b. Aeroflot Flight SU2571. May 28th 2012. London – Moscow
My flight back to London in winter had gone without a hitch and before I knew it I was in Cardiff. As I had got my eight hours back that I had lost on the way to Siberia, I had arrived in Cardiff at about 6 p.m. I was still wearing Boris’s spare black hunting jacket and his ushanka of real mink fur. Carrying my half-empty suitcase over my shoulder, I bought a train ticket to Llantwit Major and stood on platform 6 of Cardiff Central Station. I was aware of how Russian I looked but didn’t care because people seemed to give me a wide berth, which I enjoyed. Not only that but I felt Russian; I was Michael Oliver of Krasnoyarsk, with a lovely Siberian wife to go home to, a dacha to enjoy in the summer, and the knowledge that I would soon be returning to Siberia for good. I stood with my shoulders back, chest out and head high. When I reached Llantwit Major however I quickly removed my ushanka and stuffed it into my suitcase as I had to walk for thirty minutes to my mother’s house in St Athan. She lives a gunshot away from RAF St Athan’s main gate and the approach to my mother’s is always overlooked by an armed soldier with a semi-automatic weapon; I didn’t want him to think the Russians were invading.
I spent a fortnight getting used to British life again, although it didn’t really take much getting used to. I ate more full breakfasts than were good for me and indulged in half a billion packets of salt and vinegar crisps. Russian crab flavoured ‘chips’ for some reason just don’t give me the same satisfaction. By early February it was high time to pay the Russian embassy in London a visit. The opening time of the department that dealt with certificate requests was 8.45 a.m., and it closed just three hours later. I needed to be in London early. The only way I could do this was by taking the National Express at 4.30 a.m. There was no way I could get to the station easily at that hour from my dad’s house in Ely, or my mum’s place in Llantwit Major. Once again I called upon the services of my mate Torben, who insisted we have ten pints in the pub followed by double shots of whatever he had left in his kitchen.
i. Red Paint
When I arrived in London, I wasn’t as hung-over as I thought I would have been but I was still suffering a little. After going to the wrong address and being given directions by two policemen, I arrived at the embassy five minutes before they opened. Having had all my visas arranged for me by a private visa firm based in London, I hadn’t actually seen the Russian embassy before, even though I had already visited Russia three times. It looked different to how I imagined because it was covered in blotches of red paint. Though the majority of the building was a nice clean cream colour, most of the windows, ledges and stonework – from the ground up to the third floor – were smeared in thick red gloss. It was clear it had been paint-bombed in the not too distant past.
During the Russian elections on December 4th, the United Russia party won an absolute majority of seats in the Duma with 49.32 per cent of the vote, however, there were reports of election fixing and many people felt that the system had utterly failed them. Just three months prior to the elections, at the United Russia Party Congress held in Moscow on September 24th, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, stand for the presidency in 2012; an offer which Putin accepted. In return, Putin offered to nominate Medvedev for the role of prime minister. Many people felt that everything had been decided well in advance, meaning the elections had been a pointless show. There were growing concerns that by keeping power in the hands of the same men who had led Russia for the past four years it would lead to political and economic stagnation. It did seem like a strange situation. The choice only came down to two men, and those same men simply swapped roles as if nobody’s opinion or vote mattered and, of course, this led to widespread dissent and protests. While I was in Russia, I hadn’t paid too much attention to the elections because I had only one month to spend with my wife, and as a Westerner, it didn’t seem like my business. I’m not saying people don’t have the right to criticise the policies of any foreign nation, but I believe one should exercise caution when criticising a country they are attempting to gain permission to live in. Not only that but it seemed hypocritical of me to berate Russia when the state of British politics wasn’t much better.
On December 10th, Russia experienced its biggest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union; not just in Moscow but right across the country, in eighty-eight towns and cities including Krasnoyarsk. At the time of the demonstration, Nastya and I had kept away from the city centre, firstly because Nastya is politically apathetic, and secondly because the British Foreign Office website advised that it wouldn’t be easy to help me if I got into trouble, even if I only went as a spectator. Protests were simultaneously held near Russian embassies across the globe, including London. Looking at that red paint it struck me how sheltered I had been; there had been so many outcries and yet I had barely seen or heard anything while I was in Russia. It also really awakened me to the possibility of there being further social and political instability in Russia, and to the fact that Putin was going to become president once again. Even though United Russia is widely seen as Putin’s party I had so far only visited Siberia while Medvedev was in power. I began to worry about immigration policy when Putin took the reins. Would they let me in? This was coupled with the fact that I had written several poems over the past year that would probably never be popular with the Kremlin. In one poem I had even criticised the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a man who openly argued with Putin on television and who subsequently found himself in prison. I had sent this poem off with several others of similar style and theme to a competition that I had a decent chance of winning. Before submitting them however, Nastya had insisted on censoring certain lines, which annoyed me at the time but, with hindsight, I could see that she was just trying to keep me safe.
After queuing for five minutes, I was ushered into the grounds of the embassy by a security official who I suspected wasn’t Russian because he smiled when he spoke to people. This was confirmed when I saw him dealing with people asking him questions at the gate. He didn’t seem to speak much Russian but spoke English perfectly. He was actually quite a nice addition to the embassy staff and made my visit a much less intimidating experience. Inside the embassy I was given a ticket and ushered into a waiting room. The interior guard didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand my piss-poor Russian. Inside the waiting room were several other Russians. From the way they dressed they couldn’t have been anything else. The decor was also Russian and a stark contrast to the English architecture on the exterior of the building. It was like being sat in the living room of the apartment in Krasnoyarsk. There was even a television showing old Russian movies. The number of my ticket came up almost immediately as I was the only person there waiting to apply for a certificate, so I left the room and was ushered by the security guard into a space that resembled a Russian post office. An attractive middle-aged woman took my certificate request from me, which was a standard form I had printed from their website, and in basic English told me I would be ‘contacted’. Leaving the embassy I wondered just how contact would be made as there had been no sections on the form for me to add a phone number or email address; the only address it had asked for and the one I had provided was for the apartment in Krasnoyarsk.