Free spirited angels of the North - Archangelogorodtsy

We only just managed to squeeze onto the bus that would take us from the plane to the terminus. We had the feeling that it left a few passengers on the runway.

The bus disgorged us all onto a frozen white and desolate space littered with a few low slung airport buildings which seemed to be closed. It was nine in the evening.

A few yards along was a wooden hut with fading and flaking paint and a few ancient ads for Coke and 7up - hints of more hopeful times.

A bus arrived quickly though - it was a vintage model,only about 15 feet long, but as warm as a russian banya. It’s gears crashed and its engine once powered a tank at the battle of Kursk.It was also the personal fiefdom of the driver and his conductor. Purple haze curtains were strung across some of the windows to provide a parlour atmosphere - it was reminiscent of Greece, and I looked around to see if there were any chickens and goats among the passengers.

The conductress had no visible symbols of authority to collect our fares, but this bus was not much bigger than a taxi and the fare was nugatory.

Lenin and Stalin still have a few fans up here - Koba was scrawled in black magic marker on the back of the seat in front of us, and in the town itself the statue of V.I. Lenin still towers over a large civic square, raging impotently at the new economic policy all around him - or maybe wondering if his own version didn’t go far enough?

It was dark, and the bus raced along the icy streets which were like huge corridors created by the endless blocks of almost identical flats that line every avenue and street.

Yet there was a vast spaciousness to everything, and the occasional gap in the corridor walls in which sat a proud classical civic design,a theatre or a gigantic town hall.

Our journey that evening ended with a walk through a forest of blocks of identical flats to the home of a kind friend who would be our host for our two day visit.

It was a hearthy, warm and generous welcome we recieved - brandy was opened, food was served and we drank and laughed until late.

I had the feeling that I was on a frontier of some sort, not just a physical frontier, a spiritual or at least attitudinal one. It could almost have been Canada, but Canada is bland because prosperity has internationalised it and its people have had everything they need for half a century without a struggle.The frontier there was conquered a long time ago. Perhaps this feeling I had for the spititual frontier of Archhangel came from the knowledge that this region has always been one of independent and rugged individualists.Serfdom did not reach up here. There was no Tarter conquest and its Tsarist successors were too soft to take on a people that were tough and resourceful enough to live entirely off of a frozen snow covered land. If you don’t need other people to help you make a living it tends to make you hard to push around.

Of course, Stalin decided to try and achieve what the Tarters and The Tsars’ failed to do and crush this independent spirit by opening the first of the GULAG camps in this region.

The presence of internment camps all around was surely likely to break the spirit of a people for whom the words of Rule Brittania were equally applicable - Britons never never shall be slaves!’

Would our next two days show any signs of the state of the spirit in Archangel?

The wearing of a uniform is the first sign of submission to higher authority, as is the sticking to a speed limit. On this score, the buses of Archangel showed promising signs - the rebellious spirit of a London bus driver reveals itself by the chewing of gum and the wearing of the uniform as scruffily as possible. These Archangel guys speed around the streets in formula one style, screeching reluctantly to a halt at stops and harrying the passengers off so that they can rejoin the race. Their conductors are a sartorial law unto themselves, intimidating passengers for the fare. Here is the first sign that Stalin failed!

Our first task on our first day was to collect Elena’s pension certificate from the local Department of Pensions. We slipped and slood along the treacherously icy and slushy pavements to the unassuming office block that housed the Department.

Elena encountered polite and efficient young people whose manners were natural and helpful - maybe Perstroika and good parenting, as we say in the West, but a hopeful sign that it’s possible to find a half-way house between people trained and programmed within an inch of their humanity and a chaotic or surly indifference to customer service.

Next though, a visit to a restaurant - not so much independence of spirit as a complete lack of awareness of how it might feel to be a customer in a restaurant. The staff are friendly spirited indeed, young but convinced that there job is just to bring the food. The notion of a broader responsibility to create a pleasant experience for the diner is unknown. Admittedly, in the UK or USA this can be taken too far with waiters intruding irritatingly into your evening wearing plastic smiles,but this other extreme is insufferable.

 We arrived at the restaurant to meet three young children of a friend.

We seat ourselves.

The waitress has to be found and brought to our table by Elena.

We are asked for our food order and if we would like tea or coffee, and she rushed away before anything stronger could be requested.

We waited an age.

The ice cream arrived and was put down - our deserts, in other words, had been brought before our main courses.

We had to find the waitress again, because she had fled after this delivery.

We waited another age and the children were older by the time their main course arrived - the 14 year old boy now needed a shave.

We were never offered a drink throughout the meal, which whilst acceptable, was salty.

By now you understand that here is a business opportunity, as we say in the West : customer service increases turnover and profits, and done with sensitivity, makes the work more enjoyable.

Will the Archangelisk spirit of independence rise up and manifest itself as the right kind of free enterprise? The kind based on individualism and responsibility, good manners and helpfulness, rather than corporate programming and the de-souling of the workforce? which is what we are doing back in the UK and the USA.

 The nest day we are taken by car to the museum of wooden architecture 30 kilometers from Archangel near small village called Malye Korely. It was a fairy tale drive along a snow dusted road. To our right was the great semi-frozen river Severnaya Dvina (Northen Dvina) which lay still as a great resting beast,its pulse lifting and shifting the ice floes which lay like parasites on its back.

The museum was created to preserve the heritage of the beautiful wooden architecture of this region : churches, houses, barns, banyas and farms. In Disney style, but without the shmaltz, elderly women in traditional costume sang to us traditional folk songs and we danced in the snow to the steps they taught us - utterly entrancing!

                                     (this video was shot by our friend Tamara Chmyhova)

Snow lay all around and I saw my first white pidgeon - the kind of pidgeon you woould expect to find in Heaven - but also a vivid illustration, surely, of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, or factual explanation as I prefer to think of it. 

Rounding a bend on the track, the view ahead hidden by Pines, we are transfixed by the sight of a masterpiece - an early 17th century church.

 Constructed entirely of wood, without a single nail, it’s spire is perfectly proporioned as it holds aloft the Orthodox Cross. Set against its background of snow, sky and pine forest, it calls forth the two great maxims of all morality :

                        Do unto others as ye would have them do unto ye

                                                    and

                        Love the Lord thy God with all they heart.

And you feel that these are called forth from God himself through the medium of this magnificent edifice. This is what churches are for - they are the fibre - optic highway to heaven, and what better material than wood to carry this news.

Our atheism momentarily shaken, we walked on to encounter the wooden homes that allowed the sturdy pioneers of ancient Archangel to live entirely indoors in their frozen winters, their harvests and livestock indoors with them, their faith in their own resilience and resourcefulness and their pre-green ecological knowledge keeping up their spirits throughout the long lonely winter months.

These sights and feelings are unique to this region - there is nothing comparable at home or anywhere that I know of and it is deeply moving.

 But next, a moment of light relief : a tall post stands before us which carrries four canvas loops which hang from its top. It is a kind of maypole swing. We each get in our noose and laugh our heads off as we swing dangerously in out and arrowly avoiding concussion on the post itself.

Then Elena spots a warning sign on the post. A list of don’ts began with Don’t eat food and drink whilst swinging, don’t throw away anything whilst swinging, don’t carry large sharp objects, don’t bring any animals or hand luggage with you, don’t use whilst under the influence of drink or drugs, or during wind speeds in excess of ten metres per second - finally, an injunction to ‘ use common sense at all times and a reminder that the museum cannot be held responsible for any accidents if any of these rules are broken.

We read these after we had broken nearly all of them and yet survived!

As we leave the site of all this snow surrounded history, perfectly and rightly preserved, we are reminded that it is still a living place - a wedding was underway on he snow, the bride in a snow white dress, the groom with frozen hands, we are invited to share the bread and shout ‘Gorko! Gorko! Gorko!’ ( this means bitter or unpleasant is life before marriage and it is shouted to encourage the kiss which will seal it and make life sweet!) 

Back to Archangel to rest and prepare for our train journey, 3rd class, back to Moscow.

Can I answer any of the questions I raised?

Of course not, there are only ever signs and these can mislead, but the train should help us get to know a few members of the broad masses, today’s proletariat.

 (the photographs were taken by Elena Bruce and Natalia Fridental)

A trip to Archangel and Moscow shopping Manners

Moscow manners are direct and Shakespearian.

The English have lost all of the lusty language of the public space that their Bard recorded.

‘Whey faced loon’ or ‘ low, base, and popular’ - the people of England, high and low, were once not afraid to insult each other with gusto.

Now they are timid or terrified to utter the mildest reproach in public, even in the face of extreme provocation.

(I make an exception, of course, of the cowardly cries of soft с***t aimed at the overpaid pansies on the pitch from the safety of the seats at Premiership football clubs).

In a Moscow supermarket, however,  we encountered the courageous solidarity of the ordinary Russian shopper in the face of rough treatment by a checkout woman.

Elena had placed a bowl down on the checkout that needed one more loyalty sticker to be purchased at a discount.

The woman bluntly grunted - you can’t have this, not enough stickers.

Elena politely pointed out that by the end of her shop, she would have earned another three stickers, so the problem would be solved.

No, said checkout woman, and she barked at another assistant to take the bowl away.

Other shoppers in the queue started to take up Elena’s case - you are very rude, said one to   checkout woman.

You should ask your manager for some more training said another shopper, this woman is a customer you know, mind your manners!

I must stress that none of these people knew Elena. They merely saw the justice of her case and were not afraid to remonstrate on her behalf.

But checkout woman too was not to be bowed and came back fighting - I am in charge of this checkout, you keep out of it if you want to buy your stuff.

You should be sacked, I will ask the manager to sack you, came back another supporter.

Elena was overwhelmed with gratitude for the way that so many had come to her aid.

Our doughty sales preventer knew she was beaten, and gave way by sliding the bowl towards Elena a gesture singularly lacking in grace.

A small victory for solidarity and social cohesion - it would not have happened in Waitrose or Tesco in London of course, because staff in those corporates have corporate smiles and their polite responses are programmed in advance.

But you wouldn’t get any help in London if you were an old lady being robbed on a bus in broad daylight by a 14 year old schoolboy.

Everyone would look away.

Here in Moscow, he would get a good thrashing and a lesson in manners!

Our trip to Archangel, a 1000 kilometres north of Moscow, began with a ride from the beautiful Basilisk like Kievski station. Its domed and capacious interior lifted our athiestic souls heavenward rather than towards  the Airport Express that we were waiting for with a few hundred other travellers.

The cavernous corridors that led us from the depths of the underground metro line we had travelled on put me in mind of a Munich Beer Cellar and all the hurrying travellers seemed to be looking around for a bar or a waitress instead of their line.

We shuffled out of the celestial waiting room through a narrow pair of doors out onto a vast canopy of steel that housed the airport express train - a reassuringly solid and rectangular prism of exceptional width, soviet red and non-negotiably punctual.

It left on the second and we arrived at Vnukovo airport as stated.

Out of the train and into the airport terminal which was another steel structure, but this one post modern, to begin with a low slung ceiling, the whole cast in strange spectral gloom. We were entering a tomb, and the crowds were respectfully quiet as they slowly shuffled through security.

At last, the ceiling vaulted up and away and we were given light, a great relief from the dark spaces we had entered.

Our paces quickened as we spotted a bar sitting like a palm tree and an oasis in a desert. Our minds were on a brandy before the flight. We were met by a young barman who stared at us with a fixed and stern expression. This was Mr Gradgrind’s son and heir.

A brandy please.

He just stared at us as if we had asked for a whisky at a temperence meeting.

No.

Why not? I flew last week from Sheremetevo and had one at the airport.

This is Vnukovo - nothing strong allowed.

Here was a man who had not smiled for many years and he had no intention of smiling in the near future. He was unhappy in his work and he didn’t care if you knew it.

Many years ago I was in the line to enter Disney World in Florida with my three young daughters. As we approached the cashier, I noticed a suited man pass a note to the pretty young girl at the entrance till. As we passed through I saw what it said - Put a smaile on your face!

That was a kind of totalitarianism - Disney style - and Russia has a long way to go before it infringes on the rights of the individual to the extent of insisting on happiness where there is none.

No, In Russia, if you want to be a miserable misanthrope, you are free to be so, but don’t be surprised if somebody loudly remonstrates at you in protest.

At least it will be loud and out in the open, not surreptitiously scribbled on a scrap of paper.

I’ve still got that scrap of paper.

I’m going to take Walt Disney to the European Court of Human Rights.

I can’t stand all that fake fun - it hurts.

Give us a break, Walt, there are times we just wanna be fed up.

The plane has landed.

We are in Archangel, where Elena was born and where must now sort out some family matters.

We will return to Moscow by train, 3rd Class, with the people, the broad masses.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Meeting Tolstoy at a Pushkin Party in Moscow.

We meet Tolstoy at a Pushkin party celebrating the October Revolution.

Blimey what a troika!

It was a gathering at The State Museum of Pushkin, a very distinguished gathering of Moscow's cultural elite - Elena's good friend, Natalia Mikhailova, is the Deputy Director of the museum and a respected academic, an author, a poet and a member of the Academy of Russian Science. She was, to us on this day, a generous, gracious and informative host.

As the literati of Moscow circulated and chatted around us Natalia interrupted her flow momentarily to mention that she had been talking earlier to the knight Tolstoy. He, she said, is the great great grandson of Lev Tolstoy, and she continued explaining how Tolstoy, Pushkin and Lermentov had all experienced life in the army, serving in the endless campaign to suppress and pacify the Caucases.
It was hard to concentrate after this bombshell.
Elena turned to me and said we must talk to Tolstoy!
She looked around the crowded room, ah, she said, and pulled me towards a short, grey haired, elderly man who was sporting an orthopeadic boot in a rakish pose.
How do you do, she said to him, I have always wanted to meet a Knight.
I am sorry to disappointment you, he replied, but I am only a humble doctor, although I am a poet.
Ah, of course you are, replied Elena, literature is in your blood.
Do you think so?
Of course!
But why?
Well, because of your great, great grandfather.
But he was a peasant.
Oh, well, I've heard him called many things, but........
The kopek finally dropped. This was not Tolstoy.
He took our mistake with a huge smile and continued to entertain us as our eyes swivelled in search of someone at least two feet taller who might bear a passing resemblance to the proud physiognomy of the great man.
The assembly was called to order from a platform upon which stood a small circle of men and women, their speeches prepared.
The Director of the museum introduced the genuine article, a man who bore an astonishing similarity to his great great grandfather.
How had we missed him?
This real Tolstoy is the principle cultural advisor to President Putin - reassuring to know that the hard man of Russia takes an interest in the gentle arts of culture.
Our blunder suddenly reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, which features the hapless gardening correspondent mistaken for the war correspondent ( admittedly on the basis of sharing a name ).
Bring me a big name in culture!, shouts the President.
Elena and I drag into his terrifying presence the diminutive and humble doctor, who is too terrified to reject the assignment..........

More Moscow Manoeuvres

Living and thriving in a big city is an extension of an evolutionary trait : just as we walk and talk without having to think before or as we do so, to get through Moscow or London, the natives of each acquire over time an automatic choreography that swerves or swivvles them just at the right moment to get them through a barrier, across a road, or produces a gesture or a word to allow them to buy a necessity swiftly  and with a minimum of friction.
I am an evolutionary result of London - so I can shoulder through a phalanx of commuters coming out of the barriers at Waterloo with a duck and a dive just like a bat flies through the solid dark of a cave without touching a thing. But the heavy glass and wooden framed doors that must be pushed back to enter and leave the Moscow Metro I have not adapted to - like a drowsy autumn bluebottle, I repeatedly find them bashing me in the face as they swing back forcefully from the person ahead of me. If I don't develop an avoidance mechanism soon, I'm dead, or unconscious, just another bluebottle concussed on  glass pane.
Elena has acquired some evolutionary traits of London, but most of her evolutionary experience was in Archangel,before Perestroika, in the Soviet era, so she has very few of the traits necessary for either city when it come to shopping.
And shopping was exactly what we had to do - the worst kind of shopping: bed linen, duvets, pillows, a wi-fi router, cutlery, a toaster and a kettle, an English teapot, an iron and ironing board. All bulky, fiddly, or unreliable things that just aren't right when you get them home. And all things that everyone else seems to want at exactly the same time that you do.
We were shopping for necessities for our lovely new rented flat.
First stop, a vast aerodrome of a shopping mall to get the toaster, teapot and kitchen things.
Self service and not too bad until we got to the checkout. Elena noticed that we had been double - charged for the kettle. Before one can leave the shop, the security police shake you down, but we had a very helpful man who checked our receipt in response to Elena's query. He endorsed her observation and confronted a terrified young checkout man. There followed a ten minute wait for an officious young woman to check the receipt again, then an even longer wait as she disappeared to obtain the authority to give us a refund. many pieces of paper were signed, and thirty minutes after the helpful security man had intervene on our side, we were free.
In the same vasty palace of consumerism we searched for a double bed size sheet - called Euro-Size. The traditional Russian double bed is smaller than the London or European one, but it is catching on, so they were sold out here and everywhere - we finally found a shop miles away that had a double duvet, sheet and pillows, at an exorbitant price, but it was getting late, and we had no choice.
With such relief that the salesman gave me a lascivious leer as Elena stood by, I agreed instantly to buy the combined set. I wanted to pay him, dear reader. but he would not let me - we had to fill out a form and proceed to a bank cashier 50 yards away. The bank cashier's machine would not accept my cards ( Earlier, to by a wi-fi router, Elena had to show her passport. this is vital when you have it installed too. Uncle Vladimir is watching you.) I found a cash machine, thoughtlessly returned to the shop, and was reminded sternly that I must proceed to the unsmiling cashier at the bank.
Still, we got home, and were happy.
I opened the piece-de-resistance of our expedition, a British made, superior stainless steel teapot from England, made by Taller - Premium Quality Products.
I poured the fine black tea leave made tea into our cups but half of it leaked from below the spout - traditional British workmanship of the 1970's, or Chinese sweatshop workmanship and British branding misrepresentation? Either way, watch out Mr Taller, I will get you for this.
Meanwhile, the Moscow Metro trains run every 90 seconds, everywhere, on every line, without fail, while the Circle Line in London is always broken or lost or there is a non - person lying across it, or it has no signals, and the Victoria line is closed for every weekend - the London Underground has great branding though, and a lovely logo!
The next day Elena bought a Russian teapot.

Architecture has been defined as ‘ frozen music’

On a freezing night, Elena and I were warmed by the vivid truth of this observation from Goethe, who whilst he never visited Moscow, would have not been able to see the Metro in any case, and would therefore have missed some spectacular illustrations of his proposition.

Follow the photographs below as they trace our journey today from a distant metro station to the ancient centre of this vast city into the beautiful Peter and Paul Catholic Church, where we attended a Schubert concert programme of etherial beauty.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Moscow can completely scramble the senses - it has mine

Marc Chagall , the surrealist, came to Moscow at least once. It shows in his work; bodies fly and flail, embrace and escape, fly and fall.  

Today, everything seems to push and rush - at six thirty am as I leave our enormous block of flats,the cold and dark is pushed aside by the solid phalanx of shuffling coats and hats that move like a nation towards the Metro at Akademika Yangelya.

It is implacable. It is a gigantic snake sliding down the Metro steps, down onto the platforms which are already another solid mass of living tissue.

Inside the carriage, which grates and grunts as it pulls away and then screams as it plunges down into Moscow central. We can’t hear each other and we are too tightly packed to read a book.

At Borovitskaya station, a vast interchange for the Metro in central Moscow, we are released and I make my way with the rest of humanity, for it seems as if they are all here today, up the steep escalators and out onto the Mississippi wide streets around the Lenin Library, along which races traffic racing to escape the furies of hell.

We are in that part of Moscow which aims to embody the power and the glory of the state - and it’s enough to shake the conviction of an anarchist and turn him into a police superintendant.

Yes, I too am convinced that only ‘silnaya ruka’ ( strong hand) can rule Russia - but wait, not so fast, there is a strange fantasia ahead of us as we leave my office in this stony desert of human feeling.

 We emerge from another extended Metro nightmare out into a fairyland of edible Hansle and Gretle buildings at Teatralny Proezd - suddenly,everything is ablaze and flashing, lights dance and people bob along the streets like corks on a breeze blown lake.

At Varvarka Street, we are back in European scale, the streets are narrow, the buildings built for human beings but painted for children in pinks and blues and whites.

As we glide past the 16th Century English Courtyard - a wooden roofed and charming house granted to English traders by Ivan the Terrible - we turn and find ourselves in a forest of spires and domes and crosses to humble an atheist.

Across our path gambols a troop and column of black and white uniformed guards, all children who are laughing and smiling, a gentle rebuke to the armies of the world in their camouflage and tanks.

   We turn again and a white cathedral with golden domes and crosses flies across the sky.

     It is the flying Cathedral of St Vladimir. 

     I kid you not.

     But it’s been a long day.

The bare chested pugilist - a landlord in Moscow

                                We hoped and believed that this would be our metro. 

We expected things to be different here. And we were familiar with some of the horror stories from the chaotic gangster capitalism of the perestroika period. But today we had a somewhat alarming experience which shows Moscow to be still on the borderlands of civil society, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

To set the scene : in Moscow there are few estate agents that a Londoner would recognise, at least if they are hoping to rent a flat. The agent is not trusted to hold the key, so it is impossible to view a property until the owner is at the property accompanied by the agent. This slows everything down, of course. And reflects the  breakdown of trust in Moscow ( it is different in the frozen north of Archangel, by the way, which has a civilised property market ) as does the insistence on large sums in cash for deposits and landlord commissions, which must be paid by the tennant not the landlord.

Now London has a cash economy too, and plenty of ‘ rogue traders’ but I feel certain that it does not approach the levels here. My confidence comes from the sheer numbers of Muscovites who shake their heads in dismay at its prevalence in Moscow. They make no attempt at patriotic rebuttal.

The scene set, let me proceed: - 

Elena and I had found an agent who had advertised a property on line. The agent told us that we could view it when he could arrange for the owner to be at the property. We met the agent and a man whom Raymond Chandler would have described as a Goon - burly, thick set, a gangster swagger as he walked, auditioning for a part in a Tarantino movie, an executive operative in the security industry, with front line experience, including a long spell involuntarily behind the lines.

This walking wall was not,in fact, the ownwer. He was there to check us out for gullibility and respectability - we could be intimidated by bluster.

Whilst we looked around the flat, the Goon was on his mobile to his boss - he is Anglacheena ( English ) about fifty, she is Rooska, about forty. So far so good, he was ten years too low!

We liked the flat as well.

We agreed to take it. we were told the owner would meet us at the flat the following day to exchange contracts. We would need a large sum of money in cash: one months rent in advance ( equal to £800 ) plus the same amount as a commission to the agent plus a damages deposit to the same amount. all in cash!

Nothing else, even direct bank transfer, was acceptable.

Next day, after some considerable inconvenience, we arrive at the flat with cash and meet the Goon and the agent.

We arrive at the door of the flat, which is in a large block of flats.

The Goon knocks at the door.

No answer.

He tries to use the key.

It doesn’t work.

He tells us the owner is inside, and tries to raise him on his mobile.

No answer.

More knocking - no answer.

The agent is beginning to show signs of embarrassment.

Ten minutes pass with futile attempts to use the key and knock on the door.

The door opens.

There stands a bare chested, pugnacious impersonation of a pit-bull terrier.

Clad only in track suit bottoms, his nose red with the results of ardent spirits.

We walk in. He, the semi - naked dangerous dog, barks at us to remove our shoes.

Elena protests that she might not want to, and he barks with canine anger that it is his flat and he wants it clean.

I don’t speak Russian, but say to Elena that we will remove our shoes if he puts on his shirt.

We removed our shoes but he remained exposed.

More barking - we must agree to one year. we must not register with anyone that we are living at this address

The Goon is lifting an ancient television set into place and removing a bigger, but equally ancient one.

Elena asks why the television is so old.

He barks back in dog that it is a flat screen!

Elena asks why there are no pots, pans, plates etc in a furnished flat.

He barks back in dog a question - can’t you buy some?

Finally, Elenas asks for proof that the pit - bull actually owns the flat ( a normal check )

 The pit - bull turns into a wild boar, a pugiistic pig, spitting, blustering, stamping his trotters.

You western, he grunts, my under 16 year old daughter owns this flat, I can’t get a document. or I can tomorrow.

A non - sequitor follows this grunt - the flat is insured!

If anything goes wrong, you can fix it.

Enough.

You have the picture.

Good luck, we said, and left to look another day for another flat.