Sunbathing in Siberia (17 page)

I was probably being a bit paranoid but so much depended on me being granted Russian residency that I could leave nothing to chance. I was caught between writing and publishing exactly what I felt I needed to, and the idea that I should suppress my writing until I had everything sorted. Unfortunately, I've never been good at thinking things through before I do them, and if I'm advised not to do something, it makes me want to do it even more. Although those poems never caused me any problems, with hindsight I can see that I should have put my ego in a box, thrown all my poems on the fire and concentrated on what I should have been doing with regard to residency papers. Or as Nastya might say: ‘only a fool and a complete arsehole puts publishing before the needs of his wife.'

Just two days after I received the acceptance email, five members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot performed a 40-second anti-Kremlin song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This cathedral was destroyed under Soviet rule and rebuilt in the 1990s; which made it a very significant place for people to say their prayers. Within the next few weeks, three of the group were arrested for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' while two others fled Russia. The detention and trial of the arrested trio became a source of controversy causing worldwide public outcry. The Russian reaction was quite the opposite of that in the West. Russian people, for the most part, take their religion and associated places of worships very seriously. It came as no surprise to me that while the West was outraged by the arrest of the three punk poppers, the majority of Russians were outraged by the punk prayer actions of Pussy Riot, and subsequently annoyed by the hysteria in the West. The problem was that while the protest was clearly political, the fact that they made their protest in a church opened them up to being viewed as anti-religious. The majority of Russians I spoke to after said they weren't offended by the protest itself, but by the fact the singers showed a complete disregard for the regular, everyday folk who attended that particular church. Their actions were seen as a show of hostility, not against the government, but against the Orthodox community. Had they protested in Red Square, or sang their song in a club or protest rally, it's likely they would never have been arrested and we might never have heard of them. But then the whole point of their protest was to highlight Putin's relationship with the Orthodox Church. In recent years the Kremlin and the Church seem to have become so entangled that Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church in Russia, has claimed that Putin's government had performed a ‘miracle of God', by stabilising the country after the economic struggles during the 1990s. He later openly supported Putin before the 2012 elections, which would definitely have influenced the vote seeing as three-quarters of the Russian population register as being Orthodox Christians. Besides this, the Orthodox Church has publicly supported the Kremlin so often and in so many ways that they have even been recorded blessing Russian rockets.

Choosing Moscow's Christ the Saviour as their protest point worked both for and against Pussy Riot. The Kremlin and the media they controlled were able to spin the event to make it seem as if the band were anti-Orthodox, not anti-Kremlin. Putin later accused the group of threatening ‘the moral foundations of Russia', while others accused them of ‘blasphemy', ‘being in league with Satan' and/or ‘some Americans'. This led to a popular view that if you were a supporter of Pussy Riot you must therefore be an enemy of the church; consequently the focus shifted away from the actual message Pussy Riot members were trying to convey. However, the way the people saw ‘Putin' and ‘the church' as the same entity perfectly exemplified the dangerous relationship Pussy Riot had sought to highlight.

When I first heard of their arrest I shared the same view as those in the West; I couldn't see that Pussy Riot had committed an actual crime. No one was hurt and their song had lasted less than a minute. As a counter PR stunt, I thought it would have looked good for Putin if the trio were set free; however he would then have had to face a backlash of criticism and outrage from his own people. It was a political catch-22. I also wondered about Pussy Riot themselves. While their punk pop song had achieved the desired effect in the West, successfully promoting a hatred of Putin, they must have known they would be arrested and sent to prison. Even I knew how sacred the church is to Russia, having been turned away following an attempt to take photographs inside one of our local churches in Krasnoyarsk. If I had waltzed in with my guitar and sung something as harmless even as the
SpongeBob
SquarePants
theme tune, I would have been arrested and would probably have ended up doing some time in prison. I also knew that if someone wanted to effect a change in Russian politics, singing punk pop probably wouldn't have any lasting effect, and yet their forty-second song was much more effective in turning the world's gaze towards Russia than any poem could ever be. In the age of the pop song and the soundbite, I realise that music was probably their best vehicle of communication, though I can't help but be cautious of pop-star revolutionaries; everyone thought the Sex Pistols were the antidote to the capitalist model of art, right up until one of them started making adverts for Country Life Butter.

When I spoke to Nastya on the phone about the Pussy Riot situation, she said she didn't sympathise with them at all as their actions had only affected churchgoers and hadn't had any effect whatsoever on anyone else. Her friends shared a similarly unsympathetic view, as it seemed did the majority of the Russian populace, their outrage spilling onto many online comments forums. ‘An opinion poll of Russians released by the independent Levada research group showed only 6 per cent had sympathy with the women' while ‘51 per cent said they found nothing good about them'. This bad feeling was reported by the Western media, who spun it by stating that most Russians got their information from television, and therefore swallowed the state's official opinion, since many TV stations in Russia are state-owned. This was quite offensive as it insinuated Russians couldn't think for themselves. I knew Nastya didn't swallow anything fed to the general populace through the TV, neither did most of her friends; they got their news from multiple sources via the internet. Nastya formed her view of the band after watching a pro-Pussy Riot video on YouTube.

At the same time, there came a stream of Pussy Riot support messages online, and petitions in the West calling for their release. Every man and his dog in the West joined the ‘I'm with the brave people' campaign, even Sting, the saviour of the rainforests who went on to make a car advertisement. I couldn't help but wonder that if Western celebrities really supported Pussy Riot, why didn't they fly to Moscow, ditch their passport and security staff and start a march up and down Red Square. But that would never happen, because while it became cool to support Pussy Riot, those celebrities in the West simply wanted to be seen as an ‘activist' without actually being active. Though this can't be said of Tilda Swinton who later took to Moscow's Red Square with a rainbow flag in protest against Russia's recent ‘gay propaganda law', yet another source of contention between Russia and the rest of the world. ‘I support Pussy Riot' became a cool slogan, a bit like those people that wear Che Guevara t-shirts, most of whom love to wear the logo but would never have opted to fight for the freedom of the people and give their lives in a Bolivian jungle by Che's side. In the West, while it was cool to talk about Pussy Riot, other people's causes were going unnoticed. For example, far fewer people made petitions to save the poet Talha Ahsan, a British poet who had been held in custody in the UK without trial or charge since 2006, after being accused by the Americans of contributing to illegal ‘terrorist' websites. The case was very similar to that of Gary McKinnon, the British computer genius who famously hacked the NASA database to seek evidence of UFOs. Like Mr McKinnon, Talha Ahsan is on the Asperger's Spectrum, however despite this common factor it was only Ahsan who ended up being extradited to the US.

According to the Russian embassy website, criminal record certificates can take up to six months to process. After emailing to check on progress I was informed that mine was ready just five weeks after I had applied. A week later, after another night at Torben's flat, I woke up in London on the National Express. I had a vague memory of beer, singing and of Torben putting an omelette in my one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, before pointing to the station and telling me to ‘walk that way'. I made it to the embassy in time to pick up my certificate and was coherent enough to thank them in Russian pronounced so badly that it made everyone laugh. When I left the building I noticed the red paint was hardly visible. It was now a very light pink after someone had attempted a whitewash with emulsion. Not only was the new white a lighter shade than the rest of the building, but the mark left by the earlier protests was still visible beneath the fresh paint, a sign perhaps that Putin's opposition couldn't be extinguished so easily.

Visas and the Capitalist Mclympics

As I left London on the coach, I wrote out several postcards for Nastya. This was something I had done routinely since March 2009, and I estimated that I had sent over five hundred. It cost a fortune in stamps but I felt it was an essential form of physical communication during times when we couldn't physically be together. When I got back to Cardiff, I spoke with Nastya of my success at having obtained the first certificate necessary for us to be able to spend our lives together. She had even better news. Not only had she obtained the invitation for my private visa but her parents had gifted us a hefty portion of their savings. This money coupled with a small mortgage meant we could buy our own flat. Nastya planned to go out flat hunting with Boris that very week and it was likely that they would buy one before my arrival and partly furnish it so that I wouldn't have to sleep on the floor when I got there. We arranged my visa for the end of May and bought a return flight package from Aeroflot. We opted for return tickets as the immigration process for temporary residency took five months, and a private visa was only valid for three.

I spent the next two months working as much as possible. I aimed my poetry submissions well and had a few decently paid performances. With the money I made I bought several Cadbury Easter eggs, twelve Chocolate Oranges and fistfuls of Fry's Chocolate Creams for Nastya. To prevent Semka from watering at the mouth with jealousy, I also bought a stash of Olympic medal chocolates and chocolate tools from the old sweet shop in Cardiff's Royal Arcade. I was slightly sad that I would be missing the Olympics. When I was a boy, my dad and I used to sit together and watch them on the telly; he even knew most of the athletes' names. I was only slightly comforted by the fact that my dad probably wouldn't even enjoy it. The Tory government was turning the event into the most commercial Olympic Games ever, going so far as to introduce draconian laws that would ensure people only ate food supplied by the official sponsors McDonalds while only being able to pay for their cardboard meals with a Visa card; two things my dad hates. My dad, like many people born in the 1950s has a habit of taking a packed lunch with him wherever he goes and doesn't like being forced into parting with hard-earned money. Still, I was disappointed for him, as he would probably have bought tickets and realised a lifelong dream had the Olympics been about sport, as it had been when he was a boy.

This feeling of missing out on an important bonding session with my dad had been exacerbated at Heathrow. While waiting to board my flight to Russia, I was surrounded not only by advertisements for the Olympics, but as I was leaving the country to begin the residency process abroad, hoards of people were entering the country to see the Olympic games. I even passed a few teams. Sat on the plane I thought of all the things my dad and I would never do together. We had always been close. No matter how many fights we had fought in the past, and there were many of those, we had always managed to build new bridges. We were after all two halves of the same person. Our faces have always been very similar; we have always liked the same music and over the years, we have included each other in whatever we could. My dad had never failed to come to my book launches, poetry readings and birthday parties. We had spent countless times in the Brecon Beacons, on walking and cycling trips. After my parents divorced, I had gone with him on many of his annual caravan holidays, where we stayed up late talking through family stuff while gorging on junk food. Now I was flying to the other half of the world, planning to move there permanently, with a suitcase full of my dad's favourite Chocolate Oranges. For everything gained in life a sacrifice had to be made; this is what I had been told many years earlier by the very man who (I only then realised) was the big sacrifice I was making. For many years, I had blamed my parents for my slow start in life, for not being able to go to university, not achieving my full potential; the list goes on and on. It's true to some degree, because we were very poor, and my parents didn't have much of a clue when they made me and my sisters; yet from the point I had met Nastya it was my parents who had helped me out immeasurably. They let me sleep at their places, let me eat their food, my dad helped me get work, or he gave me money if I was short. For all the times in my life I could pinpoint and say ‘that's where they let me down', they had since made up for by being there when I needed them the most. And I was leaving them, without saying so much as thank you.

PART IV

Aeroflot Flight SU1481. August 25
th
2012.
Krasnoyarsk – Moscow