Black Earth City Read online

  Black Earth City

  A Year in the Heart of Russia

  CHARLOTTE HOBSON

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword by Peter Pomerantsev

  1. Arrival

  2. Hostel No. 4

  3. Memorial Wood

  4. Bourgeois Medicine

  5. The Triangle Player

  6. Russian Lessons

  7. The Truth Game

  8. Dmitri Donskoy and the Borders of Russia

  9. Free Day

  10. New Year, New Happiness

  11. The House of the Deaf and Dumb

  12. Little Pavlik

  13. Inflation Fever

  14. The Commission Shop

  15. International Women’s Day

  16. The Thaw

  17. Iron Boots

  18. Peter Truth

  19. Leaving

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Foreword

  A New Yorker cartoon from 1998 showed a beggar on the streets of the city, holding a sign that says ‘Expert on Russia’. For most of the early twenty-first century Russia was a niche interest, pushed off the front pages by the War on Terror, the Great Crash, the Rise of China. Economically it was an aberration and politically, compared to the Cold War, an irrelevance. Russian university departments closed; the secret services culled their Russian speakers; development agencies pulled, or were pushed, out. Russia just wasn’t ‘in’.

  How things have changed! Writing in mid-2017, barely a day goes by without Russia on the front page: invading Eastern European countries; ‘hacking’ the US election; subverting the Liberal World Order; splitting Europe; bombing Syria to smithereens while (allegedly) bamboozling the world with its ‘next-generation’, ‘full-spectrum’, ‘hybrid war’ and ‘weaponized propaganda’. Russian President Vladimir Putin is the international Bond villain of the age (he must be delighted). The secret services are busy hiring Russian speakers again. Today everyone pretends to be an expert on Russia – though they may never have visited the country or speak the language. Russia is most definitely ‘in’: seen either as the greatest evil in the world, or, for a new generation of far-right worshippers, the great hope.

  What is missing among all the Russomania, Russophobia and Putinophilia is any sense of what the Russian people are like. They tend to be reduced to either authoritarian-loving dupes dumb enough to believe their lying leader’s every word, or to passive victims broken into submission. Charlotte Hobson’s Black Earth City, a memoir of her year in Russia in the early 1990s, is a sublime lesson in putting away one’s preconceptions.

  Hobson’s great talent is to bring people and places alive in a few lines. Her place is Voronezh, the provincial southern capital – home, over the centuries, to exiles and industrialists, a frontier town for chancers and those running away from something, and for foreign students who wanted to experience something more exotic than Moscow or St Petersburg. Hobson arrived in time to catch the last moments of the Soviet Union and stayed for the all-defining days which came after. She met poets and tycoons-in-waiting, dreamers and cynics; she witnessed hyperinflation and explored the nightmares of Soviet history which lie hidden under every picnic in the woods. She fell in love and carefully recorded the fears and aspirations of a generation coming of age in a country shedding its Soviet skin for a new Russian freedom.

  It’s hard not to read her sumptuous record now without thinking of what would come later. Were there already signs of how crooked reforms would become? How democracy would turn to what Russians call ‘dermocracy’, ‘shitocracy’? Can we already spot the coming of Putinism? Today’s wars? As one is drawn into the lives of Voronezh’s young, it is tempting to imagine where they are today: who has become a corrupt bureaucrat, and who is fighting in Ukraine; who has found Orthodox Fundamentalism, who is living in Kensington, and who has drunk himself to death.

  Can one glimpse the future catastrophes among the parties and kisses? Is the worm which will turn and return Russia to authoritarianism already there in Hobson’s funny book? And if so, where is it? In Russia’s denial of its own dark past? In the West’s cack-handed attempts to ‘develop’ the economy? In the way Hobson’s Russian boyfriend turns away from her?

  But while one can read Black Earth City through a dark screen where young people enjoy themselves, unaware of impending tragedy, one can read it another way, too. The world Hobson writes about is full of ideas, daring and wit. It is open to the West, hungry for friendship, ready to welcome an ‘Anglichanka’ blown in from Edinburgh. Is this warm, ebullient Russia really gone? Has it really become submerged beneath the Kremlin’s nausea-inducing television which sees a Western conspiracy behind everything? It’s impossible to think, while reading Black Earth City, that all is lost. There is so much energy here, so little genuine enmity, so many bridges across which one could build contacts, so many different subjects to engage with and people one wants to get to know.

  Black Earth City is not an overtly political book; it is a book about people living through tumultuous political times, but it becomes even more important to republish it as Russia becomes a political problem. More than just a tender portrait of the Russian people, Black Earth City also shows how one can engage with something you thought strange and dangerous yet turns out to be far closer to home than you ever imagined. It would have been easy for Hobson to make her Russian characters caricatures, bizarre foreigners. Instead she enters their minds so gracefully they become almost family: Voronezh might be just down the road.

  Peter Pomerantsev, 2017

  · 1 ·

  Arrival

  BBC Breakfast News

  19 August 1991: 6 a.m.

  On the screen, tanks rolled silently through a leafy boulevard in north Moscow.

  ‘Mikhail Gorbachev is no longer in charge of the Soviet Union,’ the newsreader was saying. It was the early-morning rush hour and yellow buses were weaving in and out, dodging the gun barrels. Commuters pressed their faces against the windows and gaped. ‘Within the past three hours, the Soviet news agency TASS has announced that Mr Gorbachev cannot continue in office because of the state of his health. All power has been transferred to a right-wing Emergency Committee, headed by Vice-President Gennady Yanaev. Tanks have been moving towards the centre of Moscow for several hours. Russian television and radio stations are broadcasting only the Emergency Committee’s announcement and’ – the camera cut, suddenly, to show the corps de ballet in Swan Lake pattering across a stage in their tutus – ‘Tchaikovsky and Chopin. This appears to be a military coup.’

  *

  There was a time before I went to school when my mother and I visited Russia once a week. ‘Welcome to Russia,’ the lady always said. It was an overheated flat just outside Southampton, full of photographs of ballet dancers. In Russia’s front room, where I was sent to play, two unfriendly, stiff-legged pugs lay snoring on the carpet. I didn’t object, however, because of the miraculous house that sat on top of the television. It had gingerbread walls and spun sugar icicles hanging off the roof and its path was paved with chocolates and lined with jelly flowers. While my mother declined Russian nouns, I climbed up on a chair and passed the time in awed and loving contemplation of the house. She always bribed me not to touch it. ‘A Curly Wurly on the way home if you leave the house alone.’ Every week the temptation was too great. A little piece of the back wall and an icicle or two would disappear, and she and the lady emerged at the end of her lesson to find sugary smears across my cheeks and a welling of guilty tears. Thus I discovered that Russia was forbidden, and that it tasted of gingerbread.

  My mother never gave up her Russia
n lessons. Between driving four children to school, delivering stews to her parents, knitting jerseys like hairy beasts and cooking for a stream of guests, she would pull a tattered exercise book out of her handbag and memorise Russian vocabulary. Sometimes she taught me a few words: snyeg idyot – ‘it’s snowing’ – sounded like little hooves. On Saturday mornings, I’d climb into her bed while she did her homework. Lying in the curve of her waist and watching the strange letters flow from her green felt-tip, I pondered the information that my grandfather Igor was born in a yellow house in Moscow and bound in swaddling clothes. We had an icon from that house, a Madonna encased in silver-gilt with glass jewels in her crown, and Russian Easter eggs made of wax with velvet ribbons. All of these and my grandfather, wrapped like a swiss roll: I turned the images over in my head and grinned to myself under the bedclothes.

  My mother was born Tatyana Vinogradoff, a little girl with white-blonde hair and a blue-eyed, smooth-cheeked look that later made my heart leap a hundred times when I recognised it on the street in Russia. She came from a Muscovite family of academics and teachers; her grandfather, Pavel Gavrilovich Vinogradoff, taught at Moscow University until he moved to Britain and became Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford in 1903. In the black-and-white photograph on my mother’s desk he had a statuesque quality that made it hard to believe he’d ever really lived.

  If Russia meant anyone real to me, it meant my mother’s father, Grandpa Igor, a large, square, adorable man with a walking stick that he wielded for emphasis. In his youth he had a passionate temperament, and once my father met a man who remembered him at university: ‘Ah, dear Igor … the only fellow who’d come for a drink and eat the glass.’

  In the nineteen twenties, he’d fought a duel with sabres; a couple of decades later, so the story went, he wrestled Lucian Freud to the ground and bit him on the ankle. By the time I knew him, he was an affectionate, learned old man with a habit of repeating his remarks three times over. ‘Dear girl,’ he called me, ‘dear girl. Dear girl.’ On one occasion, he was surprised to find that the shops were shut.

  ‘It’s Good Friday, Igor,’ he was told.

  ‘Oh,’ said Igor. ‘Poor chap. Poor chap. Poor chap.’

  It was Igor who first suggested a dark side to Russia. When I was seven he told me – perhaps, in his absent-minded way, forgetting whom he was talking to – that children in the Soviet Union were taught to inform on their parents at school. By the time they came home their mothers and fathers were gone, vanished into the camps.

  ‘But why?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because that’s how the Bolsheviks operate,’ Igor answered, thumping his stick on the floor.

  Igor had good reason to hate the Communist Party. As far as he knew, all the relations that the Vinogradoffs left behind when they moved to Oxford were dead by 1931. Four of Igor’s five uncles and four of his cousins died in the civil war. His only surviving aunt, Lisa, the headmistress of a girls’ school in Moscow, starved to death by the end of the twenties. Her letters simply stopped arriving.

  The Vinogradoffs were typical Moscow intelligenty, professors and teachers, supporters of constitutional reform. They belonged to the moderate, professional middle class that was just beginning to assert itself in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century – a class that the Bolsheviks destroyed with great thoroughness. The figure that surfaced most often in my dreams was poor Lisa, who starved. I imagined her becoming weak and her stomach swelling up. I think it struck me particularly that such a fate should befall a headmistress.

  My mother’s hopes that I would learn Russian at school came to nothing. The Russian teacher left because of lack of demand and I lost interest when I became a teenager. I avoided the thought of Russia; in fact I avoided thought of any kind. My mother was ill, my life was flying past in a daze. After my grandfather Igor waved his stick at Miss Hunter and insisted that our history books were full of Bolshevik propaganda, Russia lodged itself firmly in the category of things that made my toes curl. When the time came to apply for university, Arabic occurred to me as a safe choice. I had no family connections with the Arab world; surely none of them would be able to embarrass me there.

  And then my mother died. She’d had cancer. It was not sudden, and yet I was a seventeen-year-old in a daydream, who’d assumed such a thing was not possible.

  Eighteen months later I arrived in Edinburgh and found my way to the Department of Arabic, a little Georgian terrace on Buccleuch Place. The professor was welcoming. ‘Come in, come in,’ he bustled. ‘Arabic honours, isn’t that right?’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ I stammered. ‘I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to read Arabic after all.’

  ‘Oh lord,’ said the professor. ‘Bang goes the funding for our language assistant.’

  So at last I did as my mother wanted, and began to learn Russian.

  19 August 1991: 8 a.m.

  ‘… Developments in Moscow have been reverberating on the financial markets around the world. In Tokyo stocks plunged at the announcement of Mr Gorbachev’s removal from power. In Hong Kong the Hang Seng index has also fallen sharply. The dollar is up, as usual benefiting from uncertain times, and gold, that traditional safe haven, has also risen. And now, Martin Sixsmith in Moscow …’

  ‘We have now heard that Gorbachev is in fact under arrest at his dacha in the Crimea.’ The BBC’s Moscow correspondent was looking pale. ‘The Russian Parliament have declared that the announcement of a State of Emergency is not constitutional. Boris Yeltsin, in the Russian parliament building, seems to be gathering resistance around him. He is proposing a national strike…. There is a substantial lobby that wants to return to the rule of Communism, and also a lobby that considers Gorbachev wasn’t going fast enough. The Soviet people will be split along these lines. I think clashes will be inevitable.’

  ‘I’m bound to say, it seems to me this will lead to violence and bloodshed,’ said a commentator back in the studio. ‘The coup leaders include the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence and the head of the KGB, so one has to say that they control the forces of coercion…. On the other hand there will be some very serious resistance.’

  My friend Emily rang halfway through the morning, having talked to our tutors at Edinburgh. ‘We can forget leaving for Russia in a fortnight,’ she reported. ‘They think it looks bad.’

  I still had not moved from in front of the television. I’d covered many eventualities in my preparations for this journey, but a military coup was not one of them.

  *

  In early 1991, I had received a letter offering me a place on a year-long course at Voronezh University, which would count towards my degree at Edinburgh. Enclosed with the letter was a list of the other students who had been accepted and a briefing document, giving detailed advice as to how to survive in the provincial town where I had decided to spend the coming months.

  Voronezh was not, perhaps, the most obvious choice. When Emily and I began to look into studying in Russia, we discovered that only two universities were willing to take us for a whole year: Moscow or Voronezh, and there was a certain consensus of opinion as to which of the pair would be preferable.

  ‘Voronezh?’ said the Russians I asked, incredulously. ‘Have you any idea what knuckle-headed louts live in the provinces? You are a cultured person, of course you must go to Moscow.’

  I talked to people with business interests in Russia. ‘Well, Voronezh is somewhat – how to put it – off the map,’ they hedged. ‘If you go to Moscow, you’re likely to end up with some useful contacts. There’s a great ex-pat community there now. There’s even an Irish bar.’

  Emily and I were not convinced. We weren’t going to Russia to sit in Irish bars and make contacts. Our minds were finally made up, however, by a girl we met from the Russian department at St Andrews. Tossing back her hair, she began to talk about the coming year.

  ‘I’m going to Moscow, actually,’ she said. ‘Are you coming too? Oh, it’s going to be
such fun. A whole bunch of my friends are coming, we’ve got the maddest ideas. We’re organising a ball! You absolutely must come. We’ll all be living in the same hostel, so I’ll know where to find you.’

  Emily and I did not need to confer. ‘Actually, we’re going to Voronezh,’ we said politely, in unison.

  *

  Russian Language Universities Scheme briefing document issued for Voronezh:

  An average-sized city (pop: 1 million) situated on the banks of the river Voronezh, 8 km north of its confluence with the mighty river Don. It lies some 500 km SSE of Moscow, or approximately halfway between Moscow and the Black Sea, on the border between the forest and meadow region of middle Russia, and the southern steppe. The soil is famously fertile, owing to the prevalence of black earth. The potato is the major crop of the region and among the finest in all Russia.

  Founded in 1586 as a Cossack fort against Tartar raids, Voronezh soon became an important entrepôt for corn and other produce carried up the Don from the southern regions. Since Soviet times, it has flourished as an industrial centre producing a wide range of products, including televisions, chocolates and nuclear power. The city contains a monument to Peter the Great, a railway college, two museums and a well-regarded university. Almost completely destroyed during the Great Patriotic War of 1940–45, during which it suffered front-line fighting for two hundred days, the city has been rebuilt in the finest tradition of Soviet construction and design …

  After several paragraphs in this vein, the tone became practical. ‘Certain items will be invaluable to you in Voronezh. The correct clothing is essential, as in winter the temperature falls to minus twenty and more.’ A sports shop sold me a pair of fur-lined boots a size too large and a down-filled coat that, they said, was suitable even for a hanging bivouac. (They showed me a photograph: a climber dangling from a snowy peak in a kind of sling made of Goretex.) ‘In summer the temperature can be as high as forty degrees. In the autumn it is rainy and muddy.’ Three cases were already full. ‘Necessities will be hard to find in Voronezh.’ So Emily and I stocked up. We bought two saucepans and a frying pan, plates, mugs, cutlery, coffee, teabags, tomato paste, dried milk, dried mushrooms, packet soup, a Christmas pudding, vitamins, stock cubes, marmite and ten packets of Sainsbury’s luxury nut selection. We bought a year’s supply of toothpaste, soap, tampax, shampoo, toilet paper, aspirin, plasters, antibiotics and a sterile surgical pack with a full set of syringes and a drip. We bought presents, without knowing who they were to be for: tins of Earl Grey tea, Union Jack ashtrays, postcards of Princess Diana and a joke nose on elastic. When we’d got these home, we went straight out again and bought bleach, a padlock, cockroach powder, contraceptives, a rape alarm, a scrubbing brush, a pair of flip-flops each and an Allen key which was necessary, apparently, to open the windows on Russian trains. I never actually remembered to take it with me on a train journey but it had a talismanic value. Surely I was ready for every possible situation now that I had an Allen key.