn’t go in,” he jeered. “It’s because you’re cursed.”

  “It’s true!” Natasha agreed cheerfully. But the way she said it made me hope that however much she once felt cursed, she no longer did: it was a joke now, if an edgy one.

  “Yes,” she went on, “Crimea’s been miraculous for us. It’s taught us how to live. And each step of the way it’s been the animals who helped us. That black dog Jack was the first. He was wonderful—he used to come to our house and scratch on the door, inviting us to come out and play with him. Then he got terribly ill and his owner had to put him down. That same day—it must have been ten in the morning—we heard this scratching at the door and we said, “It must be Jack.” I opened the door and there was nothing there. I found out next day that he’d died at that time in the morning. His owner said the same thing’d happened to her.” She paused. “After that how could you fail to believe that animals have souls?”

  “And it was dolphins who cured Natasha of the drink,” Igor took over. “One day I came home and found her lying on the floor in a pool of blood. I really thought she was done for—”

  “I’d got blind drunk and fallen down, gashing my head and nearly taking out an eye …”

  “Volodya came and took her to hospital.”

  “What about that crate of vodka then?” I finally asked the question.

  “Ah, that—I keep it there as a warning.”

  It was Volodya who took her to the dolphins. They were once part of the Soviet navy’s intelligence operation. Most had been sold off. The rest were going through a lean time, as they always lived off frozen fish, and now there were none. The woman who trained them went around collecting money for them. She got them working again, too, this time not to make war but to heal people.

  “There was one in particular,” Natasha went on. “I’d hang on to him so tightly that it must have been very painful for him. But he didn’t object—he’d swim off with me around his neck, and I could feel his power—”

  “Their trainer’s the one who said to us: ‘People think of the relationship between man and animals as being like a pyramid, with man at the top. But you should turn that pyramid on its side—that’s how it really is.’ ”

  Natasha interrupted: “That’s what we’ve come to learn here—to take animals seriously; to live with them, to live with plants.”

  “Maybe that’s where you’re one step ahead of us,” I reflected. “After all, communism and capitalism were ever only variations on the same theme. In both of them man’s on top of the pyramid. Capitalism may have proved stronger, but it may be doomed too because of just that—our arrogance about the natural world. Look at climate change. There’s a chance we’ll get through, because the market’s inventive. But if we have an economic collapse it’ll be much worse for us. At least you’ve learned how to live with a minimum.”

  “Last winter the mice got into our clothes.” Natasha laughed. “They ate only the very best of them.”

  “Only the very finest wool, for their nest.” Igor took over. “They turned up their noses at the rest.”

  “The wise mice,” Natasha added. “We had to learn not to mind about things. Yes, animals have been our teachers—we had a lot to learn. We were emotional cripples. Take Pasha for example.” Pasha was their mongrel. “He’s the one who taught Igor that he can’t do anything with his head alone—that he has to learn how to love.”

  The sun had dropped behind the hill by the time Natasha and I took Pasha out for a walk. It was magic hour and the sharp outline of a pale crescent moon hung in the violet southern sky. We walked over the open grassland to the wooded hill and looked down over the coast. “As soon as I saw this place I thought, yes, I could live here,” she said. “I recognized it, too. I used to have this recurring dream: there was the sea, rocks, and a bay. I’d never seen the sea either. But that dream came back again and again. When we arrived here I recognized it at once.” She paused. “The situation here’s bad—but at least there’s work for us to do.”

  The air was balmy with the smell of growing things. Each footfall released the scent of bruised wormwood. All along the little river at the foot of the hill the frogs were singing. In this half-light the Soviet detritus of concrete and rusting metal that scarred the landscape was barely visible. “The Greeks believed that the gates to heaven and hell were in Crimea. Well, they were right—they are. Everything that God has made is heavenly, and everything that man made is hell,” Natasha murmured.

  As we walked we were greeted by a red-bearded Tatar shepherd. Evdan was grazing his sheep. He was just back from Kiev, he told Natasha with an enormous smile; he became betrothed there. His fiancée was longing to come, he said. This was a lonely place to be a serious Muslim, for few of Crimea’s Tatars were interested in religion, but it was even worse in Kiev. All this land was once owned by his grandfather, Evdan explained. That was before Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. Evdan was an educated man, a mechanic by trade. But when he started taking his religion seriously, he decided to become a shepherd to keep out of harm’s way. Walking the land every day with his sheep, it felt like his again.

  Dark fell before we reached home. We were noisily greeted by little Musya. Natasha brought out fruit juice and we sat out in the courtyard under the crescent moon. “When Evdan and I started talking,” Igor began, “we found that though we had nothing whatever in common, we’d come to the same conclusion: that the world was so multifaceted, so infinitely beyond our comprehension that all we could do was to concentrate on living as decently, as ethically as possible, and encouraging our neighbors to do the same.”

  • • •

  “Susan, you remember when we first met?” Natasha went on after a long silence. “We were expecting the worst.”

  “Yes, you were pretty unpleasant that night.”

  “In the old days you, the West, were a fairy tale,” she conti
nued. “A land where everyone was decent and true. Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, we trod them in our dreams.”

  Igor interrupted: “But by the time we met you the foreigners had started coming, and we’d found out that they were just the same little jerks as us, cheap businessmen who despised us, who simply weren’t interested in who we were. We’d been brought up to believe that the collective was everything; that there was no such thing as individuality. That’s why we’re all so riddled with inferiority complexes. And now it turns out that there isn’t anything but the individual; that all governments are equally awful, that there’s only this fundamental principle, the same in religions the world over.”

  “This principle you can arrive at in so many ways,” Natasha concluded, “through nature, culture, or education.”

  • • •

  Natasha and I were waiting for the train to Kiev when she asked me: “What do you think? Is it going to get better here? Or is this just a glimpse of what the rest of the world’s going to be like after everything collapses?” How blithely I would have reassured her if she had asked me that at the start of my travels. Now I just did not know.

  Volodya must have come by my ticket through a contact in the FSB. For I found that I was sharing a compartment in the sleeper with a friendly couple in the secret service who assumed I worked for some arcane part of the Organization. I did not disabuse them.

  • • •

  When I opened my notebook out fell an article I had found about the Crimean War. It was from Flag of the Motherland, the mouthpiece of the Russian armed forces in Sevastopol. It proposed that we, the British, were still out to punish Russia for our defeat in Crimea, because the war had “destroyed a significant proportion of the genetic bank of their aristocracy.” I was vastly amused when I read it. But Natasha and Igor ticked me off: I must take it seriously, because of what it had to say about the way Russia’s Ministry of Defense was thinking.

  When the train reached Kiev, I rang Natasha and Igor to find that, news having got around of the impending edition of The Messenger, the businessman who refused to pay bribes had got permission to supply gas to the town. Natasha and Igor were jubilant. “You’re our good angel!” said Natasha. “After you left we sat down and had a good cry. Now it’s raining so everything is in mourning.”

  “I love you both,” I told them.

  “No, you can’t love us—we’re revolting. Revolting—but redeemable.”

  My visit left me feeling deeply connected to Natasha and Igor, and proud of them: at enormous cost to themselves they had slain the dragons of their past. In the course of doing so they had mended one small piece in their country’s torn past. The path they had chosen was fraught with difficulty, for Crimea was too important both to Ukraine and to Russia for either to surrender control. But whatever happened, Natasha and Igor would not lose their moral compass, as Natasha believed her father had done. They would always be on the side of the powerless.

  2005–2007

  ON JANUARY 1, 2006, RUSSIA BECAME THE FOCUS OF WORLD ATTENTION when it briefly cut off its supply of gas to Ukraine and Europe. Although the tactic was aimed at Ukraine, it shocked the West. It demonstrated how vulnerable dependence on Russian energy had made it: the state-controlled monopoly provider Gazprom was now supplying Europe with two-thirds of its gas imports, and this was being piped through Ukraine.

  Russia’s decision to turn off the tap on Ukraine in midwinter was more than a drastic negotiating tactic. It was an escalation of the power struggle which started when Ukraine went to the polls at the end of 2004. Russia and the United States were both involved behind the scenes in that bitterly fought election. The resulting Orange Revolution shifted the country’s orientation from East to West. After that, Ukraine even applied to join NATO, and started permitting NATO exercises on its territory. This was a further defiance of the agreement with Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward.

  Russia’s displeasure was not confined to Ukraine, for Georgia and Moldova had also changed their allegiance. As the year progressed, Russia increasingly reminded them how unpleasant it could make their lives. This strategy came to a head in the autumn of 2006, when Georgia’s arrest of four Russians engaged in covert operations triggered the deportation from Russia of thousands of Georgians.

  Russia’s reemergence on the world stage was symbolized in the summer by Putin’s chairmanship of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. Putin was riding an economy which was growing at over 6 percent a year. A poll in July showed that 86 percent of the electorate supported Putin’s leadership. The streets were no longer run by gangs; the oligarchs had been brought to heel, and a fifth of the population was now said to belong to the middle class. The president had not merely restored order; he had restored Russia’s self-respect.

  But this achievement came at a price: in August, the takeover of the newspaper Kommersant by a subsidiary of Gazprom removed one of the last two independent voices in the press. This was followed in October by the contract killing of Anna Politkovskaya, critic of Putin and tireless chronicler of Russia’s behavior in Chechnya. The last remaining independent paper, Novaya Gazeta, had lost its star journalist. Her death provoked worldwide protest, but little in Russia itself.

  Meanwhile, unconstrained by the checks and balances of a free press, effective opposition, and independent judiciary, corruption was spiraling out of control. No part of the edifice of state power, from top to bottom, was unaffected.

  Over all this Putin reigned supreme. The end of his second term in office was drawing to a close. Thanks primarily to the rise in energy prices, but also to his prudent handling of the economy, GDP had increased sixfold since his accession, and poverty had been halved. According to the constitution, he was due to leave office in the spring of 2008. Would he do so? The pundits thought it unlikely.

  2006

  FAIRY TALE IN DUBIOUS TASTE

  Eight years had passed since Ira and Sasha lost their money during the financial crash. Sasha, who borrowed money to buy a regional television station, was still weighed down by colossal debts. Though the couple remained stoical, Sasha’s handsome, ravaged face told its own story. Harassed by creditors, he was plagued by insomnia and his heart was giving him trouble. “In his place I’d have topped myself long ago,” one friend confided. Well-wishers urged him to declare himself bankrupt, but Sasha was determined to honor his debts.

  The icons hanging in every corner of their flat indicated the deep change in their life. Their year now revolved around the rigorous calendar of Orthodox feasts and fasts, major and minor.

  Their politics had changed, too: “The liberals would hate me for saying this, but we’re very pro-Putin,” Ira announced a shade defiantly. “He’s given Russia back her self-respect. The intellectuals are always going on about the constraints on our freedom of speech—but whenever you turn on the television there they are, protesting about Putin’s authoritarianism! I’m fed up with them—you never hear them saying they’re grateful for anything.”

  The documentaries they made were nothing like the standard fare of soap opera and celebrity concerts which dominated Russian television now. Made on tiny budgets, the weekly series More than Love told stories of ordinary people with inspiring lives: a woman who had chosen to redeem a brutal murderer through her love; a simple couple who adopted the unwanted children in their district. “We want to increase the amount of happiness in the world,” Sasha declared, smiling beatifically.

  For all the pressures on them, they adored one another, and their work. “The crash was the best thing that could have happened to us,” Ira insisted, refusing my presents. “We’re really not interested in things anymore.” When we first met, Ira was a talented writer and filmmaker with an acerbic wit, but she was not happy. Though she was a dutiful wife, it was clear she was acting a part. “You’re right,” she sighed: “I wasn’t born good. It’s been the great labor of my life.” When communism broke down, so did Ira’s marriage. Only when she met Sasha did things fall into place for
her.

  It was a sunny Saturday, and the three of us were heading for the country. Ira, who had only just learned to drive, rode the car as if hoping it might take off like Pegasus. Speeding along Moscow’s new raised motorway in the sunshine, we almost did seem to be flying over the capital. Gleaming mirrored skyscrapers were flashing by on either side; tall blue and yellow cranes showed where more blocks were going up. The dingy old Soviet city center had become a celebration of capitalism.

  Our trip was prompted by a conversation with Sasha the other night. He mentioned an ecological settlement some city people were building near where the couple spent their weekends. It was one of a whole lot of such eco-settlements that were springing up all over Russia, he said. They were inspired by these books about a woman called Anastasia.

  “Books?” I interrupted. “What sort of books?”

  Anastasia was not a common name in Russia. I knew where I had last heard it.

  “Well, they’re fairy tales really. But the ideas behind them are rather sympathetic. Very ecological.”

  “You mean Anastasia’s not real?”

  “Well, she’s supposed to be. This man meets a gorgeous blonde who lives in the forest, and is fed by wild animals …”

  “Where are these stories set?”

  “In Siberia.”

  Was it possible? The woman Natasha told me about, who lived in the forest because she loved listening to the cedars singing … her name was Anastasia.

  When Sasha gave me one of the books to read I saw that it was part of a whole cycle entitled The Ringing Cedars of Russia. There was a voluptuous blonde on the cover, rearing her head against a wild sky. It told the story of a trader who, while peddling goods to outlying villages in Siberia, meets a nymph of the woods and they have a romance. She proceeds to bear him a son, and in the course of many volumes, initiates him into her magical vision of life.

  The first book came out in 1996, the year before Natasha mentioned the singing cedars to me. Ostensibly, it described events that took place the year I visited the Old Believers. There was a good deal about the extraordinary powers of the Siberian cedar, too. According to “Anastasia,” the trees only “rang” when they reached old age, and when they did they had extraordinary curative powers. I had to laugh. There I was, still spellbound by the memory of that music in the forest, only to learn that it had been co-opted into some fairy tale in dubious taste.