Deep Field (23 page)

I had arrived in Russia in search of a language school to teach English and a university to learn Russian. I had an email from someone in Kazan—‘come’, it had said, ‘we’ll offer you $450 a month’—and Kazan sounded good. I knew that in Moscow the train stations were built in the predominant architectural style of their destination. Thus Finland station, where Lenin had returned to Russia in a sealed train from Germany in 1917, had a light Scandinavian simplicity. Yaroslavl station’s spires echoed the Huon pine settlements of Siberia and the Far East. Kazan station—the jewel—was all dark cavernous interiors of polished marble and celestially brilliant onion domes, an iconic fusion of Byzantine Orthodoxy and Islam. And after arriving at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport I headed straight for the domes.

I had no address, no phone number, and knew nothing about Kazan beyond its exotic name. I had been employed, if that is the right word, by a grandly named organisation called Linguamir (a Russian play on the words for language, world and peace)—which also styled itself as the Volga Centre for Education and Information. Before I arrived, there had been a debate about whether to rename Linguamir with the more aspirational and less Soviet-sounding appellation Win Brand: a short, pugnacious and avaricious phrase deemed more appropriate to the New Russia. I had been given the job title
prepodavatsil
—a word roughly equivalent to ‘professor’ in the general sense of one who teaches adults—which appeared to inspire a mildly dutiful respect among the lower echelons of the post-Soviet bureaucracy and the occasional salute from the paramilitary police.

Knowing no Russian, and unable to read the Cyrillic script, I soon became hopelessly lost in the vast lugubrious railway mausoleum of Kazan station. The language section of my guide book—before I lost it—under the heading ‘Useful Phrases’ provided long polysyllabic agglutinations that were totally unpronounceable. While I briefly held it upside down, in a futile search for greater clarity, a young Russian couple took pity on me. They helped me change my money and buy my ticket before introducing me to an Italian-speaking Russian, incongruously named Olympia, who they identified by her ‘Western clothes’. While I knew no Italian it was close enough to English, after being so woefully lost in Russian, that I felt I could breathe in my own language again. Somehow Olympia guided me to my platform, train and carriage. I waved as she left, waiting for a train back to Ukraine and her job at an almost totally obsolete car factory to resume production of Ukraine’s national automobile, the Zhiguli (equivalent to the Russian Lada or the East German Trabant)—a leaky, cast-iron fridge on wheels and an industrial dinosaur doomed in a world without command economies or production quotas.

In Kazan I knew no one. From the station, I dragged my bags down the main street—Bauman Street—a solidly bourgeois nineteenth-century promenade with ornate streetlights and balustraded buildings. It was cold and clear and I wanted to find an internet cafe where I could email my contact to say I’d arrived. A Turkish kebab seller directed me to the Hotel Tatarstan—a drab Soviet concrete block—and I found myself in a brown room with brown stuccoed walls and a hard bed with a severely tucked brown polyester blanket. It was a drab and awful world that smelled of cigarettes and air-freshener and was relieved only by the dull grey of a steel chair in the corner. It gave the impression of only recently having been vacated by members of the Politbureau in pre-lapsarian Soviet days. I dumped my bags and escaped quickly back out to the street—bare now in the looming twilight, a few people walking in black overcoats and oversized fur hats as they made their penumbral way home.

I walked on, past the closing shops and the disappearing crowds, stopping random strangers with incomprehensible English requests for directions. One man pointed to an ancient and derelict building—it had the look of a nineteenth-century Grand Hotel but had fallen on a century of hard times. Painted green, its once magnificent awnings were in an advanced state of decay, and noble columns upheld by muscle-bound caryatids sagged alarmingly. Not only were these forgotten gods banished by the revolution but they had been condemned to crushing indifference and prolonged neglect. Architecturally, they were a futile attempt to prop up a long defunct tsarist political order whose vestigial memory lingered on in the collapsing masonry of the present.

I made for what would once have been the grand entrance to the Hotel Kazan, but found the doors locked and a small ripped cardboard sign with an arrow that pointed to a side entrance. I walked on, through a gap in the corrugatediron fence, and followed a path being cleared by a platoon of grey-coated Russian Army conscripts who, more or less as I arrived, decided to take a urinal break and started pissing against the walls leading up the hotel’s makeshift entrance. Inside, I was immediately struck by the fetid air, the damp red carpet, and an immense spiral staircase whose luminescent marble steps wove their way funereally up into the gloom.

Up I walked, and on the second floor found an ancient Intourist office—formerly the official chaperone of any foreign visitor, but now reduced to a redundant bureaucratic outpost—and a man inside it who spoke German. This was at least more comprehensible to me than Russian and he intoned sagely and pointed his finger ominously upward towards the staircase. I climbed higher, losing confidence with every step and beginning to think my Russian adventure was about to be pathetically extinguished in the musty, cloying air of the disgusting Hotel Kazan. I followed yet another dank corridor, and at the end as it turned almost to total darkness I noticed a large steel door that was slightly ajar. I opened it cautiously and in the relative glare of a lighted room, I made out two young Tatar women.

‘Tom—you’ve arrived! Welcome to Kazan.’

It was dark and cold and I desperately wanted a warm room and food. But in the excitement of my arrival, my new colleagues had decided to take me to meet their friends and to go on a nocturnal tour of the city. I was introduced to Misha—a silent, calm architecture student with hooded blue eyes. As we laboured over conversation I asked what he enjoyed about university. ‘Specialist military training,’ he replied and, after a long pause, ‘I am sniper.’

Soviet stereotypes seemed to live on in modern Kazan. The leader of our party, Natasha—tall, powerfully built with waist-length blond hair—was herself something of a human version of the iconic statues of muscle-bound ‘Soviet woman’ breaking free of their capitalist chains. ‘To Victory Square, he must learn about Russia!’ she cried and we followed. I warmed immediately to my two Tatar colleagues—Zulfyia and Albina—as we sat shivering in the back of Natasha’s ancient Lada rumbling at speed through the backstreets of Kazan, guided with ballistic precision by Misha. Like me, the last thing on their minds on that freezing night appeared to be rusting Soviet military hardware.

Natasha was an aeronautical engineer but in the post-Soviet collapse found herself out of work designing jet fighters and, for $50 a month, had become the language school administrator. Her Russia was turbocharged, and the encroaching winter and steady sleet provided no disincentive to the worship of the once glorious Russian military machine on display at Victory Square—a gigantic wrecking yard of Tupolevs, Illyushins, and MiG fighters. The tour became a whirlwind of air-speed velocity, comparative combat dynamics and high-calibre machine-gun rounds per minute. We paused momentarily, heads bowed, in front of a MiG-3 with the legend
Za Rodinu
(For the Motherland) written in Cyrillic on the fuselage—a plane that her uncle, also an engineer, had worked on during World War II. ‘Not so effective at low altitude,’ she said after a while, and I wondered if this statement was also true of Natasha herself, reduced now to the role of administrator rather than serving the greater glory of the revolution.

Later that evening, as if to compete with Natasha’s tour, we visited Zulfyia’s grandparents in their flat overlooking the Kazanka River. Her Tatar grandfather, also a military engineer and proud defender of the Soviet Union, brought out a bottle of toxic blood-coloured
samagon
(his own cherry-flavoured home-brewed vodka). The label showed him with a vast chestful of Soviet military medals from long years of service and glorious campaigns putting down nascent liberation movements—Budapest ’56 and Prague ’68. At 94 per cent proof, the lethal liquid had not only fuelled the troops under his command but probably the aircraft as well. To shouts of ‘
Allahu al-Akhbar!
’ (God is Great) we drank shots of the stuff until my weak Western constitution could take no more and I collapsed in bed.

Kazan is an ancient city, founded by Turkic-speaking Tatars as part of the great Mongol Empire—the Golden Horde—that stretched through Siberia, Russia, Central Asia, China and the Middle East a thousand years ago. The empire had run as a federation of subordinate tribute-paying khanates of which Kazan, located in central Russia on the banks of the Volga River, was an important trading centre. Kazan was also one of the first to fall to the rising power of medieval Moscow and its claims to the mantle of the Roman Empire after the fall of Byzantium.

Modern Kazan reflected these influences and had become, in the post-1989 world, a curiosity inside the Russian Federation. It is the most northern of Muslim cities, located at the centre of Russia rather than the troubled post-imperial periphery, and links road, rail, air and river trade routes. It is close enough to the Ural Mountains to boast that it is the ‘Gateway to Siberia’ but is also an integral part of the ‘European’ Russia. Kazan was at once key to post-Soviet Russian unity and yet also symbolic of Russia’s ongoing negotiation of its place between Europe and Asia.

‘I am in Asia,’ Catherine the Great had written to Voltaire on entering Kazan in 1767. ‘In Kazan, there are twenty different peoples which are nothing like each other and I have to sew, for them, one garment to suit everyone’. Similarly, the philosopher and revolutionary Alexander Herzen observed that the ‘significance of Kazan is very great: it is a place where two worlds meet. So it has two beginnings: Western and Eastern, and you can see them at every crossroads; here they lived together and became friendly as a result of the unending interaction, and here they began to produce something quite original of their own’.

With a population equally comprised of ethnic Russians and nominally Muslim, Turkic-speaking Tatars (as well as small Jewish and Volga German populations) Tatarstan was in many ways everything that the Muslim experience of the end of the Soviet Union was not. This was no Chechnya, Abkhazia, Ossetia or Dagestan; the notorious and vicious Caucasian conflicts. Instead it was stable, had relative wealth (through oil and natural gas), and with more than a million people Kazan was a major urban centre. Tatarstan was an Autonomous Republic within the Russian Federation and its then president, Mintimer Shaimiev, had effortlessly made the transition from Communist Party chief to president with all the democratic legitimacy and symbolism that a repainted Kremlin office could confer. For this, he was lauded by the United States, visited by George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, German chancellor Gerhardt Schröder and financial luminaries including George Soros.

Kazan even featured in an article in the
Atlantic Monthly
in which the journalist, after a short stroll through Kazan’s one and only shopping strip, declared it to be a triumph of capitalism. The mass poverty hidden away in drab suburban tower blocks, the grindingly low wages, the alcoholism, the declining life spans, the barter economy and the ubiquitous presence of maimed Afghan war veterans without pride or pension begging on the side of the road were mere details to the triumph of the market. At least now you could get a decently tailored suit in Bauman Street, something that had been unheard of since 1917, and vote for the republic’s politicians as long as you didn’t choose anyone not already in office.

Revolutions, it has been said, have a tendency to devour their children and this was especially true of Russia in the 1990s. From what I could see, Kazan had become, like much of the rest of Russia, a ‘babushka economy’. The disappearance of the old order had knocked the perestroika generation sideways. ‘We used to have a beautiful ideal,’ one of my students told me. He had been a young Soviet army officer, highly trained in electronic engineering at the time of the collapse, and had made a successful transition to the private sector as a pioneer of the new middle class. ‘But now we sell cigarettes.’ Young, educated and adaptable, he made the transition well, but for the overwhelming majority it had been a catastrophe eliminating employment in ‘unproductive’ industries, and most forms of state social investment from schools to roads, farms, hospitals and pensions. The middle generation, brought up under the old regime but not yet familiar with the new one, or insufficiently well-connected with it, failed to cope and died off at levels higher than the birth rate—lost to alcoholic oblivion and drug-induced despair. Average life expectancy had declined by over a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a consequence, families were propped up not by the young and the economically active but by the grandmothers, widows of the earlier lost generation of World War II (which claimed in excess of 23 million Soviet lives)—the ‘babushkas’. In an irony that would only become clear to me years later, these widows often spoke some basic German, limited as my landlady once told me to the contradictory imperatives of the invading army: ‘Hands up!’ and ‘Help me!’ These were exactly the same phrases, learned this time in Russian, that were repeated to me by Afghan refugees who had lived through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had fled subsequent conflict sixty years later.

The babushkas were everywhere—running the market stalls, selling clothes, producing unappetising mounds of turnip and beetroot, and making deliciously warm hand-knitted socks and gloves for winter. They scoured the streets and shops for deals, looked after children, and ran homes. One morning, as I was returning from an evening out—the perpetual night of the Russian winter easing slightly into a grey dawn, little lighter than the static of a dead television station—I encountered a group of people standing on the street corner. As I approached, I saw that they were all elderly babushkas, heavy steel icepicks in hand, cracking the black ice from the pavements in temperatures approaching minus 30 degrees so that the morning’s passers-by could walk the pavements and shop in safety.