Diary – 12 January 2017

In December I was in a group of writers on a British Council visit to Moscow, where the UK was the guest nation at the Moscow Book Fair. This entailed going to art galleries, restaurants and to the Bolshoi as well as giving various talks. The hunger for books at the fair itself was extraordinary. Young people queued with armfuls of the latest Jim Crace, Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes or Marina Warner in the hope of a signature. Used as we are to the apologetic €1,000 advance and talk of young people not reading any more, this was heady stuff. One night my Russian publisher, Alexander Andryuschenko, took me and my son William, who was passing through, to dinner at the Pushkin restaurant because he says it is the only place you can get ‘real Russian food’. We ate meat and smoked fish in a semi-frozen state, as it was in the old days when it was dug out from under the snow at the beginning of spring. It was wonderful. Mind you, the three of us drank a whole bottle of vodka with it, so we were inclined to the positive.

Last time I was in Moscow was in 2000. The hotel lobbies then swarmed with prostitutes, Goldman Sachs salesmen and Russian gangsters — an oddly homogeneous group. On the surface, those Wild West days are now over; things seem more orderly. Yet there is a nostalgia for Stalin and a sense of the past creeping back. You see this in the hatchet-faced security men, who look like former Gulag guards. One such official was making life difficult for Sir Ian McKellen when he went to Moscow a few months earlier as part of the British Council Shakespeare festival. Back and forth went Sir Ian’s passport, back and forth the sullen scrutiny from page to face till suddenly… ‘Gandalf!’ The guard leapt with joyous recognition, put his arm round the famous actor and begged to be allowed a selfie.