I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia

by John Mole

  All day I traipsed round GUM, the street markets, the tourist shops, without success. As Russian milliners hadn’t caught on to the idea of putting sizes in hats, they made me try on all their stock. Assistants tugged at the rims, incredulous managers brought tape measures, stock boys ransacked their storerooms, but every specimen of animal skin perched on my head like a cat on a cushion. I was depressed. Was this was a portent of my Russian adventure? If the cap fits wear it. And if it doesn’t fit?

  My way home passed the Moscow Cinema Centre. The main screen was showing the new Bruce Willis and was sold out. I loitered with the crowd on the steps and sidled up to people asking if they had a spare ticket to sell. In my new coat I must have looked like a tout, because several hopefuls asked how much I was selling for. The lucky ticket holders drifted inside and I was left alone.

  “My friend, you want movie? Come,” said a man behind me in English. He was slight, wiry, about 35, Mexican moustache, dark eyes, shabby grey suit, no coat or hat, nice small head. He led the way round the side of the cinema. Thinking he was slipping me through an emergency exit for a couple of bucks, I followed, but he opened the door into an office building. Not wishing to be found the next day minus wallet, new coat and several pints of blood, I turned back.

  “Come, please. Classic movie.”

  “I don’t watch porno.”

  “Not porno. Great movie.”

  “I don’t watch snuff.” Especially my own.

  “Hey You Goose. Lydia Bobrova. Very good Russian movie. Astakhov kinematographer. Nominated for Golden Leopard in Locarno.” For a mugger he knew his movies. It meant nothing: muggers go to the pictures too. “Ten dollars.”

  “Ten dollars! I don’t pay that in London”

  “Five dollars, then. And if you like movie you take home for fifty dollars.”

  This I couldn’t resist. We took the lift to the fifth floor, which had been opulent in its day, with white beech panelling, red carpet and frosted-glass wall lights. It seemed we were the only ones on the floor, if not the building. I followed him down a corridor to a pair of double doors. He opened one with a flourish and ushered me into a small viewing room with a dozen rows of what the Streatham Odeon calls fauteuils and pronounces footles.

  “Five dollars. Thank you. Sit down where you like. When reel wants change I am 502”

  The lights dimmed, the screen flickered and I was treated to a personal viewing of Hey You Goose, with English subtitles, in black and white, moving and funny, set in a provincial village at the time of the 1980 Olympics. The hopeless lives of the villagers contrasted with the hype and hoopla of the Olympics. When the projector clattered into white mist I went to fetch my projectionist down the corridor in room 502. On the second reel he was sitting at a desk opposite a plump, dyed blonde with jet-black eyebrows, a serious squint and an overbite. On the third reel they were on the same side of the desk dealing with a bottle of vodka and he had his jacket off. When the film finished I coughed and knocked loudly. They were flushed, but it could have been the vodka. Leonid searched for a glass in the bottom drawer of the desk while the woman kindly took my coat and bags and pulled up a chair for me.

  “I am Leonid. This Marta. I am PhD in English Linguistics. We are scream-writers. You?”

  “Biznismyen”

  “We are biznismyen too. We have made the Intercinema Agency - Insultant Services for Film Production, Distributing and Advertisements in Russia. What is your business?”

  “Fast-food restaurants.”

  “We have two tons of frozen meat. Pork, beef, chicken,” said Marta. Because of her squint she addressed an empty space about 45 degrees off, aggravating my growing sense of displacement.

  “What?”

  “We make publicity movie for the Saratov Machine Tool Company. They pay us frozen meat. Only three years old. Very fine”.

  I didn’t want to talk about catering. I asked if they made much of a living by ambushing film buffs in the street. Wasn’t there a more conventional way of attracting customers?

  “I only had idea when I saw you. Our first idea is to sell films. You want to buy the film? Fifty dollars.”

  “Don’t the films belong to the Film Centre?”

  “Nobody watches them no more. They want porno. Bruce Villis. Gollivud.”

  “I’d love to, but I don’t have a projector. Why don’t you advertise and get people to see them? You could get fifty dollars and keep the film.”

  We planned a marketing programme built around small ads in the English-language papers. I undertook to finance the first four insertions in return for free admission for life. To seal our new partnership, Marta went away and returned with sausage and a loaf of bread. I felt good about my part in saving the cinémathequé for posterity.

  We toasted friendship and success and world cinema. We concocted the plot for a comedy, to be co-produced in Britain and Russia, about an Englishman, a no-hoper and dreamer with a distorted and romantic idea of Russia, who comes to Moscow to try his luck and escape his creditors and pretends to be a wealthy biznismyen. He falls in with a Russian no-hoper and dreamer with a romantic and distorted idea of the West, who pretends to be well connected with the new nomenklatura. They con each other and try to set up a fast-food restaurant. They fancy the same woman and each thinks the other is sleeping with her. The mafia steps in and the business collapses. The girl brings them together, they save each other from the mafia and they plan another venture.

  “Darling,” said Leonid, “we have first draft scream-play in three days. I know everybody in film business. We start shooting in six months. Please, you find pre-financing.”

  “No problem. I’ll put it to my investors. I’m sure the British Board of Film Finance will come in as well,” I said, stepping into the character of our hero.

  “How about fifty dollars for immediate expenses?” asked Marta of an empty space two yards to my left. I pretended she wasn’t talking to me.

  Leonid talked about the smuggled foreign films they had watched as aspirant screenwriters. Comedy was his speciality and he knew the early Carry On films almost off by heart. Carry On Camping was his favourite. Unlike Leonid, Marta had actually worked in films before the industry died through lack of state financing. She talked about the actors she had worked with and sighed and implied that she had slept with them, but I fear it was brave talk. We bemoaned the invasion of Gollivud and the collapse of Russian cinema. I talked about A. A. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Solaris and Stalker and The Sacrifice - I didn’t confess I found them hard going.

  We got to the last half inch or so in the bottle, the moment for sentimentality before you toss the empty into the bin and life goes on. I told them the story of my day. I tried to make it funny, but I felt my eyes burn and a vodka-laced tear trickle down my cheek as I recalled my big head and the humiliation it had caused, from the day my mother sent me to the infant school round the corner in one of her pink sunhats, to standing hatless on the parade ground with 400 boys in berets, to having a crone in GUM prod the bumps on my head and tut.

  I sniffled and wiped my eyes. It was all so not as it should be. Leonid and Marta looked at me - at least I assume Marta did - and their eyes filled too, astonished at a display of emotion from an Englishman. They talked quickly to each other in low voices, too quickly for me to understand, and I didn’t care. Marta left the room. Leonid filled our glasses and tossed the bottle in the bin. We slugged the vodka down without a word. Leonid sighed. Marta came back. In her arms she cradled what looked like an obese cat. Looking over my shoulder she held it out to me. It was a hat, not fur but Astrakhan, thick tight curls of black wool. In all other respects it was a proper shapka with earflaps tied over the top with black tapes.

  “Try it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Trust me.”

  It wasn’t new, but there were no unpleasant sweat marks on the band inside or hair-oil stains on the lining. It was heavy. With two hands, like Napoleon crowning himself, I put it on. It
was a perfect fit. I had never worn such a hat. A hat that doesn’t sit on your head but envelops it. A hat that you do not wear, it wears you. Heavy and solid. There was no forgetting you had it on. I stood bolt upright because it threw me off balance if I stooped.

  Leonid applauded, his face creased with genuine pleasure. Marta looked smugly into space. She pointed to a mirror on the back of the door. I looked like the minotaur with a man’s body and a gigantic woolly head.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Andrei Konchalovsky. When he go to Gollivud for Tango and Cash he give it to archive. Big head.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Of course,” said Marta, “Fifty dollars.”

  A bargain. The cap fitted. And next Saturday the cine-matheque was full of foreigners paying five bucks to see subtitled Russian classics, as advertised in the Moscow Times.

  I took my hat for a walk. It was the end of autumn. An occasional flurry of snow dusted the slush underfoot and the temperature touched freezing in the middle of the night, but during the day it was mild and sunny. The political climate was more sinister, however. Revolution was in the air. An emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies had been called to impeach President Yeltsin. The Communists were poised to take back power and renounce what they called “political adventurism and romanticism about democracy”. The German Chancellor warned of the threat to Germany if Yeltsin was toppled. The G7 called an emergency session. The European papers ran profiles of army generals and whether they were likely to stay in their barracks.

  When I went out that sunny Sunday morning I didn’t anticipate spending the day at the epicentre of world-shaking events. I felt like a stroll round the icons at the new Tretyakov Gallery, a chocolate sundae in Red Square, a subtitled film at the Moscow Film Centre and a couple of pints of Guinness and a steak-and-kidney pie at Rosie O’Grady’s. It was a lovely day. Sunday bells were ringing and the sun shone from a china-blue sky on frosted walls and golden cupolas. My Astrakhan hat was a bit hot and itchy, but I had exchanged the commissar’s coat for an anorak. Looking like a native was not only vanity but protection from harassment. The currency touts and taxi drivers outside the museum ignored me.

  The Tretyakov is about half an hour’s pleasant walk from Red Square on the other side of the Moskva River. I sauntered back musing on icons, wishing I could learn to like them more, as to me one Dormition looks pretty much like another. I crossed the wide bridge to the sloping square in front of the Rossiya Hotel and behind St Basil’s to see a crowd scene from a jigsaw puzzle, masses of white dots for faces and swirling red-white-and-blue flags against the candy-coloured domes of the cathedral. What their PA system lacked in clarity it made up for in volume. Ranting speeches were punctuated by cheers and applause and blasts of patriotic music. Megaphones and car horns and a jazz band added to the gaiety.

  Up closer the scene was less coherent and lively than it appeared from the other side of the river. People milled around and chatted and ate ice cream and ignored the speeches. The cheering and applause came canned from the loudspeakers. From time to time a rabble rouser took the mike and tried to get a chant going, “Yeltsin Yeltsin Yeltsin”, but only a few enthusiasts in front of the podium joined in. Claques of students made the most noise. We were a varied lot, of all ages and types, as many older people in shabby clothes as youngsters in expensive jackets and jeans. Couples flirted and took photos of each other. Men wore dark jackets and medal ribbons. Vendors mooched around trying to sell badges and souvenirs and postcards, but business was poor except for paper flags. I bought a lapel badge from a gypsy-looking fellow who grumbled about the tourists being scared away.

  The only seriously motivated people were those who formed two queues snaking through the crowd, each over 100 yards long, for the His and Hers lavatory trucks parked by the end of the bridge. The toilets were simple constructions, a shed divided into five compartments on top of a trailer with a metal container underneath. Each cubicle had an open window from which refinements such as frosted glass or curtains had long since disappeared. The Hers truck was placed so that the windows faced the bridge in full view of pedestrians. You saw the back of a woolly hat just above the sill and then the owner stood up and a white bum filled the frame. Knickers were hoisted - I can report various shades of pink and beige - followed by a flurry of movement and another woolly hat appeared. An occasional passerby would loiter on the bridge for a better look, but the unselfconscious mooning was generally ignored.

  I was curious to see what was happening at the other end of Red Square. It was barricaded off and all the streets around were blockaded with trucks and buses full of young militiamen smoking and sleeping sweetly on each other’s shoulders. In contrast, GUM was open and full of shoppers indifferent to history. On the way through I stocked up on a cheese pie and a Pepsi in case the government fell and they sealed off Rosie O’Grady’s.

  The anti-Yeltsin faction was assembled in Manezh Square between the Moscow Hotel and the old Lenin Museum. Although the museum was closed for renovation and Leninism banished to the Revolution Museum on Tverskaya, it was still the regular meeting place for die-hard Communists. They had assembled about half as many people as the democrats. It was the same mix of young and old,shabby and smart, with a greater proportion of old men wearing dark jackets and medal ribbons. They looked more careworn and unhealthy than the others, possibly because they were not enjoying the sweets of the enterprise economy. Their allegiances were more fragmented than the democrats’. There were hammer-and-sickle flags, black-white-and-yellow flags, black-white-and-yellow flags with Imperial eagles, white flags with Imperial eagles. I was so used to seeing the red flag as a tourist souvenir that it was a shock to see it waved in earnest. There were a lot more homemade placards and banners than on the other side and newspapers that looked as if they had been printed on the same presses as Lenin’s Iskra, “The Spark”. The Communists quaintly called each other tavarish, comrade.

  Different factions of the anti-democrats had different PA systems. Wails of feedback were interspersed with lonely chants of “Yeltsin Out” and “Long Live Lenin” and “Bring Back the Romanovs”, but they got nowhere with the crowd who milled around and ate ice cream and ignored the poor badge vendors and postcard sellers. Again, the only ones with any sense of purpose shuffled forwards in the His and Hers queues that snaked among the crowd. The anti-Yeltsin lavatories were parked in the shade around the corner from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. From the steps of the museum I was able to ascertain that the bottoms were as large and the knickers the same colours as those of the democrats.

  I was thinking of leaving history to play out without me when I recognized a neighbour at the front of the Hers queue, a sweet old babushka who lived in the effluvium of drains and cat and cabbage in the bilges of my staircase. I sometimes helped her down with her shopping and breathing through the mouth did no good at all. She was little and dumpy and had ice-blue eyes and beautiful white hair tucked neatly into a purple woolly hat. Strung round her neck she carried a picture of Comrade Stalin that must have hung on her wall. Most days she loitered in our square looking as if she was trying to remember where she lived and I would not have associated her with political activism. We greeted each other like long-lost relatives.

  “Comrade Olga, how are things?”

  “Normal. The queue moves so slowly that as soon as I have my widdle I have to go to the back and start again. Why are you here? Why aren’t you with the Americans on the other side?”

  “When I was at university the Communists had the best parties.”

  “The girls were hotter, eh? Just like us.” For a sweet old lady she had a dirty laugh.

  “Was he your boyfriend?” I asked, tapping the picture on her chest.

  “My husband crawled on his belly from the Volga to the Elbe for this man. He kept the country together. Look what’s happening to us now.”

  “But Comrade Stalin did terrible things to Russians.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right.” I could never understand. What people like her had been through was outside every frame of refer ence available in the leafy postwar suburbs of Birmingham.

  We reached the steps up to the trailer and I said goodbye. I didn’t think it was polite to hang around while a friend mooned out of the window. I hankered after another cheese pie and strolled back into GUM. Through the ground-floor windows it looked as if the democrats were becoming livelier, so I went out at the St Basil’s end. People were pushing closer towards the Kremlin walls and there was talk that Yeltsin was going to make an appearance. I was at the edge of a group chanting “Yeltsin Yeltsin” in a desultory sort of way when I saw a pretty blonde girl in a skiing jacket pushing through the throng in apparent distress.

  “Please, does anybody here speak English?”

  “Yes, me,” I said.

  “Oh, thank God,” she gasped.

  I gripped her upper arms with a brotherly sort of embrace, which she tried hard to wriggle out of.

  “Calm down. Don’t worry. Tell me what’s happened. We’ll find help. Take deep breaths. It’s all right.”

  “Let go! We are the BBC. Please, will you come with me?”

  Still thinking there had been a terrible accident, I followed her through the crowd. We pushed through a cordon of police towards an angular frame and crinkly smile familiar from countless Newsnights. Anticipating the worst of the physical as well as the political climate, he wore an extravagant pair of calf-length thick brown fur moon boots. He had his back to the Mr Whippy domes of St Basil’s, protected by gun-toting milizia savvy enough to stay out of shot. He waved cheerily and beckoned me over to a little group of young people next to him.

  “Ah, super. Very good. Are we ready?”

  It was only when he looked into a camera that I realized what was going on. His expression suddenly became earnest, his eyes bulged, he put heavy stress on alternate syllables whether it made sense or not, and he jerked his head this way and that while keeping his eyes fixed on the camera, as they are taught in TV Presenters’ School, so they don’t look wooden but afflicted with nervous tics.