by Tim Moore
‘Meat Beach Gardens.’
‘Children’s Alexander.’
‘Tea Pork with JW Boils.’
‘The Sultan Episode.’
Tatiana’s enthusiasm for this technology did not ease the ordeal; battling my features into respectability, I looked up at her open, expectant face and falteringly ordered support beef with titles of mushroom. She smiled and scribbled, then spoke once more into her phone.
‘What is not a drink?’ it mused in response.
‘Pivo,’ I said.
With a flustered look she shook her head and a free hand, then held the phone to my mouth promptingly.
‘Pivo,’ I told it.
The device said something in Russian that seemed to disappoint her. She pressed the screen a number of times then showed me its suggestions, translated back to English:
‘You knew. Pencil case. Peugeot.’
We tried again.
‘Beer,’ I said.
‘Bill,’ offered the phone. Then: ‘Pace of the warp.’
‘Heineken!’ I blurted, launching into a strident roll-call of ales that began with Champions League-grade ubiquities and went very sharply downwards, ‘Amstel, Budweiser … Skol … Carling Black La—’
‘Ah, piva.’
Unaccountably, my support beef and its accompanying refreshments were delivered by a young man who spoke better English than anyone else I met in Russia.
‘Your bicycle, it is different,’ he said by way of introduction. Let me guess: was it the colour? ‘I think it is not easy to do many kilometres on such so-small bicycle.’ I concurred. Viktor was a font of wistful observation, the son of an Uzbek English teacher who had come to Russia two years before and said he would always feel like a foreigner. ‘Gostilitsy is not wonderful,’ he said superfluously, placing before me ten dice-sized cubes of dry meat and their meagre fungal garnish. ‘Important in last war, but now not important. I like to work in St Petersburg, maybe as translator or in shop.’ I began and finished my meal in the course of this brief address; when I asked Viktor to see the menu again, the cloven hoof popped out: ‘It is too late, kitchen closed!’
In September 1941, Gostilitsy’s defenders heroically withstood the Nazis’ hitherto relentless advance on Leningrad, forming a bridgehead that somehow held firm until Hitler was pushed back two and a half years later – a last line of defence that helped foil the Führer’s well-developed plan to wipe a huge, proud city right off the map.
With its grim legends of rat pies and bark-eating, the Siege of Leningrad was well known to me. Or so I had thought. In fact, my grasp of this slow-motion atrocity didn’t come close to an appreciation of its horror. Cannibalism became so common that the authorities had to amend the criminal code with two new articles for ‘special category banditry’: those who ate corpses (and were generally imprisoned), and those who killed people for food (and were shot). At the height of the siege ten cannibals were arrested every day, three-quarters for the non-capital offence; by the end of 1942, 2,105 cannibals had been charged, and the siege still had a year to run. In one six-month period, 1,216 citizens were murdered for their ration cards.
The individual accounts are unbearable. ‘I watched my father and mother die,’ one man remembered. ‘I knew perfectly well they were starving, but I wanted their bread more than I wanted them to stay alive. And they knew that about me too. That’s what I remember about the siege: that feeling that you wanted your parents to die because you wanted their bread.’ When it was over Leningrad had suffered the greatest loss of life any city has ever endured in war or peace: 1.5 million citizens died, mostly through starvation. There have been moves to classify this human tragedy as an act of genocide.
Though extensive, my incomprehension of Russian menus was in truth not quite all-encompassing: every dish, indeed every ingredient in every dish, was always followed by brackets containing its requisite weight in grams. I might never know what went into a Children’s Alexander, but I could tell you it had 180g of one thing and 15g of another. It was the same now at breakfast, when Viktor laid before me the specified 20g of porridge, prepared with 100g of milk. The common denominator, as exemplified by my support beef’s desiccated tininess and the finger-bowl of cooked oats now congealing before me, was unabundance – what those of us in the long-distance shopping-bike game call ‘not nearly enough food’. If, as I did now, you ordered bread, you received, as I would shortly, a single small slice. I had previously ascribed this phenomenon to lingering socialist parsimony, or some pilot project to starve foreign cyclists to death. Now, though, I wondered if these carefully weighed, tiny meals might be a legacy of traumatic shortage and hunger: more than four million Russians died of malnourishment between 1941 and 1944, adding to a pre-war toll perhaps twice that across the Soviet Union, courtesy of famines inflicted by Stalin’s ruthless imposition of collectivised agriculture. It was an extremely sobering thought, and one that meant Comrade Timoteya pedalled away from Gostilitsy’s grocery with many high-calorie capitalist confections concealed about his person.
If Finland had hosted the hardest weeks of my life, then Russia was home to the longest days. The last was a War and Peace job, 120km of all-weather, multi-surface tribulation. Through sleet-slitted eyes, I watched careworn figures drag themselves to village bus stops for their ride to work, bent into the malevolent headwind that would be trying to push me back into Russia all day. It was back below zero and each one of these bundled-up strugglers seemed to embody the blunt old maxim that might as well be Russia’s national motto: life is shit, and then you die. Then it was out across a scorched bleakness of derelict farmland, the broken hulks of cream-brick Stalinist mega-barns marooned in burned hogweed and gorse. Try as I might, it was hard to imagine these draped in the agricultural propaganda banners I had read about that morning in my habitual breakfast companion, Anne Applebaum’s authoritatively withering Iron Curtain – The Crushing of Eastern Europe:
Colorado beetles are smaller than atomic bombs, but they are also a weapon of US imperialism against our peace-loving workers!
Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of the imperialist warmongers!
The surface declined to a state more pothole than road; as the sleet cleared I could see cars bumping mazily about ahead, gingerly picking their way through hostile, cratered terrain like the Mars Rover. Speeds at least were way down. On such roads the native motorist’s habitual pace would reduce a car to its component parts in minutes; a Russian car in seconds. The shambolic degradation of Ladas and Moskviches still in apparent daily use invited much unkind speculation on the rigour of a Russian MOT: I imagined an inspector slamming the driver’s door, ready to sign off a pass if fewer than four things fell off in consequence.
None of this was doing the MIFA many favours. Quite how I avoided hourly punctures in my shards-of-Lada verge-zone remained a mystery, but with 2,000km up the bike was now trailing a reedy, pained shriek. Along with occasional terminal-sounding clonks from the hub area this demanded investigation, but it was now far too cold to muster the requisite dexterity. I swapped my one glove between hands every fifteen minutes, then every ten, and spent a fruitless and painful after-lunch session in a bus shelter attempting to swaddle my numb feet in gaffer tape. My virgin saddle sore had ripened to a nexus of the purest agony and my jaws ached from their battle with permafrosted Snickers. Like Hitler and Napoleon before me, my Russian campaign was being derailed by the durably awful conditions. Paging Comrade Timoteya! Comrade Timoteya to the saddle please!
My first race was the turning point. It was a straight fight between me and another elderly shopping cyclist, a docker-hatted old geezer who I reeled in as he laboured through the outskirts of a village. The wave of fraternity as I passed was clearly misconstrued: twenty minutes later, back out on the lonely plain, a dour rearward grunting announced his presence in my slipstream. I turned my head and met the blotchy, challenging face of Rocky’s trainer: You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thu
nder!
Instinctively I pushed down hard on the pedals, then reflected and eased off. His little front wheel and its green mudguard hoved alongside, then with a jaw-rippling effort he toiled past and took the wind in his hard old face. I watched him judder and weave away, thinking: Have your fun, Granddad. You’re fighting battles, I’m waging a war. This ride of mine wasn’t a sprint, but a yo-heave-ho marathon in the grand Soviet tradition. The indomitable knuckling-down to an impossibly vast task, the forbearance to endure the grimmest reversals and come back for more – that was how to beat Hitler, or cultivate the steppes, or ride 10,400km on a shopping bike. That morning I had for the first time surveyed my little map of EV13’s entirety without the urge to burn it or hurt myself. My goal remained distant, and my daily increments towards it negligible. But progress had now been tangibly made, there in the marker-pen line I’d traced from the northern tip of Norway to the southern Baltic coast. Inspired, I put the hammer down, and took a regrettable trophy snap as I barrelled past the old man in the next village along.
When the sun came out and I passed my first sign for Estonia I could have cried. So I did, a bit. But Russia never goes down without a fight, and I duly spent the late afternoon wrestling my steed towards the stilted old border watchtowers lined up in the sunset. I hauled it over a teetering mountain of rubble and on to an endless railway-side path interrupted by many more of the same. I dragged it up an overgrown embankment to avoid a dog ready to bark himself to death in defence of a car bonnet. Twice I lugged it across the rusty tracks. Finally and most memorably, I raised it over a large log that a stout old woman had levered across the path, with effortful deliberation and a pitchfork, when she spotted my distant approach from her lonely cottage threshold. With folded arms and a placid air she watched as I lowered the MIFA back to earth and remounted; I looked back a moment later and saw her forking the log back to its original station.
Then there were great queues of lorries, a slight contretemps with a guard’s Alsatian and all the usual po-faced border rituals, borne this time with a very different sort of anticipation. In dusky light I wheeled the MIFA across a no man’s land bridge beneath the meaty witch-hat towers of Hermann Castle, and with prickling eyes past that hallowed circle of gold stars on a blue background. My phone trilled; I kissed the screen that welcomed me to Estonia, where calls were charged at the standard EU rate. Class Traitor Timoteya seduce by empty promise of imperialism, sentence in absence to inseminate many pig and airbrush from all archive.
My mood of exultation blinded me to the fact that Narva, whose twilit streets I now gleefully patrolled, was dominated by stack-a-prole Soviet blocks and Cyrillic script. In this same heady, heedless spirit, I found a hotel, fairly bounded up the stairs and told the young receptionist how very, very happy I was to be out of Russia.
‘That is good for you,’ she said, handing me a key with a rigid smile, ‘but bad for me.’
‘Is it?’
‘I am Russian. Here we are all Russian.’
7. ESTONIA AND LATVIA
The night before entering Russia I had lain in bed thinking of all the things I’d miss about Finland. It was an extensive list that covered most human needs: on the most starkly fundamental level I was exchanging a country where you could drink from the hot tap for one where you couldn’t from the cold. The morning after leaving Russia I made an even longer list of what I wouldn’t miss about it. My first Estonian meal had been a cornucopian rebuke to the era of 20-gram Alexanders, a weighty platter of bulbous sausage, cheese and fried bread, brought to me along with many frothing steins of ale by a game old dear in a bierkeller outfit. Everyone here might be Russian but I’d spoken English all night, and been smiled at in the right way. I’d slept under cotton sheets. My satnav maps were back, as were the euro and the Latin alphabet. So too bike paths, and not just any bike paths: weaving back from the restaurant I’d passed my very first Euro Velo sign (for EV10, which EV13 followed through most of the Baltics). Belatedly I realised I couldn’t grant Russia the get-out clause that has allowed me to tolerate the failings of so many nations over the years: it hadn’t even been especially cheap.
The unRussianness of my new world cheered me all morning as I whistled up the River Narva’s broad brown estuary, flicking the Vs at Putinland, over there on the other side. All through the Cold War years, I’d thought of the Soviet empire as a single, one-nation entity: we called it the Eastern Bloc, though its component countries had never been in any way united prior to 1945, and effectively had nothing in common. How good it was to be reminded of their resurgent idiosyncrasies. Estonia’s roads were smooth, and overtaking cars gently whooshed past at a respectful distance. A policeman drove by in a brand-new Skoda Octavia, a compelling contrast to the humiliating old Ladas and MASH-era jeeps foisted on his cross-border counterparts, which might as well be plastered in stickers reading: Funnily enough, yes I am amenable to bribery. If these people were ethnic Russians then they were house-trained: they didn’t chuck bottles out of the window, shave their heads or let stupid, furious dogs run loose.
And yet so much of the backdrop was Russian, or at least Soviet: those prefab tenement blocks, the memorial T-34s and hero tractors on mossy plinths, the rundown Commie spa resorts out of town with their muddy, joyless pleasure gardens and bullying concrete hotels. I overtook an old chap on a bike weighed down with scavenged firewood, and saw a few more picking discreetly through bins. This was the EU, but not as I knew it.
Even the weather went Russian on me after I hit the cliffy Baltic coast and turned left. At once a stinging gale punched me in the face, pushing my snood hard against its ever bonier contours. Why was this still happening? Here we were in the second half of April, with forests full of birdsong and violets and fields flecked with sheep. Yet there I was, having ridden south for 2,000km, stopping at a seaside resort to buy more socks. I had a great idea for a book as I pulled them on in the lee of a wheelie bin: man rides bike through Finland and Russia, then puts bike in car and drives to Black Sea.
Buffeted gulls and geese shrieked their dismay, two flaps forward, one flap back over the tussocked bluffs and the mean grey sea below. I chuntered bitterly into my head coverings, letting the wind know in no uncertain terms what I thought of its behaviour, loud and often, and cursing that awful disconnect between what my eyes saw and my legs endured, the torture of cycling up a vast hill that wasn’t there, of battling Mother Nature in an invisible rugby scrum. My eyes streamed and my snood hid a multitude of sins, principally the sin of drool and the sin of horribly snotting yourself.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Headwind was so frigid I had to stop & buy more socks. Spent most of the day chuntering bitterly into my snood.
At diminishing intervals I took shelter behind the old pillboxes and ruined barracks strung out all along the clifftops, warming hands in armpits and rusting the Iron Curtain’s stumpy foundations with wayward sprinkles of rider Tizer. Nowhere on earth had a worse war than little Estonia, burned and bombed to bits by Nazis and Soviets, its menfolk conscripted by both armies in turn. Factor in Stalin’s post-war massacres and deportations and the country lost 25 per cent of its population in the 1940s. Here and across the Baltics, Horrid Joe made up the numbers with a concerted programme of Russification, resettling a million ethnic Russians in a deliberate move to erode national identity. In 1945, just 4 per cent of Estonian residents called themselves Russian; by 1989, almost a third did. It was much the same in Latvia and Lithuania, and in the weeks ahead I would hear a lot of nervous mutters about Putin’s sabre-rattling, and which of the Baltics would be first on his to-do list once he’d ticked off Ukraine. Just occasionally an ethnic Russian would whisper that things were more complicated than they looked.
Our 1990 route had looped around the Baltic states: they were still in the Soviet Union, and therefore a royal pain in the arse to travel through. With so many resident Russians, it’s perhaps not surprising that the drive for independence was a little
slow off the mark here. Nor that this drive rumbled to life in Estonia, which had always been an outsider, a nation with a funny Finnishy language where most TV aerials were turned to Helsinki. The drawn-out Baltic uprising that saw off the Soviets is collectively known as the Singing Revolution, but they barely mustered a hum in Latvia and Lithuania: Estonia was the iron-throated crucible of this very particular pro-democracy rebellion. For four years, huge crowds – regularly containing a third of Estonia’s entire population – would gather to bellow out banned national folk songs, a tide of anger and pride that swelled unstoppably. The Soviet Union had stubbornly clung on to the Baltics as all its other satellites defected to democracy, but after Yeltsin sat on that tank in Moscow and the hardliners’ 1991 coup unravelled, the last outposts of empire were lost in days.
In Sillamäe, I pondered all this while stuffing rolls into my numb face behind a derelict office block. More of the same were mingled with Soviet tenements, all leading down to a line of giant chimneys along the seafront. The town’s faintly entertaining name had attracted my attention during the breakfast route-survey; the history of Sillamäe was anything but. Built more or less from scratch by the Soviets in the 1940s and populated exclusively with shipped-in Russians, this was a closed town that appeared on no maps, known to the postal service by the code-name ‘Moscow 400’. The reason: the plant beneath those chimneys produced over 100,000 tons of elementary uranium, refining it for use in the Soviet’s first nuclear warhead and no less than 70,000 of its successors (how very hard it was to process that dumbfounding figure, along with the subsidiary revelation that at its peak in 1985, the Soviet nuclear arsenal comprised 39,197 weapons).
As I came to discover, the Soviets commandeered endless stretches of the Baltic coast for nefarious ends: though my compact map showed EV13 clinging to the beach, it actually spent most of its time skulking distantly behind the dunes, diverted around radar stations, nuclear waste dumps, naval bases and training camps. These were the legacies of the Soviet Union in its ruthless, paranoid pomp. The leaders who sent in the tanks to crush revolts in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia twelve years later would never, I thought, have allowed 300,000 Estonians to trill away en masse in praise of nationhood and democracy. In reality that irresistible tide of pride and anger was eminently resistible. For tempting as it is to imagine the USSR being undone by humanity’s irresistible urge for freedom, in truth it just lost its mojo and fell apart. With the bomb built, space conquered, its people housed and all the other big boxes ticked, the Soviets ran out of motivation and momentum. A general hardening of the arteries set in, literally so for the ageing old guard. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev was in many ways just a fortunate accident – the politburo had no idea he would push through the reforms that got the revolutionary ball rolling. (Nor in truth did Gorby himself: as an ardent Leninist he believed that Communism simply needed re-energising, and was quietly aghast when his attempts to do so precipitated its collapse.) The two general secretaries who had followed Brezhnev were frail veterans who lasted barely a year each, and the Soviet top brass simply saw Gorbachev as a slightly more vigorous candidate who wasn’t about to peg out. In a tweaked alternative universe, they might plausibly have plumped for the thrusting young KGB colonel Vladimir Putin. We can only speculate how the man who describes the USSR’s break-up as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ would have handled the Singing Revolution, but I can’t see him clapping along in the chorus.