Two very funny things happened before the end of the day. Oleg rang up out of the blue, offering me another hall with facilities for synchronised translation. Then I called the Dean of the Faculty of Journalism, expecting to hear his excuses about the seminar. Instead he was charming and positive, and said there are no problems with the premises. He made some caustic remarks about the Friendship Society and how they would love to ensure a small audience. So, the fight is on!
Journey to Siberia
I never thought I would set off for Siberia with only a light jumper, but Yelena and Stanislav assure me it is summer in Tomsk. It was a dark wet night in Moscow, and when I arrived at Yelena’s, nine adults were standing waiting for me in the hall with luggage. We set off, a raggle-taggle group of ex-prisoners and hangers-on, then flagged down a car to take three of us and nine bags to the Kazan station.
Once we were in the coupe, out came the computer, the water melon and all the other things essential when you’re travelling light here. It turned out we’d remembered and forgotten all the same things, so we had lots of bread, cheese and carrots, and no cups, spoons or knives. We sat round sharing tea from a jam jar. The fourth person in our coupe was a young and silent Kirghiz soldier, on his way to Novosibirsk. Yelena eventually asked him if he’d been involved in the coup in Moscow, but he said not. Throughout the three days I kept seeing a long brown arm descending to drop a melon rind, or a bare calloused foot slipping down into some big muddy army boots. The door to our coupe continually jammed shut and provided a leitmotif for the journey. When Yelena and I were having an English lesson, the soldier was throwing himself at the door as though he couldn’t get out fast enough.
I spent the first day in a kind of bovine stupor. Yelena woke me up when we crossed the Volga and we later pulled in to Kazan in Tatarstan. The train passed through endless meadows and birchwoods, with little peasant huts occasionally dotted by the railway. The next day we travelled through the Omsk steppe, which looked the way I imagine the US prairies to be: grasslands with occasional herds of cattle. The towns en route were like frontier towns too: water cylinders on tall legs, dwarfing wooden ranch houses. In the evening we pulled into Omsk, passing a lot of US containers going west from the Pacific, then crossed the big Irtysh River. Yelena got out at 1.00am to pay her respects at Barabinsk, the town where Anatoly Marchenko was born. The temperature plummeted in the Siberian night. We headed across the Ob River and when I woke up, we were going north up the single-track branch line to Tomsk. This whole trip has cost 71 roubles, or under £2. It costs £2.10 to get from Heathrow to Brixton.
The first time Yelena came here she was under escort by three armed soldiers and beginning her five years’ exile. I first met her two years ago, when she was profoundly depressed at the end of her sentence and also planning to enter a convent. I was musing on how she’s changed since then, and watching her sorting her reflection in the train window, adjusting her dress and fiddling with her hair. When everything was looking nice, like all nice people, she said, “Ghastly!”
We’re spending the day at Stanislav’s hut in Timiryazevo outside Tomsk and have been out gathering mushrooms in the rain. When we got here it was like a scene from Chekhov. We were met by Boris Anatolyevich, a small, faded man with bright blue eyes, and a young guy called Aleksey, whose wire spectacles were all at an angle. Stanislav sat on the stoop telling them about the coup and showing them pictures from the Moscow newspapers. They didn’t know Dzerzhinsky’s statue had been pulled down, and were incredulous and tickled to hear that it had. “Did it immediately shatter?” Aleksey asked.
Yelena and Stanislav put me in the new room to write this diary, looking out at the garden, while they got water, washed the floor, chopped wood, dug vegetables and were generally fantastically busy. There was no spoon, so Stanislav carved one out of wood. We had borshch and stew from vegetables in the garden, then Stanislav sang a nice song about being lonely travelling by train. Yelena and I slept in the kitchen by the stove with the dogs and cats, and Stanislav slept up in the loft.
Sunday 1 September
When I woke Yelena was dressed and standing in a corner with her back to the room, saying her prayers. We had one lazy breakfast, then discovered the delights of raspberries from the garden, so had another one.
We then set off across the fields for the bus to Tomsk, this time with nine bags, a cooking ring, frying pan and a dog. A little girl in Pioneer uniform came running up with a certificate, back from her first day at school. Tomsk is an ancient, wooden town with tramlines running down the middle, all overgrown with grass. There is a small Tatar quarter with mosque down by the river, but the main street reminded me of small towns in the US Midwest. Until January this year it was a closed town. The local Party buildings have just been sealed up and the “Boards of Honour” were all blank. Yelena and Stanislav gave me some Tomsk ration cards for soap, flour, butter and sugar, all worthless because, despite rationing, the goods are just not there to be had. Apparently to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, everyone got a ration card for meat, as a present. People were not amused and it almost provoked a riot.
We’d missed the hydrofoil river bus up the Ob to Krivosheyno, so spent the day visiting their friends. We had baths and a meal at the Strombergs, a lovely family of Soviet Germans, all physicists and chemists. Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Soviet Germans. There’s a four-hour time gap with Moscow and so they’d only learned about the coup at midday from someone’s car radio in the street.
From there we visited other friends and ended up at another German family, the Fasts. He’s a terrific, prophetic-looking man. In years gone by they had made it their business to find out who was exiled to Tomsk Region and had helped them, at great risk to themselves. Now Wilhelm is on Tomsk Regional Soviet and has been compiling lists of local people killed in the purges for “Memorial”. He himself was imprisoned in the Tayshet camps.
Their three-year-old grandson, David, wants to be a deacon. He stood on a stool facing the icon on the wall, and all the adults stood behind him, while he said grace. I couldn’t follow a word of what he was saying, but every so often everyone else would cross themselves. There was also no stopping him and he went from one prayer to another. Eventually someone said, “That’s enough, David, or we’ll never eat.” He seemed extraordinarily bright and over dinner looked up and said, “What’s a category?”
Monday 2 September
We had a fantastic sail up the River Tom and along the River Ob to Krivosheyno: the length of Britain and more, for 12 roubles (25p). The sky was blue, some of the trees were turning yellow or red, and the Ob makes huge sweeps to left and right. The riverbanks are eroding at a great rate, so at some points there are big sandy cliffs with trees lying tangled in the water. There were cows on the shore when we reached Krivosheyno jetty. We piled out and walked 1km up a grassy cliff to the last hut on Kolkhoz Street, which was Yelena’s place in exile. The vegetable plot was shoulder-high in weeds. When we went into the hut my heart quailed, because it was like the seventeenth-century cottages at Culloden. There was a shed and an outer room, both dark and dilapidated, then an inner room, which was somehow recognisably Yelena’s. The walls were whitewashed, there were yellow curtains, books on the shelves, and a beautiful icon in the corner. Thieves had been in previously and stolen a lamp and some books. Yelena had lived here, washing floors at the club and making hockey sticks at the local factory.