by Peter Millar
The Soviet frontier post was a hundred yards or so away. In the distance stretched a line of flat-blocks that marked the outskirts of Brest, a long low line of concrete between blue skies and white snow. Ahead was a barrier similar to that we had just come through, guarded by two soldiers in greatcoats and fur hats with a red star badge and Kalashnikovs held at attention. They moved forward, inspected my papers unsmilingly, gave a signal to some unseen superior and the barrier rose. Apprehensively I edged the car forward onto Soviet soil, only to see a line of black-clad, furhatted men emerge from the building ahead of us. I had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.
The Russians greeted us with open arms. We were obviously the best thing that had happened in a year to a group of bored customs officials whose routine job was stamping the papers of lorry drivers carrying concrete in both directions. They pulled the car apart, of course. That was the best bit. For them. They checked out all the tapes for the cassette player, playing a few snatches here and there, not to check for seditious sermons – God knows what they might have made of Cold War Nightlife if they had understood the words – but to hear new songs. They inspected our clothing, our socks, our underwear as if eager to find out whether Westerners had the same anatomy. They pored over our photograph albums. For hours. Honest. Not looking for evidence of anti-communist propaganda but out of genuine, ridiculously enthusiastic, almost childish human interest: ‘So that’s your nan, is it? How old is she then? And is that where you live in England? Does everybody have a house like that? What sort of car is that then? How much does that cost? How fast does it go?’ It was astounding, endearing, amusing, infuriating, downright bloody maddening after five hours of it, before eventually they realised it could not go on for ever and somebody – claiming at last to have had the proper clearance from ‘above’ – finally let us pack up again (no offers to help there) and said, with obviously great reluctance, that we could go.
‘Where are you heading for tonight, then?’ one of them finally asked.
‘Minsk,’ I said. We had no choice: we had been obliged not only to book our accommodation in advance but also to give details of our route, and estimated times of arrival. The estimates were now shot to hell, to say the least.
‘How long will it take to get there?’ I asked.
He shrugged, thought a minute and said, ‘How fast does your car go?’
An East German would have told me precisely how long it would have taken, driving at the legal speed limit of 100 kph. Russia, I was already learning, worked on a whole different set of rules. I put my foot down. It was late, already turning dark – despite the fact we had set out from Warsaw early and reached the border well before noon – but we made good progress at first. We were, after all, on the smart new motorway that the five-year plan decreed be finished for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, nearly eighteen months ago. It had two lanes – occasionally three – in each direction. And next to no traffic.
In fact, there was less and less traffic the further we went on. And gradually – ever so gradually – I began to realise why. It was a bit odd, after all, to see chunks of debris on the hard shoulder. And then there was the occasional obstacle on the carriageway itself: a pile of sacks of cement or something similar where the central reservation ought to be. It had been a while since we had seen traffic of any sort coming in the other direction. And then the obstacles started to become more frequent: pallets of concrete cladding in the slow lane; heaps of stone that now were clearly not just random debris but piles of aggregate. It’s at times like that that the human brain does its utmost to shut out realisation of the blindingly obvious. At least until you run into it, head on. Which is what we now did, in the shape of at first one huge pothole, then another and then, definitively, inescapably, incontrovertibly – no matter how the mind tried pathetically not to recognise it – the physical end of the motorway. Not in a diversion sign, or a turn-off, or a line of brightly-coloured warning tape stretched across the carriageway, but in the sudden, immediate absence of paved surface, concrete pavement replaced by frozen mud. The car bucked, slid and juddered, as I braked hard and we swerved, bounced and rattled decisively to a halt. Possibly forever.
Ahead of us, about a hundred yards away, was what would have been a motorway bridge, had the motorway got far enough to go under it. It hadn’t. The Olympic motorway not only hadn’t made it to Moscow in time for the games, it hadn’t even made it to Minsk, still over 100 kilometres away. And Moscow was a full day’s drive beyond that. I was fast beginning to know how Napoleon – and even Hitler – had felt.
For one thing, we couldn’t move. Not an inch. We had bumped our way to a standstill in a rut that was not just bigger and deeper than our car tyre – the bumper was resting on the earth in front of it – but also frozen solid. We would have to get out and push to get any chance of purchase at all. Thank God, I thought, as I lugged the heavy things out from under our hastily repacked luggage, at least we had brought snow chains. What we hadn’t done, of course, was ever practise putting them on. Not even under perfect easy circumstances, like on the street outside the office, let alone at ten o’clock at night stuck in a frozen muddy rut in pitch blackness with the temperature pushing minus ten degrees Centigrade.
It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was virtually impossible. With our fingers freezing we battled with fiddly catches, cold metal, hard rubber and frozen mud. ‘Push this way,’ shouted Jackie. ‘No, pull this way. It needs to fasten here,’ I replied. ‘No it doesn’t, I’ve got the clip here. ‘Well, it’s supposed to be here!’ These are the sort of little occasions that have been known to cause just the mildest marital strain.
Where the hell were the KGB? That was what I wanted to know. Where were the omnipotent, omniscient masters of secret surveillance who were supposed to be watching our every move? Were they lurking, sniggering to themselves, just out of sight a few hundred yards behind us, in a comfy Volga saloon, with the heating turned up, sharing a flask of vodka-reinforced coffee. Maybe, but I doubted it. They were back home in bed, tucked up and warming their feet against the backs of their well-upholstered wives. There was only so much a man would do in the service of socialism. And keeping an eye on two ill-informed, off-course Westerners who were obviously no danger to anyone but themselves was quite literally above and beyond the call of duty. And as far as I was concerned, it just wasn’t good enough.
It wasn’t just the whereabouts of the KGB that was on my mind. It was the whereabouts of the wolves. This might be a motorway building site in what is today Western Belarus, rather than the depths of Siberia. But at the time it didn’t feel to me as if there was much difference. And I’m still not sure there is. At least not in the depths of winter. I didn’t know the exact numbers (between 1,500 and 2,000 at the latest estimate) but I knew there were wolves out there. And every time I heard a howl – which was not infrequently – it might have been a mangy dog in some forsaken farmyard, but as far as I was concerned it was a prowling monster with ice-blue eyes and snow-grey fur circling in the dark, already licking its lips and summoning the rest of the pack at the thought of a tasty little Irishman and his bride for a midnight snack.
The trouble was: there didn’t seem any way out of it. None at all. Even with the snow chains half-fastened – which was the best we had the remotest chance of hoping for – the wheels spun and spun. On either frozen mud or empty air. We weren’t going anywhere fast. In fact, we weren’t going anywhere at all. I was beginning to wonder about a Volvo 340’s life-support systems. Would it be best to keep the engine running all night to keep us warm, even at the risk of the tank being empty by morning. And was there any guarantee anyone would come by in the morning? I had no idea where we were – other than halfway to Minsk – or how far it might be to the nearest human settlement. There were certainly no lights – friendly or otherwise – to be seen in a landscape of unremitting darkness and unreflecting snow. What we needed was a miracle.
And then the miracle arrived. Out of nowhere. At lea
st so it seemed. With no glare of headlights to announce it, just a dull gleam from dirty sidelights in the dark, puffing, grunting and farting loudly, a dilapidated, noxious gas-emitting parody of an open-backed beaten–up truck. I would later learn this was the ubiquitous workhorse of the Soviet economy, and in pretty routine condition. Then, all of a sudden the headlights came on and we stood in them illuminated like timorous frozen bunnies.
It would be another year before my Russian was up to understanding the full idiomatic and syntactic richness of the obscenities that spilled forth from the little fat man with arms like tree trunks who barrelled out of the driver’s cab. (Nearly all Russian swear words, I would later learn, are, thanks to Genghis Khan and his hordes, derived from the Mongolian words for the body’s private parts.) I gathered he was not pleased. Not pleased to find us parked ‘in the middle of the road’ where he might have ploughed straight into us had he not thought to do something as rash and energy-wasteful as turn on his headlights. Not pleased either to find the reason we were there was because we – and he – had literally come to the end of the road.
He ummed and ahhed a bit, spat on the ground a few times, uttered the names of a few more Mongolian body parts, and then shrugged and made to get back in his cab. If he was a top-level KGB agent trained to tail Westerners in deep cover, then he deserved an Oscar for his method-acting portrayal of an ignorant, half-drunk, foul-mouthed member of the lumpen proletariat who didn’t give a bent kopeck for two namby-pamby Westerners and their fancy little car stuck in the mud.
‘We can’t move,’ I bleated. ‘We need to get to Minsk.’ At this stage even a lift in the back of his stinking lorry seemed an attractive option.
‘It’s that way,’ he shrugged, indicating the inaccessible bridge ahead as he climbed back into his cab and started up his grumbling engine. ‘Just follow me,’ he grunted, leaning out of the cab as he pulled level with us.
I was about to point out that this was not exactly the easiest thing in the world as we were stuck fast and there was no road, when I turned and saw in the glare of his headlights, a good metre higher than ours as he passed, that there was in between the lumps of snow-covered concrete what appeared to be a track. And as mercy would have it – or maybe because the weight of the truck had changed the frozen contours of the mud – I rammed home second gear and the snow chains caught. And we pulled, lurchingly, bumpily, with sounds that suggested God only knew what damage to suspension and chassis, out of the rut, following in the illuminated path taken by our unlovely lorry driver as he heedlessly rattled, occasionally at alarmingly improbable angles up what would perhaps one day be a motorway slip road but right now resembled a frozen obstacle course around the tank traps of El Alamein. And then the lights went out.
Somewhere just before reaching the brow of the incline, he turned his headlights off and fell back on the use of mud and slush-covered sidelights that offered no more forward illumination than a single candle in a hurricane lantern. In all my subsequent three years in the Soviet Union I never saw an industrial, public transport or even private vehicle that ever used its headlights properly. I don’t mean full beam, but even just dipped. Whether the average Soviet citizen simply didn’t believe that by the mere act of driving, he was charging his battery – who knows, maybe on some vehicles it didn’t! – or whether it was somehow believed that they were saving fuel, or whether headlights were deemed a privilege only for the party elite, who flashed them relentlessly when roaring at high-speed along the priority lanes reserved for their Zil limousines, I never really knew. It was just a fact. Something you came to expect and not argue with. Like so much in the Soviet Union. Dimly lit streets required dimly lit cars. It was part of the atmosphere. As if they were following Hollywood stage directions.
We got to Moscow. In the end. Arriving at Minsk in the small hours of the morning, then on the next day via Smolensk and mind-numbingly beautiful vistas of broad snowfields littered with giant black crows, silver forests of birch trees, sparkling golden cupolas of onion-domed churches, and huge foul-smelling black cloud-belching industrial plants. When we finally pulled into the courtyard of the little block of flats that would be our new home – official address: Sadovaya-Samotechnaya 12/24, but known universally to its mainly Anglo-Saxon inhabitants as ‘Sad Sam’ – the Reuters bureau chief looked up almost dismissively and said, ‘Oh well, better late than never I suppose.’
Over the nearly three years we spent in Moscow the Cold War reached a new icy nadir. Relations between the Kremlin and the West plummeted to a low unknown since the Berlin and Cuba crises. Leonid Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, had been ambassador to Hungary in 1956 and played a crucial role in coordinating the Soviet invasion. He returned home to become head of the KGB and had been a leading light in advocating the brutal suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. His promotion to the top job was greeted with despair in a Poland still labouring under martial law. Washington saw him as a fittingly sinister head for what President Ronald Reagan now termed the ‘evil empire’.
A few months later, in September 1983, we reached one of those bleak moments when the awful reality of the superpower standoff came home. Soviet fighter pilots shot down a South Korean airliner which had – allegedly because of a navigational error – strayed into prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka peninsula, home to some of Moscow’s missiles sites. All 269 passengers and crew were lost. The ‘evil empire’, it seemed, was living up to its reputation. Soviet spokesmen were unrepentant, blaming the US for using civilians as ‘shields’ for its espionage activities. Conspiracy theories abounded, not least among journalists, given as a breed to black humour who noted the aircraft’s James Bond designation: KAL 007. In the meantime, our feeling of isolation, as ‘enemies in a strange land’ was intensified when the Soviet state airline Aeroflot was banned from landing in almost all Western countries who at the same time ordered their national airlines to suspend flights to the Soviet Union. Although there was still the option of the long drive or overnight train journey to Helsinki, there was a feeling among the foreign community of being trapped in the lion’s den.
During this period I took some memorable journeys to the outer reaches of that den, notably – in a not wholly vain search for some ‘light relief’ news features – to the coldest inhabited place on earth, a remote Siberian settlement called Oymyakon. It took the best part of two days to fly there, a journey of some 5,000 miles via Omsk, Tomsk and Yakutsk, a metropolis of 250,000 people literally in the middle of frozen nowhere. We landed out of an azure sky looking down at oceans of pine forest that stood up like iron filings manipulated from below by a magnet, into the grey blue fug of frozen exhaust fumes that marked the city. There were still two more flights, first to the regional centre of Ust-Ilimsk, then on in an antiquated turboprop Yak-16 where we sat in bucket seats facing each other along the fuselage, heated by something resembling a giant hair dryer. Most of the other passengers were dressed in sealskins. The pilot and copilot looked like something out of ‘Biggles goes to Alaska’, big men with thigh-high fur-lined boots and fur hats with the flaps flapping. I asked one why we had to sit around for two hours before we took off. ‘Temperature,’ he replied in the monosyllabic way men of action have – especially Russian men of action – ‘we wait until it is warmer.’ ‘How warm?’ ‘Above minus 50C.’ ‘Oh, why?’ ‘Earlier – the wings crack.’ It was good enough reason for me.
My photographer on the trip was a Russian called Lev – Reuters occasionally ‘borrowed’ local staff for non-controversial stories. He took some memorable snaps of me ‘cuddling’ dead rabbits that local Yakuti tribesmen had trapped and left sitting, apparently as pert and ready to bound off across the snow, outside their yurts to be skinned and eaten whenever they chose to bring them ‘in, out of the freezer’. Lev had previously been foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s personal snapper, he boasted. Which made me realise I was now also just ‘two handshakes’ away from Josef Stalin. As links to twentieth-century tyrants went, I had d
one the double!
Back on the Cold War front, a memorable Time magazine cover named Reagan and Andropov jointly ‘Men of the Year’, showing them standing back to back, like adversaries about to take part in a deadly duel. The American television correspondents meanwhile were engaged in a battle of their own: trying to get their domestic anchors to pronounce the new Soviet leader’s relatively simple name properly. Almost unanimously US newsreaders had taken to calling him Andropov, putting the stress – vitally important in Russian – wrongly on the first syllable. One of them, a Canadian working for CBS, devised what he thought was an ingenious – and for the state of superpower relations terrifyingly apt – mnemonic: ‘You go to the edge of the cliff … And-DROP-off.’ Needless to say, it didn’t work. It was a problem that was to recur.
Even after flights abroad were restored, the sense of oppression remained. The entire top floor of the Sad Sam building was under lock and key, and known to be reserved for KGB monitoring equipment. Phone calls to the West had to be booked hours in advance. Although under the Helsinki Accords, that back in 1973 had seemed to usher in a new era of détente but were now de facto defunct, television companies had unfettered rights to broadcast news material, in practice it didn’t happen. The BBC, CBS, NBC, ITV, ARD – almost all the Western television news channels – had Moscow correspondents, but to send their material in those pre-portable satellite days they were obliged to use the facilities of the Soviet state television transmitter at Ostankino in northern Moscow. If their film contained matter that the Soviet authorities didn’t like – interviews with the famed dissident Andrei Sakharov were a classic example – when it came to transmission time, the satellite link inexplicably collapsed, or some other ‘unavoidable’ technical failure occurred.
