Sunbathing in Siberia (16 page)

At 1 a.m. Nastya and I left for home in a taxi, leaving Nataliya Petrovna and Lilya dancing to a pop concert on the TV. Nastya had a day shift the next day and needed to be up at 6:30 a.m. I was glad of this because I was desperate for a proper night's sleep and my hangover wanted to avoid the inevitable karaoke.

Red Tape

From December 31
st
to January 7
th
Russia comes to a full stop to allow room for the New Year hangover. It is the largest national holiday of the year. After the revolution of 1917, most of the traditions that were originally associated with Christmas, like Grandfather Frost, were moved to New Year's Eve because the Soviet leaders (being devout atheists) wanted to steer clear of anything remotely Christian. Because of this, Christmas trees in Russia are known as New Year Trees. The relationship between Russia and tree decoration goes back to the 17
th
Century when Peter the Great, the man in charge at the time, decided it would be a good idea to introduce Christmas trees to Russia after he had seen them in Europe while on his holidays. All was well until 1916, when indoor trees were banned because the tradition had originated from Germany, and the Russians were pissed off with the Germans over World War I. This ban continued until 1935, when a letter calling for Christmas trees to be reinstated was published in a communist newspaper. To avoid the religious element, Christmas trees were rebranded as New Year trees and because they no longer had anything to do with God they were allowed back into people's apartments. They even went so far as to allow Santa Claus back into the country (though I'm not sure what visa he had).

The modern tradition of having a day off work after New Year began in the late forties and was originally called non-labour day. This was later extended to five days, but, with Christmas Day on the 7
th
and old New Year on the 13
th
, the holiday was unofficially extended by the will of the people so it could include both Christmas and New Year's parties. By this time I had become an ardent reader of
The Moscow Times
, the only daily English-language newspaper in Russia, and was really surprised to see an article that implied ‘see you when the partying stops'.

After the New Year party at Lilya's, Nastya and I started to lean towards the idea of me moving to Russia permanently. We were tired of saying goodbye so often; the way we were living simply wasn't right. We spent some of the holiday period researching Russian immigration policy; there was a lot to learn and if it was anything like obtaining a visa, we had to get it exactly right and perfectly timed when I applied for documents. To become a permanent resident, I first needed to obtain temporary residency. To get this I needed a private visa, which could only be obtained through Nastya formally inviting me to Russia with some lengthy letter obtained through the immigration office, stamped a hundred and one times and validated by a stamp that is the boss of all other stamps. After this invitation and all the stamps were issued, it then needed to be submitted, along with passport, photos, and all other relevant blah to the Russian embassy in London. When the immigrant had re-entered Russia on their private visa they then needed to submit a criminal records certificate, with Apostille, translated and notarised, with two completed temporary residency forms, a notarised translated copy of the person's passport, a notarised copy of something else, written consent of everyone currently living in Russia, written consent of everyone living outside of Russia, a chest X-ray certificate, a leprosy certificate and a partridge in a pear tree to the official Russian Office of Comings and Goings. On top of this, all the medical tests must have been performed at clinics specified by the Office of Comings and Goings and must have been validated by at least two thousand and fifty six stamps, which all had to be the exact same shade of pink and all had to overlap each other one tenth of an inch. In fact, the real list of requirements was ten times longer, but I've cut it short as it adds fifty more pages to this book. The only thing I needed to worry about initially was the criminal records certificate. I searched online for the right place to get one and, on the website of the Russian embassy in London, I found a page dedicated to non-criminal records certificates for immigration purposes. Bingo.

Aeroflot Flight SU2571. May 28
th
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.

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 4
th
, 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 24
th
, 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 10
th
, 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.

White Paint

On February 19
th
I received an email from the adjudicator of the competition I had submitted my poems to in January. Of the six poems I had entered, four of them had been selected for publication in June. These were ‘After the Cold War', a poem written during my first visit to Russia detailing my frustration with the relationship between Britain and Russia; ‘There are no problems in Russia', a poem that lists every problem in Russia I could think of, including the trial of Khodorkovsky; ‘Red', a poem about my encounter with the Topol-M missiles in Moscow; and ‘Anthropogenic', a self-critical poem, but one that lists certain atrocities by humans I have never fought or protested against, including a controversial factory being built near Krasnoyarsk. I had been awarded second prize. While this was good news, it also meant that certain poems that were openly critical of aspects of Russian politics and leadership would be in the public domain. Damage control was needed.

Just three days before, I had secured publication of an anti-English monarchy poem in an anthology titled
Poems for a Welsh Republic
, scheduled for release in June also. I had toyed with the idea of writing a sister poem to ‘There are no problems in Russia' but had not done so because I had been so busy travelling back and forth to Siberia and working as much as possible in between. I quickly drafted ‘There are no problems in the United Kingdom'
and sent it to many friends, including the editor of
Poems for a Welsh Republic
, disguised as a work in progress I could use some help with. It was accepted the same day. I wasn't too concerned about my Russia-themed poems being out there – I was a little-known Welsh poet with a small readership, and as such I was sure that nobody had heard of me in Russia. I could safely assume that the Kremlin would never be aware that these poems existed, but if they did read them and took a dislike to them I could then point them in the direction of the sister poem that criticised the political system and monarchy of the UK.