Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (29 page)

When the sea came in sight Volodya turned down a track and threaded his way between plots of land lush with flowers and fruit trees. In each, a little house had been cobbled together out of scavenged bits and pieces. The car pulled up in front of a couple of concrete huts with tin roofs, standing in a maze of weeds. Behind the fence, two dogs leaped around, barking in delight. Igor was standing, as upright in his bearing as ever, beaming at us. He was tanned and handsome. The mustaches which still curved down on either side of his mouth were still black and elegantly trimmed. But his hair was white now, and his front teeth were gone.

We sat and drank fruit juice in the shade of a pergola improvised out of army camouflage. After Volodya left, I looked inside the hut. It was simply furnished. To my surprise there was hardly a book to be seen. On Igor’s immaculately tidy desk there was a computer, and even an Internet connection. Thanks to Volodya, Igor said with a grin, they were producing a newspaper again—and they called it
The Messenger
, like the last one. This time they were distributing it free.

“As you can see, they’ve gone, the possessions. It seems we had to lose everything. One more time. We had to learn how to live all over again. The dogs taught us to get up at dawn and go to bed when it got dark. At one point we even had to sell our books—including the English ones. Just to stay alive. We lived on buckwheat porridge for a month. It’s funny—food was always something I’d taken for granted. Then we understood how little you need to live on. And how good it made us feel. So light and free!” Natasha’s words spurted out like uncorked champagne.

“If we’d stayed on in Novosibirsk we’d never have learned these things. Life was too easy. Yes, we were earning good money. We were living in this nice flat. We had everything a person could want. But there was nothing to do—nothing but drink kefir and listen to the air-conditioning. Besides, it wasn’t really honest, the money we were making there. Do you remember? Igor thought up this brilliant wheeze for advertising the houses the company was building. We set up this competition for children to draw My Dream House. We used the winners in our ad campaign. The paintings were wonderful. But it wasn’t honest—it looked as if the company was really going to build those dream houses. Which couldn’t have been further from the truth!”

I was sleeping in a hut across the yard from theirs. As I went to bed I noticed an unopened crate of vodka bottles stashed under a table in the corner of the room. So Natasha was still drinking. How come she was looking so happy, so healthy, then? How come they were publishing
The Messenger
, but giving it away? How were they earning any money? Nothing quite added up.

However, I had cleared up an old mystery. Over supper I asked Igor and Natasha about those rumors running around Novosibirsk when I last visited them. Rumors of a leak at the plutonium factory near their flat. Were they right? Yes, it was a bad leak, they admitted. Natasha, who was marinated in alcohol, was unaffected. But Igor, who did not drink, suffered badly. His teeth fell out soon after my visit.

After I turned off the light the sound of digging started up, quite close by, in the next-door garden. Now and then a torch flashed. On and on the digging went. What could they be doing, I wondered as I drifted off to sleep.

THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY

When the cock crowed at dawn next day, the household was already stirring, to my astonishment. My friends had been confirmed night owls. The morning sun slanted through the window into the tin basin as I washed my face. My question about the moonlight digging made Natasha and Igor laugh: “They must have been burying something they’d stolen,” said Igor. “You’ll soon find nothing here’s the way it seems!”

After breakfast, Natasha and I set off for Sevastopol. The couple never left home together now, not since the burglary, when all their computer files relating to
The Messenger
were wiped. It was a warning: someone wanted them to know they were being watched. But Igor was not going to miss us: Volodya had left behind a fat file for him and he sat up late into the night reading it. There was a gleam in his eye; he had his material for the next edition of
The Messenger
.

Heavily laden with passengers, the communal taxi labored uphill toward the port. As we reached the summit, I could see why this southwesterly point of the Crimean peninsula was so bitterly fought over for the last two thousand years. The city stood on a series of headlands divided by profound inlets. They were superb natural harbors. Along their banks lay the rusting hulks of the old Soviet navy.

From one headland we boarded a ferry to the city center on the next. Natasha stood in the prow, wind in her hair: “How good it is to get out. I adore wandering.” Then she thought for a moment: “Yes, I know what you’re thinking—I hope I
have
mastered the restlessness. But I can’t be sure.”

In the sea-bright air the low, white-painted buildings of Sevastopol sparkled. Set back from tree-lined streets, garnished with neoclassical touches, they were punctuated by elaborate war memorials and unexpected glimpses of the sea. After the German army besieged it and left it in ruins in 1941 Sevastopol was awarded the status of a “hero city.” The architects from Leningrad rebuilt it on the old lines of the nineteenth-century naval garrison. Until the end of the Cold War it was closed to foreigners. Today, its dingy Soviet-style shops were still decked out with obsolete products.

There we met up with Volodya, who showed us around the city. With his old-fashioned military courtesy and self-deprecating competence Volodya was good company, but so unlike Natasha and Igor that it was hard to imagine how life had thrown them together.

We visited the huge stone rotunda which housed a panoramic depiction of another yearlong siege of the city, this time by France, Britain, and Turkey in the Crimean War of 1854–1855. There was little in the panorama’s account to remind us that this siege ended in defeat. Perhaps that was as it should be. History called it a defeat. But the city survived and remained a Russian stronghold, home to the imperial navy.

One civilization after another fought for mastery of this peninsula. The greatest of the caravan routes from China ended in Crimea. It was from this southwesterly anchorage that the cargo was dispatched to the markets of Europe. Under the Greeks, the city-state of Chersonesos flourished here. Today people were clambering over its fallen columns, carrying their picnics across its paved forums to the beach beyond. After the Greeks, the city fell to the Romans; then to the Huns, Byzantium, and Kievan Rus before becoming a Genoese trading colony. From one of these Genoese enclaves in Crimea, the city of Caffa, the Black Death entered Europe. The Mongols razed the city when they colonized the Eurasian landmass at the end of the thirteenth century. Long after their empire was broken they remained in their khanate in Crimea, continuing to harass Muscovy from the south. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the Russian army managed finally to dispel this threat.

By that time Russia was desperate for an outlet to the south. The empire needed to secure a southern port for trading, as well as a navy to protect itself. When Catherine the Great wrested Crimea away from the Turks in 1783 she had dreams of reviving the Byzantine Empire, with her grandson Constantine as emperor.

The Turks were not alone in being alarmed by those ambitions. The British and French had imperial territories to defend. So in the middle of the nineteenth century, all three powers came together to destroy Russia’s Crimean fleet once and for all.

A century and a half later the fleet was still there, if rusty. The big question now was whether Russia’s navy really would agree to leave Sevastopol peacefully in 2017. Despite its white paint and brave show, there was an air of tubercular romanticism about the city. Although a mere 1.5 percent of Crimea’s population spoke Ukrainian, this was Ukraine now. The Russian officers, the sailors, and the large supporting civilian workforce stranded here with their rusting hulks were pawns in the larger political game being played around them.

The city was virtually ungovernable, Volodya said. The last elected mayor died in mysterious circumstances. There had been no mayor at all since then. To the extent that it was being run at all, Ukraine’s President Kuchma and Russia’s Ministry of Defense did so directly, but pulling in opposite directions. In the vacuum in between, criminal gangs acted with impunity, running protection rackets, drugs and arms deals and murdering anyone who stood in their way.

When Volodya was brought here from the Afghan front the doctors pieced him together and he reengaged on this new battle-front. He served as the navy’s commissar in Sevastopol, in charge of welfare. Being honest and energetic, he was popular, far too popular for the town’s administration, who sacked him. So he ran instead for Sevastopol’s Duma. The election brought him so many votes that it looked inevitable he would become chair of the Duma. That was when his chief rival accused him of bribing voters with vodka. This was an unlikely charge, as Volodya did not drink. It was rendered even more implausible by the fact that he was accused of bribing voters in six different places at once, as 120 witnesses offered to testify. He was allowed neither to challenge the case in court, nor take office. As Igor warned me, nothing in Sevastopol was the way it seemed.

It was at this juncture that he happened to meet Igor and Natasha, whose fortunes were also at a low ebb. Igor, observing that Volodya needed a new power base, proposed that they start an organization to support the welfare of the “former people,” Russian ex-servicemen and-women. Many of them were now in desperate straits, needing help to adapt to civilian life. That was how the League of Officers came into being.

This unlikely relationship seemed to work. They made up for one another’s deficiencies. Volodya, for all his leadership qualities, lacked a higher education. My clever friends had more education between them than they knew what to do with. In that corrupted scene, they shared one vital quality, honesty.

The League of Officers now had some seven hundred members, and
The Messenger
was its newspaper. In fact, it was not really a paper, more a series of in-depth
samizdat
reports, a guerrilla publication which appeared irregularly, when something needed saying. Some five thousand copies would be published, given away free. This way, as Volodya explained, it could not be closed down by having crippling taxes imposed on it. Nor could Volodya be accused of taking bribes.

The Messenger
played a significant role in the life of Sevastopol. It was the only publication not directly controlled by the local administration. Notionally, Volodya was its editor. Rumors about the paper were rife: it enjoyed powerful backing and was produced by a staff of thirty. In fact, it was entirely written by Igor and Natasha. Their names appeared nowhere, and they received no salaries for their work, only gifts. This was deliberate. Anonymity was their only protection. For since they had no institutional backing, they ran the danger of being casually eliminated if their identity leaked out.

•  •  •

Here in Crimea, the couple appeared finally to have found a place where their personal dramas were drowned out by the larger crisis going on around them. Yet experience made me cautious. There was always that dark force in Natasha that kept her dancing to a music the rest of us did not hear. That dance had carried her from the inner circle of the Soviet aristocracy to the status of penniless outcast. It had kept the two of them spinning around Russia like tops, full of fine intentions which did not materialize, unable to shake off their trouble, to settle down and become part of Russia’s new middle class.

The sun was long over the hills by the time Natasha and I arrived home. Igor was looking pleased with himself: in our absence, he had produced a draft of the new edition. The file Volodya left him contained a record of the correspondence between a local businessman, who was an ex-officer, and the head of the administration. The businessman wanted to supply gas to Sevastopol, supplanting the ancient Soviet system, which was in a state of collapse. The letters documented the bribes that the administration demanded of the businessman. He refused; he knew that if he gave in, he would be vulnerable to arrest at any time. From then on, the administration would be able to milk him dry.

My friends were excited: the new issue of
The Messenger
was going to be explosive. It was the first time a businessman was prepared to go public on the issue of bribes. Igor had spent the day substantiating the story; they had to be totally sure of their facts, for
The Messenger
was only as good as its reputation. Tonight, Natasha would rewrite Igor’s draft. It would be on the streets within a few days.

ONE SMALL MEND IN THE PAST

Natasha and I spent the afternoon traveling by ferry and bus around the promontory, exploring the battlefields of the Crimean War. We climbed up to an old Genoese fort on the gentle green hills above Balaklava. Down below, in the perfect little harbor with its graceful swan-necked outlet to the sea, a few old buildings on the waterfront were done up, and people were sitting out in the shade of umbrellas. But this idyllic, almost Mediterranean scene was spoiled by a rusting metal floating dock and a string of rusting naval vessels which hogged the waterfront. On the far side of the harbor you could see the gateway to the submarine base which the Soviets had hollowed out of the rock.

During the Crimean War it was from this little harbor that the British kept their troops supplied. Up that valley in front of us, under fire from Russian guns on either side, the Light Brigade galloped their horses in the charge commemorated in Tennyson’s famous poem:

Theirs not to reason why
,
Theirs but to do and die
.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
.