Chapter 22: Six days in Moscow

I had said I wasn't going to write anything about Russia, so frustrated was I by my time there. I mostly didn't enjoy myself: I was sick, I was cold, I was tired, and I was rather too easily irritated by things I might have shrugged off if I weren't sick, and cold, and tired. A litany of disappointment and dysfunction isn't fun to read - or to write - but I'm going to try, because to leave out one place when writing about everywhere else seems silly, and because I'm trying to finish this project that I still only half-regret starting. And planning out and drafting a piece is helping to extract the bits and pieces I did enjoy, out of 13 days that were mostly just one nagging little thing after another.

I'd been nervous about my train into Ukraine, but that was as nothing compared to the crossing out of Ukraine and into Russia. The two countries are at war with each other: both know it, though only Ukraine admits it, and it’s remarkable that the train between their two capitals is running at all. I'd belatedly decided to get a train, rather than bus, for two reasons: one is that I thought any border guard entrepreneurship was more likely at some anonymous road border crossing, and the other was that I'd rather be sent to a gulag than spend 18 hours on an overnight bus.

I had a four-bed sleeper carriage, and I drew the short straw and had a top bunk. Unlike the Florence to Vienna one, I at least had a proper bed – complete with pillow, no less – and a safety barrier to stop me falling out. What it didn’t have was a step-ladder, and while the other occupants in the carriage, Vitaly and Misha, didn’t speak English they pointed at a tiny block of wood attached to the wall, next to the cabin door. Evidently I was to use this as a step up onto my bed, but my first attempt was a disaster. I strongly suspect I’m neither the tallest or the most agile Australian to try travelling around Eastern Europe, and my demonstration of wall-climbing – I simply couldn’t get my foot up on that thing - must have been the biggest national embarrassment in these parts since Tony Abbott shirt-fronted Vladimir Putin. Cue much laughter from Vitaly and Misha, and as Vitaly took a phone call the word ‘Australia’ featured prominently in the conversation.

I was rescued by the fourth occupant of the cabin. Xenia – a dancer and choreographer from Omsk, about half-way along the Trans-Siberian Railway – spoke a little English, and just as importantly she knew how to get up on the top bunk. There was a second wooden block on the other side of the door frame, and Xenia climbed up Spider-Man style, using both lower bunks and the wooden footholds to get up. I followed her lead, but being neither a dancer or a choreographer I don’t think I matched her for style or grace. Vitaly moved on from teasing me to teasing Xenia, I think about finding an Australian husband, though Xenia declined to fully translate.

As usual, the border crossing was something of an anti-climax, though it was still a touch confusing. We went through Ukrainian passport control only a couple of hours after leaving Kyiv, and at most border crossings we would then roll forward a few hundred meters and then do it all again with the Russians. But this time the train sped off, clearly plunging us deep into Russia without our passports being checked. Nobody else seemed bothered by this, so I assumed it was normal and tried to get some sleep, question mark over the legality of my presence notwithstanding. We only eventually passed through Russian control about three hours later: I didn’t have any problems, but watched curiously as the guard took out a magnifying lens and examined not only the page with my hard-won Russian visa, but random other pages as well. Are there secret anti-forgery marks hidden in Australian passports or something? If so, I’m surprised that Russian guards know to look for them but apparently nobody else does. Anyway, after a minute or so of this he was satisfied, and my presence in Russia was officially tolerated.

The drama unfolded not at the border, but after arriving in Moscow. The first thing I needed to do was get some money out, so after looking around for an ATM – they can be difficult to find in Russia – I eventually spotted one and went to take out my card –

No card. No credit card. 

I have some people of delicate sensibilities reading this, so just insert as many words starting with ‘f’ and ‘s’ here as you, yourself, might use after arriving in Russia and finding that you’d lost a credit card. In Russia.

Racing back to the platform, the train was of course already gone: that famous Russian train efficiency had not worked to my advantage. There were police officers on the platform (naturally, it’s a police state), and I was able to half-communicate the scale of the disaster to him. He radioed ahead to somebody and motioned me to follow, and we were met outside the station’s police office by a translator. I’d been in Russia fifteen minutes and I was in a police station. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind.

The translator’s name was Alora, and after only a couple of minutes waiting we were shown into an office belonging to what seemed to be a more senior officer. There was nothing in the office except a desk, chair and a telephone, so I said to Alora that it must just be an interview room. No, she said, this was his office. All Russian offices are like this.

The officer took details of the card, and where I thought I’d left it. His most pressing concern was the PIN: had I written the number on the card? Apparently many Russians do. No, I assured him. That’s not how we do it in Australia at all. He called the train operators, who in turn called the cleaners – it didn’t escape my notice that this was considerably more helpful than the Austrian train company had been when I lost my insulin – and they reported that they hadn’t found my card, but had located my sunglasses (I told them not to worry about them). The officer said he’d call again that evening to see if it turned up, and would tell Alora if there was any news.

Very well. My unplanned encounter with Russian law enforcement had been quite pleasant, as far as these things go. I needed to get onto the card company, of course, to kill the missing card and arrange a replacement, and that meant finding some wifi. According to Alora, though, I would need a Russian phone number to use almost all public wifi networks in Russia (the only reason I can think of for this is so traffic can be traced back to individuals. As I said, this is a police state). I asked her to show me where I could get a SIM card, and she guided me to a shuttered mobile phone shop.

It was only when she lifted the shutter and went behind the desk that I learned Alora’s not a police translator at all. She works in the mobile phone shop, and the police had simply asked her, as the only person around who spoke English, to help with a distraught Australian who had lost something or other. Not only did she do that, but as she was figuring out a SIM card for me (the first one didn’t work), she let me use her own mobile data to check that my card hadn’t been used (it hadn’t) and request that it be cancelled. In a trip where many strangers have gone out of their way to ease my path, just because they could, Alora tops the list. Oh, and by the way, she works a 24 hour shift. 24 hours on, then 48 hours at home, then another 24 hours. I don’t understand how anybody does that.

The credit card never did turn up, and there were no attempts to use it either. I’d very hurriedly used it to buy a drink at McDonald’s on my way out of Kyiv, and I think I must have left it behind there, where it’s probably still waiting for me to come and reclaim it.

A somewhat stressful start, then. I’m not silly enough to travel with only one card, of course, so I was able to get some money (albeit at an extortionate exchange rate) and find my way to the hostel, where I was promptly told to dump my stuff and come back later while they dealt with a ‘maintenance issue’. I wasn’t told what it was, but the staff were being told to leave for the afternoon too so I’m willing to bet it involved large quantities of insecticide.

So I walked towards the city centre, and for the most iconic spot in all of Russia: Red Square, and the Alice in Wonderland-esque St Basil’s Cathedral:

That walk might have been the first time that Russia disappointed, albeit subtly, and it was unambiguously my fault. Getting to Russia at all was time-consuming and expensive: unlike other European countries Russia and Ukraine require Australians to have tourist visas. The Russian one cost something like $180 and involved filling out a nine page application form, taking and printing passport photos, obtaining a letter of invitation from a hotel that I never stayed at but that charges $20 for letters of invitation, and mailing my passport off to the Russian embassy. The website said to allow ten business days for processing, and when it came back they’d left a little note in the passport, intended for internal use, that showed they had processed the visa the day after it arrived at the embassy but had marked it as not to be mailed back until the tenth business day. Nice.

All of that effort had two effects. One was that it pushed Russia further up into my consciousness and imagination as I prepared for this trip than other countries, which might have otherwise been more eagerly anticipated. And the other was that it became imbued with a greater sense of mystery, of otherness, than anywhere else in Europe. I was ready for Moscow to be different in a way that… it isn’t.

There are differences, of course, just as there are differences between France and Spain, between Italy and Croatia and between Czechia and Poland. But the things that unite Russia and Western Europe are stronger than the things that divide them: it is very much a European city and a European culture. I shouldn’t have expected anything different, and if you’d asked me to explain ahead of time what differences I thought I’d find I might have struggled to do so. But the idea was lodged in my head, anyway, and so when I walked through a very European Moscow I didn’t find what I was looking for. I’d played the expectations game and lost.

I was here, though, and on the first US Independence Day since the American capital moved to Moscow, no less. I must have missed any events they held to mark the occasion, but souvenir shops have certainly noticed the new warmth in relations:

Later I found matching Trump and Putin Babushka dolls: inside Putin were Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Stalin and Lenin, whilst Trump had Bush and Obama. Vladimir Putin might harbour an inner dictator or two, but there is certainly nothing of Barack Obama hidden inside Donald Trump.

There’s no shortage of Putin memorabilia for sale. There are Putin t-shirts, Putin calendars, Putin mugs and Putin cigarette lighters. The magnets were the worst. One of them had one of those holographic surfaces so the image changed depending on the angle you looked at it from: Putin’s eyes literally follow you around the room. But here’s the thing: I never saw anybody wearing a Putin t-shirt, and nowhere that I went had a Putin calendar hanging on the wall. I wonder to what extent this cult of personality is for tourists’ benefit?

Marx, Lenin and even Stalin are everywhere too. On my two kilometre walk from the hostel I found no less than seven Lenins, either statues or stone reliefs set into the walls. Soviet insignia remains on many buildings, including one in the Kremlin the serves as the executive office building. The only things more common than the symbols of Communism are symbols of consumerism: Gucci, Versace, Bvlgari and so on all had shops near my hostel, and it’s a weird juxtaposition. Soviet gear outnumbers even the Putin stuff in the souvenir stores, too. I felt conflicted: I admit that I indulged in a little bit of Soviet kitsch myself, but can you possibly imagine a German shop selling imitation SS caps and badges? Because Russian ones do the equivalent. 

Near the entrance to Red Square I found a trio of street performers dressed up as - and bearing the faintest, there if you go looking for it resemblance to -  Lenin, Stalin and Putin. I didn’t take a photo, as they would have reasonably expected a tip but I only had a 500 Ruble note (about $12, too much for a photo), and unfortunately I didn’t find them again. But I was treated to the odd spectacle of a uniformed Stalin seizing a tourist’s camera and ordering him to smile, as Lenin waved his arm in the air beseechingly and Putin stared impassively at the camera from behind dark sunglasses. And all without any apparent irony.

That was, unfortunately, the best day in Moscow. There were still good moments, but some of the things I had looked forward to were underwhelming, and by the end of day three I was descending into my third, and worst, cold in only ten weeks. I left home about a week too early to get the flu shot, and I must be gaining immunity manually by catching every single bug that’s going around Europe in succession. The cold was made doubly miserable by the weather: if not for the onion domes on the churches I could have been in Melbourne, because it was July, it was 13 degrees and it was pouring with rain. 

Little, unnecessary difficulties started to get under my skin: my phone, the ungrateful bastard, is showing signs that it doesn’t want to go all the way around Europe after all. It isn’t holding a charge, and is difficult to get charging in the first place: one must angle it just so. I’ve nursed it so far – I didn’t particularly want to buy a new phone in Russia, of all places – but it’s frustrating. I withdrew some cash from an ATM, in full view of bank staff, but when it spat out a 5000 Ruble note I asked them to change it into something shops might actually accept. They just flat out refused, despite it being their note from their machine. I went to try and buy lunch, but my note was, as expected, refused. I went back to the bank and threatened to lapse into a diabetic coma on their carpet if they didn’t change the note. At first they demanded commission(!) but eventually gave in to get rid of me. Play the diabetes card. It works.

A couple of things I’d looked forward to proved disappointing. Visiting the Kremlin is really all about the churches, which as I’ve probably said too many times now have lost their lustre. I was able to walk around near one of the government buildings – the one with the Soviet decoration I mentioned earlier – but going inside was out of the question. The zoo here isn’t well known in the West but has a reputation for having an enormous collection of oddball species kept nowhere else, but I didn’t know they’re almost entirely off-display. I went to a Cosmonauts Museum: some but not all the exhibits had English signage, and while I’d gone out of curiosity about how the space race might be portrayed from a Russian perspective, the museum mostly had a deliberately internationalist approach, and it was much more like, say, the Smithsonian’s space gallery than I’d hoped to find. 

One bright spot was the Museum of Soviet Arcade Game Machines. It’s not *really* a museum, just a games arcade, but all the machines date back to the Soviet era, and in return for your 450 rubles (about $10) you get 15 Soviet kopek coins with which to operate the machines:

This was Soviet kitsch I could unapologetically indulge in. I’ve always sucked at playing arcade games – or anything that requires manual dexterity, to be honest. Soviet arcade games are no different. I tried to shoot rabbits in a game called ‘Winter Hunt’ or something like that: I’m pretty sure when winter comes I’ll be starving to death, though I did manage to torpedo some -presumably American - submarines and blow up some tanks. I only ended up playing 14 of my 15 coins: I looked down at the last one, saw that it was a Soviet coin minted in 1984, and decided that would make the perfect souvenir.

But it was the high point. as the week went on I got sicker and sicker, and the weather bleaker and bleaker. I pushed through, risking pneumonia by lining up in the freezing cold to go through Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square. There’s some debate about whether it’s really his body on display: if it is, then whoever did the embalming did an absolutely terrible job, but I’m always wary of assuming a conspiracy when simple incompetence explains something instead. So it’s him. Probably.

I made one last gesture of defiance against common sense on my last day. I’d wanted to spend some time in Gorky Park – Moscow’s answer to Central Park – but the weather made it pointless: there’d be nobody else there. So I went to the ‘Muzeon’ – a big park full of sculptures – instead. It includes a little area with some old Communist statues, that were dumped here after the fall of the Soviet Union and were eventually cleaned up and turned upright again. I might have enjoyed it if I could concentrate on something other than trying to breathe, and I lingered only a little while before giving up and calling time on a dissatisfying six days. Perhaps Saint Petersburg would be better.