The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (33 page)

specific dish. None of the dishes

featured eggs. In fact, she was not

sure they even had any eggs. Or, she

added, maliciously, any potatoes.

The stand-off was beginning to look

unresolvable

when

the

cook

emerged from the kitchen and told

me I could have the eggs and some

mushrooms too if I wanted them.

Since I was the only customer, she

cannot have been very busy. Perhaps

she agreed simply to shut me up.

I thought, as I ate my tinned

mushrooms and mopped up the egg

yolks with the one triangle of bread I

had been allowed, that this was

probably the worst café in the world.

After lunch, I walked through

the cold to the museum where

Yevgeniya Ivanovna greeted me

with the friendly condescension that

Queen Victoria would have used on

a loyal native. I would, she said,

have to register my presence with the

local authorities. She would, she

said, accompany me. She donned

her fur coat, and a thick fur hat with

a dangly thing on the side, and we

set off.

We took a car through town. The

scrubby trees looked sparse without

their leaves, and the sun was just

peeking through a gap between two

apartment blocks. Footprints scarred

the snowfields, and thickly dressed

adults – men distinguishable from

women because they were thinner

and taller – hurried past, keen to get

out of the cold. I saw no children.

The

registration

office

was

opposite a three-storey log cabin

housing a Sekond Khend – one of

the shops that have sprung up in

provincial towns to sell old clothes

imported from Europe – and

overshadowed by the two chimneys

of the town’s heating plant. They

were pouring steam into the sky in

two thick white columns.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna swept in

magnificently, her fur coat brushing

both sides of the door frame,

enquiring who we needed to talk to,

and demanding to know why the

organization was no longer called

the Passport Table as of old, but

instead

the

Federal

Migration

Service. She had, she told everyone,

spent an age looking for it in the

phone book. We would, we were

told, have to wait. Vladimir was not

currently available and only he was

permitted to deal with foreigners.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna was having

none of that, and pushed into his

office. He was dapper in jeans and a

white linen jacket and working on

some papers. He ordered her out into

the corridor, back among the

common people. She did not take

kindly to it at all.

As head of the museum, she was

a significant authority in town and

not accustomed to waiting in line.

While I sat patiently on the folding

seats

alongside

two

other

supplicants, she swept up and down

the corridor, muttering insults to

Vladimir and the world in general.

She opened the door to his office,

then slammed it behind her on

seeing he was still engaged in

paperwork, smouldering while she

did so like a volcano in a fur coat.

After two or three more slams,

Vladimir’s colleague – a curvaceous

woman with a lot of flesh poorly

concealed by a tight dress – emerged

to remonstrate. ‘You have changed

your name but kept your old ways,’

replied Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and the

curvaceous woman vanished back

behind the door.

We waited another ten minutes

before being ushered into Vladimir’s

presence. He had taken off the linen

jacket. This costume change was

presumably for my benefit since he

now

wore

a

brick-red

nylon

waistcoat bearing the English words

Migration Control. I wondered what

possible cause there could be for

English-speaking migration control

in Inta. What English-speaker would

move here? Still, I handed over my

passport and we went through the

absurd bureaucratic rigmarole of

registration.

This

involved

a

series

of

pointless

questions

about

my

employment, my parents and my

marital

status,

all

apparently

predicated on the assumption that I

was moving to Inta for ever rather

than staying here for less than a

week. Vladimir copied down my

details wrongly, however, putting

my middle name before Oliver on

his form. He therefore called me

James throughout, much to the

amusement of Yevgeniya Ivanovna,

who giggled. The giggle was

infectious, all the more so when we

understood the gist of a conversation

between the curvaceous woman and

a mumbling old man on the other

side of the desk.

The old man had apparently lost

his passport, and she wanted to

know why.

‘It was stolen, on the train,’ he

replied, and she forced him to

complete a long and tedious form

before getting a replacement. He

laboriously wrote out his name, then

put a dash in the box intended for

his place of birth.

‘Why have you done that?’

Shrug.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Sosnogorsk.’

‘Where’s Sosnogorsk?’

Shrug.

‘It’s in the Komi Republic, write

that. No, not like that. Komi. How

do you spell Komi? Four letters.

Komi. You need to do it again. If

you waste another form I’ll make

you pay for it.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he protested.

‘Nothing?

You

think

that

wasting the resources of the Federal

Migration Service is nothing?’

The curvaceous woman handed

the old man a form, and turned back

to her computer. He picked up the

pen and immediately put a dash in

the box for his place of birth.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna, who had

turned pink with the struggle of not

laughing, had to leave the room at

this point, while I took a few deep

breaths and faced Vladimir once

more. Eventually, he gave me back

my passport, along with a slip of

paper showing I was legally allowed

to be in Inta.

‘James,’ he said solemnly. ‘One

last thing, if you want to eat out

tonight it is better to eat at home

because some of our less cultured

citizens may take exception to your

presence on the territory of the Komi

Republic.’

I could hear Yevgeniya Ivanovna

snort with laughter on the far side of

the door and, not trusting myself to

speak, I nodded my thanks and

walked out of the door. The

curvaceous woman was about to

notice that the old man had spoiled

another form, and I would not have

survived that.

I was not, as it happened,

planning to risk an encounter with

Inta’s less cultured citizens since

Nikolai Andreyevich had arranged

for me to meet another old gulag

survivor. The long night had fallen

on the town as I walked back to the

Ukrainian cultural centre where we

had arranged to meet. By the time I

got there, I was shaking with cold.

My thighs felt like they belonged to

someone else. One pair of long

underpants was not enough.

Semyon Boretsky lived a short

walk away with his wife Yulia.

Considering the misery that fate had

heaped on them both, they looked

astonishingly jovial, and teased each

other in the way only an old couple

can.

Boretsky was born in capitalist

Poland in 1922. Poland won

independence from Russia after

World War One and managed to

gain large tracts of territory that

Moscow coveted. Stalin never forgot

them and, in 1939, under a pact he

reached with Germany, Moscow

took them back. Stalin and Hitler

extinguished Poland between them,

and Boretsky’s country of residence

abruptly changed from Poland to the

Soviet Union, without him having

moved house.

It was only after World War Two

was over that the Soviet security

services really got to sort out the

new territories they had inherited.

The former bits of Poland had a

population with none of the habits of

obedience learned in the Soviet

Union of the 1930s. Anti-Soviet

guerrillas

operated

in

western

Ukraine for years after the war

ended, and the civilian population

suffered as a result. Thousands of

young men were arrested, and

sentenced to entirely arbitrary terms

in the camps, and among them was

Boretsky. He described standing in

the prison while their terms in the

gulag were announced.

‘They just walked along saying

twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-

five, twenty-five. That was twenty-

five years, you understand, but I

only got ten,’ he said. I asked him

why he got less.

‘I don’t know,’ he said with a

broad smile, as if a decade in the

camps was a small thing. ‘They

needed young people in the north

back then, and they didn’t want us to

be in Ukraine, so they sent everyone.

There were not enough convicted

people to fill six wagons so they

filled them up with people who were

still just under investigation as well.’

On arrival in Inta, ‘buyers’ came

to pick the labourers they needed

from among the new arrivals. There

was no pretence that they had come

as anything other than slaves. He

was named V-195 and sent off to

make bricks.

‘This number was on my breast,

and then in larger type on my back.

It was on my hat and my knee as

well so I could find my clothes after

washing,’ he said.

If you worked well, he said, you

got 600 grams of bread. There were

fifteen of them in his shift and they

had to make 20,000 bricks. That was

the minimum required from their

eight-hour day, which normally

lasted ten or twelve hours. If they

failed to make that target, they got

less food: at first 400 grams, and

then 200 grams. Workers weakened

on the reduced diet, and could not

work harder, and lost ground fast.

Then they died. It was an efficient

way to make sure only worthwhile

prisoners survived. Fortunately for

Boretsky, he was young and tough.

They got soup made of grain, or

turnips, or potatoes, with a smear of

oil on the surface. Sometimes there

was a scrap of reindeer, or a bit of

salted fish. In summer, it was good,

he said, but in winter it would be

frozen before they received it from

the kitchen.

And it was so cold. ‘You wore

two pairs of quilted trousers and the

wind went through like you were

wearing a tracksuit. If you worked

well,’ he said, with the pride of

someone who clearly did, ‘then

every day counted as double until

you were freed.’

This was a system instituted in

the early 1950s to try to encourage

more work from the prisoners. If

they worked hard they not only got

fed, but their days could count

double, thus bringing the end of

their sentence nearer. He had a few

months chopped off as a result, but

he still was in the camp even longer

than Father Dmitry was.

‘I left the camp in 1957, and

found work. I could not go home for

another five years. I had lost my

rights, they called it. I had to report

to the police twice a month, on the

5th and the 20th.’

He did finally go home in 1962,

but did not get on with it. He had