DIARY
ANTONY BEE VOR LMoscow
uba Vinogradova, my wonderfully irreverent translator, was waiting at Sheremetevo airport to collect me in her four-wheel-drive Lada. Her driving has improved dramatically. The main risk, she told me, was that we might be stopped by the police for not having a clean car. Apparently Luzhkov, the high-handed mayor of Moscow, has launched yet anoth- er drive to spruce up the capital. The Milit- ma has been told to immobilise any car Which is dirtY, and not allow its driver to proceed until it is clean. Her Lada is a pret- ty borderline case. Even my emergency hoard of British Airways hand-wipes would not have helped much. Luba also told me of another regulation in Moscow. The Mil- itsia is supposed to drive any foreigner lost in the city back to his hotel or apartment. She advised me, however, not to try flag- ging down police cars as taxis. Some regula- tions are purely for form's sake.
0 ne day, when taking a bus to an out- of-the-way archive, Luba suddenly decided to buy a women's magazine. The lead arti- cle advertised on the front was Have you ever tried to obey your husband just for a change?' Needless to say, this was not sup- posed to be a serious proposition. Accord- ing to the article, Russian women treat their husbands as creatures of limited intel- ligence. It also complained of how unsatis- factory men were in the Motherland. 'New Russians' were uncaring, soulless shits, While sensitive, artistic types never had their feet on the ground. A good example of the sensitive category was described to me a few days later. Over lunch in the Café Pushkin, an English friend living in Moscow recounted the story of a young Russian whom she knew well. He loved books but, to earn his living, he worked for a foreign company which paid him a good salary in dollars. When the rouble col- lapsed last autumn, his saved dollars sud- denly made him feel like a millionaire. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who dashed out to buy a car before the rouble price shot up, he went straight to the main bookshop on Tverskaya. He spent almost all his dollar savings, buying every book he had ever longed to own. In his heart, how- ever, he knew that he was going to be out of work following the crash, because the foreign company for which he worked would cut its losses and pull out of Russia. On the other hand he was convinced that this opportunity to buy books would never come again. Apparently, he now sits at home, jobless but blissfully happy, reading his library. It sounded rather like a modern version of one of Tolstoy's tales in which spirituality wins over materialism. Muscovites, whether book-lovers or not, certainly seem to conform to the old cliche about scratching a Russian and finding a peasant. They long to talk about gathering and preserving mushrooms, and you see them, with an earnest expression, carrying saplings on the Metro ready to plant them either at their dacha or outside their apart- ment block. Russians have a quasi-mystical relationship with the land, and yet theirs is probably the most polluted country in the world. You have only to sniff the air in some cities to know why ecological studies in Rus- sia are known as 'Goodbye, Motherland'.
Iknow that paradoxes are two a penny in the new Moscow but they still provoke curi- ous feelings. Luba and I had to suggest somewhere quiet to meet General Anatoly Mereshko who, as a young officer, had been on the headquarters staff of the 8th Guards Army in the Battle for Berlin. The only place I could think of was Patio Pizza, a restaurant like an industrial conservatory tacked on to the Intourist Hotel. Usually its music was very discreet, but this time — just when I was interviewing a former deputy commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces — they were playing the greatest hits of the James Bond movies at full blast.
Lthe Metro, on which we seem to spend almost a quarter of the day, switching between archives or going to interview veter- ans in far-flung tower blocks, I cannot help looking at the way people dress. The weather is now considered to be winter, even though a couple of sharp, cold days have been suc- ceeded by wetter, milder weather. The babushki have put on their round woolly hats, even those who work in the muggy depths of the Metro. It's a bit like the army changing seasonal uniform on a fixed date, whether or not the temperature makes the switch logical. But one fashion here which never seems to change among the middle-aged is black leather. You see caps, jackets and overcoats that bring back uncomfortable images of commissars in the civil war. This prompts the question: can one ever have a real democracy in a country where black leather remains quite so popular? A more serious definition of an acceptance of democracy is a nation's readiness to face up to its past. This issue cropped up when I had dinner with Anne Applebaum in a Turkish restaurant just off the Arbat. Anne, who is working on a history of the gulag, wondered out loud whether a country with such a terrifying history as Rus- sia's can ever really accept the reality of its past. We made comparisons with Germany (which has), France (which both has and hasn't), Japan (which has no intention of doing anything of the sort) and Austria (which is the most breathtakingly cynical and irresponsible of the lot). On the way home, I realised that one could not expect any sort of soul-searching from Russia, especially now, when it has been so economically humiliated. The only reason why Germany was able to own up to its past was the postwar economic miracle. There's nothing like some superior Vorsprung durch Technik to help you swallow historical humble-pie. Perhaps the trouble with Britain is that we have suffered from the exact reverse: too much historical self-satis- faction and not enough technological cutting edge.
Russia has most certainly not rejected the idea of ruthless warfare, which still retains a glow of heroic implacability from the days of the great patriotic war. I will never forget my previous visit to Moscow two months before, when terrorist bombs were blasting apartment blocks and killing their occupants. A former KGB officer said openly on breakfast television that chemi- cal weapons should be used against the Chechens, even if it meant killing children too, since they were the criminals of the future. 'I am afraid to say,' Luba warned me, 'that most people in Moscow probably think the same way.' She must have been right. The poll ratings of Putin, the previ- ously derided Prime Minister, soared once he adopted a flamboyantly tough line.
AI countries have split personalities, but Russia's seems more complex than most. It is confused between authoritarian and spiritual instincts, as well as torn by Slavophile and Westernising tendencies. Perhaps the Russians will manage to accommodate these different forces in their way. For example, they now have bouncy kremlins for children instead of copying Walt Disney-style castles. But for the moment, just to be safe, I think we had bet- ter wash the car before driving back to the airport for my return flight to London.
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