For three and a half years, between Autumn 2018 and 2022, the most thrilling words I could say to anyone – especially myself – were ‘I live in Russia.’ I had read about the country since I was a child – obsessively from my mid-twenties onwards – and it was Holy Land for me. Other people I knew had flirted with the place on study-courses, temporary work-placements or backpacking, yet always with an end in sight.
But I had a child growing up in Rostov, in southern Russia, had put down roots, integrated into its society and planned to grow old there. For the rest of my life, I thought, I would be taking evening strolls down Pushkinskaya Avenue, experiencing its suffocating summers and snowy winters. The city’s bath-houses – whose extremes of heat, along with the cold, had become a kind of addiction – were just a weekly taxi-ride away. Nothing and no one, I thought, could wrench me away from the place. This was home.
Rostov-on-Don is terra incognita to most Westerners and photos on the internet are not much use. They show a place almost Mediterranean in its pedestrian avenues and cafes, or as a slick, four-square city on the banks of the Don. Both of these miss the point. Rostov’s charm lay in its haphazardness, its almost complete lack of plan. Pristine modern buildings sat next to Soviet hulks, beside which squatted little wooden 19th century shacks in which you could barely believe anyone lived.
Russians knew the country functioned on a kind of knife-edge
‘To this day I love its stones,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn of this city where he grew up, and you understood him. There was something sad and lovely about its different textures and colours: the soft ochre, dirty pink or sky blue of its official institutes, or the solidity of its brick-built houses. (Rostov makes you study brickwork as other cities school you in cobbles or Doric arches). Dusty, ramshackle, friendly, motheaten, it was the perfect place to spend your middle years, as shop-soiled and compromised as you sometimes felt inside.
I lived in a small flat – a khrushchevka – with a balcony overlooking a kindergarten full of squealing kids, and Gorky Park next door. The flat, decorated ‘grandmother style’ with old parquet floors, heavy bloc furniture, a chandelier and a gas stove, was the Soviet dream. A few minutes’ walk away was the city’s Orthodox cathedral and the Central Market – the ‘Old Bazaar’ elderly residents call it – just beside it.
The square that stood in front of both, bisected by tramlines, was chaotic, raffish and full of locals selling goods which changed with the seasons: watermelons, sweetcorn, knitted booties, handmade toys, flowers and Christmas trees. Inside the market – the real one – Uzbeks baked lipioshka (a flat crunchy loaf) in a clay oven, Tajiks sold spices, there were Armenians with apricots and pomegranates, Dagestani beekeepers with twenty types of honey. In the winter darkness, near the tramlines, the stalls outside would light up their goods with candles burning behind glass. All this was new, terribly un-English, and bewitching.
I liked the people and they seemed to like me. Rostovites tended to be practical, down-to-earth, unshockable (except by the more garish aspects of Western liberalism) and to love humour – the reckless kind – for its own sake. Many kept open door, fascinated by the differences between East and West. Local artists, some excellent, were easy to meet and budged up to make room for you in their social lives. I had been prepared for a criminal city – Rostov was the father of crime, Odessa the mother went the saying – but walked around untroubled even at night in this metropolis alleged to be the serial killer capital of the world.
Sometimes you met neo-Stalinists, whose eyes would go dead if you criticised their hero
You never stopped making new discoveries there. This old building, you found out, was a school for accordion players, that tiny hole in the wall housed a moustached Cossack whose bunker was a cornucopia of stationary products. Down in that shadowy basement off Moskovskaya Street was an elderly man whose sole employment was mending umbrellas. Non-chain bars and cafes would spring up, some of them labours of love. In my favourite, a dingy old music pub called ‘German Pepper Sausage’, I saw ‘Father Mackenzie’, the best Beatles tribute band – composed of four local workers – I’d ever seen. The sight of a packed bar of drunk Russian teenagers getting up and dancing, sixty years on, to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ wasn’t easily forgotten.
It was like going through a portal to the past. The city’s transport system was another case in point. No monthly passes, not even bus-tickets – you merely handed the coins to the driver who would sweep them into a pot and let you pass. On marshrutka minibuses you would be on trust to pay as you got out. Sometimes, in these no-smoking vehicles, the driver would be puffing furtively on a cigarette or sending text-messages while he drove. You’re either someone who finds this kind of thing hellish – the majority I suppose – or vaguely liberating. I loved it and felt I could breathe: it seemed like normality to me.
It was also a country untouched by the New Western Sensitivity with all its attendant neuroses. Arriving back there three Septembers ago, fresh from a summer-job in a British university whose campus was littered with posters warning that a staggering range of human misdemeanours were ‘never okay’, I would feel a lightening of the heart and a kind of mental unbuckling. Here you could compliment a colleague on her clothes, or make edgy jokes in a class without worrying afterwards about a barrage of complaints. Russia too of course had its ‘never okay’ things: criticising the Kremlin, questioning the divine right of the Orthodox Church, or touching on the subject of gay marriage (though at various times I heard individuals semi-publicly do all three). Despite the Kremlin’s authoritarianism, the country’s daily culture, at least until last year, was loosely wound, improvised and oddly human. As the old saying went, the severity of Russian laws was made up for by the laxness with which they were enforced. (Unless, of course, you fell foul of the authorities, when they were enforced with all the severity in the world.)
Russians knew the country functioned on a kind of knife-edge and sometimes didn’t function at all. When Putin threatened some years back to put a wall around the Russian internet, I fretted to an IT worker about it. Rolling his eyes he said wearily, in words which now seem prophetic, ‘Robin, this is Russia. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.’ Encouraged by a colleague to start my own business there, I demurred: I had no ideas what the rules were or how things worked. She looked at me like I was mad: ‘Neither do we.’
I look back now – I do more than that – over signs that the Ukrainian war was coming, that I failed to pick up. A conversation with a local fanatic, fierce in his longing for the Soviet Union’s return, feeling his generation had been cheated of direction or meaning. The local pipe club I joined and to which I took a liberal friend who, when I said afterwards how pleasant the men there had been, replied: ‘You didn’t hear what they were talking about…They were all fascists.’ A couple of workmen did my bathroom, their conversation, over days, a dreary litany of racist epithets, punctuated by the word ‘khokhol’ (a derogatory term for Ukrainians). Sometimes you met neo-Stalinists, whose eyes would go dead if you criticised their hero. Yet all these types seemed anomalous: it didn’t occur to you their time was coming.
It came with a vengeance last February. One should have expected it for months, ever since the aerial photos of the military build-up on the border the Autumn before. But life went on with no one around me, even after the grotesque meeting of the security council on the 21 February, really believing Putin would invade. ‘Western propaganda,’ I was told. ‘Do you think our president is mad?’
On 24 February we woke to find out he was. ‘Vladimir Putin launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine’ – those seven shattering, life-changing words. My ex and my daughter made sudden plans to emigrate and did so. People started to hoard their words and speak in hushed voices. Abruptly the city – often so warm – seemed coated in a kind of paranoia, in fear, introversion, distrust.
Nearly a million people would be departing from Russia in the following months, leaving their homes, jobs and possessions behind, convinced that the country they loved had turned on them and no longer had a place for them. For all my dreams of a Russian future, I was one of them.
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