

A WOMAN IN RUSSIA

by

Victoria del la Varis

Published by Victoria del la Varis at Smashwords

Copyright Victoria del la Varis, 2012

Certain names have been changed by the author, for the sake of certain people's privacy.

* * *

This book is dedicated to my sister, Chimene.

* * *

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Vladivostok, Far Eastern Russia

Chapter 2 - Xhabarovsk

Chapter 3 - Amursk

Chapter 4 - Komsomolsk on the Amur River

Chapter 5 - On the Train to Tynda

Chapter 6 – Chita

Chapter 7 – Krasnoyarsk

Chapter 8 - Ulan Ude

Chapter 9 - Arshan

Chapter 10 - Irkutsk

Chapter 11 - Tomsk

Chapter 12 - Omsk, City of Exiles

Chapter 13 - On the Train to Tobolsk

Chapter 14 - Yekaterinburg

Chapter 15 - Vladimir & Suzdal

Chapter 16 – Moscow

Introduction

_A Woman in Russia,_ describes my 2010 journey across Russia by Trans-Siberian train. Abandoning for a while, my New Zealand rural and family life, I revisited Russia to learn what the country was like, twenty years after the fall of communism.

Travelling across Russia is arduous. It is the largest country in the world, at seventeen million kilometres square. I found myself in predicaments: Russian women harangued me, Russian men were confused by me. The outcome of this journey, however, was learning that everywhere humanity is the same: complex, pithy, and fallible.

I wrote this book based on my travel diary, weaving notes on Russian history, literature, and facts of Russian life into the narrative.

The way I learnt Russian is quite interesting. I began at high school and continued my studies at Auckland University, New Zealand, where the Russian Department seemed to be an institution of the cold war. My professors hid in their offices; they might have been cultivating anthrax. I never met a real live Russian. I heard them speak through headphones in the language laboratory.

In 1989, I got behind the Iron Curtain just before communism self-combusted. Four years later, in 1993, I visited Russia again. I imagined I would hop on trains and bob along in river boats, in a post-communist, liberal Russia. My timing, however, was wrong. Russia, in 1993, was deranged.

I fell in love with a farmer in 1996, and moved to the north of New Zealand to live on a farm. I continued to learn Russian by singing Russian lullabies to my baby boys, teaching them basic words as toddlers, and studying passages on Soviet scientific atheism by night, when I had finished hanging out nappies and picked up the toys. I found those difficult passages were useful to get my tongue around long Russian words.

_A Woman in Russia_ also represents a personal victory. When the opportunity came, in May 2010, to retrace my first faltering steps across Russia – I took it.

I could not have made the second journey without the support of my husband Doug, and the strength I had acquired in the meantime, becoming a mother.

Chapter 1

Vladivostok

Population 610,000

Vladivostok is a Russian seaport city on the shores of the Sea of Japan, with sea mists, the rusty, sulking confusion that comes with shipping, vintage European buildings, and a train station lined with marble. The station is the Eastern Terminus of the great Trans-Siberian Railway that crosses all of Russia. Behind the station ocean liners dock alongside a pier and passengers disembark to purchase Russian souvenirs in a shopping mall replete with the comforts of globalization. Brand-name bags, snakeskin wallets, golf shoes, ginseng, and royal jelly await sale. Across the road in a small square, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands on a plinth.

The Bolshevik has a cap in his hand and a pigeon perching on his bald head. He points his finger at a building covered with neon and billboards, and it is true, the building needs a good clean. Sometimes, the pigeon prefers to sit on Lenin's accusing finger.

Sausages, salamis, cheese, and fruit, sit on trestle tables in front of Lenin. The

market-wares reveal that shortages are no more, communism is dead, raw capitalism has arisen, and, you are now in Vladivostok at the brink of the Russian realm, where everything costs!

It's a short stroll to 'The Fighters of the Revolution Square', more simply known as, Central Square.

Every May 9, guided missile systems; artillery mounts; infantry combat vehicles; military seamen; frontier guards, and soldiers of the Far Eastern District parade on Central Square for Victory Day, to celebrate Russia's victory over the Germans in World War Two.

Otherwise, just three monuments occupy the square. They honour the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East. One fighter operates his field gun; another stands; another strides; two clutch their rifles, and the last fighter waves his cap. There is one female fighter. She holds a bundle.

The tallest of the monuments displays a male soldier, trumpet and unfurled banner held in his hands. Presiding over Golden Horn Bay, he is the symbolic soldier who, trumpet blaring, led the Reds to victory against the Whites, in the last major battle of the Russian Civil War.

The Russian Civil War, 1918-1922

Russia, in 1918, was in a state of chaos. The Civil War that raged across Russia was a clash of two ideologies: capitalism and communism. A battle for political and philosophical supremacy was being fought to the death on Russian soil.

Russia fought in the First World War on the side of the British and the French against Germany. Conditions on the front line, and the colossal loss of life amongst the ill-equipped Russian soldiers led to desertion by the thousands. This, coupled with food and staples shortages in the cities, led to the Bolshevik revolution and the eventual withdrawal of Russia from the war. Communist Russia, the Bolsheviks said, wanted no further part in the capitalists' conflict. However, Russia had an internal battle yet to fight. Russians began fighting Russians, to decide Russia's political and ideological fate. This time it wasn't only the cities that starved: food and supplies ran out across the whole of Russia.

Petrograd (St Petersburg) and Moscow, were held by the communist Bolsheviks, but across the rest of Russia, Anti-Bolshevik forces assembled. They called themselves the 'Whites'. The Russians in the White force were former officers of the Russian army and loyal soldiers; Socialist Revolutionaries who wanted democratic reform; Cossacks and anarchists who hated the Bolsheviks; and Tsarists who wanted to put the monarchy back in place. Then there were Czechs, Austro-Hungarians, and Finnish partisans, who joined the Whites to fight the Reds.

The White leaders didn't want a communist dictatorship, they wanted democratic process. The Provisional Government, briefly established after the abdication of Tsar Nikolai I, had offered a taste of what might have been, if Lenin's Bolsheviks hadn't ousted it. When Lenin signed for peace with Germany – The Treaty of Brest-Litovst, March 3, 1918 – the Russians deserted the Allies. Lenin expected the revolution to spread world-wide. He called for workers and soldiers of every nation to rise up and overthrow their capitalist governments.

Western governments acted. British, French, and American forces landed in Archangelsk and Murmansk. Japanese troops mobilised in Vladivostok. American troops joined the Japanese and stockpiled weapons there.

The Allies promised the thousands of Czech prisoners-of-war, stranded in Russia after the peace treaty, an independent Czech state, if they continued to fight the Germans in France. The Allies dispatched the Czechs eastwards to Vladivostok, to waiting transport ships. The Czechs never made it. Russian Army deserters by the thousands, civil chaos, and rail disruptions choked the Trans-Siberian Railway. The stranded Czechs formed a legion and joined the cause of the Whites. They took over sections of the railway.

The Bolsheviks were not to be defeated. Lenin's sidekick, Leon Trotsky, proved himself a

military strategist: he galvanised a fighting force from the shreds of the Russian army. This became, 'The Red Army'.

The Civil War, Reds against Whites, waged in strategic locations across Russia – from Estonia, and Petrograd (St Petersburg), in the north, to the Ukraine in the south. From Yekaterinburg, in the Ural mountains (the frontier of European Russia), to the Russian Far East. Russians murdered each other across the steppe, in Siberian villages and towns, beside rivers, along train lines. Both sides slaughtered, tortured, torched. Both sides ransacked the produce of the peasantry. The bewildered people withheld planting their grain. Then followed starvation. The Civil War precipitated the 1921-1922 famine, in which millions of Russians perished.

July 1918, mid-summer, Russia. On the night of the 17th, in a merchant's house in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, Bolshevik soldiers shot on command, the Tsar and Tsarina, their four daughters and haemophiliac son, the family cook, the Tsarina's lady-in-waiting, the Tsar's valet, and the family doctor.

Red Army soldiers transported the bodies by horse-cart to a disused mine. They threw the bodies down the mine. An acid specialist was dispatched to eradicate the corpses, but he had a mishap and was prevented from doing his work, so the bodies were lifted from the mine and buried in a secret location in a wood.

Lenin ordered the royals' execution, because he feared the Tsar might become the rallying cause of the Whites. Eight days after the Romanov murders, the Whites did indeed reach Yekaterinburg.

Finally, on October 25, 1922, in Vladivostok, after four years of fighting, the Russian Civil War ended. The bronze monuments to the 'Fighters' on Central Square, not only embody the Red Army's victory, but they also represent Russia's tragic history of brutal communism, fratricide and regicide. At the end of the Russian Civil War, there were four million more Russian women than men.

Vladivostok's Problems

Vladivostok is polluted. Two suburbs in particular have been declared ecological disaster zones. The pollution is caused by industry and coal-power; it is exacerbated by the lack of snow to settle the dust, and by the formation of the harbour, which traps the contaminated air. Nowhere in this city is it healthy to live, according to Boris Preobrazhensky, an eco-scientist at the Pacific Institute of Geography.

At this very minute, three smoke stacks are belching smoke over Vladivostok. So dark is the sky above the apartment blocks, so decayed is the urban sprawl, that beyond the buildings clustered at the harbour, the rest of the city resembles a doomed world.

Vladivostok's smoke-stacks will continue to spew for the foreseeable future. In September 2012, the APEC Summit was held in Vladivostok. The Kremlin bankrolled a hasty lick-and-spit job of the city. Dignitaries did not see how filthy were the First or Second Rivers, or the how the human need for shelter has created towering emblems of shame.

From the 1950's until 1991 foreigners were denied the pleasures of visiting Vladivostok. Visitors and foreign shipping were prohibited because of the city's military significance as the Soviet Pacific Naval Base. Nowadays, though the city is once again open, tourists don't visit the suburbs because they are full of ugly apartment buildings and broken bottles.

In 2004 the dashingly handsome Vladimir Nikolayev, a high-flying businessman with shipping

and fisheries interests specialising in the illegal export of seafood and timber, became mayor of Vladivostok. Nikolayev's mayoral victory was made thoroughly certain when his number one opponent tripped on a grenade left outside his office. It did not quite kill him.

In 2007 Mayor Nikolayev was jailed for corruption and fraud by the Vladivostok City Court. The Kremlin decided that year to clean up Russia's corruption.

Arriving at the premises of Living Hope Charitable Trust

May 17

After collecting me from Vladivostok airport in a minivan and navigating a busy, third-world-rough, six-lane carriageway for twenty minutes, Rachel Hughes, the Director of Living Hope, turns down a pot-holed lane, through a leafy zone with quintessential Russian houses sitting amongst the foliage. The houses are made of logs. Their windows are trimmed with painted boards.

Rachel calls on her cell to say we are nearly there. She asks for the gates to be opened. We drive over a bridge which has structural bits missing. A steel gate open,s we enter the compound of Living Hope. The building is large and pink, an orangey-pink. The young man who opens the gates and closes them, is called Denis. Rachel pronounces his name the Russian way: Den-eez.

Denis is swarthy with black eyes that look in opposite directions. His face has scars and acne, and scars from acne.

He carries my suitcase of donations, staggering up the sweeping staircase ahead of me. At the top of the stairs is an enormous window. There is the river below and the trees. Girls' dresses and tiny pairs of tights are draped over the balustrade.

Rachel follows me up the stairs, growling about everything. Firstly, she's angry about Denis being drunk. She says that Denis has had his last warning. Any more drinking and he's out. By that, I guess she means out on the street.

And then she is unhappy about the clothes in the entrance-way. She says she has told the girls before, not to dry clothes there.

We go into a wide corridor with doors on each side. My room is the first on the left.

A huge mirror covers one wall, a double bed is in front of it. A large window looks down on the dismal car park area and the steel gates. No curtains. On the opposite wall are shelves with cardboard boxes of Living Hope's files, dated 2007, 2008. The building was an upmarket brothel, Rachel says.

That explains the mirror. I look at myself for a minute. I'm standing beside a much taller and larger Rachel, who wears boots with six inch heels. I'm wearing jeans and hiking shoes, and a blue merino jersey. I wonder what other figures this mirror has reflected.

The Russian light is sombre. I remember the institutional smell: a blend of floor polish, mouldy basement, and beef broth – the distillation of Russia. It is in my nostrils again. I am smelling it, here, at Living Hope, a shelter for Vladivostok's street-kids, set up by Rachel, a Kiwi from Tauranga, in a building where once women traded their bodies to men.

Rachel interrupts my thoughts.

'I want to use this room to teach dance classes to the kids,' she says.

For some reason, into my head springs an image of a young ballerina. But the ballerina isn't a Vladivostok street urchin. This is an image I remember from a book I won in high school, when I came first in Russian and won the Pushkin Prize. The book I received as a prize, was a Soviet propaganda picture-book, full of photos of healthy Russians and Soviet achievements. There were photos of combine harvesters, golden fields of wheat, and astronauts. And there was a photo of a dainty Russian ballerina at the bar. The long foreword described Soviet history:

But at the same time there was another Russia. A country of deep thought and bold dreams. A country rich with people of noble aspirations and generosity of spirit, prepared to make any sacrifice, to suffer any deprivation, for the people's happiness, in the struggle for victory. The revolution took decades to mature in the country. It smouldered in peasant uprisings, in the selflessness of the Decembrist-Revolutionaries from among the nobility, who came out against tsarist autocracy, in the inflamed articles by revolutionary democrats and in strikes and demonstrations by workers. All that was best, most progressive and noble in the Russian revolutionary movement was absorbed by the party of communists, the party of the Bolsheviks. Armed with the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism, the Bolsheviks became the recognised militant vanguard of the revolutionary forces.

Born of the October Revolution, 1977

In the kitchen, I look in the pot to see what blonde Natasha, one of the four Natashas at Living Hope, is cooking. She has picked some greens from the side of the road on the way to the shelter, and she washes them and tosses them into the soup that later will be served to we three Kiwi volunteers and other Russians living at the shelter.

'These greens are full of nutrients,' Natasha says.

'The soup looks delicious,' I say, trying not to think about the filth of the road. Natasha beams at me.

This is the recipe, as Natasha, standing at the stove stirring the pot, tells me. The greens are named, 'cheremsha.' They are similar to spinach, but they have a garlicky smell. The soup is called Solyanka.

Natasha's Solyanka (beef soup), with Cheremsha

2 onions, chopped

2 chopped potatoes

6 cups water

3 cups brisket, sliced

4 tsp Tomato purée

1 pickled cucumber, chopped

1 bay leaf

pinch salt& pepper

greens: Cheremsha (which taste like garlic chives), or garlic chives.

**Method:** Cook the onions and beef in the water for 1 hour, then add potatoes and cook gently for further 20 minutes. Add tomato purée and chopped cucumber and cook a further 10 minutes. Lastly add chopped cheremsha, just before serving.

*

I have been asked by Natasha, the Director of Administration, to join them in the office at 9.30 tomorrow, for morning prayers.

May 18

It feels like food is scarce and the world is famished, because downstairs in the kitchen where they feed all the people at this place, I can't see much food. There are hunks of Russian bread, the usual grey bread with a brown crust, and the loaf has been cut into slices and then halves, as it always is, and, although I love Russian rye bread, I panic at the thought that bread is all there is.

I look into cupboards. The contents: tea, sugar, packets of dried herbs, bouillon cubes, and one packet of pasta.

I notice that David and Dillan have their own supplies for breakfast, namely: butter, Marmite and honey. Denis has made a big pot of oatmeal, (which the Russians call kasha), for general consumption. But that is it, in the culinary department at Living Hope this morning. I better get to town to buy some food, or I'll starve.

Morning Prayers

I sit on a chair, in the crowded office that resembles any office the world over with its paraphernalia – computers, calendars, pots of pens and rolling chairs at each of the four work stations. Except the days and months on the calendar are Russian words, and there is a workday-prayer scroll hanging beside the door into Rachel's office, also in Russian, asking God for His Blessing and Guidance in the striving to be honest, hard-working, and kind to colleagues.

I wait for whatever is going to happen, to happen. In the meantime, I look at the view.

A brown river dawdles, the ramshackle bridge spans it, trees grow along the road, beside the river. This morning the trees are dressed in spring leaves. A bus goes down the road. A boy drops a line in the water.

Finally, Blonde Natasha, the house mother, and Brunette Natasha, the Director, join me and Plump Natasha, the Camp Coordinator, at the little desk by the window and the morning prayers begin. Natasha with the blonde hair, begins in a whisper:

'God – All-powerful, All-knowing – Blessed God'.

The basic drift is thanks and acknowledgement for His Beneficence, with lists of His Blessings bestowed upon Living Hope. This invocation flows for minutes, gurgling like a stream. Then I notice a change. Natasha asks for money. The stream falls over rocks, becomes rapids.

'God', Natasha says, 'this month Rachel had to pay the staff from her own purse, as donations were short. I know it is a world-wide recession, God, but...'

I sneak a look at Natasha, putting her pleas to God. I peek at the others, who, with nodding heads, begin a chorus of agreement. Blonde Natasha's husky voice rises. Then she goes quiet.

Natasha, the Director, leads the prayers next. She flings her scarf around her neck, and in tight jeans and high heels, her trim posterior against the desk, she pleads with authority and humility. She isn't as easy to listen to as gurgling-brook Natasha. Her voice sounds like a blocked drain.

After morning prayers, I go to the centre of Vladivostok with Natasha, the Director.

I have no roubles, as there was no time to change currency at the airport, so the trip to the city centre, is primarily, for me at least, to change into Russian roubles, the $200 US, Doug placed into my hand as we said goodbye.

First, a supermarket. Natasha buys food for a woman who she explains, has none. This woman is also a mother with a child to feed. Natasha buys a small bag of potatoes, some frozen chicken pieces, and a bag of frozen broccoli. I'm alarmed at the packaged-ness of every item; everything is sold in extravagantly small quantities, as if eating is the loneliest of activities.

We stand at the check-out and I watch a TV above our heads. Its a public safety bulletin showing a tea-towel on fire because someone has hung it above a gas hob in a kitchen.

I have no Russian currency. I feel like a pauper. Everything I see on the shelves looks expensive. Not only that, if the population of this country is so alcohol-deranged that they need to be told not to hang tea-towels above flames, then I ask myself, what the hell am I in for?

I make up my mind. I will not spend one night in any sordid apartment block. Being burnt alive twelve floors up – because a housewife has had too many vodkas to maintain diligence – that's not part of my Russian dream.

Natasha, with quarter-pink nails, earpieces in each ear and wire dangling, drives while conversing with three different people, one after the other, in the space of ten minutes. Between calls she sets her cellphone on a piece of velcro on the dashboard, where it plays trash-pop.

We duck down a side street, park behind an old building. Natasha calls someone. A young woman appears. I help unload bags of clothes, toys, and the food. The young woman smiles and bustles away with the bags. I know she is not the needy woman. She's too clean and friendly. She must be another charity worker.

Back in the car, I slurp a pot of yoghurt. Natasha bought it for me in the supermarket. It is tangy and delicious and I feel so healthy drinking it, as if I alone in this desperate city, have found a source of nutrition and sustenance. It is unsweetened yoghurt and without a doubt one of the healthiest items in that supermarket full of chocolates, biscuits, garlic sausage, and frozen dumplings.

Natasha lets me out, I dash across an intersection, dodging SUVs plotting to murder me. Wandering down a cobbled street named the 'Old Arbat', I pass high-end restaurants, boutiques, and camera shops, before finally, I find a bank that will change my dollars.

I'm faint and shaky with hunger, but at last I have money in my pocket. I find a café. Descending into country-style within four yellow walls, I choose a plate with a few slices of peppers, onions, eggplant, and a single chicken kebab. The chicken is smothered with dried herbs. All I need is plain food containing vitamins. It is miserable eating alone, and the food, without justification, is expensive.

May 19

I wake up early, because of the light coming in the curtain-less window. It's raining, there are droplets on the window. I translate an article on alcoholism, lying on my bed with the newspaper I brought from the plane, and my dictionary.

The problem in Russia is this: The doctors are alcoholics, so are the patients they treat; the professors are alcoholics, also the students they teach; the bosses, the employees too; the parents, the children; the statesmen, the unwashed; the oligarchs, their slaves. All of Russia is drunk.

Later, I will do as I've been told and speak with Sasha and Natasha, the two young mums, about my experience of being a mother.

I've no clue what to say to them. Should I talk about my post-natal breakdowns?

Will they benefit from knowing the drugs the doctors gave me robbed me of muscular control, leaving me speech-impaired, with anarchic, wilful limbs?

Shall I tell them how I convalesced doing yoga and drawing pictures, so that in four days time, they let me out of the ward, and I was able to go home to my husband and my six-week-old baby, Orlando? Will this matter to them?

Natasha is barely nineteen and looks like a child. My first impression of her was that someone had given her a black eye. She had a sticking plaster covering a livid-looking lump on her left cheek. Then I saw Denis, standing behind her as she peeled veges in the kitchen, give her a mock punch on the back of the head. I said in Russian, 'Don't do that. I don't like that behaviour. Violence is not funny. It is never a joke.'

Denis looked at me and dropped his hands.

Blonde house-mother Natasha, said in her sultry voice, 'Thank you, Victoria.'

I learnt that Natasha's lump was a boil.

Later in the morning

After a breakfast of the kefir and muesli I bought in town, I join Denis, the guy with the scars and the lazy eye, and Sasha and Natasha, the two mums, and blonde Natasha, the house mother. We sit with bibles. We are studying: 'From Luke'. Blonde Natasha is the teacher.

(There are so many Natasha's here: four all together. Two upstairs in Administration, two downstairs.)

Natasha-the-house-mother, tells us to open at the section [ot luka] 'From Luke'. As Lyk (pronounced 'luke'), means 'onion' in Russian, I think we are studying something biblical to do with onions. Like how Jesus' disciples planted a field of shallots in the desert, and at first they wouldn't grow until Jesus caused it to rain. After some discussion I realise we are reading, 'The Gospel of Luke.'

We laugh about that. Everyone looks at me, shocked. How can she think Luke is an onion? How can someone be so ignorant of the Bible?

We are seated at the table in the large kitchen, on the ground floor of the building. Outside the double-glazed window, the filthy river flows. There are pot plants on the window sill. We take turns to read aloud. Sasha and Denis read seriously. The reading leads onto discussion and I find I'm enjoying myself. I listen to these kids' reflections. How wise they are.

We have to keep stopping, because the mums have to attend to their children. Running around in tights, are Natasha's daughter, Irina (14 months), and Anya, Sasha's daughter (2 years). Tights have to be lowered before the girls are placed on the potty, which sits in front of the picture window. With a peculiarly dexterous action on the part of the mums – simultaneously lifting the child, folding their limbs, lowering their buttocks – the mums place their child, then supervise and encourage them, then help them to stand, and then finally, they make their child tidy.

Then, the mums empty the pee.

Sasha's older daughter, Ariana, aged 6, sits next to me and draws with my pencil, on a piece of paper from my diary. She asks me to write some letters of the Russian alphabet, which I do, and she copies them.

Blonde Natasha, the house mother, is trying to pull our group back to Bible study. But Denis and I are watching the goings-on with the toddlers: they're running in circles like wound-up toys. I watch Natasha give chase, snare her girl, and give her a light smack on the bottom. Then she puts her girl on a chair, pushes it to the table and places a cup with the watery, sugary tea in front of her, and a finger of bread on the side.

Sasha sets her girl Anya at the table too, with tea and bread, just like Irina's. Only Anya squeals and sweeps her crust to the floor.

'Anya, nyelzya...', Denis says. (Anya, you mustn't do that...)

The first time I met Denis, he was drunk. I looked at him and thought, 'Where have I come to?' Now I admire him across the table. I have learnt this about him: He is nineteen, an orphan, and a trained confectioner, with a specialty at making cakes. The scars on his face are from the car-crash which took his parents' lives. Denis's sister lived too. They both grew up in a children's home.

'Did the carers in the children's home give you hugs?' I ask. He looks at me.

'What?' he says ( Are you mad?).

'They were evil.'

The Orphan Factory

Russia traditionally has gigantic boarding schools with hundreds of children. The country regularly reads shocking reports about children's rights violations in these closed "child dumps". Highly professional legislative and other initiatives based on the best Russian and world practices have been put forward many times and received support at the top political level in the country. Somehow, this help has not reached our children.

Russia Beyond the Headlines, Boris Altshuler, November 21, 2011

More Notes:

*The leading cause of children being in orphanages in recent years is alcoholism and drug addiction which lead to cruelty towards children in the family, and the neglect of their needs. Over 100,000 children annually are taken away from such families, partially through taking away parental rights (43,000 in the year 2000).

*The number of full orphans increases due to early deaths among the population due to mostly unnatural causes.

*There is an increase in parental incompetence due mostly to psychological illnesses.

*The number of incarcerated parents does not decrease.

*The number of children born out of wedlock is on the increase.

'The social disorganization of families, financial difficulties and difficulties in living conditions are increasing, as well as unhealthy relations between parents and degradation in family morals.'

'Being an orphan has a devastating effect upon the emotional connection of a child with his or her social environment, with the world of adults and peers, who are developing in more advantageous conditions and causes serious secondary disturbances of his or her physical, psychological and social development.'

'Psychology of Orphans, Dr. Ludmila M. Shipitsyna, 2007, pages 11-13

More Notes:

A conservative estimate of the number of children in children's homes in Russia: 800,000

Number of babies and children deposited in children's homes every year: 100,000

Average number of years spent by orphans in the homes: 16

Percentage of grown children who successfully adapt to life outside the homes: 10%

Of grown children who do not adapt:

10 % commit suicide

40% become criminals

40% become addicted to drugs or alcohol or both

Of children taken into state care, about 80% are social orphans.

Social orphans have a living relative, or a parent, but, due to alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, or domestic violence, or a combination of these factors, social agencies have removed the child from family custody.

The number of children living on the streets, in the whole of Russia, is very difficult to estimate, but has been put at 2.5 million, conservatively. (www.iorphan.org)

* * *

After Bible Study, I make a cup of tea. Rachel comes stomping downstairs into the kitchen, passing Sasha. Rachel shouts up the stairs at Sasha when she sees the potty by the window. She turns to me and says in English that Sasha is lazy, always leaving the potty in the kitchen. She has been told not to do this, she says. She explains that Sasha is paid by Living Hope to do the cleaning.

Now I know why the place is clean, and why I have seen Sasha washing the floors.

I have watched the mothers hard at work. Pampers (disposable nappies) are expensive, so they potty-train their children, like most poor Russians, beginning in babyhood. Natasha and Sasha conscientiously change their children's tights when they get soiled. They are systematic in the potty-training.

In the bathroom, on the balustrade, and downstairs in the kitchen, all the pairs of tights Natasha and Sasha have washed, are hung to dry.

Lunchtime

Sasha makes this salad for lunch. It's delicious:

Sasha's Simple Salad

Tomatoes, sliced

Cucumbers, sliced

Herbs: spring onion, chives, or the quintessentially-Russian dill, chopped

Sunflower seed oil

Salt

**Method:** Mix all the above together and serve!

*

After morning tea, I go upstairs to see the Second Natasha, the head of administration, the Natasha with pink nails. I want to enquire if she is ready to accept the 30-kilogramme suitcase with its 20 pairs of donated jeans, and $300 worth of vitamins, medicines, glitter, felt-tips and face-paint. I purchased the craft supplies and health supplements in Dargaville, New Zealand, and carried them to the Far East. Not to mention the out-of-date apothecary supplies donated by our local Primary Healthcare Organisation.

I have been here three days and no one, it seems, wants to take the suitcase off my hands. Day One, I eagerly spoke to Rachel about presenting my donations, but she just looked blank and said Natasha One would accept them; it was her job.

I am disappointed. No-one has taken notice of my efforts.

I went to the local pharmacy in Dargaville and asked for out-of-date medicines, for humanitarian aid. Instead, I got a cellophane-wrapped basket filled with foot balms and lotions, toe-nail clippers, and a file for cracked heels.

One Sunday morning, at 8 am, I sold raffle tickets to men in various states of undress as they geared-up for the annual Tangowahine Motorbike Trail Ride. It was not easy to sell them a pedicure pamper pack. They would have preferred chain sprockets or lube. Explaining the whereabouts of Vladivostok, I told them I was fund-raising for homeless kids who lived in sewers when outside, the streets were under snow. In underpants, knees hobbled by trousers, those guys opened their wallets, or fished in their cars for some dollars.

I deliver the booty. In the office the women – Alla and Natashas 1, 2, & 3 – are amazed that I passed through customs with so many pills. But it was not easy at all.

I was one of about a hundred passengers arriving on a flight from Seoul, South Korea. We moved in six or so queues towards immigration. Relinquishing my passport, the uniformed customs official studied it, confirmed my surname, grabbed the phone, and barked into it. She waited several minutes with hunched shoulder and receiver pressed to her ear, meanwhile examining my face, and and then my rear, visible in the mirror behind me.

Confidence dissolving sweatily, I studied the clerk and tried to stay calm. She could be described with these words: lipstick, bouffant hair, glasses, epaulettes, no wedding ring, frowning. Her lips and frown tell me I have no choice but to wait. Words or reasoning mean nothing here.

The Customs official ordered me aside, keeping my passport. I looked at her. She waived me away. I had to stand aside and let the next person come forward.

I looked around the room; all the travellers avoided eye-contact. I was a terrorist. Perhaps a drug dealer; or an enemy of the people. I was definitely irregular, even if I looked normal. Otherwise why had Russian Immigration pulled me aside?

Ages passed. Finally, a youth in khakis and cap bounded down from the second floor, parting the crowd. He crashed my booth from a rear door, snatched my passport, and sped back upstairs with it.

All the stragglers gave me filthy looks.

I tried to inflate my lungs and kept forgetting. Heart hammering, I remembered my misbehaviours, large and petty. Speeding fines. Less-than-perfect-mothering. Past errors. Perhaps the Russians have a tally. How well do they know me? What have I done wrong, lately?

Did the KGB keep a file on me when I studied at the Training and Research Centre, of the Central Moscow Cooperative Institute, back in 1989?

I thought of the foreign currency I had spent on champagne. I recalled precisely money and bottles exchanged behind a grand hotel. Was the KGB so disgusted by the degeneracy of our student contingent from capitalist countries, that they marked _me_ for future checks?

In 1989, my student dollars transformed into riches of roubles on the black market. Most of us were young students masquerading as serious Slavophiles, intent on becoming cunning linguists. We were young and wanted to party. We draped ourselves in the hammer and sickle flag and danced drunkenly. We didn't mean any trouble.

What about that caviar I devoured in Hotel Leningrad? (One of Stalin's five architectural wonders of ostentation in Moscow). I wasn't the only one eating it. What about those hefty generals in military regalia? Yes, it felt wrong at the time. It didn't seem like communism.

We had bribed the doorman. Inside, tables groaned with garlic sausage, gherkins, smoked salmon, black bread, and curls of butter. There was also a large pot of glistening, black sturgeon roe – caviar.

I ate a lot of that caviar on black bread with curls of creamy butter. I licked my teeth. Then I drank champagne. I can still taste the fish eggs as they burst against my tongue. And that was the first course, what the Russians call 'appetizers'. (Zakuski).

The dining room was vast; marble columns held up the ceiling; the band was loud and the music was from the seventies. The lead singer wore blue eye-shadow. I danced with a Finnish rock star named Toby, whose breath smelled of onions.

Elsewhere in Moscow, there was little to eat. Particularly after dark. By day, we students ate in a 'stolovaya' (workers' canteen) near our institute; but by night...

The only food I'd found was a semi-raw chicken thigh, on the famous Arbat street. I queued for an hour in the dark. Many hungry people were waiting with me. They were carving the rotisserie chicken before time; my piece was bloody and tough, but I ate it up.

The next day, I decided to get serious about finding food. When our teacher expounded with a pointing stick in Russian, teaching us about present passive participles, I wanted to whimper and flee, so I skipped the next class. I didn't care if I spoke Russian imperfectly.

First thing, I chomped an apple-paste-bun from the kiosk by the station. It was good food I knew where to find. Fortified, I hit the streets. A shop sign said 'Vegetables'. I entered, contemplating cooking a nutritious dinner that night in our hostel kitchen.

Shock. In London where I had been living, greengrocers before grandstands of produce plopped their wares into paper bags. In this vegetable shop, which was more like a cavern, I fumbled, every step more confused. Deep in the vortex, I saw only darkness and emptiness. There was a rotting smell. I went on. Something must be for sale. Anything. At last, I came to the end of the shop. In the corner, I identified a pile of rotting cabbages.

Back now in the present, at Vladivostok Airport...

A sexy Russian mother in a pink velvet tracksuit with a tan, long nails, a navel piercing, and blonde hair in a ponytail, shuffled her bags and her daughter forward. I noted she had purchased a juicer. I pondered the connection between affluence, health, and beauty.

Then, thankfully, a party of Korean businessmen carrying man-bags, gave me something different to think about. One man held a bunch of papers, and read aloud the sign about Customs Declarations on the wall behind him, kindly translating for his fellow travellers. No one was listening. They rummaged in their duty-free bags, speaking at once and pointing in various directions.

Finally, the young guard leapt down the stairs with my passport. There was just me waiting for interrogation. The Koreans had gone. While Commandant was bashing stamps, I asked what the problem had been. 'Name. Surname. Too long. Didn't fit forms.'

I knew it. I'd had a premonition filling forms on the plane: the Russian authorities were going to hate me. My double surname. My two middle names. The ensemble overran boxes and was foreign in all countries.

It wasn't the first time I'd felt my name an impediment. I made a split decision to change it. Officially. When I got home to New Zealand. All I had to do was get my husband to agree. Deep inside, I knew that would not be easy.

I cleared Passports. What about those medicines in my luggage? I pushed my trolley into the annex and gaped at the border guard. Instead of nabbing me, he smiled and waved me into Russia. I could have covered his Slavic face with kisses.

Now, I am translating the instructions on the labels of the prescriptions, which Natasha Two, writes in Russian on the bottles and packets, eyeing me dubiously.

I am gratified when they pronounce me a 'молодец': a real marvel [molodyetz]. It is the expensive pots of glitter they really admire.

May 20

Today I arrive by bus in town to register. I have to show my passport and visa. I find the building after some searching, and when they hear my foreign accent, I am ushered in immediately to see the head clerk who, sitting behind her desk covered in papers (dressed like an Italian, in a blue and white striped business shirt, with a tanned skin, and an expensive watch), was beautiful and very proper.

The Federal Migration Service of Russia.

I am scared.

I panic. I imagine being dragged off for questioning by Immigration Police, being charged a huge fine for doing wrong, for being naughty and remiss. Breaking laws; getting up late; daring to travel solo to Russia.

The clerk looks at me silently, nonplussed. She can't comprehend my presence there.

'How did you come to Russia?'

'I flew from Auckland to Seoul, then from Seoul to Vladivostok.'

'No, I mean, it says here, you are on a business visa. Who provided your invitation?'

'I received an invitation from a business in St Petersburg.'

'St Petersburg? But you are here now in Vladivostok?'

'Yes.'

'Where are you staying in Vladivostok?'

'At Living Hope. A shelter for the homeless.'

'A shelter for the homeless?'

'That's right. It's a charity.'

For some reason I feel ready to attack myself, like she seems to be attacking me. What on earth am I doing living in a shelter for the homeless?

'Then why isn't someone from this 'Living Hope' here with you? You must have a Russian citizen to register you. A citizen of Vladivostok, where you are staying. And they must have their documents showing their citizenship, as the person whose officially responsibility it is to answer for you and your presence here. You are a foreigner. This is the law.'

I give her the number of Living Hope. The head clerk rings and speaks to Alla, the only English speaker. Alla deals with the visa issues of all the volunteers. There follows a terse conversation.

Later...

I feel so good; so happy. The dispute with the head of Vladivostok Immigration has put me in an effervescent mood. Oh, the delight to speak, to use this language that has for so long lain in wait, in my consciousness. I feel strong, positive, optimistic, tired and a little on the edge of becoming sick, and I'm waiting here for a man called Peter. I wait for twenty minutes studying the hideous modernist architecture of the building, taking pleasure in reading and translating the large letters. But Peter, confused, has forgotten to say 'Meet me in my hotel.' Until I ring him back.

Large copper letters on the building:

The Department of Administration of the Federal Migration Service of the Primorski Area in the Frunizyenski Region, in the City of Vladivostok

The last thing Peter says to me is, 'Be careful.'

We meet in a café within his hotel. I don't know who I am meeting and expect to find a man in a suit, but Peter wears a lime green jumper with a zip. We shake hands. At the counter I order tea for one and a pastry, and return to our table. I peel off my orange jacket and woollen hat and sit looking at my new acquaintance.

Peter's white hair and intense eyes lend him an air of gravitas. This man appears to be sad and guilty, someone who might have deep regrets; but a survivor, because of his pragmatism.

My long-ago Russian professor at Auckland University, Hannah Brodsky, had urged me to contact Peter when in Vladivostok. Peter, she said, would be a prime contact in the Far East. A New Zealander from Auckland, Peter was here in Vladivostok, on a business trip.

Peter had worked for the New Zealand--------Company, back in the grim days of Soviet communism. The -------Company sent Peter to Sakhalin Island, on a mission to sell tonnes of New Zealand butter. But the company neglected to teach him any Russian. He only knew how to say, 'Da' and 'Nyet', when he arrived. After three hellish weeks, he telexed head office, I'm leaving.

Anna, a beautiful airport clerk, a woman half Peter's age, remarkably spoke some English. As she processed his flight from Eastern-bloc hell, and said, 'I will help you, if you come back.'

Ignoring all protests, the -------Company packed Peter off to Sakhalin yet again. He farewelled his children. After a time, his wife visited.

'This is the last time I'll ever set foot in this hell-hole,' she said, as Peter escorted her to her flight home.

That was the end of Peter's marriage. Back in Russia, it was time to marry Anna, the beauty at the airport, who spoke English. Anna already had a son, whom Peter adopted.

Peter interrupted my thoughts about guilty men.

'My colleagues said the marriage wouldn't last. But it's been twenty four years.'

Sakhalin, the island off the coast of Russia, got the thirteen years of Peter's life.

Peter talks about those years in Sakhalin. I picture buildings in snow blizzards; I hear the crackle of a radio and Russian sentences laden with clauses. I catch the scuffle of steps across linoleum; I feel turquoise walls closing in. Soviet power, I understand. It is despair. Despair becomes cells in your blood.

There was the KGB agent who tailed Peter like a faithful dog for years, living in the same hotel on the same floor, down the same corridor. The way Peter explains it, the agent sounded like his best and only friend.

Peter describes encounters with Russian airport officials, interested in his suitcases of American dollars, cash intended for the \-------Company (payment for butter). One official wanted Peter to strip.

'You can go jump,' said Peter, reaching his hand into the suitcase and slapping five thousand dollars on the table.

'Here, see if that makes you happy.'

Then there was yesterday's polite interrogation. Peter detested the Russian secret service.

Peat mines and salmon hatcheries in Sakhalin, and New Zealand Ice cream for Siberians; these were Peter's concerns nowadays.

'Now, tell me what you are doing here, Victoria?'

I told him my history of Russian study. I spoke about volunteering at Living Hope.

'And I'm crossing Russia by train – Xhabarovsk, Komsomolsk-Na-Amure, Tynda, Chita, Ulan Ude, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Yekaterinburg, Vladimir, Suzdal, and finally, Moscow.'

Peter raises his white eyebrows.

I look at the time. Shucks. I have to be at Living Hope before five, to finish processing my registration, which hasn't gone well. (I need a Russian citizen with their residency certificate to take responsibility for my presence. When the head clerk rang Alla, the secretary at Living Hope, and soundly told her off, the disrespect in her voice was like brutal murder. She called her, 'Devushka' (girl), and used the informal, 'you.')

Peter stands to shake my hand, then issues his stern warning: 'Be careful.'

Walking down the street, where money speaks and European buildings simultaneously comfort and reject me, I wonder who or what threatens me. I decide Peter means everyone and everything here in Russia.

In a society where it was thought that people were arrested for loose tongues, families survived by keeping to themselves. They learned to live double lives, concealing from the eyes and ears of dangerous neighbours, and even sometimes from their own children, information and opinions, religious beliefs, family values and traditions, and modes of private existence that clashed with soviet public norms. They learned to whisper.

The Whisperers, Orlando Figes, p. xxxI, 2007

May 22

First thing in the morning, with Alla, the English-speaking secretary giving me the filthiest of looks, Natasha, the Director (leaning against the desk), begins to growl at me.

'Victoria,' she says, 'something very, very bad has happened. We have a big, big problem.'

I wait through the long explanation into all the ways I have contravened Russian laws, and all the terrible consequences that will ensue. It can be easily summed up: I will cost Living Hope 40,000 roubles in fines, for not registering in time, and I too, will have to pay a fine of 40,000 roubles.

'Absolute rot,' I say.

I go on. 'I refuse to pay any such fine! And Living Hope will not pay anything, either. That is preposterous. I fulfilled my obligation to register within 72 hours. After all, I was there at the immigration office. Right there. Ridiculous. It's not my fault I was caught in a traffic jam, got off that bus, got on another, only to be caught again in a pile up. Then I realised that bus was the wrong bus anyway, so I got off that one and... and decided to walk to the 'elektrichka'. And when that took too long, I gave up and got on another bus instead and... And... it didn't get back here in time. Well, the Second River is so far out of town, isn't it? Yes. I got here at ten past five. But nobody had waited. I was only ten minutes late, after all. If there's any problem, I will simply demand to see the New Zealand consul. I'm not paying any fines. That's that.'

The women in the office look astounded. They can't imagine such an attitude can be taken about the authorities. They only know one way to feel about officialdom – terrified.

I believe they hate me. Speaking Russian gives me an edge, takes away the power they would have over me if I were a non-speaker. I can understand everything they say. There is nothing they can hide. They are not used to volunteers like me. They really wish to see me quaking in my boots, because I have done something criminally wrong. But I disappoint them – I am not terrified enough.

Natasha goes on, 'Well, there is a small chance – and only a teensy tiny chance mind you, we _may_ be able to get around it, _if_ we go to another immigration office. But you must give me your passport, and your visa...'

'I'm not giving you my passport. I'm coming with you.'

We drive through traffic jams, past three spewing chimneys, past coal fields, past apartments on hills, to a cluster of yellow-brick apartment blocks, where an another Immigration Office is housed. It is closed, but a few people are waiting outside the door, whom Natasha asks,

'Who is last?'

That is how it is done in Russia. When queueing (a frequent activity), the last person to join the queue (which is not necessarily people standing in an orderly line) asks this question of those already waiting. Some one speaks up. It is then possible to leave the queue for a time, knowing that your turn is after the woman in the grey cardigan, or the man with the big nose.

Natasha and I buy ice creams. We sit in a park, licking our ice creams, watching full-term pregnant women in dressing gowns with bellies straining at the buttons, smoke. There is a whole ante-natal class of mothers standing outside the _'rod-dom'_ , the birth clinic, puffing.

The Immigration Office is closed until 2. We have a half-hour wait. Then we climb, once again, the unlit stairwell to the second floor, and push through the throng of claimants, (most of whom are probably involved in the hellish process of getting a passport). Nobody seems to mind us pushing in.

At last, we sit at the desk of a civil servant, in a room with a bank of steel cabinets ranked floor-to-ceiling along the back wall. There are three other clerks at similar desks. As instructed by Natasha, I shut up, smile and let her do the talking. She tells an elaborate falsehood about how I came to miss my registration time-limit, because I had gone off to another town, for some sightseeing.

The Head Clerk looks at me. I smile at her.

With a brusque stamping and an application of the clerk's signature on all papers, I am politely commanded to pay a fine of 16 roubles, and my papers are in order.

Only sixty cents!

Not quite. First, we have to go to The Bank Of Russia, so I can deposit the 16 roubles into the Kremlin's coffers. This entails more queueing.

I am spent. I understand for the first time how the Soviet people were controlled. They were worn down by the convoluted and efficient, yet inefficient systems of a state expert at keeping tabs on everyone, making them comply with Kafka-esque rigmaroles. The Soviet state was a giant, humanity-energy-eating machine.

Later, I work for three hours, applying polyurethane to particle boards that will be used as shelving for the storage area on the third floor.

David and Dillan, (two Kiwis who are Christian), and Denis the Russian, have been working up there building rooms in the vast area, which is actually an attic that runs the length of the building. David is 60 years old, a builder, over six foot tall, as solid as a bear. Dillan is 42.

David has paid for the building materials out of his own pocket. He must have spent thousands. This is his second volunteer stint at Living Hope, but he speaks no Russian. Shortly, his second wife, Lois, will join him.

There is no proper mask. I do the best I can with an ill-fitting mask, working by the open dormer window. The fumes make me spin. I worry about my brain cells. What if I can't remember? How will I keep all these new Russian words, if I nuke my grey matter?

Dillan works without being bothered by the chemical fumes. He tells me he wants to do a good job, not just a satisfactory one. I, on the other hand, ask myself why I have to work in an unsafe environment, using chemicals without proper ventilation. I want to stop. I argue with myself,then decide I will finish the job. I signed up as a volunteer.

While Dillan and I work, he tells me the story of his life, and I tell him mine.

Dillan was brought up on a farm in the sticks, in a big family. His mother and father were Christian. They took in young people. Then Dillan rejected their faith, setting on a path of drug-taking, spending all his fisherman's wages.

What Dillan wished he could tell his Dad now, if his dad were alive, is how he'd opened himself up to God. He had been saved.

Dillan had hit the depths of despair. A force guided him to the Vineyard Church in Auckland. A mantle of light, the spirit of God, shone down on him, filling his heart. Dillan said he was ashamed of his past.

'Everyone has made mistakes,' I say. 'It's part of being human. It's how we learn.'

When I come down from the stinking attic and smell this cooking, I feel good. It has the earthy smell of peasant food. It tastes good too.

Denis's Buckwheat Kasha with Liver

1 cup buckwheat

3 cups boiling stock

2 tbps butter or vegetable oil

pinch of grated nutmeg

salt and pepper

chopped liver

**Method:** Toast the dry buckwheat in a pot for 2 minutes, then add the stock. Simmer gently for 15-20 minutes. In the last 5 minutes, add the liver and add the butter, or oil at the end.

Two young men whom I haven't met before, come into the kitchen. The handsome one reveals, as he removes his jacket, that his arms are made of steel, his lower arms being levers ending in pincers. He has on an orange singlet which shows to good advantage his torso and shoulders. His jeans are black. His friend is wearing a blue tracksuit. And glasses.

Victor is the name of the friend in blue, Vanya is the name of the man in orange.

Vanya hates crows. Big, black ugly squawkers. When he was a teenage boy, he spied a crow's nest and decided to climb up and destroy it. 10,000 volts went through his hands, from the electrical cable he had mistakenly grabbed on his climb. This shock should have killed him. He survived but lost his arms.

Rachel Hughes found Vanya languishing in a hospital. His stumps were becoming gangrenous without the medical aid he needed. Rachel found an anonymous philanthropist who paid for Vanya to travel to the United States, where Vanya received the prosthetic arms he now has.

Victor was an athlete, a high jumper. He travelled internationally, competing in China and other countries. Then he had a sporting accident, which left him with a brain injury.

The biographies of these two men come out, as they've heard that I'm translating stories written by the young people who have been helped by Living Hope. Blonde Natasha asked me to do the translations for a fund-raising calendar.

Vanya is the most talkative, but writing about his life quietens him. When he has finished, I read his story aloud. He keeps interrupting to elaborate, to make sure I've understood.

Vanya remembers his three months in America with pride. _I have lived in America,_ is the main point of his tale. Victor listens and nods. He will always play second fiddle to Vanya, because he has never lived in the USA. The distinction is understood.

After reading and translating both stories, I am tired.

Vanya asks me, 'Are you tired? You look tired. Yes? OK, I will finish soon.'

I have photos taken with Vanya, who is taller than me, and without hesitation he has put his arm around me and is clasping my shoulder. I can feel the metal of his arm pressing into me and I can smell his body. I laugh, because Victor has difficulty taking the photos and they all come out blurry because he moves the camera every time.

I take a photo of Vanya and Victor together.

Dinner for Eleven

Two women with the voices of angels sing. They are both eighteen. One is very beautiful. The other plays the guitar.

Everyone joins in the singing, including Dillan and David, because this song is sung in English too – it's international Christian pop.

'I'd be happy to marry a Russian woman like that,' Dillan says to me, meaning the beautiful one.

'She's too young for you. She'll break your heart,' I say.

'It would be so worth it.'

'What about blonde Natasha? Our house mother. She'd make a good wife.'

Dillan looks at me as if I were nuts. Clearly, he can't discern grace, humour, and gentleness in a woman. He wants to possess the substance of youth.

The glorious one looks at me with shining eyes.

'You aren't singing,' she says. 'Why? Don't you know the words? Aren't you Christian?'

'No, I'm not Christian.'

'Oh, you're not Christian!' she wails, her face emotive, very captivating.

'I feel so sad for you, because you are going to go to hell.'

'I beg your pardon?'

Everyone who understands the Russian has fallen silent. David and Lois are chatting. Dillan looks from me to the Angel, the object of his desire. He is smiling idiotically and humming the earlier song. I can tell he is waiting for me to shut up, so the singing can resume.

'I said, 'I feel sorry for you because you are going to hell.'

'I'm not going to hell.'

'Sorry, but every time I meet people who do not believe, who are missing out on the joy that comes of loving God and Jesus, I wish they would change their minds. So that hell will not be where they go.'

'I'm not going to hell. I live responsibly and try to do good. That's not the preserve of Christians. I've had to learn what is right and wrong my own way, the hard way. Nobody told me. I made mistakes when I was younger, like most people. I've suffered remorse for them. Now I live true to the values I believe in. So why should I go to hell?'

'Sorry. I want everyone to believe in Jesus.'

'Some people don't.'

Dillan nudges me. 'What are you talking about?'

'Jesus.'

The guitarist strums. Lois holds David's hand.

'Can I tell you a story?' asks the beauty.

'What's she saying?' Dillan asks, smiling.

'She wants to tell a story.'

Dillan nods.

'Go ahead.'

'You translate,' says Dillan.

'When I was young, my father worked. Then he lost his job and started to drink. It was bad. Then my mother began to drink. It was very bad. My parents were drinking; our lives were terrible. Our parents were drunks. My little sister and I didn't know what would happen to us, what would happen to our mum and dad. We saw that they would die. Then we would have to go into a home.'

'It would be better to die,' says Denis.

'One day, my father went to church. Something happened. He decided to pray. He knew there was nothing left for him in the world, save death, so he thought anything might be better. He looked around at the people kneeling on the floor. He got down on his knees. He prayed for God to come into his life. On his knees, he said, 'Help me, God.'

'God listened. God heard his prayers. God answered him with love, and my father was taken into the family of Christ. Then, my father went to my mother and said, 'Come and be saved.' But my mother didn't want to be saved. She wanted to drink. My father kept on living the right way, listening to Jesus, to keep on the right path. He found work. He said to mum, 'Mother, why don't you put down that drink, and come with me to church? Then, my mother said, 'Yes.' She went to church with us. When my father fell down in church, asking for Jesus to bring mum to God, my mother just stood there. She wouldn't kneel. My sister and I were on our knees, eyes closed, praying hard for our mother to hear our prayers, to come join our life with Jesus. We heard our mother sob, our father praying. It seemed a long time. Like forever. Mum cried and her legs shook. Dad never stopped praying, he never looked up. Finally, my mother went down on her knees. She crumpled. She took my father's hand, held it and began weeping with my father. My heart lifted. I felt light, full of hope. My prayers were answered in that moment.'

'...Now, my mum, dad, my sister and I, are happy. Life is good. This is what happened to us. This is the joy I wish for everyone.'

Half of All Premature Deaths of Russian Adults Put Down to Alcohol

More than half of all premature deaths of people of working age in Russia are caused by alcohol, according to research by Oxford University and the Russian Cancer research Centre in Moscow.

Russian health continues to be devastated by the effects of alcohol and tobacco,' says Professor David Zaridze of the Russian Cancer Research Centre, who led the study in Russia. 'Many Russians die in their twenties, thirties, or forties from disease, violence or suicide caused by drinking.

Professor Sir Richard Peto of the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) at the University of Oxford states:

'If current Russian death rates continue, then about 5% of all young women and 25% of all young men will die before age 55 years from the direct or indirect effects of drinking.'

University of Oxford, 26 June 2009

This morning I offered to cook dinner, because it is blonde Natasha's night off. Tinned tuna, tinned tomato, and the packet of spaghetti I bought, will make the meal. This is my plan.

I expect to be feeding David and his wife Lois, Dillan, the two mums, the children, and Denis and me. The children I count as one adult. So that makes eight.

Now, the two singers are eating with us. That makes ten.

I search in cupboards for another packet of pasta – I need to make the meal fill two extra mouths. I thank God for the extra box of spaghetti I find. The tin of tuna I mash into the tomato sauce. Cucumbers and tomatoes I bought at the supermarket, I toss with kefir (yoghurt) to make a tiny side. Ten plates I place around the table while everyone is singing.

There are lots of songs the Kiwis can sing. They sing in English, the Russians sing in Russian. It sounds good. Back at the stove, I'm cooking at speed. Can I feed ten? With a lot of salt and oil, I make the pasta moist and tasty. It will feed ten at a stretch.

Then Sasha comes into the kitchen.

'Rachel says she will be joining us for dinner,' she says.

Somehow, supplementing the meal with a basket of rye bread, I feed all eleven of us. The Russians are impressed with my pasta. Everyone, including the Kiwis, likes my salad.

'Where's the Parmesan cheese?' Rachel jokes, reaching for the basket of bread.

David and Lois and Dillan laugh.

'And where's the bottle of Cab Sav? Rachel adds.

My notes about famines in Russia:

The 1921-1922 famine in Bolshevik Russia occurred in a country torn apart by civil war, where all sides – the Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and the Whites, took food from the people to feed their supporters. The Bolshevik administration took grain from the peasants without payment, which led the peasants to reduce their crop-planting in protest. Then, in 1921, drought exacerbated an already perilous situation. The Encyclopedia Britannica, puts the number of those killed by hunger at 6 to 8 million Slavs, of whom 4 to 5 million, were Ukrainian. Lenin appealed to the world for aid.

The 1932-1933 famine in Russia, came about because of Stalin's programme of forced Collectivisation, where an army of soldiers, NKVD agents, urban workers and students, fired up with propaganda, went into the countryside and forced peasants to relinquish their machinery, grain, and livestock to the state, and join the state collective farms.

All information about the resulting famine was suppressed by Stalin, and then by succeeding Soviet governments, until in 1991, after the end of communism, the archives were opened and censorship was lifted. An estimated 10 million people died of hunger.

Wikipedia, The Soviet Famine of 1932-1933

Wikipedia, The Russian Famine of 1921

May 23

Sunday. At Church. Everyone looks smart. The first song is beautiful, powerful. Group of musicians, a beautiful blonde singing, louder and louder it gets, until I have to block my ears. Now the Pastor is speaking in a clear, loud voice.

'Open your bibles at page 325,' he says, then he reads.

I am sitting here, in the last pew, next to David and Lois (David's wife). Dillan is sitting next to Lois, Rachel is at the end.

I feel like an outsider here.

This morning, Sasha, standing beside me in the kitchen, in her bright dressing gown, told me she was sick. She gave me the cordless phone and asked me to explain to Rachel that she couldn't come to church. She showed me a digital thermometer. It read 39.

'I am from suffering a high temperature, I have bronchitis,' she said, touching first her head, then her chest.

I repeated this to Rachel.

'Sasha is a liar! She just wants to sneak out and see her boyfriend. I want you to get that thermometer off her! I want you get it, then I want _you_ to take her temperature!,' Rachel screamed.

Rachel's words hit me like a blast from a furnace. But I stood my ground.

'No, Rachel. I won't do that. And I don't feel happy about hearing you speak like that about Sasha.'

'Hand the phone to Lois.'

Lois took Sasha's temperature.

I knew Sasha didn't have bronchitis. I knew Rachel was correct, that Sasha wanted an opportunity to meet her lover. But I wasn't going to invade her privacy.

I knew about Sacha's lover because Rachel had discussed it with us, the volunteers. The discussion had taken place three days earlier.

One night, Rachel, Plump Natasha, David, Dillan and I, had gone to see a concert of the dumba (a Russian string instrument), and the oboe. The concert was given by conservatory students, the standard was excellent.

We went to a café first. I had a hot chocolate. David and Dillan ordered pancakes with maple syrup. Rachel said she was fasting, but she had a fruit purée. Rachel shouted Natasha a Vienna coffee.

Rachel complained that 24-year-old Sasha – the mother of Ariana, aged six and Irina, aged 14 months, who had been living with Sasha on the streets, before Living Hope took them in – had found a boyfriend and was sneaking out to be with him, leaving her girls with Denis and Natasha.

I admitted when I was 24, I wanted sex constantly too.

Couldn't Sasha invite her boyfriend to dinner at Living Hope, to meet everyone?, I asked Rachel.

After all, Living Hope wasn't a cloister or a jail, nor even an institution. I though it was wrong to sit in judgement on the people that Living Hope was trying to help. What was this charity work, in the bigger scheme of things, achieving?

It was helping these people, but with strings attached, and there was coercion to become Christian.

'The guy's just another hopeless case. Otherwise why hasn't she brought him to meet us? Sasha will get pregnant again: three children to three different fathers. Imagine. If she keeps meeting him, she'll have to leave,' Rachel said.

At Church

I am trying to understand the Pastor. I pull words from the dictionary, write them down, falling behind in the sermon. I want to understand everything.

exhaustedly

to feel thirst

to break, to get broken, to get smashed

at the rock face; at the cliff

to offend, insult, insultingly

The Pastor holds up something long, maroon-red. It looks like a velvet bucket with a slit in the lid. 'Give deeply,' he says, passing on the bucket.

A young Japanese woman with buck teeth and hair piled high, approaches Rachel. They squeal and give each other loud smacking kisses on the cheek. The band is playing again, people are getting to their feet to sing. Rachel stands, turning to us on the pew, and says, 'Have you met Ayumi? She's one of our beautiful people.'

Rachel and Ayumi leave. The music gets loud again. The man in the pew in front of me is on his feet, singing, waving his arms.

I slip away, meeting Rachel on the stairs. She and a little girl are coming up the stairs, holding hands. I guess Rachel must have taken the girl to the toilet.

'I'm going to the train station to buy my ticket,' I say. 'I'll be leaving tomorrow night.'

When I come home to Living Hope, after I've bought my ticket, Sasha and her daughters, Ariana and Anya, have already gone.

At Vladivostok Train Station

May 24

I am sitting on a steel seat, beneath the vaulted ceiling at Vladivostok Train Station, waiting for the train to Xhabarovsk. Looking back at the past week, these are the lessons I learnt at Living Hope:

I learnt about differing ways to be charitable; about different reasons and motives for giving. In the church yesterday, the people were asked to give _more_ and thereby serve God. And most people took the bucket and immersed their hand fully, before letting go their money, so it was impossible to see how much was being given. Rachel, on the other hand, allowed everyone to see her 1000-rouble note. I felt affronted by her doing that. When I absorbed the shock of her showing off – it sunk into me what real charity is: you give, but never boast. Why did Rachel reveal the money? To show her generosity, wealth, importance? To set an example? I don't know the answer.

I feel exhausted by the time I spent at Living Hope. Apart from the immensity of living with the indomitable Russian teenagers, I feel blessed to have met Dillan and David. They were both good men.

I loved seeing Dillan act the goat for Аriana. I saw her joy. Dillan couldn't speak Russian, but he found other ways to communicate. He was good with the children.

Once, he jumped on the table pretending to be a cat. On his knees, one hand a paw, he licked his paw, then cleaned his face with it, just like a cat. Ariana squealed. When he began meowing, she hopped up and down. It was as if she had never seen someone behave like that. (Nobody in Russia, jumps on a table pretending to be a cat!) And Dillan _did_ look like a cat, in his paint-splattered shirt, black shorts and bare feet, with his curly hair and tired eyes.

I felt confused by how I was treated as a volunteer. I was unsure of how far to defend my sovereignty and safety.

I learned a lot about 'charity'. The administration of it becomes an occupation with privileges elevating the administrators above those who are impoverished. Rachel said she was fasting to encourage God to help out, then she ate piece after piece of cake. She would never eat cabbage,, yet she expected parmesan cheese, and she talked about wine in an abstinent environment. I was not impressed by Rachel.

I am proud of my translations. It was blonde Natasha's idea to print the Russian teenagers' stories on a calendar, with a photo of each teen, showing the work Living Hope, has done.

I cried, working on them. I had to stop sometimes and pull myself together. Natasha's life story so crushed me (mother of Anya, the one who Denis gave a mock punch), I put my head on my arms and wept on the table.

Natasha spent her first years living on a little island, until her mum and dad sent her and her younger brother away for schooling. In the holidays, she and her brother waited to be collected by their mum from the boarding school, then they would go home to the island.

Once, it happened that her mother was a few days late. But at last, she came to get them. Her mother and her father had taken to drinking, because there was no longer any work.

Then, back at school, Natasha learned that her father had died. Another holiday came around. Natasha and her brother waited and waited, but their mother did not come for them.

Finally, it was not her mother, but her aunty, her mother's sister, who came. Her aunty told Natasha, that her mother was dead. She had died from the drink. Her mother was 43 years old.

Natasha and her brother were sent to an orphanage. Natasha hoped they would be able to stay together as a family of two. That didn't happen. Her brother was sent away to live somewhere else.

Later, Natasha met a guy. At first, he was good to her; he made her feel special. She became pregnant. Her boyfriend left.

In her story, she said she was happy to become a mum at the age of 16, because at last, she would have someone to love, someone who truly would be hers. The baby Natasha had, was the little girl, Irina, who she kept putting on the potty. Natasha and Irina, with no one to turn to, and nowhere to go, ended up on the street, until they were taken in, by Living Hope.

I did my best to translate those stories, ten of them, faithfully. I think that's why '[maya golova krooshitsa]', (my head is spinning).

The best thing about Living Hope, were the men and women supporting each other; looking after the children; eating together; pulling in the same way, together.

When I took leave of the pink building by the dirty river for the last time, after taking photos and saying hurried farewells, I pulled my trolley-bag across the train tracks, and felt anxious that I'd forgotten something.

I was on my way. I was going to cross Russia by train.

I pulled my suitcase across the broken asphalt, and veered to the right, towards the 'Electrichka' train station. Coming over the river and the train tracks behind me, I heard the words being shouted: 'Goodbye Victoria!'

Dillan was calling from the dormer window in the attic, on the third floor. In my rush after the photos, I had left without saying a proper goodbye to him. I smiled. Not even the drunk staggering around the elektrichka station in his shit-and-piss-soiled trousers, could dispel my bit of happiness.

Chapter 2

**Xhabarovsk**

Population: 390,000

May 26

In 1858, the left bank of the Amur River – all 4,444 kilometres of it – was claimed by the Russians as part of Russia.

This city of Xhabarovsk was named after a seventeenth century Russian explorer, Xhabarov, who sailed down the Amur River and set up a temporary fortress here, in 1649. The Aboriginal people of this region, the Nanai, are descended from a Neolithic people who inhabited this region thirteen thousand years ago. This is known, because 75km north of Xhabarovsk, near a village called Sikachi-Alyan which sits beside the Amur River, there is a collection of carbon-dated rock carvings. These carvings depict a skull mask, a serpent, and an elk. They were carved into the basalt rock on the right side of the Amur River, twelve thousand years ago.

The Nanai fished and hunted by the seasons, in an area 600 km in length along the Amur River. They dressed in fish skins and bartered their goods. Neither the Manchu Chinese, who ruled over them for a time, nor the Russians, who succeeded the Chinese, did any good to the Nanai. Today, the men die, aged 58 on average, from cirrhosis of the liver. Only 12,000 full-blooded Nanai are left, of whom only 3000 speak the language, which is dying.

In Xhabarovsk Train Station Resting Rooms

My first paid accommodation. The receptionist refuses to accept me at first. She tries to send me to a hotel down the road, and actually rings them up to get rid of me. But they are full. She tells me to come back in an hour, and she will try them again.

I take my belongings and sit for an hour and a half in the station café, eating potato piroshki and drinking tea. When I return, the receptionist has softened. She registers me, with much frowning and peering at my passport, shaking her head and sighing at the arduousness of writing long foreign names.

This lovely old woman of 91 is the only woman in the room who doesn't complain about me:

Galyuta Raisa Ivanovna

Vladivostok

Ovchinikova St

In our large room with four beds, a high ceiling, and two long windows that look out upon the square in front of the station, there are four women. There is me, the woman whose address I have written above, Raisa Ivanovna, and there are two others: a mannish-looking woman who grumbles about having to wait for her train and every other of Russia's innumerable ills, and a puritan in a head scarf with a long grey plait.

The Puritan whizzes past me as I am in the Dog-Down position of my yoga salute. (I see her sensible shoes disappear through the door.) Then she marches in, throwing the door open and shouting:

'We are against this! We are against it! I've spoken with the Administration! You are not allowed to do it! What do you think you are doing? Some kind of gymnastics? You are not permitted to continue doing what you're doing!'

I apologise. I sit on my bed, gathering my things around me, watching Raisa Ivanovna peel an egg with her ancient fingers.

The other two keep up their litany of complaints.

My neck muscles are tense, my calves sore. I fish in a pocket, open my vial of Deep Heat, smear the ointment on my legs and shoulders.

'[Allergeeya]!'

'Allergies! Allergies!' The Puritan waves her arms. Hard-done-By in the corner joins the chorus. The Puritan's protests go on and on...

'What sort of cream is she putting on herself? Dear Lord, the smell, and me with my allergies...'

'It's camphor cream!'

Hard-done-by answers, giving me filthy looks:

'Oh, my goodness, gracious me, these people from New Zealand, who put these creams on...some kind of camphor, I don't know, and me and my allergies too...'

I look from one to the other. Puritan is spinning, muttering to the Lord. Her plait swings as she runs to the window and pulls open the curtain. She leans forward and her skirt inches above her calf as she flings open the window.

I look at Raisa, the ancient one. She lies with her head on the pillow, one arm tucked under it, the other resting on the cover, watching the goings-on.

The noise of the traffic fills the room. Outside the sun is shining high in the sky, although it is nearly ten at night. I prepare for sleep. I put my eye-patch on my forehead, have my ear-plugs at the ready. I lie down, cover my eyes. The last thing I hear, even through ear-plugs, is Puritan saying her bedtime prayers.

In the middle of the night, I am woken by the sound of water tinkling. I work out from the direction of the sound, that it is Raisa peeing into a jar.

There are prayers again, but it is dark. I fall back to sleep. I wake up, the sun is up, it's just Raisa and I in the room.

I call out to Raisa,

'Good morning!'

'Good morning,' she says.

Then a newcomer, (who I learn later is called Tulyana), comes into the room, dragging a suitcase. We watch the traveller unpack her things. She goes out for a shower. I begin chatting with Raisa, gazing at her white hair, black eyes, and her cheek bones: she has a beautifully wrinkled face. I tell Raisa, I admire her dressing gown. (It is silky, with leopard spots.)

'You're still beautiful,' I say.

Raisa says it is important for a woman to look beautiful. To be rich isn't important, but to look beautiful is. She isn't impressed by Tulyana's laptop, cell phone, or hair-dryer, saying that people want what others have, but you don't need all that stuff, just live.

She tells me all her friends have died, but she remembers one friend from her army days, who always made an effort with her dress: she slept on her skirt at night so it was pressed for the morning, she turned her cuffs back and embroidered them prettily, she exchanged her horrible, army-issued boots for ones that fit, and best of all, when the army issued them with satin pyjamas, she cut them up and sewed them into bathing costumes, so they could swim in the Volga.

Tulyana is from Yakutsk, the world's coldest city. The buildings in Yakutsk stand on stilts because the shifting ice would otherwise topple them. The oldest city in the Far East, it is also one of the most remote, and getting there and away, is very expensive.

Pleased-with-the-world Tulyana has high cheekbones, almond eyes and a big round face. She is in Xhabarovsk on a 'komandirovka', a company-paid business trip.

I happily watch her blow dry her hair, then apply make-up from a black folding box. The box has all the colours of eye-shadow and lipstick a woman could ever wish for. I can tell Tulyana is having fun.

'This is an Yves Rocher make-up kit,' she says proudly, looking into the box's tiny mirror, expertly smearing shadow. Then she asks me, 'Do you have Yves Rocher, in New Zealand?'

'Yes, I think so. Listen, I need to do something about my hair.'

She stops her painting to look at me.

'Well, yes. I see.'

She thinks of something: 'I need a manicure,' she says, looking at one of her hands. 'You come with me. I know where to find you a hairdresser. I can get my nails done too.'

Tulyana takes me to the hairdresser. They fix up my 'yellow' hair and show me much tenderness, as my hair is dyed, the colour of which has been the subject of general discussion. They notice my eyes, 'Beautiful eyes you have.'

The plump woman beside me, under a cape, with hair awry, advises me: 'You must do your eyelashes.'

The hairdresser Elena, thinks I must also do my eyebrows, 'darker,' she says. The plump woman getting her roots done, agrees with me when I demur:

'No, if you make the eyebrows dark, she will look like a clown, but the eyelashes must be done.'

The plump woman is a defence lawyer. She tells me how her daughter delivered her 2002 baby with green waters, because of the smoke that choked the city. Illegal logging was the cause of the smoke. The loggers start fires (a usual occurrence) to hide the evidence of logging, then, with no rain, the fires roar out of control. The state has no money to pay for helicopters, to douse the flames.

We end up talking about being mothers. The hairdresser Elena, tells me she does not see Anna Karenina (Tolstoy's famously tragic character), as a heroine, because she took her own life, and abandoned her children.

13th June 2011

by Charles Digges, from Bellona.org, Bellona Foundation

A devastating wave of wildfires across Russia could ravage millions more acres of forests and cause worse damage than last years catastrophic blazes, environmentalists and officers have said, despite last year's promises from

forestry agencies that such ruin would not be repeated.

'We're burning, burning badly', Russia's Greenpeace forestry expert, Alexei Yaroshenko told the Associated Press. "This year's situation is already much worse than last year's."

Elena Kobets, a researcher with Bellona on the effects of black carbon on climate change, pointed out disturbing data from the Russian Federal Agency on Forestry Management indicating that extremely high temperatures in Siberia this year alone could have fuelled outbreaks that exceed the number of fires reported there over decades.

Air-planes and helicopters have dumped tons of water over the Chinsk district. Siberian Governor Dmitry Mezentsev has declared a state of emergency in the entire area as the situation appeared to be increasingly deteriorating," Itar-Tass reported.

Information on Peat Fires Suppressed, say Environmentalists

Greenpeace claimed the Russian government is silencing information about fires, especially about the renewal of peat bog fires around Moscow that last year choked the capital with acrid, toxic smoke.

"There are dozens of them around Moscow," Greenpeace's Gregory Kuksin told journalists. "It's technically impossible to put out some of them already."

Once ignited, peat bogs can smoulder for months or years, surviving even heavy rains and snow, said Kuksin. While burning they emit an acrid smoke that can aggravate asthma, bronchitis and heart conditions.

Moscow last year was engulfed in a thick blanket of smog that, combined with the intense heat, doubled the death rate.

In the Soviet era, authorities extensively drained numerous bogs around Moscow and other cities in Western Russia to extract peat for fuel, said Kuksin. Once coal and oil replaced peat as fuel, the drained peat bogs were left unattended.

Moscow authorities have allocated some $150 million to flood peat bogs. Greenpeace's Yarushenko said that little had been done due to corruption and bureaucracy.

"What's been done is a drop in the ocean," Yaroshenko said.

Russia's forestry agency chief Viktor Maslyakov played down the threat to Moscow this year, but admitted that a surge in fires and peat bog fires is imminent.

"This summer will be tense and uneasy,"Maslyakov told journalists. He said the government should declare an emergency situation in three Siberian regions where unusually hot and dry weather has caused multiple wildfires.

Russian forests constitute 22% of the world's total woodlands, an area larger than the continental United States.

A top government official accused illegal loggers of starting some of the Siberian wildfires to conceal the traces of their work. "They set it all afire – and covered it all up, "

Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.'

"Illegal logging of pine, larch, aspen, birch intended for China, is responsible for 2 million cubic metres per year of unlicensed timber going out of Russia. The area of most intensive illegal logging is in the Siberian Taiga, from the Zabaikalsky Krai at Lake Baikal, to the Far East of Vladivostok. At this rate Russia will be stripped of its wood reserves in 5 years.'

Illegal-Logging.info.com

* * *

Hair restored, I set off to walk the elegant streets of Xhabarovsk until it becomes too hot. A bus takes me to the City Park, on the bank of the Amur River.

A crowd of teenagers, all taking photos of each other. The girls are wearing black pinafores with lacy aprons, pink sashes like beauty contestants, pompoms in their hair, and are holding bouquets. They look like French maids in a seventies porn film, but this is how Russian girls dress on Graduation Day. They scamper through the park, much like a herd of zebras. Boys in suits and sashes puff out chests.

A regal staircase cuts through grass, with lamps on attention at landings. The staircase drops to the river.

In Xhabarovsk, I have one place above all others, that I want to see: the Hotel Intourist, only a short walk away.

It is the same: a ten-storied building that overlooks the park. Two pillars with hammers and sickles flank the wide steps, which lead to the park from the hotel.

I remember the Hotel Intourist. I stayed here in October, 1993.

Walking across the forecourt where the taxis drop the guests, pushing through the doors into the lobby, I try to recapture a sense of the person I was then, in October '93. Seventeen years is a long time.

The hotel is familiar, and yet not familiar. The structure is the same, but it has been revamped. Not too much. There are pot plants, coffee tables, comfortable easy chairs. Guided by memory, I veer to the left, and take a circular flight of stairs to a lower floor. I remember the staircase.

I find the women's toilets. There is an attendant's desk, but the attendant is cleaning. Inside the cubicles there is a bucket for the soiled paper, just like in every toilet in Russia. (The plumbing is too frail to handle paper.)

A wall papered blood-red, lined with mirrors. I wash my hands, then confront my face. I tidy my hair, put water on my eyebrows, apply lipstick. My face is tired. My body is slim. I try to remember looking into this mirror seventeen years earlier.

Remembering My Second Visit to Russia, in October 1993...

I met the British guys on my journey out of Japan, on the 'Antonina Nezhdanova', a clunker of a cargo ferry that plied the Sea of Japan, between Nigata and Vladivostok. The two young Englishmen had a tent, but they spoke no Russian.

The hold of the ship was crammed with second-hand Japanese cars, that would overwhelm and ultimately destroy the city of Vladivostok, with traffic jams. On the upper decks were a small number of passengers: me, the two English boys, and a posse of permed Yakuza car-traders. The Brits had been living in Japan like me, and like me, teaching English. They too, decided to travel home across Russia.

In Vladivostok Train Station, where we went to buy our Trans-Siberian train tickets, we met a tall American carrying a goat-skin bag. He was clean and blond and young, and had good teeth, like all good Americans. Time has robbed me of his name, so I'll just call him, Dave.

Dave carried only that goat-skin.

We four foreigners found two babushkas holding signs, who were looking for travellers to rent their rooms. Dave and I went with one; the English pals, with another.

The old woman with the scarf knotted under her chin, showed us her room for rent. There was one big bed.

When it came time to sleep, the American asked if he could put his arms around me. 'Not for sex', he said, 'Just to have someone to hold. It's been so long .'

Dave had been living in a village in Mali for two years – his gap years – working as a volunteer. He had been offered daughters by their fathers. He knew, had he accepted any one of them, it would have been like a marriage. He thought it better and more honourable to just say, no.

Dave had little money and was hoping to get a working-passage on a boat from Vladivostok to America. I was jealous. It was a different world for men. Jumping boats and travelling with no money wasn't an option for a 27-year-old-single-woman like me.

Dave had somehow made it to Vladivostok, Russia, all the way from Africa. What a gentle guy he was. In all my life, there are two men who have treated me with utter tenderness – and one of them is my husband. Dave was the first. I can remember his arms around me in that bed, and the talking, and the truth of his word. He held me as if I were a dying nun. He was in awe of me because I spoke Russian. We were fragile, we both knew it. His fear was returning home to the American the dream. I had a broken self. There was another tiny feeling. The feeling of _love._

Getting around Vladivostok in those days meant cramming into trams, which were free because the state had collapsed and no authority had been organised to collect ride-money; or flagging down a second-hand Japanese car, and paying money to the driver. This was a bit risky.

One night, I met up with the Brits at their accommodation, in an apartment block in the hills. I remember the darkness, because the street lights were out; the craters in the road, because there was no municipal service to repair them, or more to the point – no money; barking dogs running amok; electrical wires dangling in the vestibule of the apartment block, and the reek of piss.

What I didn't know then, but I know now, is that I had arrived right smack bang in the middle of hyper-inflation, that lasted from the end of Communism in 1991, until 1994. Costs of consumables and foodstuffs rose thousands of times. But the cost of alcohol, didn't.

Those who worked for the state fell into poverty, because they were not paid.

At The Hotel Intourist, October 1993

The English boys and I arrived in Xhabarovsk, on the Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok.

We came to this hotel, the Hotel Intourist, as it was then the only place foreigners could stay.

My room was on the eighth floor. It had been decorated once, in about 1962. It was still the same. The bedspreads were orange; a brown lampshade covered the bedside light. There was a worn, striped towel in the bathroom, but no soap. The Brits shared a room on the ninth. We all enjoyed the running water, but it only ran cold.

On the first night we went to a disco in a park, by the Amur River. We drank Kiwi Steinlager beer and danced to Anastasia singing, 'All that she wants, is another baby...'

We met with two policemen who drank with us. One was on-duty, one off. One was in uniform, one wasn't. In the early hours, they gave us a lift back to the hotel in their police Jeep. On the way, the CB crackled into life, and the on-duty cop took the call. Suddenly, brakes squealing, we did a u-turn on an empty avenue, then came a tour of apartment blocks.

We drew up, the uniformed cop talked back and forth, clarifying directions. He got out. His partner turned to me and the Brits, and explained we were attending a domestic dispute. He said his partner had gone to arrest the violent husband.

The husband appeared in cuffs, a cussing Russian, he was wedged into the back of the Jeep behind a bit of mesh.

That was our first night in Xhabarovsk. On the second night, we dined in the hotel restaurant. A group of three Russian men wearing leather jackets invited us to join them. So, we did.

Later, we took our drinking up to Igor's room. Igor was one of the Russians.

Igor dragged a box of deer antlers out from under his bed. Igor was a hunter. He shot stags in the Siberian Taiga and sold their velvet to the Japanese.

In the smaller hours, it was just Igor and I. Igor didn't speak much. I think he was the quiet type, even without the language difference. But the way Igor and I related, you didn't need much language.

First we made love on the sofa, and his brawny chest surprised me. He didn't have much body hair. His skin was white. The shock of a man's body above me morphed into pleasure, tinged at first with shame. I wasn't sure if Igor was a thug.

I was a bit drunk and that helped. Soon I was calling out, to hell with shame. I was on fire. It had been a very long time.

He was behind me on the balcony and I held on to the concrete balustrade. The new day had begun and the light shone around my body and made a statement of my nudity. It was very good. All of it was very, very good.

After my escapade with Igor, I took the English boys with their tent to the office of Regional Administration, to enquire of the civil servant behind the desk, whether or no these English could take their tent up the river, into the wilderness, to go camping. There I left them. Whether they ever put up that tent in Siberia or not, I don't know.

Chapter 3

Amursk

May 27

My friend at home in Dargaville, Sergei, has a fiancée in Amursk. I'm going to visit her.

Sergei's girlfriend Veronica has short curly hair and a joyful smile. She is a speech therapist and a psychologist. Her daughter Polina is a pretty fourteen-year-old.

They meet me at the bus station and we begin the short walk to their block. All around sprout degenerate apartment blocks. In the common area children play and people hang around. The play surface is gravel, broken concrete, or dirt. The sun is shining. I feel Veronica's embarrassment.

We enter a dark, urine-reeking vestibule. Veronica says, 'When Sergei said you wanted to visit us in Amursk, I felt so ashamed. I thought of the mess. I thought, 'How is it possible for me to clean up the whole town?'

We walk up two flights of stairs. Veronica summons the lift. It doesn't go to the ground floor, Veronica explains, and then we fall silent until the lift arrives.

I understand then, something about Russia. Across this land, in its millions of decaying apartment blocks, there is a vestibule and a lift that stink of piss. And every decent Russian is shamed.

The lift is tiny and dark, there is a puddle in the corner. We exit at the tenth floor. Veronica opens a battered door with three locks. Inside, Charlie, a terrier, is going crazy. He carries on but I don't care. Veronica's flat is ordered and clean.

Saturday. We visit Sergei's sister. Sergei's brother-in-law is also called Sergei. They take me to their apartment, on the eleventh floor.

I ask Olga if she has children. She says they have not been able to conceive. I ask Olga if she is sad about that. She says, yes. Sergei and Olga work for the ambulance service. He is the driver and she is the nurse. They work shifts.

We have tea and cake. I present chocolates. Sergei's father is there too. He has come to meet me. We sit in the tiny kitchen and talk about New Zealand life and Russian life.

Outside there is a man repairing the wall. He sits on a wooden swing, with two ropes holding him. One is the safety rope. I am shocked to see this man working eleven floors up, with such a flimsy rig. His feet touch the wall, he smokes and laughs at my fear. His father did the same work. I ask him, wasn't he ever nervous, not at first? No, he never was. I take his photo. He says I am to show people in New Zealand how they do things in Russia.

Olga gives me a set of hand creams as I leave.

Veronica, her mother Nina, and her mother's boyfriend Valeria and I, head out in Valeria's old car to Veronica's sister's dacha on the Amur River. A group of men are fishing off the bridge we cross. We stop so I can take photos of the catfish and the pike the men hold up for me to see.

The dacha exists in Russia because of its vegetable plot. City-dwellers, if they are fortunate, own a dacha, and that is where they grow their food for winter. Veronica's sister's dacha has a shack (all dachas have shelter) which takes up a tenth of the ground. Next door, a fat woman is gardening, oblivious to us. She rakes her rows wearing a black bra and knickers, shoes, and a head-scarf; she is dazzlingly white.

Veronica's sister is called Zhenya. She is tall, with long blonde hair. Zhenya's husband is called Sasha. He looks like James Dean. A cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth, while he leans over the coals, tending the kebabs. Zhenya stands beside him, he puts his arm around her and smiles at her.

They don't have children. Sasha is infertile, something to do with his job in the military. He can't travel overseas, because of his job in the military. He knows sensitive things.

Veronica and Nina, sit on an old couch next to Valeria, who smokes. Nina is a cardiologist. Valeria was a mechanic. He was a Communist Party member.

'Do you believe in Communism now?' I ask.

'No,' he says.

Nina and Valeria have their own dacha and grow enough potatoes to last the year. They grow cucumbers for dill pickles, and tomatoes and beetroot to bottle, and melons, strawberries, and greens to eat in summer.

The size of the vege-plot at the dacha surprises me. It is a large enterprise. The soil is soft and black.

We all wander through the birch trees and grasses to the river. Empty alcohol bottles are strewn about. I remove my shoes and walk up to my knees, which shocks everyone. They giggle. They must never do this. They probably never swim. Perhaps they are nervous about standing on glass. I wonder if they had a boat, would they jump off it out deep? I suspect not.

A preacher called Kholya, his wife and two of their four daughters, are with our party. Every tooth Kholya has is silver.

We eat grilled chicken and pork kebabs on plastic plates. Kholya serves. He presents me with the biggest piece of chicken. I tell stories of my hunting at home, jumping fences on my horse, following the hounds, galloping after the master in his red coat, while the whips crack their stock-whips to harry the hounds, and the huntsman sounds his bugle. Horses. Hounds. Bugles. I don't admit I mostly ride through gates, only jumping the smallest spars.

We are off to visit a Nanai village. Nanais are the indigenous people. It is a familiar, sad story. Once they would have been a proud people hunting and trapping, living a semi-nomadic life. Now they live in typical tumbledown villages, in wooden houses with crooked fences.

Teenagers walk down the road . One girl pushes a pram. Another carries a baby. Hanging around the shop step is another group. They look bored.

At the river, which is beautiful, but strewn with rubbish and empties, a group of semi-naked kids are sunbathing on a shell of a bus. They jump about when I ask if I can take their photo.

'Come in for a swim! Come in with us!'.

'I'd love to, but I forgot my costume,' I say.

'Victoria is a real diplomat,' Veronica says to her mother.

Sunday at church in Amursk

On our way to church, we pass a children's home, then cross the Palace Of Culture square. The Palace is a modernist white cube with glass doors sitting on the hilltop, an avenue leading from it. The avenue is lined with apartment blocks.

We descend the hill, short cut into the shade of some apartment blocks. Half the blocks are empty.

Amursk was a town built in 1958. It attracted a young workforce, who married and had babies, and found entertainment at the Palace of Culture. Although it was prosperous, it was not a clean place. Russia's largest cardboard plant discharged pollutants into the Amur River, and into the air. This plant, a tree-pulp mill making particle board, and an industrial plant producing mortar shells and mines, employed everyone in the town. When communism collapsed, so did these industries.

My friend Sergei lived in Amursk his wife and two daughters. Sergei is a dentist. He fixed the teeth of the soldiers who worked in the munitions plant. Sergei said because of the pollution, everyone in Amursk had breathing disorders. He left Amursk so his family could have a better life in New Zealand.

There is no industry any more. Amursk is cleaner and the asthma rates have plummeted, but few people in the town work. They live on welfare or their wits. The town is dying.

We come across a man lying on his back, legs and arms spread, in a patch of sunlight. He is clutching a pink shoe. The other shoe lies in the dirt.

His face is battered. I think, 'Perhaps he's dead.'

People approach. A young man prods the man's chest. 'Hey. Are you asleep?' he says.

A drunken groan.

'Drunk'.

We all move on.

I find this mysterious and moving. A picture of the woman who owns the shoes fills my mind. Why did she flee barefoot?

Does she love the man on his way to the grave? Will she come back to get her shoes?

How can I erase the sense of beauty I feel, seeing this drunk? I appreciate the eternal partnership of man and woman. Even heading towards self-annihilation, we hold hands on the ride.

Kholya, the Pastor says, 'God loves the righteous, believers like us.'

With rows of silver teeth, his own lost in youth, Kholya alarms me when he smiles. Clean-cut gentleman becomes a monster, a James Bond villain.

Kholya's speechifying in the cold church has us all yawning and shivering and then he shakes hands with the congregation, including me. My cellphone bleeps. I am imprisoned on the pew until I can no longer resist sneaking outside into the sun. It's Doug. He says he loves me.

The old ladies and Veronica have arranged themselves in a line and sing in falsettos, then a fair-haired maiden in a red sequinned dress sings like a virginal bird, calling a man to find her. Her heels are high and their spikes are grubby.

No wonder. Walking around Amursk means navigating through rubbish, dirt paths, broken footpaths and chunks of asphalt. Lots of empty bottles. It looks like a war-ravaged, post-apocalypse zone.

It is hot. Sitting on the bus waiting for the last passengers to take their seats before the 8 pm, Amursk to Komsomolsk-Na-Amure bus departs, my attention is caught by the goings-on between a girl and a handsome, bare-chested male.

A drama is unfolding. The gathered curtains that decorate the bus make a proscenium arch.

The girl wears her hair in pony tail. She clasps the arm of the man, he pulls it away. She speaks and leans into him. He puffs his cigarette. He lifts his shoulder to shrug her off. He is laughing. The girl clutches his arm.

I create a story. He became a father before he began to shave – but his daughter is devoted to him. He's not much older than her.

The man wears trousers and his shoes are dusty. Tattoo on his shoulder, plastic bag knocking about his leg. He holds it like a hand bag.

It is the shoes in such heat that say it all.

I recognise the situation instantly. It is my mum in the staffroom at the end of her teaching day, reaching the bottom of her glass; and it is me willing her not to refill it.

The bus is idling. A last-minute passenger, a young woman, is making lots of noise as she makes her way to her seat at the back of the bus. For a minute, I stare at her in her green jumpsuit, pink bra and blue plastic earrings.

I look back. The man pulls away from his daughter, lurching to the nearby kiosk. He stands at the little window, still holding his plastic bag. The bus begins to move. I watch to see what the man will buy. I crane my head, the wheels of the bus turn. I see the bottle, watch it touch his lips, see his mouth move.

I see the girl's sad look.

Chapter 4

Komsomolsk on the Amur River

**Population: 280,000**

May 28

Stalin ordered the city of Komsomolsk-Na-Amure built in 1932. There were Komsomolsk volunteers to do the work, but not enough. Much of the city was built using the forced labour of Gulag prisoners.

In the restaurant at the Hotel Amursk, I eat a delicious, 'Salad Peking', (sweet-vinegared rice noodles, grated cucumber and carrot), and an omelette, so divine – the best I've eaten in my life. I wish I dressed to do justice to the elegant restaurant. The whole meal, including grapefruit juice cost 200 Roubles.

Nina and Sergei Geier pick me up at the Hotel Amursk, drive me about, show me monuments, then take me to their home.

We exit their air-conditioned SUV in a smart little car park, and there are flowers in the garden. There is no lift and only four floors in the building where they live, but even so there is an awkward pause in the conversation as we begin climbing the stairs. Soon, we are taking off our shoes at the entrance. Nina proudly shows me the living room with its large TV and expensive sofa. It has an extravagant central light-fitting.

We go into the kitchen. It is a big kitchen, by Russian standards. A lot of good food is awaiting me. Nina has been working hard. The chicken breast in a creamy sauce goes to my head. Nina hands me a martini. We clink glasses. Sergei is not drinking.

Sergei Geier is a little man with a Mongolian face: high cheekbones and almond eyes. Nina has gone to much trouble, and wants me to eat and drink more, but the conversation has turned to Russia's alcoholism, and I sit on my one strong martini, knowing full well I could get absolutely slaughtered with Nina, if I want to, and I know she wants to.

Nina explains about her work in the library of the university, and about Sergei's work for Putin's United Russia Party. I remember him taking a call in the car, as he was driving us around Komsomolsk, and now I look at him, and think about his conservatism. I think about the big pink building with the, 'United Russia Party, Party President, V. V. Putin', sign on its lawn, in the city of Xhabararovsk.

The building stands on a promontory by the Amur River, beside the museum and the biggest hotel of the city (the Hotel Intourist). The building stood next to the central park, not far from the main square. I had to pinch myself and keep remembering that the rosy building was only in actual fact, the headquarters of a _political party._ It was neither the _institutional_ nor _administrative_ premises, that it seemed to be.

Sergei, aside from his political leanings, is an ethnic native of the region, a Nanai.

Then, a beautiful and strange creature arrives. It is Sergei and Nina's daughter, Anna. With her, is her tall, skinny boyfriend. Anna has thick, jet-black hair that falls to her waist, green contact lenses, and inch-long, two-tone nails. She is twenty-seven years old, and her beauty comes from the mix in her blood, not the fake contacts, which are odd. She speaks English with me. She talks about the difficulty of her job. She works for a firm that sells bathroom white-ware, and she has a lot of stress.

After a short time, she leaves with her boyfriend. Nina explains that manicuring nails, is her daughter's hobby.

May 29

I am at the museum, talking to an old man. There are numbers tattooed on the man's arm. They have faded. I want to ask the man about the numbers on his arm, but instead I ask him where I can find out about the Gulag history of the city, and he says, 'Here's the phone number of a woman who has written books about that history. You could ring her.'

I ring Marina Kuzmina, the author. I explain that I'm from New Zealand, and am interested in the Gulag history of the city. I ask her whether she has time to meet me.

There is a long silence. Then she yells at me, 'What do you want to know about the camps?'

I am on a slippery slope. I am choked as my mind is bombarded with pictures of horror. Uncountable millions of people in columns trudge before me in a line as long as the great wall of China, no, longer than that: as long as Russia's borders with nineteen countries. These people stagger forward, their brutalized faces turn towards death in the salt mines; the coal mines; the diamond mines; the dark, snow-buried forests.

I see bundles of rags who are people, tumbling into the snow, as they can no longer heft the railway sleepers they are laying across the frozen steppe.

Another image: pairs of shoes, elf-sized and smaller, the footwear of children of the Volga, lined up outside the barracks in the most dreaded of all camps, Kolyma, in the frozen lands of the Russian North East.

Stalin sent these children to Kolyma to work to death with their families, because they were ethnic Germans, the enemies of Mother Russia. The families had been living in the Volga basin for generations. Their great-grandparents were enticed there by Catherine the Great, who wanted to import Teutonic agricultural enterprise and knowledge to her backward land.

Then, my mind shifts place. All is grim. Grey apartment blocks. Crumpled fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, sons, daughters, grandfathers, grandmothers – the terrified, and yet resigned people inhabiting their hastily flung on clothes, as if they were already ghosts – standing beneath dim light-fittings in halls cluttered with coats and boots, turning for a last look at their loved ones, at their children, their sisters, their mothers, their fathers, and their brothers, who stand weeping in doorways, with the words of the NKVD men coming like quiet bullets: 'There is no time...'

Stalin's death sentence was spoken to tens of millions of Russian men, women, and children. I tried to comprehend, to put into a shape, or a figure, or a phrase, the number of the people who died because of him, because of the curse of him, uttered over the history of Russia.

'I ask you again,' Marina Kuzmina screams down the phone at me, 'What do you want to know about the camps?'

'I want to know... how did this happen...and go on happening? How do the Russian people cope with this history? Why has there been no reckoning? Why do Russian people not hold their government to account? How dare the Kremlin try to whitewash Stalin's legacy? I have so many questions...'

'So then,' Marina interrupts, 'You must prepare your questions, for when you see me. Where are you staying? At the Hotel Amursk? How about tomorrow? I will meet you at ten. I will come to your room. What number are you?'

Marina Alexandrovna Kyzmina is a professor of chemistry. She is large. She limps everywhere, throws her glasses atop her forehead and peers at whatever she needs to see very close up: her cellphone; my papers with the notes I've written that she has grabbed from my hand, etc. She is so emphatic and demanding. It is as if she hates me. But then she is dying to tell me everything and it all comes gushing out of her. As she staggers along the street I produce my questions and she is satisfied I've given the subject some thought.

Every now and then she primps her blonde hair with dark roots; her little eyes under her half-inch thick glasses are dramatically etched in thick, dark kohl.

Marina says the city powers are ignoring the Gulag history and instead want people to believe the lie that the city was built by volunteer brigades of communists (komsomols).

Marina is a member of a Russian-wide group, Memorial, which came into being under the time of Gorbachev – the product of 'Glasnost' (openness). Memorial – the organisation – is uncovering, collecting, and safeguarding the memories, evidence, and the archives of the acts of political repression in Russia's history, and their victims. The members of Memorial in Komsomolsk-Na -Amure, have been fighting for years to erect a fitting monument to the victims of the camps, but, Marina explains, all they have is a rock with a small plaque, in an anonymous snip of a park, somewhere unremarkable in the city, next to a bus stop.

They have the plans, and the funds to create an imposing monument, a sculptural piece in granite. But they have yet to be given permission by the Communist old boys who run the city, to build it.

We walk, talk. She shows me building after building, built by the inmates of the camps. She points out the place where the prisoners were housed in barracks. There is nothing save her knowledge, to attest to this particular past. It is not written in any guide book.

We visit the stadium where the team Dynamo, played soccer. Marina tells me the team was made up of camp prisoners, who having played their soccer game, were returned to the camp. There is no official history of that fact, either.

Exhausted after the walkabout around the city, after I'd seen the rock and the tiny plaque and posed for her to take a picture of me beside it; I try unsuccessfully to take hers. She shakes her head, and turns away quickly, as if she doesn't know me. I realise she doesn't trust me.

Once again, we set off. I mention Nikolai Tolstoy's (the great writer's grandson) book, 'Stalin's Secret War'. She hasn't heard of it, nor of the writer.

I ask, 'Does she agree with his estimation, that 30 million Russians perished in the camps?' She shakes her head. Too many. I ask how she was able to access her information and facts, for her research. She relates how, with the period of glasnost (openness), the authorities allowed the relatives of those taken prisoner and missing in the camps, access to the archives.

Marina's uncle, in 1934, had been arrested for openly criticising communism. Two weeks after his arrest, he was executed. He was 28 years old.

I ask Marina to take us somewhere where I can buy her lunch, to thank her for her time. Marina orders the business lunch, I choose the same. We eat without speaking, sitting side by side. She thinks the soup good. I pay the bill, relieved to be parting company.

I ask her a last question, 'Could this happen again?'

'No. We have a middle class, now.'

Extraordinary even by the standards of the Stalinist regime, The Great Terror was not a routine wave of mass arrests, such as those that swept across the country throughout Stalin's reign, but a calculated policy of mass murder. No longer satisfied with imprisoning his real or imagined 'political enemies', Stalin now ordered the police to take people out of the prisons and labour camps and murder them.

_The Whisperers,_ Orlando Figes, 2007, p.34

I am feeling exhausted, even though I slept soundly. Without the ear-plugs I would not sleep at all. The trams in particular are so noisy. I have five hours to do God-Knows-What before my train leaves for Tynda. I am excited to be finally on my way. I feel drained by people. I want, to be alone with my thoughts. After five minutes with Marina I'd had enough. It was four hours.

Marina works on her piece of land, her 'dacha'. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays she labours. To get there she has to travel 20 km, by bus. I understood she thought we in the West were lazy. I also knew she had no concept of a capitalistic life, and that she would have been shocked to find how difficult it was.

I showed her a photo of Doug and told her he was a farmer; she gripped her hand in a fist and said, 'A strong man.' Later, when I was talking with her about the forced collectivization of the kulaks, and the millions who died of the resulting famine, I felt a pang of love for Doug, for his skills. I realised the world has come full circle; with the global financial crisis bringing to people the thought or the reality of hunger, the peasant who grows food, is once again a hero.

My notes:

'Kulak' literally means 'fist' in Russian, but it also has the meaning of 'rich peasant', or a peasant owning property, or employing the use of hired labour. When Stalin began to force the peasants into state-owned, communal farms, peasants revolted, and the term _kulak_ was put to use in Bolshevik propaganda to create hatred and justify the murder and imprisonment of millions of peasants – 'kulaks' – who resisted Stalin's disastrous policy of 'collectivisation.'

Often, it was the peasant who had worked hard and was skilled at animal husbandry and possessed a prize cow or some desirable equipment, who was denounced by their less industrious neighbour with a covetous eye. In the three years from 1929 until 1932, at least 10 million 'kulaks' were forced from their homes. Peasants slaughtered their own cattle and horses rather than see them requisitioned by the state. In this way, 33% of Russia's livestock was lost.

And then, in 1932, there came the famine.

The destruction of the 'kulaks' was an economic catastrophe for the Soviet Union. It deprived the collective farms of the work ethic and the expertise of the country's most industrious peasants, ultimately leading to the terminal decline of the Soviet agricultural sector.

_The Whisperers,_ Orlando Figes, 2007, pp. 86-87

Chapter 5

**Tynda**

I have berth 16. This is the best position. I am one compartment back from the end of the wagon where the toilet and the provodnitsa's office are; close enough, but not too near the services where all train-borne humanity converges.

I stand by the samovar, waiting to use the toilet. I'm holding my wash kit and have the train-issue, linen towel over my shoulder. It is warm. I am wearing jeans and my black merino singlet.

A young hunk is standing next to me. His eyes are merry; I can tell he's been drinking. Behind him is another young guy. I realise this train is full of men.

I'm looking at the countryside that flashes by between the net curtain and the top of the window. 'Nothing much to look at out there.'

I've been spoken to. I turn and look at Brad Pitt.

'It's beautiful,' I murmur, turning back to the colour. I am suspicious about good-looking men. It pays to avoid them.

'Ukraininan? Latvian?'

'Nyet', I shake my head at the window. Then I give it away.

'New Zealander.'

'Ah. Australia.'

Now he has me. No letting that pass. 'No, _New Zealand_ is my country. It's n _ear_ Australia.'

'Married? Children?'

Yes, to both.

'Oh.' He eyes me, as if I am a deserter of husband and children. Or maybe he's making me nervous because I don't how far to trust myself.

'I have two girls. On my way home. Two weeks on; two weeks off. That's how it goes. All these others, they do their stint, they go home. I'm going home to my wife.'

I feel inexplicably jealous of his wife. Then we part company because the toilet comes free.

The train rolls along. Relaxing on my berth , I enjoy the steady rocking sensation. A tall middle-aged man and a younger guy with short hair, who share my compartment, come back from the other end of the wagon, sit down and continue drinking beer. They look at me, lying above them on my berth, with specific interest.

I get 100 questions. An inquisition. Not from the younger, the older. The younger man eyes me. He's handsome. They leave. Smokers go to the other end of the carriage and between wagons, where the floor plates overlap and shift and the clanking of the train is deafening, they smoke. That's where my compartment-companions went to smoke and, judging by how they lurch, to drink forbidden hard liquor with the other blokes.

Mr Middle-Aged starts:

'How come,' he wants to know, 'You left it so late to have children?'

'I went to university. Then, in my twenties I went travelling and worked. I wasn't ready to have children.' (I don't tell him that the men I knew weren't ready to have them either.)

'Travelling?' Mr Middle-Aged says, as if I'd said something frivolous, like window-shopping, or doing a scrap-booking course.

'Look, I wasn't the only one. I have friends having children in their forties. Women are having babies at nearly fifty. They want to get established and have a career before they become mothers.'

'Do you hear that?', the older man turns to the younger, 'In the West they build a material base before they breed. Then when they are old, wrinkled, and rich, they buy the push-chair, the nappies and the cot, spending up large to look like happy young mums.'

I think of my friends who spent serious money on IVF to achieve their children. It is true, what he says, that Western prosperity offers women the luxury of delaying reproduction. Of staying trim, taut, terrific, and unfettered for longer. Squeezing every last cent out of our trade-able, sexual currency. In essence, postponing maturity.

'Forty three,' he goes on, shaking his head, referring to my age, as if I'm not there.

'You should be a grandmother by now, not a mother of three boys. I got married at nineteen. Three children; all nearly grown. My wife and I are waiting to be grandparents, we'll help bring up our grandchildren. That's how it's done; how it should be done. You have got it all wrong. It is a sociological problem of the West that women won't have children until they are so old.'

I get out my journal and face the wall. Scribble away. Eventually Mr & Mr go for a fag again. It is getting hotter. Under the cover of my blanket, I slip out of my leggings and feel instantly cooler in my underpants and T-shirt.

When the blokes get back, they begin talking about me. I pretend to be asleep. Straining my ears, I listen hard, wanting to understand what they are saying: it sounds like good gossip. Certainly, they are fascinated with the fact of a married woman travelling alone. How frustrating! I want to understand _every_ word, not just the gist. Maddening. They are speaking fast and whispering on purpose. Guess I am listening, probably.

The conversation turns.

'I'm not ready. I'm twenty five. I don't want to be a father yet. I told her.' It was the younger talking. His voice slithers like a wet mushroom; there is something sexy about this conversation, or the situation, or both – I can't work out which.

Then his voice goes gravelly and they are back on the subject of me. The older man sounds very drunk. That isn't surprising. They've been drinking for hours.

I fall asleep.

In my dream something is bugging me. It won't stop. It is a cycle, a repetition, an insistence. I bat away the annoyance, my left arm swinging out. It goes on. Once, twice, then the third time I hit out, I come into contact with a definite something. I wake in darkness. Then I feel it: the touch of skin on the skin of my calf; the long, light strokes from thigh to ankle. A slightly rough, warm palm is thoroughly caressing my leg. I know it is a palm because of the way it fits my contours. I can feel the individual pads. It is a truly sensual touch.

I swivel my body and see a man standing beside my berth. It is dark but I recognise the younger man with the short hair, the one who doesn't want kids. He stands unmoving, as if waiting for an answer.

Mind whirling, it takes seconds to assess and compute my options: Should I scream, wake up the carriage, and cause a scene? Or climb down – which demands much acrobatic bending – and in my underpants, flee to the provodnitsa to denounce the groper?

Should I kick him in the teeth? He is standing like a hunched statue, facing me but looking off to the side. No.

'Oo-ee-tee!,' I hiss.

'Get!' (The harshest words in my repertoire.)

Nothing. No movement at all. He is waiting. He is waiting for an answer.

A different tack.

'Go away!' I hiss using English. It works. Mr Short-back-and-sides isn't brave enough to face my indignation in a foreign language. He is out of his depth. The mystery and the power of _other._

I wait. In seconds that seem forever, though it is almost dark in the carriage, the man slips the sunglasses on top of his head over his eyes. He vanishes.

Wide-eyed, I drop my head on the pillow. My body throbs, released of tension. It comes to me that he might return, again I tense, keeping my eyes open. Mr Middle-Aged is snoring.

In the morning I discover that in the middle of the night, somewhere in Far Eastern Siberia, all the men have left the train. I wonder about how much they have in their pay-packets; about how glad their wives are to see them; about how many people share their apartments; about whether their lives would have been better under the communist regime, when they, the workers owned the factories.

Lyuba is travelling with her teenage son. They have the compartment next to the service area at the front of the wagon – where the _provodnitsa's_ (carriage manager) office is. Next door is the toilet, and opposite, the samovar. Lyuba and I strike up conversation while I wait for the toilet.

I return to my place. Within a few minutes, Lyuba turns up. 'Victoria,' she says, dangling my money belt with my passport inside. I left it on a hook in the toilet. I took it off to have a wash.

Lyuba gives me a wry look.

'You must be more careful, Victoria'.

Lyuba invites me to her berth for a drink. She gives me a glass of chocolate formula, complete with minerals and vitamins.

Lyuba is an agent for the product and she makes a good representative: she is skinny with clear eyes and skin. We talk about staying well in Russia; about the difficulty of obtaining nutrients from the food; about the untrustworthy vegetables and fruit from China, packed with pesticides, that.

Lyuba offers me rice crackers. I nibble, sitting on the opposite berth. When I leave she gives me a box of sachets.

'Napeetok', she explains – a hot drink.

In my compartment the woman opposite has woken. She fluffs her hair and makes-up her face looking into a mirror. She is fifty three she says, but looks younger.

She is also called Lyuba.

I ask this Lyuba, if she wants to try one of my drinks. I fill our glasses at the samovar. It transpires she is also an agent for the supplements that Lyuba One sells. I introduce them, Lyuba One & Two. They hit it off.

We are all on our way to Tynda.

Lyuba One says she will ask her friend Nikolai, who she is going to visit for a night on her way to Novosibirsk, if he can also take Lyuba Two and I in, for a shower and some food.

'Don't worry', she says. 'I have everything under control.'

When the train pulls into Tynda, I am excited about being in this marvel town that epitomises the vast scale of Stalin's rail ambitions for the land he ruled over. On the map, it is evident that Tynda is in the middle of nowhere. There was little point in building a railway to such a place. But Stalin had millions of Gulag prisoners to work to death, and so,Tynda exists.

Tynda

Population 39,000

The town of Tynda is the hub for trains coming west from Komsomolsk-Na-Amure and east from Severobaikalsk, on the Baikalo-Amurskaya Magistral (BAM) train line. It is 4234 kilometres in length, stretching from Tayshet to the west of Lake Baikal, to Sovietskaya Gavan (Soviet Harbour), on the Pacific coast.

It is also where the little BAM line from Blagoveshchensk to the south, joins the Trans-Siberian Railway.

This train station is here because Stalin had something to prove: that Soviet power was gigantic, indissoluble and imperial. Stalin wanted to show the might and right of the world's communist superpower by reaching tentacles to the limits of his kingdom, through the establishment of railways.

Stalin's engineering projects in the Far East were continued by succeeding Soviet leaders. The BAM is so remote and so little-used, it costs more than it earns to run. It is a megalomaniac's folly.

Tynda is not picturesque. Established in 1974, the train station is a wonder of the 1970's aesthetic with its textured stonework, dark-light juxtaposition of floor and walls, and its copper wall sculpture. Only people in flared denims are missing. Lingering in this vintage however, are Russians in polyester prints; these people have been pitifully shunted aside in the world-wide transport of fashion.

Hemming in the Soviet apartment blocks are planted pine forests. Beyond lies the wilds of Eastern Siberia.

First thing, Lyuba One,Two and I go to buy an onward ticket for me. Lyuba One pushes in. There are no tickets left for the train leaving that afternoon. The next train is in two days times.

That will be awkward, I realise. I could get stuck in Siberia, never to make it to Moscow, miss my flight home. How will my boys and my husband cope without me?

Lyuba placates me.

'Don't worry. We'll come back later,' she says.

She calls her friend Nikolai.

'I have some friends with me. They're our kind of people,' Lyuba One says.

What makes me one of 'their people'? I'm pleased to be accepted, but amused, because there is a ultra-right-wing nationalist political group who adore Putin, called 'Ours', which is short for, Our kind of People.

Nikolai is prepared to take Lyuba on her word. He is delighted to take us home. We four, plus luggage, pile into Nikolai's hatchback. I am put in the front seat, being an honoured visitor from New Zealand.

The morning is hot, the concrete blocks shine, the alder trees planted between traffic lanes, glow. The trip is brief.

Nikolai lives on the seventh floor. I wash first. Wallowing in the shallows of a short bath, in a tiny bathroom, I enjoy being in a stranger's place. The other travellers also want to get clean, so my pleasure in watching the water become brown, is brief.

We cram into the kitchen to drink tea and eat. Our fare consists of my cheese, and Nikolai's sausage, dill pickles, black bread, pickled mushrooms, and wild forest berries from a jar. I copy the others and sprinkle sugar on the berries to cut through the sourness.

Lyuba Two is ecstatic about the mushrooms. I examine them suspiciously: the ones on top are blue.

'A home is not a home, without pickled mushrooms,' Lyuba says.

I take the jar, take a whiff. There is no poisonous smell. I put them aside. The others heartily eat the fungi, going in for more. They are still upright without keeling over, so I give them a go. They are large and grey, or yellow and blue, slippery-looking things. My mushroom is fished from deep in the jar. I lie the cap on my plate, take a little in my mouth. The texture of slime competes with the taste of toadstool. A note of poison. However, a yummy tang and a mushroom woodiness overtake my taste buds. The fungi are dangerously delectable. 'Yummy,' I say, and everyone smiles.

We sit in Nikolai's living room, on sofas facing bookcases. Nikolai chats about Russian history. He is a philosophical electrician, who is optimistic about the future. He owns a car and two apartments. Most Russians live well nowadays, he says.

Lyuba One & Two ply me with supplements for my journey, including Siberian green tea, a natural laxative.

We pile in Nikolai's car to return to the train station. First though, we visit the BAM Museum. Most exhibits proudly celebrate the achievement of the train line. It is a Soviet-era museum.

Another room shows stuffed reindeer, wooden sleighs, and life-sized models wearing furs and moccasins. These exhibits portray the natives of the region and their lost way of life; their descendants are Russians now. There are photos of annual ceremonial events in winter: husky-drawn sleigh races, feature among other customs.

June 5

Afternoon. On the way from Tynda to Chita.

To get on this train, Lyuba One takes me to see the manager of the train, five minutes before the train is due to leave. 'She has money,' Lyuba says. He nods me away to the _provodnitsa_. The brunette ushers me to a coupé, pointing to a lower berth crammed with laundry sacks. A man sitting on the opposite berth looks up in surprise as I squeeze my bags in.

On the platform I snap farewell photos with Lyuba One and Two, the teenage son, and Nikolai. We smile and squint. A passer-by takes the photo. It is very hot.

The train shudders into life. My coupé companion begins his questions: Where are you from? What do you do? How old are you? Are you married? Do you have children? Why are you in Russia? How come you speak Russian?

I answer all his questions, then ask: 'What do you do?'

'I work for a paper, and TV.'

'You're a real journalist!'

'I'm the editor.'

'Victoria. Pleased to meet you.'

'Sasha.'

'Alexander?'

'Da.'

'Victoria, would you like a glass of pomegranate juice?'

'Da.'

The train rumbles. It grows hotter. Wiping sweat from his brow with a hanky, Sasha, is finding the heat difficult. We chat. Sasha is tall and skinny with dark hair and almond eyes. He has ethnic Siberian blood. He wears glasses. I relax in his company.

A few hundred kilometres later, I pay the provodnitsa. She tries to charge me four times the price. 'I'm not paying that. Those sacks took up my berth... It's been uncomfortable.'

'What about _my_ comfort? _I_ gave up my berth to _you_. Now I have to sleep in the upper one.' I pay her three times the price. She slips the money into her pocket.

Sasha reads. I'm trying to rest after an hour of newspaper reading too.

Above us the provodnitsa is sleeping, her shift done.

Sasha offers me a chocolate bun with a banana-cream filling, but instead I eat a pear with muesli and milk-powder milk.

I absorb the beauty of the land through which we are passing. The ruins of a white Russian Orthodox church stands alone in a field, green all around.

Not being able to buy a ticket on the train has given me a shock. What if all the seats are sold out across Russia? I allow my mind to settle on some facts from the Lonely Planet.

A non-stop train from Tynda to Moscow takes five days. I am right now, without knowing exactly where I'm situated, somewhere in the Stanovoy Mountains heading south towards Skovorodino, to join the Trans-Siberian line. That is my aim: to join the Trans-Siberian line and continue west...I estimate that destination Moscow is 7000 kilometres away.

Time and Date Unknown: no cellphone reception, but roughly, June 6

Sasha and I read the paper. He reads every page.

I take his leftovers and am more haphazard, going for articles which look less intellectual: the vocabulary is more accessible and I need to thumb the dictionary less. There is something facile about the news – as if the populace is only ready to take baby steps to become educated about everything: health, wealth, politics, scandals and scares.

In between articles, we talk.

'What were you doing in Vladivostok?'

'Volunteering at a shelter for homeless kids.'

Sasha nods, looking at the river winding through the trees.

'This area is full of gold. But they haven't been dredging here...see, the water is clear.'

I look outside. The rocks and the clean water remind me of the South Island of New Zealand. I tell him so.

'Does New Zealand have social problems?,' he asks.

We have one of the worst records of child abuse.'

Sasha looks shocked.

'Why?'

'We have a problem with violence against children,' I begin. I search for words.

'Across all groups; Asian, Pakeha, Pacific Island people, and Maori, the original people. Maori have a culture of warfare. The culture of these indigenous people was nearly destroyed by the Europeans when they came...When the Maori people shifted to cities they lost tribal support and their value system. The cause of much abuse in New Zealand is poverty, and of loss of identity and pride. I continue:

'There's been a renaissance of the indigenous culture. Maori are trying to solve their problems. The real cause, the socio-economic one, has yet to be addressed. And the acceptance of violence in our country has to stop. Education is the most important thing, the only way to bring about equality, I think.'

Sasha considers my lecture. I wonder how much he comprehends what I've said. I feel defeated by the impossibility of translating the issues of my culture into Russian. I don't know if Russians, or indigenous minority Russians share the same _ideas_ about colonialism.

Sasha and I take in the outside panorama while these thoughts run through my mind.

'How much does the average person earn?' Sasha wants to know.

'I think the average wage in New Zealand is about 40,000 New Zealand dollars. A lot more than here.'

Sasha does the maths. He turns his head to the side, then he shifts the drinking glasses on the little formica table. He agrees that New Zealanders are more prosperous.

'I live well. My wife is a doctor. We own our own apartment. It is big. We have enough room for our daughter and my mother-in-law.'

'Is it hard living with your mother-in-law?' I ask.

He looks at me as if he doesn't understand the point of the question, as if I don't understand anything.

'She cooks. She looks after the house and our daughter.'

We fall silent. The trees roll by.

'Nearly all my classmates from university are living in the west now: Hamburg, Los Angeles, London, ' Sasha says.

I sense Sasha's feeling of loss, his sad acceptance.

'What about you? Would you like to live overseas?'

Sasha says quietly, 'If I leave, who will be here to help Russia? If all the educated people leave, how can we fix our country?'

Skovorodino

We arrive at Skovorodino. The train station is beautiful. Its pink and perfectly symmetrical, with white columns and big red letters marching across the roof proclaiming to all that this place, in the middle of somewhere very remote, is Skovorodino.

It is a long stop. All passengers evacuate the train. We tip-toe across the train tracks and the burning sun scorches the skin. I can feel the burn on my shoulders, neck, and arms. My head is cooking, my eyes hurt.

At the entrance arch with the iron gates, women are selling boiled eggs and pirozhki (deep-fried bread with fillings of meat, cabbage or potato). I buy two eggs and a potato pirozhki. Ten metres away, in a shop, I queue to buy water. I return to our coupé. Sasha has bought me an ice cream.

The next day, when it is time to get off the train because we have arrived in my destination, Chita, Sasha escorts me. He carries my case down the aisle. On the platform he shakes my hand. 'Are you going to write about your trip across Russia?'

'Yes. I want to write something.'

'You must. I want to read it. Put it on the web.'

'That's a good idea.'

'It has to be in Russian! I don't read English.'

I laugh. 'I'll write something in Russian, just for you.'

We both grin at each other for a minute. I take my leave, turning on my heel with my backpack on my shoulders and my trolley-case in hand. I head off to this place where I have never before been, to Chita, where it is vital that I find myself a bed for the night.

Another reminiscence about my last visit to Russia:

In 1993, two years after communism had collapsed, people in Moscow, people were very hungry:

On the streets and outside the entrances to the Metro stations, old women stood in their overcoats and head scarves calling passers-by to buy their buttons, potatoes, or their dead husband's neck tie. People shuffled along streets, their lips grim.

The Soviet leader Gorbachev lived in the suburb of Krylatskoe. It was a mess. I stayed there a week, the paying guest of Natasha Zdanovich, a middle-school teacher, and her teenage daughter.

In Russia, under communism, the working poor were those who in the West would be middle class: workers in health, education, science, culture, and agriculture. As these occupations were undertaken for the state, they were the lowest in the communist social scale.

Of all workers in all fields, however, it was the agricultural workers who received the lowest wages and had the least social mobility.

In 1991 the process that Gorbachev ushered in with _perestroika_ (restructuring) – caused communism's eventual collapse. What was left of the Soviet Union was a penniless Russia. No one who worked for the state had been paid in a long time.

Natasha's mother, the 'babushka', had been bringing in coin selling vegetables and flowers from her country plot.

Natasha had another guest, a Canadian doctor of Russian birth. He had come to Russia to buy precious icons from the hungry Muscovites to sell in the West at a large profit. He told me there would be an outbreak of cholera in Moscow. There were mounds of uncollected rubbish and wild dogs running in the streets.

I bought a postcard of the Red Square and went to the Krylatskoe post office to buy a stamp. I was the only customer. Perhaps there was a problem with the electricity supply, because there were no lights on. It was dim. The dark wooden walls also made it dark.

There was a counter. Two Russian women were moving about behind it They were formidable, as only Russian women can be.

I approached the counter. What I saw made no sense.

One of the women held a horse's head. It was not attached to the horse's body, she held it in position on a table. The other woman sawed the head down the middle, between the horse's eyes.

Chapter 6

Chita

**Population 372,000**

Unusually for Russia, this town is laid out in a grid. It has many European buildings and its share of 1970s communist administration buildings, theatres and cinemas, and the graceless Hotel Intourist, formerly owned by the state, now privatised.

There used to dwell here a mix of Mongol and Turkic tribes before the European settlement in 1653. Situated on the confluence of the Chitinka and Ingoda Rivers, the city has an average temperature in winter of -26C, and 25C in summer.

In the early nineteenth century Chita became a trading town, dealing in gold, uranium, and timber.

After Russia's 1905 revolution socialists bestowed the title of 'Chita Republic' upon the city, but it was only a republic for a year, until Tsarist forces crushed the rebellion. After the 1917 revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War, Chita was briefly occupied by the Bolsheviks, then by the Japanese. The Japanese withdrew and in 1920, Chita became the capital of a republic, the Far Eastern Republic. In 1922 it was absorbed into Soviet Russia and was a closed city from the 1930s until the end of Communism, in 1991. It is now a silver-mining centre.

Chita is sometimes called the 'City of Exiles' after the Decemberist Revolutionaries, who were banished there.

The Decemberists were Russia's earliest revolutionaries, who wanted a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom. On 24 December 1825, they protested against the accession to the throne of Nicholas, who was known to be a less enlightened prospect as Tsar than his brother, Constantine, who had refused the title.

The Decemberists, as they came to be called, were a group of military officers (mostly nobles) who were appalled by the ill-treatment of the peasant soldiers serving beneath them in the Napoleonic War. They returned from war in France with hopes of an egalitarian Russia, where peasants would be given freedom, education, and dignity.

Troops numbering 3000 followed their officers to the Senate Square in St Petersburg.

Tsarist troops shot at the soldiers, killing sixty. The protesters were rounded up. 121 of them were found guilty of treason. Five leaders were hung; those remaining were sent as convict-labourers to exile in Siberia. Thirty six of the rank-and-file convicted, who had to march to their destination, perished. Nobles like Sergei Volkonsky, however, went in carriages, and in their journals they mentioned their pleasure in travelling through the countryside.

The sisters, mothers, and in particular, the wives of the gentlemen-prisoners shine in this moment of history. The revolutionaries' sacrifice for humanity's good, is not to be forgotten, because of these women.

Princess Katya Trubetskoi renounced her aristocratic privileges: her maids; her velvets and silks; her afternoons of social-calling; her dusks dashing about in her three-horse-sleigh, along snow-covered boulevards with the bells ringing; her dancing at balls, the liveried servants wearing wigs and powder, lining staircases holding trays of champagne-filled glasses.

This Princess from St Petersburg followed her beloved into exile, to a backwater of hovels. Chita would not be called a town until 1851.

Princess Trubetskoi travelled to Siberia by stage-coach, on rutted roads.

The young wife of Sergei Volkonsky, Maria Volkonskaya, was a society belle. She left behind their one-year-old son when she followed her husband into exile.

Maria, whose family had renounced all connection with her and her treasonous husband, showed fortitude when she arrived in Siberia. At first she shared a hut with Princess Katya, and together they learnt how to cook and wash their clothes.

Years later, after the forced exile in Chita, the women were allowed to settle in civilised Irkutsk. Maria improved the town by establishing a school, a hospital, and a theatre.

At first, restricted to only twice-weekly visits, by perseverance the Decemberist women were able to get the regulations changed to allow their men to live out their exile with them. Not only did they petition the capital for the rights of the prisoners, they also sent pamphlets to be circulated amongst the educated, keeping alive ideals of reform. These women earned the respect and admiration of the locals. They survived conditions of poverty and privation; they changed the world they lived in.

Damskaya Ulitsa (Woman's Street) was the name given to the street in Chita, where the Decemberist women settled to wait out the twenty years of their man's punishment. The log houses are now falling down and the street has been re-named, Stolyanova Street, an inconsequential name. These houses mark the women's contribution to a noble chapter of Russian history. But Russia is paying no attention to the houses; they are becoming ruins.

Day 1, Chita

I wake up in a spick and span student-hostel. I have the day planned. I will visit the Decemberist Museum.

Doug sends me a text: 'Have you forgotten us? Two days, no contact. Don't you love us anymore? I worried.'

I reply: 'Love you. Had no reception on train for 33 hours. Am in Chita now. Off to the Decemberist Museum.'

Fifty metres before the Decemberist women's houses, I pass a nightclub, which has typical nightclub, studded-leather doors. A BMW, a Mercedes, and an Audi are parked outside. The doors open and a woman in nine-inch heels, struts out in black leggings and a transparent shirt. Her pony tail swings.

In the afternoon sun, I photograph the log houses trying to capture their decaying beauty. They slouch, the footpath touches the flower-boxes beneath their lace-curtained windows. It is impossible see inside.

The Decemberist Museum:

The Decemberist Museum is housed in the 1776 Michael-Archangelsk Church, the oldest building in Chita, the very church where the exiles worshipped.

The church is made of logs. It is two-storied, with a small belfry. The belfry has one window in each of its facets. The church has a green cupola and a golden spire which supports the Orthodox cross. The cross has a short bar at the very top, and at the very bottom. Two thirds up, there is a longer bar.

The written material accompanying the exhibits (murals; letters written in spidery hands; iron shackles and primitive furniture set up in a mock barrack; and period furniture in a drawing room), are written only in Russian.

It takes time to translate the plaques. The words of the poets, thinkers and writers in that group of exiles make the effort worthwhile.

Fonvisin described the Russian peasants as, 'Being solely on the earth for their master's pleasure. They lacked any rights of property or sovereignty, and not even their children belonged to them.'

Muravyev wrote he would be glad, 'If only the people that were to follow would read his words and know that this man had a soul.'

It astounds me that these writers, in their time, _were_ _revolutionary_. This humanist thinking was new and dangerous in Russia then. That Muravyev, Fonvisin, Volkonsky and Trubetskoi, amongst others, had the capacity to think and feel, not just for their own destiny but for the lives and fates of others, made them _rebels_.

Some young newly-weds arrive and begin to pose among the furnishings. (The furniture exhibits the life the exiles made after their sentences expired; they chose to remain in Siberia.)

The bride and groom pose beside a mirror and a pianola, and in front of the portraits of the Decemberist women. They squash on a seat in front of a writing desk where Maria Volkonskaya might once have penned her letters.

Much snapping.

Downstairs in the Museum's entrance, the ticket seller is an old woman with a disfigured face. There are two planes to her face. A raised cheekbone pops out a protruding left eye.

I think about why Russia's people have been oppressed by their rulers from Ivan the Terrible to this day. It must be to do with the severity of the weather and the vastness of the terrain. In such a climate, over such distances, seeds of morality and ideals grow feebly. Such goodness as there is, comes not from enlightened rule, but is generated by the humanity of the people, by the moral backbone of their Orthodoxy.

Ivan the Terrible, 1533-1584

Ivan the Terrible was the first to use the biblical term, 'Tsar', which was translated from the word 'Caesar' and had the meaning 'King'.

He was a poet. He fostered trade and signed a trade treaty with Queen Elizabeth 1 – that was one of the good things he did.

But he brought about serfdom in Russia by forbidding the peasants to move annually, as had been their habit, and their one freedom.

He hated the nobles with inherited rank, so he tried to destroy them as a class, instead creating a meritocratic, military aristocracy, with title awarded for achievement.

Ivan the Terrible was expansionist, and annexed or conquered Siberian lands. He tried desperately to gain for Russia a warm-water port, but in so doing he led Russia into war with its neighbours. He created a port in Archangelsk, in the north of Russia.

At the end of a 37-year-reign he died, leaving a mentally-retarded son to rule, because he had killed his groomed-for-the-job son with a fire poker, in a fit of rage.

Ivan the Terrible became Ruler of Muscovy at the fragile age of three. His mother, who stood in for him, was poisoned by the nobles of the court – the Boyars. Ivan then suffered further at the hands of the Boyars. It is said they deprived him of adequate food and clothing, which is believable if you think of the hard Russian winters and the periodic crop-failures that Russia endured. Even the court would not have been exempt from privation.

Imagine an orphan boy at the mercy of plotting aristocrats, with their greed and ambition. He would grow to be a person living in fear, trusting no one, hating the entitled class and wanting to erase it.

Ivan threw huge tantrums (like the one where he killed his son), then set off to monasteries to fast and pray for redemption. He created a private army called the Oprichina, who dressed in black and rampaged in the countryside, raping, pillaging and slaughtering Slavs.

His relationship to women is noteworthy. He had eight spouses, four of whom he married. He attacked his pregnant daughter-in-law for provocative dress. This assault killed his heir in her belly.

The translation of the word daughter-in-law as, [snoha], means something along the lines of, 'fucked one', from the point of view of the father-in-law. [snohachestvo], is a word which describes the practice of the father's right to have sexual intercourse with his daughter-in-law, in the absence of his son. (Son, where, I ask myself? Permanently or temporarily absent? At war or deceased?)

'Bride', [nevestka], is the word used to describe the concept of daughter-in-law, from the point of view of the mother-in-law. It has none of the above connotation.

One of Ivan the Terrible's more enlightened acts was to establish the first printing press in Russia. But the printers, who ran the operation had to flee for their lives to Lithuania. The stunning St Basil's Cathedral was built under his rule. However, he established the first state-owned vodka distillery and set in motion the custom of the Russian state taxing the drunken population. Vodka was a dark influence on the Russian soul, way back then. (It was against Lenin's principles to take advantage of this revenue; Lenin attempted to curb Russia's alcoholism. Stalin had no such scruples.)

I return from the day's outing. The cleaning-woman, Olga Viktorovna Markova, brings me fish soup and potato dumplings. She sits at the table in my room and after the soup and dumplings, she plies me with chocolates and biscuits.

She asks if I'm married.

'I am.'

'Children?'

'Three sons.'

'How old?'

'8, 10 and 11.'

'Oh,' she asks, 'Who is with them?'

'My husband. I did all the caring, from the time they were babies. Now it's my husband's turn.'

(The way to express the concept of 'turn' in Russian is to use the word for 'queue' – so in Russian I was saying that it was Doug, who was next in the child-rearing queue.)

'Good. Teach your boys to do for themselves. Let them see their father in the kitchen. Otherwise your boys will never learn. Just learn to watch the woman. A woman's lot is tough. Even in your country, I bet. Everywhere women do the work.'

I agree.

'But New Zealand men', I say, 'Are not as bad as some...'

'...and thank you for the meal'.

'Where are you going?'

'For an evening stroll.'

My new friend nods.

'Quite right. That's good. Cooler in the evening. Off you go. Have fun. You should meet a someone too. A pleasant man. Why not? Better than having supper on your own...'

I laugh. She thinks I'm lonely. Then I realise I _am_ lonely. But only a tiny bit. It's a good loneliness, but of course, she doesn't see that.

I am on my own, experiencing something that no one else needs to share. A journey broken in 1993 has to be completed. The Trans-Siberian train journey.

I hit the hot streets. The aroma of barbecued meat stops me, my nostrils lead me to a tent where a man is grilling kebabs over charcoal. It is pork marinated in garlic, yoghurt, and herbs. I have eaten, but the smell... I order a beer and shashlik.

A group of men sprawl around a table, bottles and sunflower-seed shells everywhere. They look like gangsters, they have tattoos on their arms and scars on their hands. One grunts into his cellphone: 'What do you want?'; '12,000?'; 'When? When I'm ready.'

These are not the pleasant guys the cleaning-woman was imagining. I'm sure she meant a man with a mind. I think about the likelihood of meeting Sweep-Me-Off-My Feet when there are millions of Russian women searching for the same. What nonsense!

I have lost weight. I am slimmer, and looking at my figure, few would guess I had birthed three rugby-players. It is because of the travelling and the kilometres I walk each day, and the heat which robs my appetite, and the stress of reaching the other side of Russia.

And the cost. In Russia food is expensive. I am scared of over-spending; of arriving home to long credit card bills and Doug's growling. I won't live it up when Doug has three boys and himself to feed on the family budget.

It's also happiness. I am content to be in control: I shape each day and each of these days brings me to observe and understand my _resourcefulness_. I am pleased with myself.

When a woman is in control, what need has she to eat for comfort? When a woman is alive in all her senses, using knowledge she has worked for decades to gain, then that woman will eat for fuel and for taste. Delicious Russian ice cream, juicy apricots from Uzbekistan, and salty, oily herrings from a tin become sustenance, not food for _feelings_.

The second factor relates to the first, but it is also a thing apart, and that is – travel-skill. I have learnt how to eat nutritiously while travelling: kefir and oats; hearty soups for lunch. I eat cheaply. Or at least not expensively, for only Russian rye bread is cheap. I pick and choose and the flab falls off.

I sit in the empty tent on the footpath, studying the waitresses flopped at their resting stations. They are so close I could read from their notepads. Aprons are tied around their waists; their faces are tired.

What do they expect from their lives? Do they look forward to the future's possibilities? It seems social mobility is not a feature of Russian, or at least, of Siberian life. The waitresses are close to middle-aged; prospects of prosperity and self-fulfilment seem negligible.

Perhaps I'm dropping a filter over their existence that has no place, as it is _my_ filter. Perhaps it is my Western upbringing has corrupted me with yearnings for achievement and reward.

But these women's lives are hard, that is evident. The national statistics of life-expectancy say so.

I am interested in what life has been like for Russian women down the ages. Is it the climate that has made a woman's lot so hard? Yes. Food, shelter and their surplus which provides wealth, is difficult to obtain, and spring and summer are short.

Russian women are tough. Even into the nineteenth century, peasant women wore rope harnesses and pulled barges up rivers. In the First World War, the head-shaven women (a typhus deterrent), who signed up to the Russian Women's Battalion of Death, (giggling and wearing of jewellery forbidden), had to be celibate, and fit enough to complete the training. Their units sometimes lead men into battle. They fought voluntarily at a time when desertion in the conscripted army was high, and morale low.

Before the Bolshevik revolution, women schoolteachers in Russia endured appalling conditions. The state frequently neglected to pay their miserly salaries; they often slept with the cattle in huts during winter, or in unheated school houses. It was not unusual for women teachers to starve to death, nor for that matter, was starvation unusual in Tsarist Russia. The Tsar's daughters, on the other hand, received sufficient pocket money to splurge on Fabergé jewellery as gifts for their friends.

Ample scholarly work exists, both Russian and Western, that documents the unequal status and opportunities of women compared with those of men in Russia. On a multitude of fronts, including hiring practices, media portrayals, and treatment by law enforcement agencies in cases of domestic violence, women face blatant stereotypes and discrimination. In measures such as unemployment levels, salaries, domestic workloads, representatives in positions of power, women are vastly unequal to men.

Reproductive health has always been an enormous problem, with abortions being the major form of birth control.

– from 'Women's NGOs in Russia, Struggling from the Margins', Lisa McIntosh, Associate professor in Political Science, University of British Colombia.

My Notes:

Frederica Behr, of Amnesty International in Moscow, says there are three times as many Russian women murdered at home as in any other European country. Yet there exist only 20 shelters for victims of domestic violence in the whole of Russia, that is one shelter for every 7 million people. In England, by way of comparison, there is a shelter per every 150,000 people. Furthermore, there is no protection under law for women in Russia, from the effects of domestic violence. If a woman calls the police they say, 'Ring us back when he threatens to kill.'

A saying, spoken by mothers to their daughters in Russia:

'If he doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you.'

Another, spoken, presumably, from one bloke to the next:

'The more you hit the old woman, the tastier the soup.'

Day 2, Chita

June 8

Wake up, walk the corridor, turn left into the room with three sinks and three mirrors, cross to the toilet. Open the door and am nearly knocked out by smoke. A thick cloud from floor to ceiling. The room is huge, the window small, two sets of panes with a gap in between. Closed!

I stagger to open it, cursing the sneaking smoker.

Walk all day around the town. Spot an exquisite building with wooden tracery, peeking out behind some trees. Open the door, step over the sagging threshold. A wide corridor. A woman bustling. Can I help?

Is this a school? I'm from New Zealand...I would be interested in seeing this school...

Would you like to have a look around?

The tour: Classrooms. Painted wooden charts – the eternal syllabus: Algebra; the Periodic table; the Latin alphabet; the laws of Physics. The headmistress behind a large desk. The Russian flag. No computer. No computer visible anywhere. The curriculum has never changed. Chemistry; Latin; English; Physics; Mathematics; History; Geography. Today, the senior students had their finals. No, no problem children. If we do, they have someone sitting with them. Other schools teach extra curricula subjects, such as music; dance; sport.

Thank you for your time. Your school is splendid.

Evening. Night. Collapse into bed. Woken by the sound of shouting outside on the street, then a strange scuffling and a thud-thud. A shadow passes my window. Look out in time to see a figure crawling up the wall, like Spiderman. Get up and look down on the street outside. Two youths giggling, their faces looking upwards. Realise its the old trick – climb up the drainpipe when you're locked out of the building. Probably engineering students.

Day 3, Chita

June 9

In Chita, the town of the heroines of the Decemberist Revolution...

Now, even those well-bred women who came east, following their men into winters that seemed to have no end, broken by springs which turned everything to mud, ruining their hems and their hair, enforcing the need to wear gumboots... Even those women would have weekly done, what I was about to do. Enjoy the banya. They would have carried their soap, towel, and bundles of birch leaves to a public bathhouse.

The goal is excretion, perspiration, detoxification. Encouraged by whipping with birch twigs, and scouring with loofah. Knees, thighs and ankles, arms, bellies – all the parts that want sloughing off.

There is another dimension to the Russian custom of sweating in the bathhouse – it is a spiritual cleansing, a kind of metaphysical transformation. One emerges a cleaner and a better person.

When embarking upon a banya experience, whether it be in the common, old, municipal banyas, or in a quaint 100-year-old wooden version in a village, Russians say to each other: 'Steam well!'

The Public Bathhouse, Chita

Pay my 90 roubles and go left into the women's side. Two old women are sitting at a table, one of them has a pile of tickets. I give over my ticket. The other woman bundles me off to a locker room.

'This is my first time,' I say.

The old woman gives me an oval tin bucket, large enough to sit in. I put my shoes on the shelf at the top of the locker. 'No, no. They go on the bottom.'

She leaves me. A few naked women are chatting in pairs on the wooden benches in front of the lockers.

I undress and carry my small travel-towel and my kit into the next room. A large space; old, circa 1930's. Brown tiled floors, white tiled walls. A wide aisle and on either side, concrete benches. At most of these benches there is a woman, or if not a woman, then her bucket claiming her space. In each bucket is the whole business.

Women moving about with the same efficiency as women pushing trolleys in the supermarket. These ones have pendulous breasts or rosebuds, flattish stomachs or folds over their thighs. There is really only one woman with rosebuds and a trim waist – a daughter, who is with her mum – and she is perfection itself, because she is so perfectly young.

I take a vacant bench. Watching the other women at their benches, I splash at the low taps. Dropping my kit in my bucket, I follow the aisle.

The banya. Dense black heat. Dim. Bodies. White women's bodies. Legs, arms, faces. Pixie hats. Bosoms. Russian jabbering. The heat so intense that I can't see where to sit... I take the middle tier. I want to go unnoticed. I want to sweat.

All the women wear slip-ons. And most wear felt caps, or if they don't, their hair is wrapped in a towel. And they sit on another towel. I have no towel to sit on. I've left it with my kit.

Mother scrubs daughter's back with birch leaves. Daughter braces herself, holding on to the bench. Someone speaks to me. The word is out: a traveller, from _New Zealand_ , in their midst. I escape.

Outside I reel. Shower. Overwhelmed. Suddenly a crone, about three-foot-three with breasts like old socks, comes right up to me and starts jabbering. I look down at her silver teeth and her glittering eyes hidden in wrinkles. Her words are not like Russian I know.

'I don't understand.'

More jabbering. I stare at her ancient face, trying to guess what she is saying. Maybe its my bare feet? No towels? None to catch sweat before it sullies the benches? No pixie hat? Is it these wrong-doings?

She is yelling at me in her wizened voice, waving her birch twigs like an Italian taxi driver who's had his car dented.

'Can you speak more slowly?'

Every woman is converging on us, shouting to be heard above one another. I look at twitching eyebrows, pubic bushes and hands waving, I hear words, they're pointing at the old lady standing beside me, while she gesticulates with her twigs.

Dumb and dumber.

Then I realise the situation is idiotic. I haven't done anything wrong.

I listen. Not to words, but intonation. My heated mind has overridden comprehension, the reflex won't work. I have to go for body-language and sounds.

At last I get what they are saying. What the old woman wants. She wants me to turn around so she can scrub my back with her birch twigs.

This is what I do.

Shashlik and Beer

I, professor

'I professor,' the man says, opening his arms.

I sit at an un-laid table with a stained cloth, my 'Lonely Planet Russia', in front of me. Outside, wind is bulging the empty beer tent and sending up eddies of dust and leaves amongst the table legs. With much persuasion, one of the tired waitresses permitted me to sit in a corner of the restaurant to drink my beer, write my diary, and eat my shashlik in comfort. The wind outside made me feel unwelcome.

Here, on the other hand, a private party is in full swing and I have a view of the goings-on, like I'm the audience.

A couple of women and a three men head outside for a smoke. One man stops, seeing me alone. He catches sight of the book on the table.

'I, Professor.'

'Professor, I', he tries again. He waits to see me swoon at his English.

'I speak Russian perfectly well,' I say in Russian.

'I English speak....You English!'

He is swaying, behind his glasses his eyes are amazed. A chorus of 'Na Zdorovyes' breaks out, the party are downing shots.

There is something belligerent about the professor. It's as if I challenge his manhood by speaking better Russian than his baby English.

I stare into my glass of beer.

'You...Russia...You...?' He shrugs. A sulky shrug with his lip up and his hands open.

A waitress comes up.

'Why are you annoying the lady? Go on, off you go. Outside. Go have a smoke and leave her in peace. Go on. Go, go.'

Day 4, Chita

June 10

I search the shops for a hat with a wide brim. Russian women must relish the brief summer, oblivious to the sun.

I find one at last. Blue. Goes with my eyes. I um and ah. Too expensive? The sales-assistant watches me.

I look at her.

'I don't want my husband to be angry with me.'

She smiles, pulls out her cellphone and rings her boss.

'I have a woman here, from New Zealand. Uh-huh. She wants to buy a hat, but she doesn't want her husband to give her a hard time. Can I give her a discount?'

Lovely woman. The hat costs $15 New Zealand dollars. Made in China. Synthetic raffia. Eye up a t-shirt with flowers on it. Resist.

On the street everyone looks at the woman in the big hat.

Before I left Tangowahine, Doug and I talked about freedoms while apart.

We affirmed sovereignty over our bodies. We let each other _be,_ no recriminations about the mysterious movements of life. It felt unnecessary to claim possession, it was either there if we each respectively felt it – or not.

Of Doug's love, I am in no doubt. He is still, after all these years, a little in awe of me. When he stands back and _sees_ me, really sees me, he is proud that he can call me his own.

Doug wasn't ecstatic about me going: I remember my art blowing in the wind, and recognise the anger he actually felt at my leaving him alone with the three boys – but he wanted me to do what I needed to do.

I am about to pack up and go. My train to Ulan Ude, leaves at one in the morning, but I must check out of the hostel by seven, or pay extra. Olga offered to take me in for a few hours. I demurred, saying I didn't mind hanging out at the station.

Olga and I have a last conversation.

She asks how we make a living.

'My husband and I are farmers.' I tell her about raising cattle. She wants to know if we milk our cows. She is shocked that we don't.

'My husband's family have a dairy farm nearby. We get our milk there.'

'How many cows?'

'550.'

Olga's eyes boggle. One of her lower eye-lids is inflamed. It looks like a carcinoma.

'Your husband is really rich.'

'We're not rich by New Zealand standards. My husband's parents are. But they are frugal, mean and want to hold onto everything they own. Forever. They loved it that my husband worked most of his life for them for free.'

I think about Doug raising the courage to ask his parents to refund the money he spent putting down an artesian bore on the farm years ago, so he could give me the money for my ticket to Russia.

'My husband is a good man. He is working hard so I can travel. He knows how important coming to Russia is to me. I've studied Russian since the age of 13 – thirty years! Doug doesn't speak Russian.'

'It's good. Your travel. Otherwise you look back and see you've spent your life cooking and cleaning. Like me. My husband dead. Alcoholic. Let me do all the work. I put food in front of him at the end of my working day, he ate, then emptied the bottle. Fell asleep at the table. My second husband, he drank too. I kicked him out. No more men for me. Just my son. He has no wife, no children. He drinks...'

I am lying on the cold marble floor of the Chita train station, in an almost empty waiting room which is large, with a high-ceiling, and has a television attached to the wall, way down the other end.

I have placed my bags beside me where I'm lying, on my sleeping mat.

There are five or six young men asleep on the steel benches near the television.

A station guard stops his surveillance to admonish me. He tells me to shift my bags, or else they'd be stolen.

I move my backpack and trolley-case to the other side, next to the radiators, beneath the windows, which look out onto the platform.

A broadcast comes over the intercom, calling parents to be vigilant with their children in the zone of the station. The station is a dangerous place, so the announcement goes, and the Federal Russian Train Service will take no responsibility for any harm coming to children. Parents must pay particular attention to the areas on the platforms: children unsupervised could fall on the tracks.

My bum is hurting after my trip to Aginskoe, where my bottom split. I had to endure two hours of this, seated facing backwards in the crowded mini-van, watching my companions slumber to the motion of the transport as the driver jerked along the pot-holed highway. They lay their heads on fellow-travellers' shoulders, or on headrests.

One of my cheeks sat on one seat, the other on another. In between was a chasm edged by metal. On my right, a snoring youth hogged the space, his thigh against me; on my left a girl luxuriated in her sleep.

I was the passenger squeezed in at the last minute; there was no place for me.

Aginskoe

Population 15,000

The Aginskoe Datsan, a Buddhist temple, was beautiful and huge. It was one of a sprawling complex of temples and buildings. I went inside a smaller temple and was transfixed. People genuflected, with notes clasped in their fingers, to seated monks in claret robes. Others held bottles of milk as offerings. After praying, they retreated, fingertips touching noses.

The fat monk had a gravelly voice and was chanting. Beside him, the younger monk read through the stack of wishes, and intermittently blew a horn. The monks sat cross-legged on a dais; arranged in front of them were their prayer scrolls, a gong, a horn, a box of prayers. People lined four sides of the room, moving along the walls, then placed their offerings at a crowded table.

I left to wander along pathways, through the swathes of grass, where cows grazed.

I was in Russia and totally lost. I was unprepared for this. Between Chita and here, there had been shift to Buddhism, from Russian Orthodoxy. After I was just getting to grips with Orthodoxy. Here was a Buddhist culture, about which I felt ignorant. The Buryat language, the region's history, and the religion were unknown to me. My efforts had been to understand _Russian_ language and culture. But Russia was also this.

What a flea I am. A woman from Tangowahine, in the north of New Zealand, a green hamlet. How could I organise thoughts of this place?

I walked around then caught a taxi back to Aginskoe.

The woman taxi driver chatted .

'There are so few trees', I said, gazing at the grassland.

' _There are trees_. Look, there is a tree, and there, and there.'

My eyes followed her digit to the gardens along the road. Sure enough, there was a tree in each. Probably an apple, or a cherry tree. Each of the gardens were fenced, so I couldn't see, but I guessed they were for potatoes and greens, rather than trees, which would deprive the vegetables of sun.

'And see, the municipal government has planted trees along the road.'

'Yes, I see,' I said, appreciating the young alders.

In Aginskoe, I found something to eat. Most shops were closed, but I found one open. I bought kefir, cheese, and a bag of pastries.

The museum was closed. The cows outside the museum's gates eyed me coolly.

On the way home to Chita, I had the back seat to myself. I lay down, pulled the tasselled curtain against the glare, and was bounced all the way back to Chita.

All I could think about was love.

My Russian love fantasy:

A blanket of snow bounces light, a pale blue sky is the universe. Naked trees spike the purity.

Along a path, in the snow come a man and woman, dressed in furs.

The woman is in front. She laughs, she is teasing. The man launches a snowball which catches the woman's shoulder; snow speckles the pelt of her hat.

The woman gathers a snowball. She throws it.

They come together, laugh.

Their izba, their house made of logs, is close. Smoke rises from the chimney.

Inside they pull off mittens, boots, furs, clothes – it seems to take forever. On the bed by the stove they learn the sounds, smells, and grimaces that are part of their understanding.

Further Reflections, and Some Pertinent Quotes on Russian Love, the appearance of Women, Cooking, & Drunks

There is something that stirs my soul, that makes me love Russia, that flutters my heart. It is the melding in this land of man and woman. There is something different about the way Russians love each other, and I don't yet get it.

Around me are exemplary pairings from the super-young to the senior. I see a peculiarly Russian union in the faces of the drunk and disfigured couple in the park, and on the train I encounter it: a beefsteak husband and his juicy wife crowded the wagon with their lapdog, their two sturdy daughters, and their bags bursting with groceries.

The couple was en route to the army, leaving the offspring with the wife's parents. I studied the photos shown to me by the proud wife of both husband and wife in military camouflage, standing side by side with marital satisfaction on their faces. How did they hold their marriage and family together living in separate barracks, away from their daughters?

(Their plump daughter woke me in the dead of the night with her snoring, not the first time a Slav female had woken me driving a Belarus tractor. I reached across and squeezed the girl's nostrils. She snorted, smacked her lips, tossed and turned, then let me get some sleep.)

I spotted Russian love again. This time it was embodied in the brawny newly-wed (ring on right, third finger), in the berth opposite. He was speaking laconically to his wife (or his lover?), on his cell. Afterwards, he pulled out a newspaper and read it cover to cover.

While I slept, he disappeared, leaving the train to find his Siberian woman. His discarded paper became my property. I wondered what so absorbed him.

Bang. I was hit with the Russian collision and enmeshment of the sexes:

The articles investigated sexual behaviour. From advice about the physical functions and malfunctions of the sexual organs, to sex therapist talk about breaking through the blocked libido of the non-climaxing woman. This sex therapist countered the argument that prolonged foreplay is best for arousing the frigid woman. He counselled giving it to her roughly and brutally. Do it manfully, despite all protests.

Maybe Russian sexuality is marked by roughness and brutality?

Did communism kill sexual love?

It certainly tried. After the revolution in 1917, existing ideals of romance were considered bourgeois and repressive; young communists embraced new mores of sexual freedom; loyalty to the Party was foremost, stronger than ties to family or lovers. Feelings were not to be indulged.

People reinvented themselves as 'workers for the Party'. Anyone not embracing this ideology became an Enemy of the People. Love was old-fashioned, even maternal and paternal love. Communal living was meant to make old family structures redundant, so a mother's or a father's love – with its nursery rhymes and hugs and kisses – was regressive. Marriage and divorce became perfunctory; intimacy was suspicious.

Is Russia a country that needs to relearn so much about intimacy, that daily broadsheets are necessary for sex education?

Remembering the depiction of love from the great Russian novels: Anna Karenina's and Vronsky's pre-revolutionary love was doomed by the society of the time. So too, was the post-revolutionary love of Zhivago and Lara:

They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

To them – and this made them unusual – the moments when passion visited their doomed existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves.

_Dr Zhivago_ , Boris Pasternak,page 387

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna – he did not yet believe that – but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

What would come of it he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were concentrated on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, and that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her.

_Anna Karenina,_ Leo Tolstoy, page 121

How the Women Dress

I like how the women dress however they god-damned like – and the men don't give a damn.

It's as if the men respect and accept that it is a woman's job to embellish her every aspect. Whether the women colour their hair (any shade, from blue to pink); or break ankles because of the heights of their heels, (I've seen 9-inch-heels holding up a mum carrying her toddler like a football, as she jettisoned off a moving tram); or, whether they reveal each inch of leg and uncovered orbs; or a combination of the above – the men approve.

There is another aspect to this dress sense. It is the joy of dressing experienced only recently – since the fall of communism. For seventy years Russian women wore hideous clothes. The best of Soviet cotton, wool, and leather, went to the Military Complex. The only kit of quality was worn by Red Army soldiers, or by officials' wives, bought on their overseas visits. Now, post-communist women can dress as they chose, the spectre of state control being exorcised daily, with every lick of mascara.

And in a country where the temperature can drop to minus fifty, clothes can instantly signify health and wealth.

I wish I could photograph the heels and the hair and ignore the scenery. I could share these studies with non-Russians: Here are the display-behaviours adopted by women at liberty to decorate themselves – because they are constrained by the shortage of men (good ones), and by a society hostile to women, couples, intimacy, and families.

I read a recently, that ovulating women go to extra lengths to look attractive. It is a sub-conscious drive to be successful at mating. Getting a man to impregnate you – this is the ultimate prize. In the Russian mating game, the stakes are high.

New Zealand women wear the clothing of the repressed, in comparison to Russian women.

I believe the display-behaviours, and, moreover, the sexuality that permeate Russian media, (which conversely smacks of sexual repression), stem from these factors: Russian men and women bond early. Ideally, they then support each other throughout parenthood. If it doesn't work, the man (men hold power in this country, where they are fewer, due to low male life-expectancy), quickly chooses a second mate, and even a third.

He'll casually breed. The man is as promiscuous, or as serially-monogamist, as he likes.

How the Women Cook

The women feed the men here. If they have a man to feed.

I've got their cooking sussed. It is all about laying the table. Putting all the morsels out, in a series. Appetisers, main, sweets and tea.

Every two to three days, the Russian woman makes a soup, (borscht, solyanka or shchi), and then she has the basis of the meal. She can heat it up and pour out a bowl, whenever her Mr. presents himself. And then, also, on the tiny table, in the teensy kitchen of the small apartment, she will have laid out chunks of bread, dill pickles, and slices of cheese.

If the woman has a relative with a dacha, or if she has one herself, she will have a store of potatoes, preserves and pickles. If she doesn't have a dacha, she would at least have a few jars of mushrooms or berries from the forest.

In a glass bowl on the table, there will always be some sweet offering to drink with tea.

Before the tea, after the soup, if her Mr. is deserving, the Russian woman will serve fried cutlets of minced fish, beef, or chicken, with boiled potatoes, and salad with the ubiquitous mayonnaise squeezed from a bottle. Mayonnaise (which doesn't spoil) has replaced the traditional sour cream.

The Cuisine of the People

The high cuisine of Old Russia, with its elaborate service and imported delicacies, existed only for the very few, great landowning aristocrats and the richest city people. Cities were few and mostly small; the bulk of the people were peasants huddled in and around tiny villages on the great level plain that sweeps eastward through Russia to the Ural Mountains. They were isolated by distance and primitive transportation, and nearly all the foods they ate came from their own small farms and the forests and the streams nearby. Most peasants were desperately poor by modern standards, but nevertheless they created out of simple ingredients a very attractive style of cooking which, with additions and elaborations, is the solid base of Russian cooking today. Not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 did this fundamental cuisine begin to undergo a significant change.

In the old days, the peasant returning from a long day of labour in the fields joined his family around a crude wooden table in a tiny – sometimes one-room – wooden cottage. Their repast, illuminated by weak oil lamps or flickering candles, consisted of a single nourishing course. It was simple and cheap, but hearty and flavourful. The head of the house cut the loaf of sour, dark Russian bread into thick slabs and a steaming bowl of borscht (beet soup) or shchi (cabbage soup) or uhka (fish soup) was passed around. When the soup was thin, as it often was, plates heaped high with the coarse cooked grain called kasha helped fill the diners' stomachs. The food was lightened – and the spirits of the family lifted – by glass after glass of kvass, a thin beer drunk throughout the meal.

The most important pre-revolutionary food was bread, which was taken seriously, prepared with loving care and much appreciated. Over the centuries, the baking of the Russian peasant's bread developed into a slow, perfect ritual. In the evening the housewife lit a wood fire in her big brick stove and banked it so it would heat the oven slowly to the right temperature. In the morning she arranged her heavy loaves of dough, which had been rising overnight, on the hearth. There they baked long and slowly and took on a tough crust, a slightly sour, nutty flavour and a wonderful yeasty fragrance.

The traditional loaf was generally made of rye flour, because rye is a dependable crop for the short and fickle Russian growing season. The flour was coarsely ground, and the customary leaven was dough left over from an earlier baking. Other grains such as millet, wheat and barley also were used, but white bread made of refined wheat flour was a rarity. Peasant bread was almost always dark, like pumpernickel, and most Russian bread is dark today. Russians prefer it that way. They do not slice it thin but eat it in thick, man-sized slabs. If they use butter, they may spread it as much as an inch thick. Bread, they believe, is no petty side dish, it is the very essence of life and should be honoured and enjoyed accordingly.

_Russian Cooking,_ The Foods of the World', Time Life Books, 1969

Everywhere in Russia there is food. Cafés, kiosks, stolovayas (dining canteens), snack bars, restaurants, supermarkets, street-vendors, markets and school canteens, all sell food. Women are not excessively relied on to provide food for men or children. Schools feed children, which means mothers don't have to shop, or cook for school lunches.

Therefore, not much food-preparation is required, when living in the Russian cities and towns. And in the Russian diet, generally, the meals are not complex.

So Russian women are not as burdened as me. And that answers another question I have. If their cooking is succinct, what does that leave them with?

Time. Time to cultivate another essential survival tool: attractiveness.

Drunks

I have seen a few couplets of drunks. The first, was in the back streets of the Second River district, in the outer suburbs of Vladivostok.

I was meandering nowhere in particular. My proper destination was the botanical gardens. The bus had dropped me off nearby, but I wanted to get lost and find the unpredictable.

A Russian woman, who looked wifely, staggered ahead, while her Mr. followed with a flagon of beer.

'Hey. Hey. Hey,' he said, his words coming like drops of vodka at the bottom of a bottle. 'Why such a hurry?' She ignored him.

'Come here, woman.'

She continued on.

'Wait up!'

The woman with purple hair, aged about 50 – ignored her husband and kept on. Perhaps she wanted to pee.

She had a vestige of self-pride, that was evident in the tidiness of her dress and in the condition of the shoes she wore, as she trotted sideways. A piss by the road would rob her of that dignity.

Maybe their session had been at a friend's house. Now they were heading home. Mrs. was longing to hit the sack. Or perhaps she was in hurry because her neighbours might spot her in a state.

What shocked me about this pair was, they were _both_ drunk. _In the middle of the day._ They had hit the bottle together, taken to drink as husband and wife, for better or for worse.

A Russian drinks to forget his or her worries, Elena in Komsomolsk-Na-Amure told me, my hostess who wanted to get drunk with me on martinis.

Looking even worse if it were possible, because of the spring foliage – the scruffy apartment blocks, the common area, and the booze shops sprayed with graffiti were decayed. The place seemed menacing. Is Russia like this because Russians drink too much? Or do they drink too much, because they wish to escape this devaluation?

Drinking under Communism was not hedonistic. It provided us with an outlet – a coveted, even if short-term, escape from political dogma and social gloom. A bottle of vodka was therefore a sort of liquid hard currency, much more reliable (and more stable) than money. Anything, from a trip abroad to difficult-to-obtain roof tiles, could be bought and sold for alcohol, and had its inflation-proof vodka equivalent.

But at the end of the 1980's Mikhail Gorbachev tried to curb his country's near-endemic alcoholism. Countless sobriety societies, which every worker was forced to join (fees were simply deducted from salaries), sprang up like mushrooms after a good July rain. These societies were staffed for the most part by carefully vetted bureaucrats from the uneven ranks of heavy drinkers and chronic alcoholics. They did nothing apart from organizing politically correct 'sober' birthday parties and wedding ceremonies, during which vodka was covertly poured from samovars and kettles. Alcohol was hard to find in the shops. The effect was predictable: vodka-deprived drunks took to shampoo, glue, perfume, insect repellent and window cleaner. In a Moscow park, I once saw three drunks boiling tooth powder in an empty can on top of a bonfire. They boiled it for five hours (or so they said), then carefully removed the alcohol from the top with tablespoons, drank it –and immediately started vomiting.

Vodka came back in a flood after Gorbachev went. Westerners assumed that with the collapse of Communism, people in the former Soviet Union would drink less - a democratic society would provide alternative forms of escape; books, a free media, foreign travel, the cornucopia of consumer goods. The reality has been different. Drinking in the post-Communist world has increased dramatically since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

_The Last Eighteen Drops_ , Mines a large Tooth-powder, Vitali Vitaliev; Granta 64; pp. 188-9

Chapter 7

Krasnoyarsk

**population 910,000**

This is a bustling city on the Yenisei River. To the south of the river sprawls a wilderness of forested hills designated as a reserve. The Stolby Nature Reserve covers 17,000 hectares of forest. This wonderland has rock formations, 'spiky volcanic rock pillars', according to the words of the Lonely Planet. Part of the town is nestled in the foothills of the forest.

The region of Krasnoyarsk supports the petroleum extraction industry, so there is money about. That means in the city-centre there will be shops for Russian millionaires.

There are passenger-boat cruises to Igarka, and the further city of Dudinka, in the Arctic Circle. However, as a foreigner I am forbidden to travel further than Igarka. Dudinka, and nearby Norilsk, are closed to me. Why? Norilsk is the city built by Gulag labourers, who were sent there to mine nickel. Norilsk is one of the most polluted places on earth, with an average life-expectancy of around forty.

Here, in his 2007 novel, _The House of Meetings_ , the writer Martin Amis describes the forced -labour camp in Norilsk. First, he translates the jargon used at the Norlag. ('Lag' is a shortening of the Russian word, camp. Thus, 'Norlag' is short for, Norilsk Correctional Labour Camp.)

Glossary of the Camps

(from Amis's **House of Meetings):**

zona = the name given to the total area within the perimeter fence of the camp

Hierarchy in the zona:

pigs = administrators and guards

urkas = designated as 'socially friendly elements'

bitches = urhkas who wanted to stop being urhkas and start being pigs

brutes = urhkas who wanted to go on being urhkas

snakes = informers

leeches = bourgeois fraudsters, embezzlers and similar

fascists = political prisoners, mostly convicted under Article 58.10

locusts = juvenile prisoners, mostly orphans because of the exile, displacement, imprisonment, and execution of their parents

shiteaters = goners, unable to work any longer, so feeble they can only survive by brawling over scraps

We sucked up breath and looked out into the sector. And saw what? In the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers off his left hand, a team of locusts twirling an old shiteater into the compost heap, and finally, a leech who, with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right-angles (scurvy), was nonetheless making a serious attempt to eat his shoe.

_The House of Meetings_ , Martin Amis, p. 25.

In the Resting Rooms, Krasnoyarsk

An ordinary room **.**

There are four beds in this room, all are occupied. The TV is on and a dark-haired woman sits in her bed, glued to it.

'Shush, listen', she says, when the news comes on.

'Kyrgyzstan. My mother and sister are there.'

We watch the TV. Burning cars and houses, crying women. The leader of the country has fled. These are insurgents, the capital has been taken over by fighting.

'The people are poor,' the Kirghiz woman says, by way of explanation.

This woman is wearing a vest. Her legs are under the blanket. When she gets up, I see she is wearing only a g-string.

I wake early and decide to walk the empty city streets. Not one vehicle moves so I stand in the middle of a six lane avenue and snap the pastel buildings with their white embellishments. There are many stunning buildings. I see two art-nouveau buildings. I pass a large edifice which proclaims itself to be:

THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE FEDERAL SERVICE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FOR THE CONTROL OF THE CIRCULATION OF NARCOTICS IN THE KRASNOYARSK REGION

I photograph a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky! Why is there a monument to this brutal murderer, the head of the Bolshevik Cheka, the revolution's secret police? Originally Polish, Iron Felix, as they called him was a fanatic, held up by Stalin as a hero. A monument honouring him in Moscow was smashed down in 1991, when communism collapsed.

**My** **Notes** :

Iron Felix was the founder of the KGB, and established the first prison camps. During the Civil War, he ordered the execution of thousands of politically moderate people: the 'bourgeois elements' who had to be annihilated. The shootings took place in basements, or on public squares. Iron Felix justified the use of terror as a weapon. This terror aided the Bolsheviks in their fight for political supremacy. The slogan of the Communist Party was:

THE END JUSTIFIED ALL MEANS

I photograph Felix Dzerzhinsky's head on its plinth, in the flower garden.

On the main thoroughfare are luxury shops and a sushi restaurant.

Yesterday, I visited the Stolby Rocks, riding a chairlift to the Takmak Stolby. It was first miserable, then delightful. I felt lonely, then happy. When I saw I was the only sole-occupant, I wanted to jump off and run into the trees.

It was calm, and then there was birdsong. Beneath me lay a carpet of flowers and field weeds. The trees were dark and still. I expected a bear to creep out – it was so lush. The rocks and the forested hills and valleys were endless. They seemed primordial.

I launched off and the chairlift clanged behind me. Further up was a restaurant, but I followed the other tourists along the forest road towards the viewing point.

The rocks were so natural, they didn't look Russian. I tramped down the mountain slope and up the other side, to be with the rocks. The others, dressed in jewels and expensive tracksuits, took photos from the viewing point.

I passed a party in a cabin; raucous singing floated on the damp air. A man on the balcony was getting close to nature, puffing a fag. I wondered what he did for a job, and for some reason I decided he was an academic in a history department. No one noticed me.

I found three boys smoking near the rocks. I asked them to take my photo. They were the same age as my sons, more or less. I decided they _were the Russian counterparts_ of my sons, and I felt love for them. I beamed as they took my picture.

A young couple with a baby in a backpack were startled by me. A picture of health, they had tramped up the hill, shunning the chairlift.

'New Zealand!' They raved about our flora and fauna, Gondwanaland Land, tuataras, and national parks.

'But this is amazing,' I said, my arm sweeping the forest.

On the homeward climb, the air was cool; shadows grew longer. I passed the party-hut again. A woman and man chatted, leaning on the balcony railing.

'Aren't you afraid to walk in the forest alone?' the woman asked.

'What's there to be afraid of?'

'It isn't safe. There are bears and snakes.'

'I'm not afraid of bears or snakes.'

I thought about what I really need fear; I thought of the dangers of being a woman travelling alone in Russia.

* * *

When I get back to the Krasnoyarsk Resting Rooms, the four beds are still taken, and one of the women is the same one who wears the g-string, but now she is eating an orange. She piles the peel and the pips on the bedside table. She gets up to raise the TV's volume.

'I rang my mum and sister,' she addresses me and the other two Russian women. 'I said, 'What are you doing? Get out! It's a war!'

We watch the news. Russia is sending cargo planes with blankets and food to the Kyrgyzstan border with Azerbaijan, where refugees have gathered. 80,000 are there already.

One of the older women is a businesswoman. She sells Chinese clothes at a market in Novosibirsk. She shows me a plastic doll in a box.

'Look at this doll I bought for my granddaughter. What Chinese rubbish we have to buy here. 1000 roubles this cost me. Imagine!'

The women begin to tell me about Russia's problems. Life is bad after communism.

What do you think of Putin? I ask.

The third woman, of Mongolian blood, says Putin is wonderful.

'Yes, Putin. Great guy,' she says, 'but Brezhnev, Gorbachev – they were both bad. And Yeltsin, he was a drunk.'

It is 10 o'clock. Outside it is light. It will not be dark until midnight.

'Do you mind if I pull the curtains, so I can sleep?' I ask.

The woman in the g-string glares at me. She looks at the others for agreement.

'What? You want to pull the curtains? It's only 10 o'clock! Only _children_ go to sleep at this hour.'

On the train from Krasnoyarsk: Under me two women discuss growing cucumbers and blackcurrants. A man with a broken nose is snoring opposite. I'm feeling sleepy again. It could be time for my third snooze.

Chapter 8

Ulan Ude; Sludyanka; Lake Baikal

Ulan Ude

**Population 353,000**

(Closed city until 1991, as it was the site of Soviet Air force Base.)

June 10

Ethnic Russians 73%

Buryats 21%

Number of Orphanages: 28

Ulan Ude is the capital of the region of Buryatia. Indigenous ethnic Buryats are a Mongol people, who now comprise around 30% of the population of Buryatia, as well as 65% of the Agin-Buryat Autonomous District, south-east of Chita.

Although every Buryat Datsan (temple), was destroyed by communists in the 1930s, now there is a flourishing of Buddhism. The Buryat language is Turkic, but everyone speaks reasonable Russian.

Ulan Ude boasts, not only a small Lenin on a plinth in a garden near the train station, but also the largest head of Lenin in the world. This 7.7 metre bronze was erected in 1970, to celebrate Lenin's 100th birthday. It dominates a vast square, The Plaza of the Soviets. Today pigeons, boys on skateboards and chatting girls, gather below Lenin's head.

I ask one of the girls to take my photo in front of it, and she giggles. Why I should want a photo of Lenin's head? The pigeons do not soil it; it remains unblemished.

I sit near the statue and watch the boys glide down the concrete balustrade. They probably don't stop to think what the Bolshevik revolution brought about in their country.

I find a busy lunchtime place down a side street. It is a plain, formica-table-type place, where the punters sit with glasses of tea, a bowl of soup or a dish of dumplings. I go for the latter, ordering and paying at the counter.

'Tea with sugar, or without?' (You pay extra for sugar.)

'Without.'

The dumplings arrive with the bowl of carrot salad I ordered. I'm ravenous. I scoff the carrot – called a vitamin salad because of the vegetable, then my three dumplings arrive. They are grey and lumpy. When I pierce one juice oozes, mincemeat steams, aromas waft. Delicious. These are called 'Pozhe', a name I will not forget. I love the meat, the stock, the starch. I love Buryatia. I love Ulan Ude.

Fortified, I walk the back streets past antique wooden houses. Log houses with intricate embellishment around the windows, shingled roofs, and dormer windows. I wander, not seeking, just looking. I find the headquarters of the Red Cross, then a plaque dedicated to, 'Alex Alexandrovich Badmaev,' or his Buryat name, Emchi-Lama Sultim, 1810-1873 – the founder and the first Doctor of Tibetan Medicine of Pre-Revolutionary Russia, and a Lecturer at St Petersburg University.

Finally, at the end of a quiet street, with an Orthodox church with golden cupolas rising behind, I find a monument to 'The Victims of Political Repression.'

It is a bronze statue of a woman and a child. The child stands against the mother's skirts, the mother's hand rests on the child's shoulder. There are stakes set into concrete around them; a nest of barbed wire is caught at the end of the spikes. On the building behind this monument a wall displays plaques engraved with the names of those people from Ulan Ude who died in the Gulags.

The main plaque has just one word:

Why?

Sludyanka

Population 19,000

'Lacking any architectural charm, neither Sludyanka nor smelly Baikalsk tempt many Westerners off the train, yet these drab, functional places have superb, mountain-backed settings and accommodation that's cheaper than Irkutsk's.'

Lonely Planet, Russia, 2009, p. 634

I am at Lake Baikal!

This tin-pot town is the closest place to Lake Baikal you can get to on the Trans-Siberian, so I have stopped here, not because it is a destination in itself.

At Kafe Gril, I drink a beer and eat a greasy pork rissole with mashed potato. This is the only place to eat.

The supermarket. I want fruit, but I can only find expensive black bananas, dusty apples and wrinkled oranges. There are no vitamins in the whole damned store. I buy an orange, kefir, a cucumber, a hunk of bread and some cheese.

I have no luck finding the first accommodation listed in the Lonely Planet. The Hotel Chayka – The Seagull Hotel, a friendly place with, 'moulting lino, very basic rooms and shared showers' – no longer exists.

Dropped off by a micro-bus near a clutch of apartment blocks on Frunze Street, I trawl backwards and forwards between two deserted buildings looking for number 8a. No luck. Who needs numbers or letters? Everyone in this place knows what is what. All these buildings are number 8. There are no strangers here. The postman knows everybody.

It is beginning to drizzle; it will soon be dusk. There is no-one about to ask.

I head in the opposite direction towards two more identical apartment blocks. There, at least are two women, smoking together. They are hairdressers, standing outside the salon which is tucked away behind them. There is the tiny wooden sign:

Hairdresser.

Hotel Chayka? They barely bother to move their lips. No, never heard of it. Don't know.

Plodding off, I feel their eyes on my back. In fact I feel many eyes, hidden behind twitching curtains. All the furtive inhabitants of blocks 8 have learnt there's a stranger in their midst, a foreigner...

I stand on the main road where I was dropped, waiting for another micro to take me four kilometres back to town.

I have walked for a kilometre at least, along a road with Russian cottages on either side. I pass a flock of ducks, and a goat on a chain surveying the district with his cold eye. Every now and then a dog barks behind a fence.

These humble homes have satellite dishes for Sky TV. But I don't see many cars. No carports. The road becomes dirt, I am nearly in the foothills that once seemed far away. It is feels late and I have never before been so in need of a bed for the night.

Here is the place I'm looking for. The sign on the steel gate reads: The Baikal Mineral Museum. Whatever lies behind, is hidden from prying eyes by a two-metre high concrete wall around the perimeter of the estate.

I'm actually after the Mineral Museum Homestay, the second Sludyanka hostelry listed in the Lonely Planet.

I ring the bell, the gate opens. A little woman of about 65, pushes the gate into place behind me, and it locks with a loud click.

This is quite a surprise. I am in a compound with lovely wooden buildings here and there, and tended flower beds filled with tulips and stock. The woman leads me to the second cottage on the left, up two steps to a cute verandah. She unlocks the door, opens another and I am shown into a room with low ceilings, fussy wallpaper, an ugly oil painting of a mountain, and two beds with a lampshade on a table between them.

'I'll take it.'

'How long will you stay?'

'I'm not sure. I want to visit Arshan.'

'Oh, Arshan. That's a day trip. You should come back and stay here. There are ticks in Arshan. Encephalitis. I had a guest who went to Arshan, but she didn't like it because of the ticks, so she came back here, because she liked it better. There are no ticks here.'

She learns I'm from New Zealand, which brings no comment. I learn she is a retired doctor from St Petersburg, and that this establishment belongs to her daughter, who lives in Turkey. Her daughter returns in winter, and the doctor returns to St Petersburg. The biggest building, which is locked up, is the Mineral Museum. That is where the doctor's husband's rock collection resides.

'I see.'

The Doctor asks me where I have been and where I'm going. I tell her. No comment. This woman's detachment verges on rudeness. Is she part of the New Russia, or is she a relic of the old?

I don't like her.

There is a sauna, a 'banya'. The doctor tells me I can use it, but I have to wait. There are other guests in there. I wait and wait. Cucumber, cheese, bread I eat. Tea I drink. I am writing in my journal, passing the time. It is 8 pm, 8.30. The temperature has fallen sharply; I'm glad of the oil heater in the room. I'm in bed, fully dressed, cold. I get up occasionally and peer out the window into the endless dusk. At last I go out. In the garden, I meet the doctor talking to one of the guests. I ask her when the banya will be free.

'Not yet.'

The guest is a man in a red t-shirt with a fat gut. He has a red face from the banya. He is telling the owner how he has come from the north with his wife to visit his step-son, who is in prison. For 'hooliganism'. The doctor nods.

'So many young people in prison,' the man says.

Doctor nods.

'And where are you from?'

'New Zealand.'

'New Zealand!' The man turns to the doctor.

'Would you believe it? You have a visitor all the way from New Zealand!'

The doctor nods.

'How come you speak Russian? I thought you were Estonian, or Latvian.'

'I studied Russian at university.'

'Well. At university... New Zealand. I'm from the Ukraine. I've been living in Russia twenty years. I'm retired.'

'Retired?'

'Yes. I was a fireman. You can retire early if you have a dangerous occupation. Now I go fishing, I visit places like this. I have a good time. Hey. How old do you think I am?'

He runs his hands over his grey hair.

'Forty five.'

'I am forty!'

The doctor has disappeared.

The man eyes me. 'How old are you?'

'Forty three.'

'Married?'

'Yes.'

'Hey. Why don't you come and join us? We have vodka, cognac, wine, beer..'

'No, thank you.'

Suddenly the man grabs my face with his fat fingers. Under his grey moustache are the puckered lips of a fish. I am so taken by surprise...it takes me a second to wrench myself away, before his lips touch me...

Locking the door, I stand at the window. The man has slunk away, but I keep looking.

The banya has gone cold when my turn comes. I undress in the vestibule. On a shelf, there is a box of matches and a set of five or six old volumes, all blue, hard-bound. I read the spines. The Collected Compositions of Lenin 1917 – 1924. Printed in the _Pravda_ (which means Truth – the communist, state-run newspaper.) I open a book. Half of its pages have been torn out. I have a read. What a conscientious communist Lenin was. He died trying to make it work.

It just goes to show you how Russia has changed. Lenin's contributions to the pages of _Pravda,_ are now being used to start a banya's fire.

Lake Baikal

I sit beside Lake Baikal. I am here at last.

In 1993, when I passed this way on the train, I was frightened. Russia was in such a bad state, I feared to leave the security of my carriage, and my friendly compartment with the fellow-travellers I had grown to know. There was another reason: I was suffering from a disorder. I was bulimic. A person with this illness is fighting enemies within; they are lost to themselves. Fortitude and courage don't stay down. Nothing stays down. I went straight past Lake Baikal.

Now, sitting on a rock down where the water laps the shore, I feel proud. It is a quiet, but strong sensation. Like the feeling a repaired tugboat has when it successfully traverses the violent sea, and the crack in its hull doesn't leak. As the tug chugs into harbour it gives a toot, so all the other boats know the tug has made it. It is sea-worthy again.

There is one person in the whole world I know will respond to the wonder of me being here, at Lake Baikal: my sister Chimene, who loves Russian poets. I want to send her a text. How can I capture this place in words? I sit on a rock and recall certain details from the Lonely Planet. Lake Baikal is 636 km long, and up to 1637 metres deep. It is the world's deepest lake, containing nearly one-fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh water. The water in Baikal is pure enough to drink. ( _Lonely Planet, Russia_ , p. 616).

This is the text I send Chimene:

I am here beside Our Great Mother. It is preternaturally still. I am looking across the Lake into a something like a pink-grey haze. That is what my eyes call, the distance.

It is freezing, the water. The sun glows, there is no breeze, and ordinarily I would be swimming.

But there is no coldness like the ice of this water: it is glacial.

Bottles lie beside the rocks. Bottles nestle in swathes of twigs, left by the retreating water as it transformed at the end of winter from ice to liquid.

A man and his son fish with hand lines, standing on the rocks. They are the only people near me. To the left, quite far, I can see the town of Baikalsk. To the right, nothing but distant rocks.

Chapter 9

Arshan

Population 900-3800 (seasonal)

– A sleepy, hot-springs village at the foot of jagged, forested mountains, with an old sprawling sanatorium nestled among the trees, in which one can take cures as various as mineral-water enemas, or a circulating shower.

A kind place. Purple and orange flowers point their heads above the grass. Roof of trees high. Morning grass wet with dew. A long bronze of Mongolian design stands near a weatherboard building, the sanatorium's epicentre. Two-storied. It imposes in the park. It is from the forties or earlier. Neglected.

The sanatorium symbolises a rare kindness of communism: people rested here. Factory staff, student groups, clubs all came here. Staying yearly for free, for weeks at a time, the visitors paid a nominal amount for extras, like massages and doctor's consultations. The cafeterias were subsidised. Even with communism dead in the ground, this establishment survives in much the same way. It is no longer free, only cheap. But it seems a little wretched.

There is a War Memorial in the park, with a Hammer and Sickle Star, and plastic wreaths.

Another building, near the stream, says 'Drinking Pavilion', above the door. The sign is decorated with indigenous Buryat designs.

Renovation and maintenance are not urgent matters for the state owners of the Sanatorium.

* * *

I have something to write about Arshan. About Nikolai and Lyuba. They are lovers, illicit lovers. Lyuba is my landlady and she is 60 years old. She doesn't own the izba, she rents it, taking in extras to make a bit on the side. Another Lyuba, Lyuba 2 is also staying here. We three women share the little old house. The toilet is a long-drop in the garden, beside the big potato patch where Nikolai and Lyuba have planted potatoes.

Lyuba 2 has told me all the gossip about Lyuba and Nikolai's liaison before I even get to meet him. She tells me he's a very bossy man.

Drinking morning coffee at the table in the kitchen with Lyuba 2 while Lyuba 1 makes kefir (a kind of yoghurt), a deep voice shatters the camaraderie, and I clap eyes on Nikolai for a brief second. He pops around the door and I see a tall, grey-haired man wearing glasses on his regular, manly face. Lyuba 1 and Nikolai disappear.

Lyuba 2's commentary:

Nikolai and Lyuba are the same age, they went to school together here in the village. He is married with grown children. His wife lives in their apartment in Tyumen. But his kidneys were bad and he lay in hospital two weeks, then he decided to come to stay in his late mother's house in Arshan, to take a cure of mineral waters.

Nikolai's late mother's cottage is where, one evening, Lyuba 2 and I take our banya. As arranged, Nikolai fires it up for us, for a fee of 250 roubles each. That day, Lyuba 1 (Nikolai's girlfriend, my landlady) asks me:

'Nikolai wants to know what you drink. He wants to treat you.'

'Oh,' I say, thinking for a bit. 'I like to drink white wine.'

I go in the banya first.

It is a little room with a low roof. The floor is made of wooden boards. The fire-box burns ferociously. Unable to stand upright, I sit on a bench and place my kit on the table. An oval tin sits by the fire. It is the same kind of tin as in the banya in Chita, but here it holds the water for washing. Bending, I watch the water from my wet hair run through the gaps in the floorboards.

After the banya, Lyuba 2 and I, Nickolai and another guest sit at the table in the cottage. I sit opposite Nikolai. Lyuba and I drink the Italian white wine, and everyone shares some Russian chocolate. The other guest is a skinny old Buryat, who has climbed the fence to join us. He downs two shots of vodka. Nikolai isn't drinking because of his kidneys. Tonight, Lyuba 1 wears a Hawaiian print dress busy with parrots. She doesn't sit at the table. There is no room.

Lyuba 2 escorts me through the Sanatorium. She spent a week here before renting a cheaper bed from Lyuba 1.

We climb the wooden stairs. Lyuba approaches the reception. 'I've come to show this woman from New Zealand around.'

We walk down the corridor with ancient linoleum on the floor. Lyuba stops at a door and knocks. She opens the door. There is a girl of about twenty sitting on one bed. The room is tiny. The other bed is unoccupied.

'This was my room. Hello, Anna. This is my friend from New Zealand. I'm showing her around. This here is Anna. Anna is taking a cure.'

'I have catarrh,' Anna says. 'I'm here for another week.'

'Another week?' says Lyuba.

'Yes,' says Anna.

'Oh,' says Lyuba. 'Well then, bye bye, then.'

'Goodbye,' I say.

'Goodbye,' says Anna.

We climb an internal staircase. The treads and the banister are worn and long ago they were painted brown. There is a trailing pot plant next to a coffee table, and an old armchair, circa 1950s, on the landing. We see a man in a white coat walking fast towards us.

'That's my doctor,' Lyuba says.

'Hello, Doctor,' she says to the doctor as he passes.

'Hello,' he nods.

Next Lyuba shows me the library. The books look like censor-approved Soviet-era literature, in print forty years ago. I read the Russian titles. There are scientific manuals. I squirm. Let's go, I say.

Now it's time to see some treatment rooms. We trot past a group of nurses in gowns. Lyuba whispers, 'Come on, quick. Before the nurses come.'

In a room, she pulls back a curtain. I see a bed, some ancient scales. A weird-looking lamp. There are other beds behind other curtains.

Lyuba opens a door. A strange machine with four oscillating arms, each arm has a square of white cloth on it. Lyuba opens another door. A row of people on chairs, leaning forward, with their noses and mouths stuck into a breathing apparatus. They face the wall. The machines are individual, each person has one in front of them on a long bench. The man nearest to me turns his eye, he's startled by us, but he can't move his head without pulling his nose away from the machine. Lyuba says, 'They're cleaning their lungs.'

Two nurses find us.

'She's from New Zealand. I'm showing her around. We're just off now,' says Lyuba in her sing-song voice.

The next morning, I walk in the mountains. I want to keep on up and over, to find the pathway home through the forest that Lyuba, my host, has told me about. But I find myself clinging to a rock while a fierce wind whips through the gorge, each blast stronger. The wind is funnelled through a gap in the peaks ahead.

I remember Lyuba's warning: she told me not to go walking without telling her. Every year tourists get lost and die in the mountains during their walks, she said.

It would be irresponsible for me, a mother of three young boys, to die up here on a mountain and leave Doug to bring them up alone, so I give up and come down. It is a difficult return.

Down in the valley, by the water fountain, I hear someone call my name. I recognise Nikolai. After listening to me explain how I became lost on the mountain, trying to find the path over the mountain and through the forest, to the Sanatorium, Nikolai says,

'Eat this piece of chocolate. It will restore your energy.'

Then he says: 'Come with me. I'll show you the path you should have taken.'

I do as I am told. I eat the chocolate. Already I am striding off with Nikolai into the glade of birch trees. We walk through the forest until Nikolai stops, touches my arm and points. I see two mounds. 'Ants,' he says.

We approach the mounds and Nikolai shows me how to hold my hand to catch the smell of ammonia. Very strong. He takes my photo beside one mound, then he decides he has to take another one of me in the field with the pretty orange flowers. Then he tells me to sit on the park bench and enjoy the view. All the while we converse about Russia. Then I answer his questions about life in New Zealand.

We follow the path until we came to an abandoned quarry and a bore. Nikolai teaches me the word for, 'Bore' (Artesian well), which I have since forgotten.

'Импортивная Девушка'

'Imported Girl', he calls me, more than once.

Emerging from the trees, we decide to get some lunch. Nikolai rings Lyuba 1 and asks her to meet us. We go to an Uzbek café. I part with Nikolai to find a toilet and when I rejoin him at the counter, I see that Lyuba is already there.

Lyuba turns and gives me the filthiest of looks. She sits at a table. Nikolai and I stand looking at the pictures of the dishes in the menu file; he is pointing to what I must eat. I feel awkward, because I know that Nikolai wants to shout me. This will annoy Lyuba more.

Nikolai insists on paying for me, as Russian men prefer to do. (So states the Lonely Planet, Russia.) I'm not going to create a scene.

I sit next to Lyuba, Nikolai sits opposite us. The silence is thick. I try to make conversation, it falls like a ton of ice. I give up. I do not need to 'rescue' the situation, to please everyone.

When the noodle soup, Lapsha, (Лапша), arrives, I am delighted by the redness, the glistening home-made noodles swimming in the meat broth, the shreds of meat, the kidney beans, and the slices of red pepper.

I am so hungry. I am in heaven. Embarrassed by my hunger, I try not to eat too fast. Then the Pozhe (dumplings) arrive. Lyuba is not about to forgive me any time soon. She tells me I am eating Pozhe wrongly, that I have to use my fingers to hold them, first sucking out the bouillon, then eating the rest.

I do as I am told and the bouillon squirts over the table, running over my fingers. I give up eating them like that, picking up my fork. I think, 'Why please her?'

Lyuba 1 goes to work. I finish my lunch, then Nikolai says, 'Have you finished? Let's go.' Outside he asks me whether I have seen the Datsan, (the Buddhist temple), and when I answer, No, he offers to escort me there. We agree to meet at this spot, at four. Home I go, tired and full. I wash my clothes, ready for the morning, ready for my trip to Irkutsk. Lyuba 1 comes home. For some reason I decide not to tell her about my planned excursion to the Datsan with Nikolai.

Stopping along the way to sit in the forest on a log and talk, until the midges become unbearable, Nikolai shows me the Datsan. He photographs me in front of the temple and between the two white, temple mounds. He walks around the temple, and he turns the prayer wheel.

We walk around the mounds together. Nikolai places coins on the offering table. While we are talking, a young boy appears. He collects Nikolai's coins.

I ask Nikolai if the Buryat people chafe against Russian colonisation? He says yes, there is beginning to be a feeling the Russians are masters. ('хозяины'.)

On the way back through the forest, Nikolai wants to go a different way. First I say, 'No, I'm tired.' Then I change my mind, thinking, What's to fear? I should go and enjoy a last walk in this lovely place. But we come across a pile of rubbish with heaps of bottles discarded out of view, amongst the trees. I am embarrassed for Nikolai.

We talk about Russian alcoholism.

'When someone has become a hopeless drunk and can't work any longer, how do they get money to drink?'

Nikolai shrugs. 'People give them money.'

'But why do people give them money?.'

A shrug. A silence.

'Ten roubles. What's that? It's nothing.'

Nikolai's work, before retirement: installation; assembly; fitting, of an industrial plant

('монтаж').

We go to a clearing to look at little piles of stones – shamanistic shrines.

Finally, we find ourselves back at the mineral water fountain, where I fill water bottles to take on the train with me.

Nikolai leans against the stone wall. I take my leave. I stand before him, thanking him for the guided tour and his hospitality. I wish him success in life. While I speak, Nikolai stops drinking his mineral water from his small coca-cola bottle. He looks at me. I finish. A long pause. Then Nikolai says, 'Kiss me.'

I have expected this.

'Nyet', I say, authoritatively, using the same tone of voice I have learnt from him.

'For a farewell. Kiss me.'

'Nyet,' I say again. I put out my hand.

With an air of resignation, Nikolai shakes my hand, wishes me well, and then I am gone...

Chapter 10

**Irkutsk;**

Population 587,200

Distance to Moscow: 6198 kilometres

June 13

Situated on the Angara River (580 metres wide; 1779 kilometres long), a tributary of the river Yenisei; it drains from the southern end of Lake Baikal, and is the only river flowing from the lake. The city takes its name from the smaller river, the Irkut, which joins the Angara, directly opposite the city.

According to the Koppen Climate Classification, Irkutsk enjoys a 'borderline subarctic climate, just short of a humid continental climate.' The coldest temperature recorded since 1971, in Irkutsk is, -49C; the hottest, 37C. Irkutsk is surrounded by the impenetrable Taiga forest of East-central Russia.

Founded by one Ivan Pokhabav in 1652, who built a winter-quarters here, traded gold and extracted fur tax from the indigenous Buryat people. In the seventeenth century, it was the lucrative fur trade that drove the imperial expansion east. 'Soft gold' (fur) filled the Tsar's coffers.

Russia's colonial expansion was a massive hunt for bears and minks, sables, ermine, foxes and otters.

Natasha's Dance, A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes, 2002, p. 377

A Cossack fortress from 1661, Irkutsk became a commercial centre for the fur trade, dispatching furs to China and Mongolia. The first road between Moscow and Irkutsk reached the city in 1760. The city's symbol is a Siberian tiger with a sable in its mouth (соболь: 'sobol', in Russian). However, the Siberian tiger became extinct in the area before 1850.

Irkutsk was designated the capital of Eastern Siberia in 1822, then, the coming of the Trans-Siberian train line to Irkutsk in 1898, made the city even more important as a trade centre. Later industries included, aircraft, automobiles, textiles and machine tools.

The most popular sport of the city is 'bandy', known locally as, 'Russian Hockey'. This game is played with sticks, skates, and a ball, on an area of ice the size of a football field. Peter the Great played this game on the frozen Neva River, but he played on foot. Only later were ice-skates introduced to the sport. Irkutsk boasts a famous women's bandy team. The city is sometimes called, 'The Paris of Siberia.'

Only in Irkutsk for one day, I arrive in a micro-bus from Arshan, and, leaving my luggage at the train station's left-luggage office, I set out for central city, briskly walking across the bridge that spans the Angara River. So much to see, so little time.

There is much river traffic languidly navigating the waters, as if to say, Why the hurry? Time is not of the slightest importance, see: this is Russia. Russia is forever, it is everything and everywhere, and the Russian sky covers the universe. Look at the girth of this river. Is it not mighty? Imagine the length of this river. Is it not endless? Look about. Is there any feature of this horizontal landscape that steals your attention from witnessing eternity and endlessness?

After crossing the river, I jump on a trolleybus which takes me directly into the main centre.

The old part of Irkutsk is picturesque, with fine European buildings in pastel shades sitting side by side like pretty Victorian ladies holding parasols. There is a big central square, the ubiquitous Lenin statue, a fountain.

Today the throngs of people, the balloons and the dancing on the stage, are all part of Russia's 20 year celebrations of Russia Day, the new manifestation of national identity since the demise of the USSR.

A camel and a pony are dressed for the occasion. For a fee, children can be photographed sitting astride either one.

My main destinations are the Volkonskaya House; and the Zamenisky Monastery, one of the oldest continually running monasteries in Russia. I decide to visit the monastery first. Using my Lonely Planet as a guide, I walk all the way.

Hot, flat. I hug the shade, crossing the street to find it. There are trams running the length of the main thoroughfares. I shun them and keep on walking, comfortable in my black dress and sandals.

The monastery is nearly impossible to get to. Russian cities have quickly responded to the rise of private vehicle ownership, but the concept of a pedestrian's relationship to town-planning is anathema. I have to run the gauntlet of a round-about with four non-stop feeds, one of which is the bridge I have crossed. No lanes, nor paint on the tarmac. Nothing to tell the cars how to behave.

Fifteen minutes it takes to get across to the monastery, marooned by progress. A statue to the White Commander Kolchak, stands in front of the monastery. A large plastic wreath lies at its base, and a bouquet of fresh red roses.

The Provisional All-Russian Government has come to an end. The Council of Ministers, having all the power in its hands, has invested me, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, with this power. I have accepted this responsibility in the exceptionally difficult circumstances of civil war and complete disorganisation of the country, and I now make it known that I shall follow the reactionary path not the deadly path of party strife. My chief aims are the organisation of a fighting force, the overthrow of Bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order, so that the Russian people may be able to choose a form of government in accordance with its desire and to realise the high ideas of liberty and freedom.

I call upon you, citizens, to unit and to sacrifice your all, if necessary, in the struggle with Bolshevism.

Admiral Alexander Kolchak, November 1918

On this spot, on the 7th February 1920, the darkly attractive, Admiral Kolchak was executed. The Bolsheviks shot him. His body was wrapped in a white sheet, then carried by sleigh to the frozen river, where a hole was cut in the ice, and his body was passed into the water. It had been a particularly cold winter, and the ground remained too hard for a burial. Both his wife and his mistress would have mourned him.

Kolchak was patriotic, but no saint. In the desperate times of the Civil War, with the position of 'Supreme Ruler' of the fledgling Siberian government (that had been established in Omsk by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party) foisted on him for lack of a better candidate, this Vice-Admiral of the Russian Navy, attempted to lead the various reactionary forces of the Anti-Bolsheviks, in a military-style dictatorship.

There were many factors against him, not least his own lack of the qualities necessary in a leader. He was unable to command the unruly Whites.

To describe the warp and weft of this phase of Russian history would require me to write a book different to this one. Therefore I will summarize to give you, the reader, an idea of who Kolchak was, and what he did:

The Whites alienated the indigenous peoples of the region, the Kirghiz people and the Bashirs, who wanted more autonomy, but they also alienated the workers, and the peasants. Kolchak furthermore, alienated the moderate Socialist-Revolutionaries, who changed sides to join the Bolshevik Red Army in droves. As a leader, Kolchak was merciless: he authorised capital punishment for 'activities' that 'could' lead to revolt and brutality. He ordered the execution of an estimated 25,000 dissenters, and authorised his men to loot and burn homes.

On the front of Kolchak's plinth a relief shows two brothers – one a Red Army soldier, the other a White – crossing their rifles, and turning them down, symbolising the end of the fratricidal war.

Name: Alexsandr Vasiliyevich Kolchak

Place of Birth: St Petersburg

Place of Death: Irkutsk

Allegiance: Russian Empire

Service / Branch: Russian Navy

Years of Service: 1895-1920

Rank: Admiral (from 1917)

Battles/wars: Russo-Japanese War

World War 1

Russian Civil War

Awards: Order of St Stanislaus 2nd classification

Order of St Anne 4th class

Order of St George 4th class

Order of St Vladimir 4th class

– from www.livingwarbirds.com/alexsandr-kolchak

The Znamensky Monastery, built 1762

It is cool inside the monastery, and I have come in time for the service. I drape a scarf from the box by the entrance over my hair, and stand at the back of the small chapel, listening to the hymns. The Nuns' singing is exquisite. The music reverberates in the vaulted building, but seems to be coming from behind the iconostasis, the wall of gold icons, which is the centrepiece of the chapel. The music makes me feel lofty, as if I am looking down and can see what humans are striving for. My scalp tingles.

I walk to the other side of the city, to the 'House Museum of the Decemberist Exiles', which is the Volkonsky's house. They moved to Irkutsk, after their release from exile in Chita.

The museum reflects the lives and accomplishments of the Prince's family, once it settled in Irkutsk. Schools and hospitals, they established. Literature and the arts, they supported. Flora and fauna, they identified and catalogued.

Finding myself on ironically named, Karl Marx street, I trek past luxury stores with window displays of Armani, Gucci, Fendi, and the like. I am hungry. I have walked about fifteen kilometres around the dusty city. I find a café, where I order 'Pozhe' (the dumplings I love), a salad, and a juice.

I am joined by a young woman, a just-graduated student, who enquires what I have seen of her city.

'You ought to go to the theatre,' she says. We have fine companies, one which performs only Chekhov. There is a very good Opera, here. The Ballet is excellent.'

Right. If I had more time. But, there is Moscow to reach, there are my children at home. There is the rest of the expansive land called Russia, that must be crossed...

One of the last things of note I see in Irkutsk: Six young, beautiful women dressed in pink. They tilt on stilettos. Their slips of dresses are not just pink, but shocking pink. So beguiling are they, they attract the attention of passing motorists who sound their horns. The women posture around a light at the intersection near the main square. One is squatting like a Cossack with thighs spread, another is pole dancing, another takes their picture, then cameras are passed and the goddesses swap places and the hot-pink strutting in the glowering dusk continues. I take a photo.

Marinsk

June 14

I have not much to say about Marinsk. But I know one interesting fact:

There was a camp here in the 1930s, which served as a holding camp to process the geologists and others destined for Norlag, the Norilsk Nickel labour camp, situated to the north of Marinsk.

On the train from Irkutsk, towards Tomsk, I exit at Marinsk, because I couldn't get a ticket to Tomsk. There were no seats left. The closest I could get was Marinsk. Today is still a public holiday, Russia Day. It has been twenty years since the collapse of communism in Russia, and the disintegration of the USSR.

I have just got my period, which reminds me that I have just two weeks left in Russia.

Marinsk – Tomsk

Should I or shouldn't I travel in a private car with a bloke?

At the close-your-eyes-and-you've-missed-it town of Marinsk, I leave the train at the brick station and am faced with the problem of getting to the 'Oxford of Siberia' (Tomsk), some 250 kilometres away.

A man touts a ride, calling out to people in the waiting room.

I've seen a touter before, in another bus station, in Xhabarovsk. While I was standing in that interminable line in the Xhabarovsk Bus Station, I wondered why Russians didn't jump at the chance of a convenient ride. I wanted to.

'Why don't you get a ride with him?' I asked the woman standing in front of me.

'Why?' said the woman, 'The bus is safer.'

I interrogate the cashier in the Marinsk Station. Bus ride: 6 hours; private car: 2 hours. The wait until the bus departs: 2 hours.

I want another look at him. At a hot-dog kiosk, clutching my frankfurter, I check him out. He is lingering by the entrance to the station. He looks respectable. Plenty of sociopaths do.

I drag my case over. I look at his face, try to read his eyes. He is the same height as me. I make my Russian sound tough.

'Tomsk?'.

'You want to go to Tomsk? Great! I'm going to Tomsk.'

'I want to go there.'

'That makes two of us. I'm looking for passengers.'

'I'm catching the bus.'

'Why take the bus when you can travel by car?'

'There's nothing wrong with the bus.'

'You don't want to go by bus.'

'Why not?'

'Why not?'

'Why don't I want to go to Tomsk by bus?'

'Tomsk from Marinsk by bus? Really? The bus trip will be long. Slow. It will be like a snail travelling across Siberia. Better to come with me. Faster and much more comfortable.'

'I like the bus.'

'Terrible.'

'You drive fast, do you?'

'Fast? No. I'm a safe driver. Strictly speed limit.'

'Very safe?'

'Very.'

'Will you stop on the way to drink vodka?'

'Nyet! I'm a responsible driver. I have a clean record.'

'Do you drink vodka?'

'Vodka? Nyet. Vodka, nyet.'

'Beer, then?' (Beer is not considered alcohol in Russia)

'Nyet. I don't drink at all. Not vodka, not cognac, not beer. No alcohol. But kvass, yes. Kvass is tasty in summer.'

Something is worrying me: this man won't meet my eyes.

'I don't know you. How can I trust you?'

'You want to see my identification? Of course.'

He pulls out his driving license, obtained in 2002, proudly showing me the photo ID.

'See. Here's my name: Andrei Victorovich Klenov. Born 1966.'

I study the photo, memorise the name, note Andrei's wedding ring, ask Andrei which is his car, and at last, Andrei makes eye-contact, pointing to the blue saloon in the car-park. I hold out my hand.

'Victoria del la Varis. From New Zealand.'

Case in the boot. Hop in right-hand passenger side. The car is a clean, humble, Korean car. Andrei is on his way home after visiting his widowed mother, in a nearby village.

Andrei is proud of his car and his driver's license. The road pleases him less. In fact, it embarrasses both of us: we slow down and swerve to avoid craters. Often.

Then we speed up. Andrei pitches me forward and back. I am tense, concentrating as if I were the driver, willing Andrei to speed... Come on faster, faster, Andrei.

I want to drive. Show him how _I do it_ at home when my road has potholes. Come on. To hell with it.

We see wide fields with no fences, and fat, hobbled horses. Andrei stops so I can photograph the horses. Everything is flat and green. Not many trees. Occasionally, we pass ramshackle houses.

Andrei is an engineer at a thermoelectric station, married, with two daughters. He is the same age as me.

In the West he would be wealthy, being an engineer – not a man giving rides for gas money, worrying about supporting his mother. An UN-insured drunk-driver killed his father. Financial compensation for his father's life was therefore, denied to his mother.

Andrei drops me at a hostel I found in the Lonely Planet. Students crowd the entrance. I thank Andrei. He calls my name. I've left my water bottle behind. I take it, wave goodbye.

The receptionist refuses to accommodate me, but a young woman offers to escort me to a hostel she thinks might take me.

Chapter 11

Tomsk

Population: 473,000

June 17

A university city, closed to foreigners in Soviet times, now open.

It has: 11 universities and colleges (6 main universities); 16 scientific research institutes, and

45 children's homes/orphanages in the Tomsk region. (There are 5186 such establishments in the whole of Russia.)

The room is on the third floor, overlooking the service area at the back of the building. There are two beds, a desk, a TV, a fridge, a sink, a closet, and the usual parquet floor. Sasha, my new friend, offers to show me her city.

Sasha is a student of literature, French, and English.

Sasha is 24 and pretty, with a few moles dotted on her face, no make-up. Her parents are academics; her mother a professor of physics, her father a history don.

Sasha shuns them. For four years she has lived in that hostel which refused me, because her parents and grandmother don't like her friends, or her social life.

She is a poor student with no parental perks, surviving. Consequently, when she takes me to a café that is more expensive than my budget allows, I find myself shouting her a kvass and sharing with her my Greek salad.

Sasha suggests taking me to visit two special monuments the next day.

Heat, dirt, potholes, traffic, no footpath. I long for an umbrella. We have been walking for an hour along roads with cars and trucks spewing smog. We tread among the beer bottles and crud.

There it is, Sasha says. I squint at the building. Tomsk Electrical.

'Look, see? Climbing up the pole?'

Then I see what she is talking about: in front of the building is a lamp-post, and climbing up the lamp-post, nearly at the top, is a man in a hard hat. But he isn't real. It is a bronze.

'He's an electrician. Isn't it funny? This is a monument which I particularly like.'

I take a picture but even in frame the subject is inconsequential, his back facing me, hard to define as a man up a pole.

After the statuary Sasha and I have passed – a bust of Pushkin; a monuments to the founders of the city; a figure of a pregnant woman covered in shreds of cloth by mums-to-be, I can't understand what is remarkable about this.

The sun at its zenith burns us as we navigate the congested roads. In a patch of shade, under a tree, there is a bronze wolf, and he has a shiny belly. He has eaten a pig, Sasha says. Sasha goes up and rubs his belly, 'For good luck'. Everyone passing rubs his belly. There is a metal box which takes coins to go with the wish.

I am underwhelmed. I think of the sightseeing suggestions in the Lonely Planet. I imagined I was going to see something wonderful with Sasha.

It takes hours to get back to the main street where the hostel is. We pass a store. I buy sardines, kvass, biscuits, and kefir. My backpack weighs a tonne, my feet are swollen. A sign says that it is 36C.

Back at the hostel, I want to be alone. But I am stuck being pleasing. I feel faint with heat-stroke, anger, exhaustion, and culture-shock.

The two statues, special to Sasha mostly in a sentimental way, showed up the differences between us. Her appreciation was based on a cultural past I hadn't shared.

I step into my room. Instead of the cool I am longing for, the room is hot and stuffy. Without removing my sandals, I stomp across the room, step on the corner of the bed, then on to the desk in front of the window. I throw open the window and jump down.

'I don't know about you in the West,' Sasha says, standing at the door, 'but here in Russia, we do not wear our shoes inside. We do not stand on desks. We do not stand on beds. Not in our shoes. The streets are filthy. We consider it very dirty not to take our shoes off at the door.'

'We also take shoes off,' I snap, knowing she is right, but I am pissed off with being told off.

'And,' I continue, 'I stood on the bed, but only on the sheet, which will be washed tomorrow when I'm gone, as will the floor, and I myself will wipe the desk.'

When Sasha leaves me, I give way to my feelings of loneliness. I send a text message to Doug, to ring me. Like a gallant, he does so immediately. I weep when I speak to my eldest son Orlando, my honest, heroic boy, whose voice breaks and rises, so that I smile, knowing that he is becoming a man in my absence. Then I speak to Dante. How grown-up he sounds. His voice is different; I don't recognise it. He speaks authoritatively. I am delighted to hear the happiness in his words.

Giving way to hunger, I have eaten so much bread, cheese, and tinned sprats, I'm scared my bulimia of long ago might resurface. I am glad to connect with my people and find inner stability.

Later, I revisit the shop where the shoes I long to own lie lonely, one on display, the other in a box somewhere in storage. Luckily, the shop assistants ignore me, even as I limp around in one shoe. When I cast an eye over my appearance in the mirror, I see why. I am an outcast: my hair is a mess, my dress looks grubby, my face is puffy, and my feet, my feet, for God's sake, are filthy.

Brushing my dress, I try to order my hair. Then I ask for help.

'Shop closed. 8 o'clock.'

Why did they let me in? Oh, well. Imagine the frustration I would feel if, after trying on _both_ slip-ons with kitten heel and leather rose, made in Germany (I've never owned shoes made in Germany), I were to discover that they went perfectly with my black dress. Placing that shoe back on the shelf was difficult.

Why had I wasted time _not_ being _elegantly_ sexy, as I now knew how to be? What was I doing all those years? It seems a loss to me now, that I didn't courageously embrace my femininity, that I preferred to look rebellious when I could have concentrated on being _beautiful_.

Now I was learning what to do with hair, how to define my best feature, my eyes. What shoes accentuate my legs and ankles. Which clothes and colours I can wear without them wearing me.

Before the shoe trying-on, I slept two hours. The room was light, there was a hum of traffic noise. After my call home, I felt safe and secure, knowing I was loved and needed. I slept. I awoke feeling good.

A Visual Punch in the Guts: A mother and her son, the soldier, Lagerny Gardens

The monument is visible from afar. When you see it, it is like a visual punch in the guts.

The boulevards in Russian cities are wide and straight, and this one ends at Lagerny Gardens, with two immense figures standing on a dais, facing each other. They look like black giants on the horizon. A wedge of forest abuts the gardens filled with flower beds, and ranks of walls. The walls are engraved with the names of the war dead.

The mother-figure dressed in a robe, holds her palm flat – the stop gesture – while her other hand grasps the rifle that the second figure, her soldier son is holding.

Poor Russia. Of course, it is not just Russia's loss. It is all of ours. It is mine.

Wiping tears, I film, turning in circles. Following the promenade behind the statues, weaving in and out of throngs of people, I direct my camera to follow the River Tom that trails into the distance.

I circle the dais, drawn to the walls. On the walls are names in alphabetical order – Axmatovas, Antipenkos, Brodskys, Bobrovs 1901, 1915, 1923. These are some of Russia's dead souls, her war heroes. (The Russians call the Second World War, The Great Patriotic War.)

In raised letters on the first wall are the words:

Remember!

Through the centuries

Remember!

Through the years

Remember!

Those who will never be here again.

– V. Rozhdenskovo

So many dead, it is unfathomable. To put the number of Russians dead in the First and Second World War, into words, is possible. To mould an idea of that loss into a visible shape – that it is a feat.

The sculptor has carved the deaths of men, women and children into this work. And the sad survival of widows, orphans and fatherless children. Death is easier than life without men.

It is clever, how the sculptor achieved this expansion of ideas: he used the mother-figure to encompass all of humanity's loss.

Historians have put an incredible number on Russians killed by unnatural causes between the two world wars – the numbers lost in the wars only counted for a part. What about the tens of millions lost to the famines caused by the Civil War, and by Stalin in his forced Collectivisation? What about the millions of Russians Stalin murdered in the purges, in The Great Terror? I feel the weight of this history pushing me down, bearing me down.

Walking forward, I see a little girl and her mother. There is the flame burning, there are steps leading up to the little girl and the flame and her mother, there are roses placed at the feet of the giants, the mother and the soldier, who block the sky. I move one foot in front of the other, up the steps, trying to stop crying. My brother is here. My father is here. They are both here with me. I have come to this statue to stand in the shadow of death.

My father, Don Victor del la Varis, was killed by a drunk driver, in a car crash, in 1987.

My brother, Leon Juan Victor Camelia del la Varis, took his own life on the May 1, 2008.

In June 1941, Hitler's Germany and the USSR were at war. Stalin was unprepared for war; Russia was unprepared for war. Stalin addressed the Russian people on the radio. Without the people's will, Russia would be overwhelmed....'Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and Sisters! Men of our Army and Navy! I am addressing you, my friends!', began the tyrant. And the Soviet people, though subjected to the oppression of communism, rose against the hated enemy in defence of their motherland.

Day by day in the bloody battles on the front, with raids by partisans on territory temporarily seized by the enemy, victory against the German war machine was gradually, horrifically forged. On a May day in 1945, a Soviet soldier hoisted the victory flag over the Reichstag.

Courage

by Anna Akhmatova

We know what trembles on the scales,

and what we must steel ourselves to face.

The bravest hour strikes on our clocks:

may courage not abandon us!

Let bullets kill us – we are not afraid,

nor are we bitter though our housetops fall.

We will preserve you, Russian speech,

from servitude in foreign chains,

keep you alive, great Russian word,

fit for the songs of our children's children,

pure on their tongues, and free.

23 February 1942

_Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems_ , translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, 1989

The night before I leave Tomsk, Sasha, who has forgiven me for standing on the bed, takes me to see the Cossack fortress overlooking the town. This was how imperialist Russia expanded: it sent Cossacks into the unconquered territories, fortresses were built and the Cossacks were dispatched to defend them. Then peasants were enticed to settle the new regions and administrating nobles were sent to regulate the trade in furs, and gather taxes from this trade. Wealth was generated by the productivity of the peasants and the newly annexed, semi-nomadic indigenous peoples, who traded the furs.

We talk about Russian women, Sasha and I. She explains in a non-judgemental way why they obsess about their appearance: to get a good man. Good men want tall, well-dressed, gorgeous women.

Sasha says most Russians think she's strange, because she doesn't wear make-up, but _she_ wants to find a man who cares more about inner qualities, otherwise when you lose your looks, what do you have?

I question Sasha about her family. She refuses to see her parents, her brother and grandmother, even at New Year. (New Year is celebrated by Russians the way we celebrate Christmas. The marking of Christmas was banned after the revolution, it being too 'bourgeois'. Christmas trees were prohibited in 1928, but were reinstated by Stalin when he tried to revive the culture of family, to arrest the plunging birth rate of the 1920's). Instead, of being supported by her family, Sasha chooses to live on her student allowance, in the hostel with her three 'neighbours' – her room-mates. When one of her room-mates brings home her boyfriend, that is the 'time' for the others to take a shower, so the room-mate and her boyfriend can have sex.

On the Train to Omsk

I have to write about two women on the train, sharing the compartment with me. They are lesbians. These are the first I have met in Russia. Russia is not gay-friendly. The mayor of Moscow keeps banning the gay parade.

The biggest of the two women is so fat and creamy, with ash blonde hair, and she is so attentive to her lover – stroking hair, squeezing pus from from her ear lobe – that I can't take my eyes off them, wondering what will come next.

They hold hands brazenly and no one seems to mind. They are on their way to Moscow, and have made a nest for the journey...

White chocolate mama embroiders a tapestry beneath me: it is a cartoon cook. Her other half lies sprawled asleep on the berth opposite.

There is little night. I'm used to all these hours of light, waking daily at 5.30, when the day is already bright.

Chapter 12

Omsk, City of Exiles

I leave my luggage with the reception at the resting rooms of Omsk Train Station, and head off to see the city of Omsk. At the Dostoevsky Museum, I discover the existence of a writer:

Gregory A Vyatkin 1885-1938

Author. Wrote: 'Yesterday'; With Eyes Open'; 'A Goblet of Love'.

These works I never studied at Auckland University. But here is a whole section of the Dostoevsky Museum devoted to Vyatkin.

I peruse the displays inside the glass cabinets, the only visitor in the museum. The first item I read is a piece of paper, an official printed form, with black typeset. It has been filled out by hand in blue ink.

It is an official form, an _anketa._ This document required Vyatkin to disclose his parents' names, their pre-revolutionary occupations, and their political activities. Then, it required details of their post-revolutionary occupations and political activities, including whether or not they were Communist Party members. Then there were entries with Vyatkin's name, date of birth, schooling, higher education, and political activities.

This piece of paper, as inconsequential as it may seem, was Vyatkin's death warrant.

Vyatkin was arrested on December 16, 1938. The secret police – the NKVD – came at night to his apartment in the building known as, 'The Writers' House: number 39, Cheysushkinstev Street, Novosibirsk. Vyatkin had been expecting them; he knew that it was only a matter of time. He was one of many writers and intellectuals who disappeared. The NKVD men were known as 'the crows'.

The crows took his collection of books, many of which were autographed copies of works by Gorky, Pushkin, Gogol, and others. They took every page of his correspondence, his manuscripts, all his writings, his verse, his poetry. They even took his money, leaving his wife and children without a kopeck to survive on. Vyatkin was shot on January 8, 1938, after intense interrogation and torture.

Vyatkin had been a writer, a poet, a journalist, and a teacher. In 1912, he won the Gogol Prize for composition with a story, 'The Holiday'. His literary genius was acknowledged and remarked on, by the great Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky. In 1918, he joined Kolchak's government, the government that was briefly fronted by the White leader. In that same year, he wrote and was published in all the local Siberian periodicals. Vyatkin's fatal mistake was to side with the Whites. After the revolution, furthermore, he had joined the Socialist Revolutionaries, a group opposed to the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks and the Red Army won the Civil War, thereafter, any anti-Bolshevik activists (and often their families) were doomed to be murdered in Soviet Russia.

In the autumn he sent the children home to Omsk. He knew – the clouds were gathering.

Within a few days came the interrogation, Vyatkin calmly and assuredly maintaining composure throughout – then a couple of more days passed – then came the second interrogation with intent to prove his guilt, with torture...It was terrible for me, his grandson, to look at the pages yellowed with time, of case no. 3590 of the Novosibirsk NKVD...it was terrible to imagine all that horror...

He always considered that the whole of Russian literature - 'was, first and foremost a response to human suffering, a cry tied to the conscience, a confession from the burning Slavic heart.

'Vyatkin, Known and Unknown', Andrei Zubarev, (Vyatkin's grandson)

Motherland, my mother

Motherland, my mother

Is it you who appears in my dreams?

You, with your torments?

My heart weeps and prays

Prays for your suffering

– G. Vyatkin

Alone, in the museum, a wretchedness overcomes me. Russia's history is so poisonous, so diabolical. It is as if there is purely Russian form of terror and tragedy. It is everywhere; it is in the very air that you breathe. It is inescapable for the very reason that it lies hidden. In empty museums, and in Russia's collective memory. The forgetting feels like a crime.

At the Dostoevsky Museum, I copy this :

Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in piety, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanity. She needs not a sermon (she has heard enough of them!), not prayers (she had learnt them by heart!), but the awakening in the people of the feeling of human dignity, for so many centuries lost in the dirt and the dung; and law and the laws, made not according to the doctrines of the church, but with sound thought and justice [...].

But in place of this, she is presented with the terrible spectacle of the country where, finally, not only are there no individual rights, or rights of dignity or possessions, not even is there merely police surveillance, but there are only huge corporations of various serving thieves and robbers.

– written by Belinsky to Gogol, 15.07.1847

This dangerously radical letter, was almost a death sentence to the famous writer, Dostoevsky. It was the very reason why Dostoevsky was exiled for four years to Omsk, to do hard labour. The world is lucky that the Tsar commuted the sentence; Dostoevsky was meant to have been shot. Dostoevsky stood and faced the firing squad, before the Tsar's last minute reprieve. All because of a circulated letter calling for human dignity, and the rule of law.

These are Dostoevsky's words about life, taken from a letter written to his brother,

written from his place of exile, Omsk:

Brother! I have not succumbed to melancholy or lost heart. Life is everywhere life, life is within us, and not in our circumstances...Beside me are people and to be a man amongst people, to remain one forever, no matter what misfortune may befall you, to not get depressed and to not succumb, that is what life is about, that is life's challenge. (22.12.1849)

Today's temperature: 32C

It is so hot in this flat, oppressive city. Motor vehicles charge down the avenue, leaving no air, no quiet, no remnants of space in which to be human. I search out shreds of shade. In parks I find statues of Lenin; statues of heroines who fought beside their sons; statues of soldiers who killed Kolchak's Whites, and brought down Bolshevik Communism upon the city of Omsk.

A circus, a shop selling furs, another offering cellphone telecommunications, three cops in a park ticketing a hooligan. Children splashing in a fountain. The grey-brown River Om. An old man in bathing trunks, his skin as wrinkled as a walnut, sits on the stone balustrade above the river-steps. He smokes. On the other side of the river – low foliage. Midges hover. There is no wedge of space without them. They are an infestation.

I eat 'okroshka' – cold yoghurt and cucumber soup, sprinkled with dill. There is no end to my thirst.

At the Dostoevsky Museum, I read about Lev Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova's son.

Who was Anna Akhmatova? (1889-1966)

Anna Akhmatova was a poet of great significance, and her life can be read as prism by which to view the distorted facets of the period of Russian history through which she lived.

A poet born to into a genteel existence in St Petersburg before the revolution, (when subsequently the name of the city was changed to Leningrad), Akhmatova lived through the First World War; the revolution; the Civil War; two famines (the famine of the Civil War, and the famine created by Stalin because of his programme of forced Collectivisation); the Winter War with Finland of 1939-1940; then the siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944, when Hitler's war machine surrounded and starved the city.

The siege of Leningrad lasted almost nine hundred days. It was the most murderous siege in all of history. Three quarters of a million Leningrad citizens died of starvation. Anna Akhmatova was one of the lucky ones evacuated, although she contracted Typhus in Tashkent, where many of the Leningrad intelligentsia were dispatched.

The Bolsheviks shot Akhmatova's first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, in 1921, and though she had divorced him three years earlier, she was thereafter considered an 'enemy of the state.'

The Soviet regime repeatedly imprisoned her son, Lev Gumilev, both before and after he served in the Red Army, fighting the Germans. Lev was first arrested in 1935, in the years of The Great Terror (1934-1938). He was released after a year, then re-arrested in 1938, then released to serve at the front, in 1942. After being demobilised in 1944, in 1946, he was again arrested and exiled to a Gulag camp in Omsk, for another ten years.

Akhmatova tried everything to gain his release, even writing hack poetry to please the authorities – _In Praise of Peace._ Lev was finally freed in 1956, two month's after Khrushchev's famous speech denouncing Stalin.

The Soviets had arrested Akhmatova's second husband, the critic Nikolai Punin, and sent him to into the Gulag camp system, where he died at the age of sixty four.

After the revolution, Anna Akhmatova had refused to leave Russia to escape the 'new order'. Many from her circle had. She stayed and was persecuted. The Russian people love her. They love her for her stoic patriotism and for her poetry, where she records their bitter history.

Akhmatova was unable to publish new work in Russia from 1922, until a new edition of ' _Flight of Time'_ was published, in 1965. In the same year she travelled to Oxford, England, to receive an honorary Doctorate of Literature. She died in 1966.

Anna Akhmatova

'Everything is Plundered...'

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined dirty houses –

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

1921

In the resting rooms of Omsk Train Station

Arnold Swartzeneger's sister comes in.

'How hot it is! Two days on the train! I'm desperate for a shower!'

She is tall, elegant, about 50 years old, and has a strong jaw. I explain where the showers are. 'I'll be back,' I expect her to say as she goes out.

The Terminator's sister comes back into the room after her shower. We start talking while she towels her hair. She tells me she has just come from Kazakstan, from the capital, Astana.

'Why were you in Kazakstan?'

'To visit the graves of mother and father.'

'Why are your parents' graves there?'

'Because of Stalin...'

'Stalin?'

'Because my family were ethnic Germans, Volga Germans, as they are so called, from the Volga region.'

'You look German!'

I am flabbergasted. That's why she resembles Arnie. From the minute she started talking to me, I was curious about her speech. We conversed in Russian, but something about the way she spoke was strange...

'Do you have any Russian blood?'

'None at all. My family comes from an unbroken line of German ancestry.'

So then...?

This woman's grandfather, David Altergot,, was arrested on 15 February 1938, because, being Ethnic German, he was considered an enemy of the state by Stalin, once Hitler's war effort intensified. On the 3 February 1939, David Altergot was shot. In July of 1941, her grandmother,who was born Maria Katerina Pfeiffer, with her ten children, were exiled to Kazakstan.

This woman, who is named Elvira, with her mother, father and their other four children, went too. They left behind everything they owned in Saratov: their land, their house, and all their possessions.

Elvira is now married to a Ukrainian man, and they live in Tyumen,Russia. Three of her siblings went to live in Germany in the 1990's, when Germany allowed ethnic Germans, forcibly deported from Russia, now dispossessed by the independence of Kazakstan, when it ceded from the former USSR, to resettle in Germany. One of Elvira's brothers remained in Kazakstan.

Her family is dispersed, but her parents graves are in Astana. Every five years Elvira makes a pilgrimage to tend them.

Elvira doesn't speak German, but there is a Teutonic phrasing to her Russian speech, rather than a Russian one. That is what I found strange when I first heard her speak.

When Elvira sees that I am writing...

'Write about this,' she says, 'Write about what history has done to us...'

She brings me a booklet. It is a history she has written of the diaspora of the Altergot/Pfeiffer family. There were forty four grandchildren altogether.

The booklet is written in Russian. I want to take notes, but I sense, and I am right, that Elvira wants her book back soon, so I rapidly skim read...

My Notes on the Volga Germans:

Catherine the Great sought to attract German agricultural expertise and enterprise to backward Russia. In 1730, she offered German farmers land for settlement in the Volga basin, freedom to worship in the way they wished, (there was persecution at that time in Germany for practising Protestantism), exemption from military service, and from taxes. German families migrated to Russia, and settled in and around Saratov.

For two hundred years, these Germans had been settled in the Volga basin in the south of Russia. They lived as farmers, but kept their language and customs, and their Protestantism – their German culture. They came to be called 'Volga Germans'.

After the October 1917 revolution, in accordance with the November 1917, Declaration of Rights of the Russian Nationalities, Moscow enshrined the right of colonial German schools to use German in tuition, but their Christian teaching was forbidden. The Bolsheviks sent the pastors and clerics, who taught the schools, into exile, to die in camps in Siberia. In 1924, before Lenin died, he conferred the status of, 'German Autonomous Republic', on the German colonial region. The famines of 1921-1922, and 1932-1933, drastically reduced the Volga German population.

In September, 1941, using the services of NKVD guards, Stalin began the mass deportation of 400,000, Volga German men, women, and children, to camps in Siberia and the Urals, but mostly to Kazakstan. The overcrowded conditions in the cattle wagons, meant thousands died before reaching the camps they were destined for. More perished from starvation and cold in those camps. Still more were worked to death. Stalin exploited the labour of his genocide victims, before they died.

Nowadays, approximately 200,000 descendants of ethnic Germans, continue to live in Kazakstan. They are a minority people there. They sustain some customs, but many cannot speak German. Some of them have repatriated to Germany. Within Russia, most have assimilated into the Russian way of life.

But it was not just the fate of Ethnic Germans to suffer the fate of forced exile under Stalin's rule of terror:

From: The Centre for Volga German Studies

Joseph Stalin's forcible resettlement of over 1.5 million people, mostly Muslims during and after World War I, is now viewed by many human rights experts in Russia, as one of his most drastic genocidal acts.

Volga Germans, and seven nationalities of Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported. The Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai and Meskhetians and other minorities, were evicted from the Black Sea coastal region. Also included in this exile were Bulgars, Greeks, and Armenians.

In the morning when I wake, Elvira has already gone. I cross to the bed where she slept. The bed is perfectly made; it is impossible to tell she was in it. Even the towel she used to dry her hair has been draped precisely over the headboard. It looks immaculate.

Today, I walk beside the bottle-strewn River Om, and watch Russians at play. Smoking, drinking beer, sunbathing, all shapes and sizes. G-strings, men in speedos. I sit with the poor Russians where they picnic on the sand amongst the litter. A few get wet.

Behind us, rich Russians sit on restaurant terraces with potted trees and white umbrellas.

I wonder how people cope with the heat.

Get on the wrong bus and cross the river to the suburban hinterland, get off the bus, and, waiting at the bus stop for a returning ride, see fat girls dancing in a beer tent across the road. The music pulses through the chaos of traffic. Drunk and dancing at this hour.

I breathe smog, cringing beneath the twin assaults of screaming traffic and scorching heat, witnessing escapism under plastic beside the four-lane interchange. Watching the silhouettes of women thrust buttocks and breasts – side to side, shake-shake, boom-boom – I plunge into depressing thoughts.

Frightening facts come to mind. Here, the threat of AIDS hovers over the lives of everyone sexually active. 30,000 of the two million Russian heroin-users, die from the drug every year. The evil duo, prostitution and drug addiction dance across the nation, and the result of their conjoining is AIDS. The rhythm is provided by unemployment, poverty, ignorance, inadequate health resources to treat HIV, and a lack of education against the spread of HIV.

The government in the Kremlin can't hear or see the death-dance. It denies. Tardy and meagre in its efforts to educate drug-users, who often prostitute themselves to get money for drugs; not teaching the populace about safe needle-use, and safe-sex – this is the Russian government's inexplicable negligence.

Russian women are offered 16,000 NZ dollars at the birth of their second child, in a last-ditch effort to make them bring babies into this troubled land.

Russia has more heroin-users than any other country in the world – up to two million , according to unofficial estimates. For most, their lot is a life of crime, stints in prison, probable contraction of HIV and hepatitis C, and an early death. As the efforts to stem the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia bring limited success and the street price of the drug goes up, for those addicts who can't afford their next hit, an even more terrifying spectre has raised its head.[The synthetic drug, _krokodil_.]

New Zealand Herald, Shaun Walker, Russian Correspondent, June, 2011

There are lots of people waiting for buses. Women carrying grocery bags look the most stressed. Finally, my bus. The conductor, a blonde, nods asleep and never takes my money.

Back at the train station, I walk past drunks in filthy clothes and holey socks asleep on cardboard in the grass around the Lenin statue.

I must look Russian, as I'm frequently asked directions. I say: 'I'm not from here.'

Waiting in the Omsk Station, with crowds of summer people: girls in knickers, men in singlets wiping sweat from bald heads with hankies, and babies squawking at their mothers. Hours to pass before departure. I stand before a huge map. A network of lines of different colours run in all directions over the map, intensified, more entangled on the left. This is Russia's rail network.

Lying in a stupor across three seats, I am told to rearrange my legs. It is a station attendant with long legs and short skirt, who tells me this. I'm wearing shorts, it's impossible to see anything, but obviously I offend her, even if _her_ skirt barely covers anything. Maybe telling me off makes her feel important.

It says 38C, but yesterday it was hotter, at a guess, 40C. So hot, the only thing I could do was escape the heat at the movies. I watched the film, 'Letters to Juliet.' It didn't last long enough.

After the movies, at the supermarket, the check-out girl asked me, 'Are you a pensioner?'

I was wearing my hat, maybe that was it? Or maybe she was kind. First, she asked if I had the supermarket loyalty card. I hadn't. When she asked:

'Are you a Pensioner?', I realised she really wanted me to get a discount. I said,'Da'.

Afterwards, I wished I hadn't said that I was a pensioner. Do I really look like a pensioner? Now, I'm angry. Maybe this trip across Russia, has put years on me, the distance I've travelled, commensurate with the toll exacted on the people of this country, by their oppressive and neglectful state.

###  Chapter 13

Tobolsk;On the Train to Tobolsk

**On the Train to Tobolsk**

At last I'm on the train to Tobolsk.

Tobolsk is the last stop on a branch off the main trunk line – the so-called, 'Trans-Siberian Magistral'. It should be peaceful there, because it is a small town. An historical town.

It is stifling and above me, are two sleeping men. One has a fat belly. I am absorbed by this character.

Firstly, I was alarmed by the sight of the thick legs belonging to this fat-bellied man. He wore over-tight, black, nylon trousers. The crotch was about to split.

He opened his bottle of water, it sprayed out of the bottle and dribbled over his loins. I looked at his face. His crew-cut emphasised his sweaty, heated, piggishness. He took his shoes off and I was terrified. Now, I'd have to contend with foot-odour. But, before he heaved himself up to polka (shelf) no.30, he constantly wore an idiotic, somewhat captivating smile on his face.

So I liked him.

But my good fortune has it, the open cabin is free from oppressive smells right now. The air-conditioner is kicking in, and there is no serious Russian eating yet to bring forth aromas of garlic sausage, sweat, smoked fish, and pickles.

The fat woman opposite is speaking to someone on her cellphone forever, and although her face is pimply and a boil disfigures her nose, she says such coy, yet well-articulated re-joiners, that I am jealous. Where do Russian women learn to flirt? I have to give them this: they rise above the metaphorical and literal filth, and put admirable effort into the mating game.

A woman this morning swayed past me on her way to work, wearing stilettos, a short skirt, and a tight top. I turned and studied her undulations. Her walk was 100% affectation. First thing in the morning, on an almost deserted street.

Smoking

Smoking. They do it in packs, huddled on the street, squatting on haunches or just loafing. Boys hold the cigarette backwards in cupped hands and frown as they puff. Hairdressers and manicurists do it in pairs on the doorstep, gossiping. Skinny, pretty office girls sit in the park and smoke but don't eat, then biff their thin fags to the ground, ignoring the trash right there, slinking back to work on their fake-tan legs, adjusting their yellow or pink boleros.

I read in the paper that an imposition of tax did nothing to stop Russians smoking, and more are starting up.

* * *

Apart from big boy with his shirt shamelessly undone and his wobbling belly, his buddy, Mr Bad boy, has a serious tattoo on one of his biceps. It looks like a thistle or some kind of weed. Another ugly-looking thing on his calf, is half hidden by his trousers, thank goodness, because I can't tell, but it may be a swastika. He looks like a dude, he has bum-fluff on his face and a scar on his nose, from what was obviously a bottle fight.

The atmosphere has changed. A modern-day babushka gets on the train and wipes away sweat. She lugs enormous luggage-sacks. She is large, with short hair and a commanding voice. I know that everything will be OK now in our cabin, because the sensible survivor from Soviet times, who really runs the country, has arrived.

Big boy up for a fag. Hot as hell – what happened to the air-conditioner? No one has spoken to me yet. I want to be incognito. I want to disappear. I want to be Russian. I want to be a Russian woman with a Russian man. But I am already married, and for that security, I am daily grateful.

I've been on and off these trains for a month now. I feel quite at home. I love the trains, everything about them. I feel nurtured, as if back in my mother's belly, warm and safe, in the best of places to ponder things. Fantastic. I'm doing it, I've nearly done it: the journey from Vladivostok to Moscow. Only three more stops, then the metropolis awaits. I am impatient to be in Moscow. The city captivated me in 1989, and in 1993. I can't wait to be there again.

We are passing the commonplace: flat green fields, birch trees with white trunks, (so lovely). And there are copses of bush and scrub, because how could all of Russia be tended?

Even as we approach the Urals, into Western Russia proper, there is still wilderness. You see it lurking in the distance: mighty, but self-defending no longer. How can it be that we are eating up all the trees on this planet, making swathes of green life barren, even in the vast spread of Russia?

The country we are passing through, is flat. There are ponds, areas of swamp, cleared areas and a straight road, which runs parallel to the train line. I see power-lines, but no animals. Imagine if Russians could find a way to graze livestock on this land for the summer? The grazing goes on and on. Of course, come winter, any cattle, sheep, or goats would need to be housed. Therein, lies the difficulty. The only solution would be to move the herds south in autumn...cattle trucks, maybe? Conjecture. I can guess the logistical challenges. It seems wrong to let this grass go to waste.

I'm pondering what pleases me, in Russia. The birch trees, of course. The swamp, with its patches of wet-dark, life-giving peaty soil. I feel grateful for the Russian swamps. I love the men pushing the baby-buggies. Big, macho, proletarian men. I love the herb dill, and okroshka (cold yoghurt soup). I adore the drink kvass, the colour of treacle, with its yeasty, thirst-quenching taste. We don't know what we're missing. In the heat, it is the best thing. Just wait till kvass hits the West. It leaves coca-cola in the dirt.

Bad boy, doesn't drink, he says.

Babushka is telling me how there's no work, not on the farms, not in the north. She speaks spit-fire fast. I can't understand her. 'Work! I,...'

She is getting fired up; her glasses are glinting, she keeps on at bad boy, interrupting, machine-gun talking. 'All young people drink...no money...where are the builders? Before, everything was good. Prices of everything now are astronomical. Now,' says Babushka, 'You are paid in 'matchsticks'. How cheap life was then. The cost of living. Everyone could afford to live. Now for 2000 roubles, what do you get? You get a ticket on the train, and a mattress, that's all. How can young people survive without work? Difficult, very difficult,' Babushka says, 'Let's go and live in New Zealand, and work on a dairy farm.'

They give the beautiful two-year-old – who pees on a potty, holds a 'stakan' (a glass in a metal holder, standard train issue), and tells stories about foolish Dedushka (grandfather), who broke the stool (Drunk! Says Babushka) – a lollipop. Oh, no, I think. Her lovely pearlers.

Bad boy's name is Pasha. He has scars on the fingers of one hand, bad ones. Teeth, he says. Took a long time to heal.

Tobolsk

Population 101,000

June 21

Tobolsk was once Siberia's capital. It is an historic city. The Romanov family were billeted here before their transfer to Yekaterinburg, where they left their troubled land for good. Tobolsk has a magnificent, restored Kremlin, set above an old town untouched by refurbishment. In the decayed, swampy old town, you feel the cold touch of communism linger.

Tobolsk is off the trans-Siberian main line, but there are direct overnight trains to both Yekaterinburg and Omsk. ( _Lonely Planet, Russia,_ 2009, p. 542).

At Tobolsk Station, in the Resting Rooms

I am in Soviet Hell.

1970's architecture, the station looks grey, made of concrete outside, but inside it has a dazzlingly red mosaic against one wall. The mezzanine is reached by stairs, with treads worn down by the feet of the defeated.

Inside the Resting Rooms, nothing has changed in forty years. Not since the height of Brezhnev's stagnation. On the desk sits an old black phone with a circular dial. There are steel lockers with antiquated knobs, like those on the very old types of safe.

Tobolsk Station Resting Rooms have to be experienced in person, to get a true idea of their psychological terrors. This morning, I had my first confrontation with Russian service. Have experienced rudeness, but this was too much. I fought back.

'Devushka', she bellowed at me. (Girl)

'Girl, the sign is on the wall!'

The blonde, frowzy attendant at the concierge desk this morning, was a different one to the gracious woman last night, who, in the wee hours of the morning, when I arrived straight from the train, brought me a jug so I could make a hot drink.

This one is surly and seems hung over. I asked for the electric jug. She tilted her head at the wall and bellowed at me, then turned away from me as if I didn't exist:

'Girl, the sign is on the wall.'

'Sorry, I just want the kettle.'

'The sign is on the wall, girl!'

'Just the kettle. That's all I want.'

'Kettle. Pay.'

'Pay?'

'Pay!'

'Last night I didn't have to pay.'

'Fridge, pay. Kettle, pay. Cold shower, pay. Everything, pay. Go downstairs, pay! Get receipt, bring back.'

'Go downstairs, pay?'

'Downstairs!'

'Into the Station?'

'Yes, in the station pay. Pay! Everything pay!'

'But I'm not even dressed yet. I haven't even had a shower!'

'Shower pay! Everything pay!'

'But you said the shower is cold. I have to pay for a cold shower?'

'Yes, cold shower, pay. Everything, pay. Bring me receipt first.'

'How much for a cold shower?'

'Look at the prices, girl!' the concierge yelled, like a Gulag guard with a shoe polish hangover: 'Everything on the wall!'

I turned to see three plaques. On the first, written in black capitals is the decree stating the Resting Rooms come under the jurisdiction of Federal Russian Train Services. The next plaque stated the rules of the Resting Rooms, and then under big letters saying FORBIDDEN, was a list: no drinking, no noise, no gambling, no vices whatsoever, no freedom of speech, no entitlement to dignity, truth, or hot showers.

The next poster listed cost of bed per hour, per 12 hour, per 24 hour period, then the charges for every extra amenity: use of jug, fridge, shower.

I go downstairs. Stand in queue in slippers. Groggy. Unwashed. In the corner of the cashier's window I see a little piece of paper advising travellers that if they wish to make a complaint, apply here.

Bombastic and filled with self-pity, I complained. I interrupted the long discourse of the ticket-purchasers in front of me...

Back upstairs, in the Resting Rooms there is a three-way conversation:

'I am not a girl. I am a woman. I am 43 years old.'

'Devushka' is a compliment in Russia. We use it if a woman looks young..'

'It was the tone of her voice. She shouted at me. It was no compliment. There was no respect. I am a visitor in your country. We would never treat people like this in New Zealand. Is this how you treat people who are using your services, who are travelling in your country?'

The smart lipsticked and hair-dried Superintendent of the Station, apologises for the concierge's behaviour. The concierge nodding, occasionally murmuring, looks demure and pious, like one of the enraptured at the Orthodox churches selling candles. I feel dishevelled, but adamant.

No offence intended...no none at all.

Have a splash, put on a skirt, smear some red on my lips, then Concierge has manners. She looks me up and down, starting from my shoes. You bitch. You treated me like a piece of shit because I looked dishevelled. I hadn't even had my morning coffee.

By the middle of the 1930s the NKVD had built up a huge network of secret informers. In every factory, office, school, there were people who informed to the police. The idea of mutual surveillance was fundamental to the Soviet system.

The Whisperers, Orlando Figes, 2007, p. 180.

At the Tobolsk Kremlin

A fairy tale place. Golden cupolas and smaller blue cupolas, like minarets in the Byzantine style, with little gold stars. They rise on white towers above the square white church.

Angels are singing. It comes to me that I must lie down on the spot, and stare at this magnificent architecture, and wonder. I don't of course, lie down.

A series of cards called, 'What I know about Russia' is caught in a whirlwind. I catch sight of the images filed away: the serial-rapist director of Stalin's secret police, Beria, at a Party Congress; Peter the Great chasing a puck on the frozen Neva; Rasputin's famed penis; Catherine the Great in bed; Stalin's shrivelled left hand, Lenin's Tatar eyes, and his communism-obsessed wife, who accommodated his infidelity; Anna Karenina beneath a train; the shaved heads of the Women's First Battalion of Death. The cards fall into my box called: 'Russia.'

Now, I have another Russian picture to put in my box. This one is called, 'superb architecture'.

Evidently, the architect understood form and proportion. These Tobolsk churches – St Sophia Cathedral, the Intercession Cathedral – are 17th century, but their architectural roots go back to 988, when Vladimir the First persuaded the Patriarch of Constantinople to establish a branch of the Christian church in Kiev, marking the birth of the Russian Orthodoxy.

But, if we are tracing the roots of this architectural style, we must go back further, to 532, when in Constantinople, the Roman emperor Justinian, ordered built the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia). It was built in a proto-Byzantine style, with minarets, cupolas and arches.

When transferred to Russia, and into the wooden architecture that the Russians used, it evolved into that unique Russian style, with the onion-shaped cupolas we all love, of which the cathedrals here in Tobolsk, are fine examples, in stone.

Cut grass is laid over cobblestones. I tread on the grass, like walking on a once-living carpet. Today, there is rain and cold at last. Cumulus clouds float against a silver sky. The Kremlin is high above the river. Down below is the 'Old Town'.

Inside the main church, the murals on the ceiling are naively beautiful: cameos are painted with figures inside them in a 'sky' of cobalt blue. Gold frames the cameos.

In an annex off the main chapel, an old woman sleeps on a mattress on the floor, her bag and wooden staff beside her.

Fashionista in white pantaloons, wedges, and headscarf, makes the sign of the cross, places her candle with the others before the icon of Saint Sophia.

At the Palace, opposite the church, which is now a museum, I pay and put sockettes over my shoes. The Red Army used this Palace to house their tractors, after the revolution.

In the museum, through the exhibits outlining the history of Tobolsk, I get to grips with bureaucratic achievements of tsarist Russia: sending civil servants [chinovniki], to newly conquered regions [volosti]; bringing under administrative control these remote places – that was the Tsarist achievement.

One of the exhibits' surprises me: a journal about productive dairy farming. It was a journal for the peasant farmer. How many peasants were literate, I ask the museum attendant? Many, she assures me. Many? I must find out about peasant literacy and education...

I am also surprised by the detail of a wedding sash, embroidered in red. This is true finery. I imagine the bride-to-be, stitching for hours, all the linen in her trousseau.

Were many peasants literate farmers? I am not sure. This museum attendant might have been biased.

All the exhibits: the films and plaques accompanying them, are in Russian. I take hours to go through the building.

Downstairs, the royal classroom has been restored. On the blackboard, written in chalk, are the grades given for academic work:

outstanding

excellent

very good

good

fair

satisfactory

not managing well

poorly managing

few successes

an attempt made

The Imperial Decree, March 3 1861

By the grace of god, we, Alexander I, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., to all our faithful subjects, make known:

Called by Divine Providence and by the sacred right of inheritance to the throne of our ancestors, we took a vow in our innermost heart to respond to the mission which is entrusted to us as to surround with our affection and our Imperial solicitude all our faithful subjects of every rank and of every condition, from the warrior, who nobly bears arms for the defence of the country, to the humble artisan devoted to the works of industry, from the official in the career of high offices of the State, to the labourer whose plough furrows the soil...'

\- Tsar Alexander I, announcing the emancipation of the serfs.

My Notes:

In pre-emancipation days of Russia, the peasant population (80-85% of population), were those who worked for and lived on lands belonging to the state; and those peasants who worked for nobility, and lived on the nobles' land. This latter group of people, 38% of the peasant population, were called serfs. The serfs bore double the burden: not only did they have to contribute labour to the landed class, they also paid tax to the state.

In the 1812, Napoleonic War against the French, the Russian nobility (who spoke French rather than Russian), were humbled by the valour of the peasant army. There began to be a feeling that the serfs had earned their right to be 'citizens'. (Read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'.)

But emancipation was still many years away...

In the end, it was for economic reasons as much as any other reason, that the serfs were freed, as Russia's serf-owning economy was moribund and non-productive. Infant mortality amongst the peasants was shockingly high. The landed gentry lived like fat slugs, eating, drinking, gossiping, playing cards. They couldn't run their estates to save themselves. Leaving their spreads in the hands of bailiffs, they consumed extravagantly, exhausting the profits from their serf-worked lands. In the end, most of them owed money to the bank against their estates...living beyond their means.

Even Tolstoy gambled away, his treasured family home, Yasnaya Polyana. (Bright Field)

(One significant factor after the emancipation, in 1861, was that household serfs won their freedom, but had no land.)

The Emancipation Manifesto decreed that a peasant could marry, own a business or land without permission, and they could buy land from their landowner/ master. Prior to the Emancipation, peasant marriage had been patrilocal, with the landowner retaining his female, marriageable serfs, by only allowing them to marry men bonded to his estate.

23 million peasants won their freedom as a result of this act.

I have read various illiteracy rates, as being between 79-86% of the peasants.

Early publications were woodblock prints (lubok), and booklets of fairy stories, and folk tales. Tolstoy set up a press to print the classics: Gogol, Chekov, and Turgenev, for the newly-literate Russians, in addition to his own morality tales.

In the Russian peasant world, with the endless cycle of seasonal labours, it seemed to many irrelevant to learn to read and write.

With the rapid rise of industrialisation in Russia, landless peasants flocked to the cities.

In the 1920s, only two out of every five Russians could read.

*

Near the Tobolsk Kremlin, I visit the Fine Art Museum, which has a collection of First World War, avant-garde paintings.

Downstairs, as an afterthought, there is a more intriguing collection: a stuffed bear standing with his left paw raised to strike, his head pulled back to show his teeth; a Siberian hare, its eyes following your every move.

There are pre-historic artefacts: a sacrificial stone carved in the shape of a ram; and discs with stylized birds and beasts on them.

And oddly, amongst these things, there is a Red Army cap, one of the early designs. It looks childish. It has a pixie point on top, ear flaps, and a big red star stitched on the front. I spend some time drawing these things.

Down in the Old Town

I wander at the edge of the tarmac down the sinking streets of the Old Town. I am searching for somewhere to eat. Weeds and wild plants envelop decaying buildings that ought to be preserved because they are so beautiful. Their plaster is falling away, revealing bricks placed one upon the other; a wrought-iron scroll juts from a wall, gone is its swinging sign.

A large, gracious building is nowadays, the Tobolsk Regional Administration building. Here, the Romanov family spent the first part of their doomed exile.

Upstairs on the second floor, I visit the office where Tsar Nikolai I sat at his desk composing his last letters. The room has been restored to the state it was in, before this last representative of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty, was sent to his death in Yekaterinburg.

It is a small room with blue walls and long windows that look out on the square. It is called the 'Tsar Nicholas I Office Museum'.

Walking along the roads, I come to the grey river. There is a town on the other side and a car ferry docked on the sand, ramp down, awaiting a car to transport to the other side. Momentarily I consider crossing, just to see what it is like over there. It looks bleak.

Once upon a time, this town Tobolsk, was the capital of Siberia. Few people are out and about now, and those I see are quiet. I find a café down a side street, and stepping inside, through the crooked doorway (there are always two doors because of the cold) and over the threshold, I see everything about this café is dilapidated, from the chipped enamel plates, to the samovar, and the beaten-down aluminium teaspoons. The décor would have been the same when Stalin terrorised the land. I eat blini filled with cottage cheese, take a glass of tea, and look at the Russian men, just the few there are. They are solid. They are eating lunch, like me. Outside, it has begun to rain.

In the New Town

What is Russia today?

Walk around the new town and am exhausted by all the mud and dirt: it rained last night. Puddles and thick black ooze everywhere. I feel sorry for the people. Queuing in shops, how do they stand it? I couldn't. Dismayed, I join a long line in a shop, to wait for service. I give up. Why don't they lay on extra staff in the lunch rush-hour?

The bunches of men and young boys hanging around seem under-employed. But then, they send out teams of rubbish-picker-uppers, and vast swathes of lawn around the Tobolsk Kremlin are mown with a push-mower, then raked by hand. That's the sort of work available here.

Such a population, 140 million, dispersed across a sprawling land. The women work like slaves mopping endless floors with a stick, a bucket, and a rag.

No wonder the woman from hell took it out on me. I looked more tired and harassed than she was. I was beneath her in the pecking order, so she put her feelings onto me. Later, when I complained to the Station boss, the concierge apologised. I'd changed from the clothes I'd slept in, and I got the once-over, once again. A re-appraisal. The concierge stared at my shoes. (My friend Naeri said, you can always tell how rich someone is by their shoes. And it's true. No matter how humble my clothing is, I never compromise on my footwear. I have to be well-shod, or I couldn't feel happy treading the earth. I would rather go barefoot.)

How many people are lacking parts of limbs? How many are lame and ill-formed? How many men underfed and fagging? How many birth-marked and maimed? What has happened to all these people?

In the bus-stop I see a young man who looks older than his mother. A drunk. It is interesting to see how the patient bus-travellers handle his behaviour. _He_ has no patience and moves with a lurching gait, suddenly swinging in a new direction, squatting, then jumping up to harass his mother, first for one cigarette, then another. He is unhappy at having to wait for the bus. Thick-lipped, his once handsome face is ravaged by substances. He is scarred, with bags of skin beneath his eyes.

I turn and he catches my eye, and asks me about the timetable. I say, I don't know. When he approaches a family man with a radiator and a 2-litre bottle of water in his tote, the man moves back imperceptibly, but I see the distance he creates. The drunk helps himself to the man's water, spilling it on the pavement. The family man is poised, ready to react, then in a beat the drinker turns and is off like a hungry stray to annoy someone else.

The mother has her radar going. She knows exactly the state of her son, and is ashamed. She has given up. She is weary, defeated. She knows his fate. Now, she is trying to save herself. Her pink Puma tracksuit pants cover the neat rear of a younger woman; but her face is gold-toothed, worn, and worried.

The night of Blood in the Resting Rooms of Soviet Hell

Scared of ...

Scared of the Concierge...

I was frightened...

I have my bleed time and it's nearly on the wane fortunately, for if I lost any more blood I would need a transfusion. (And Russia is the last place in the world I would like to receive blood. It has a fast-rising rate of HIV, and a poor blood-screening process.)

Yesterday, as I walked from church to museum to church again, I had to keep changing my sanitary towels (Why are they are so named? In reality, they are made of plastic and polyester.) I ran out of my thick, night-time protection and was using wads of Russian toilet paper, which is coarse, and absorbent. I had tampons and a new packet of shields. I didn't purchase extras. I thought I had all I needed. I didn't want to carry around spares, because my case was jammed full.

Then the bleed got heavier and heavier. Last night, before sleep, I put on my black leggings and lay down on my microfibre towel, with my blue scarf on top of that, to protect the sheets.

In the middle of the night I was woken by my bleed. To my shame I discovered that even with my tampon, tissues, and shields in place, the blood had leaked. The sheet and the mattress had a stain the size of a piece of fillet steak. I pulled a sheet off the other bed in the room, the bed against the far wall, the one that had been slept in by my pious neighbour, who had so inconsiderately woken me with her hissing prayers. (I was suffering from time-disorientation fatigue and sleep-deprivation, and was dragged into consciousness at an early hour, by mutterings to God. The establishment had not yet replaced this woman's bed linen, so I figured they wouldn't mind if I used her sheet.)

I replaced all sanitary material, underwear and outerwear, put my eye-patch on, and lay down to sleep again. In the morning, I woke up to – horrors – the feeling of a flood about to burst the banks.

I STOOD AND BLOOD RAN AS IF FROM A TAP TURNED ON DOWN MY LEGS,

onto the floor, onto the sheets I had whisked away, onto the top blanket that served as both a cover and an eiderdown...(lucky it was crimson).

Oh no! I thought. Grabbing all I needed to refresh myself and staunch the blood-flow, I crept to the toilet, locking the door behind me and keeping the key, terrified the Soviet guard-woman would discover the blood-strewn room. I felt guilty, like an agent of blood. Like a murderer, except the blood was all mine.

I cleaned up. I washed the blood off in the cramped toilet, sitting on the sharp vessel with no seat. I used my underwear to wash the blood from my legs, then I rinsed my underwear clean, replaced protection, retreated to the room, and began to clean it up.

This morning, when I handed in the key, to my delight it was an entirely different concierge, not the horrible one. Oh happy day, it would not be the woman who had insulted and offended me who would discover the stained sheets and tut-tut. I had visions of being arrested, of being charged in a Russian court for inappropriate, '[nye akooratnoye]', behaviour, for wilful property damage, for flagrant neglect of proper, womanly dignity, for incompetence in the use of sanitary protection.

I check my luggage in downstairs, in the station lockers, in the left-luggage room, turn the dials to set the code, with the station attendant standing beside me with her big set of keys. Then, the attendant inserts her key, unscrews a knob, turns the key again, then shuts the thick metal door with a clang. The blood-stained evidence of knickers and Kathmandu micro-fibre towel are hidden inside a plastic-bag, inside my case, in the locker.

All day in town, I worry that when I turn up at the booth of the station attendant, to collect my left-luggage, there will be a problem waiting for me in the form of a charge for cleaning services, or a reprimand of an official sort. A court case, maybe. But there is nothing to worry about. I feel relieved.

When I ring Doug and tell him about my period, how weak I feel...he tells me to go out and eat a steak.

Where will I find a steak? Doug has no idea about the restaurants here, or the kind within my price range. Of course, in a four or five star hotel, I could order a fifty dollar slab of beef, and I will, if I find such a hotel.

Yesterday, by the markets in the new town, where all the Uzbekistanis and Azerbaijanis sell their vegetables, I found a café selling chicken _lapsha_. Men were smoking liberally, speaking a language that was not Russian; no women were to be seen in this Muslim establishment. The soup was good, wholesome, pure chicken with bits of gizzard, so the diner could be sure of the authenticity of the fowl. And a slab of white bread to accompany the dish.

I am taking vitamin pills everyday. But Doug is right: I need red meat. I have been drained of iron by a heavy bleed.

Chapter 14

Yekaterinburg

Population: 1.29 million

June 22

Arriving in the early hours of the morning, the sun seeps into the yellow paint on the station building and it glows. Large red letters pronounce this place to be Sverdlovsk, the name of the city during the reign of communism. Once again this city has resumed the name 'Yekaterinburg', after Saint Catherine, _and_ the empress of Russia who was famed for less pure pursuits. Catherine the Great had an appetite for sex that could be matched, fortuitously, by the size of her entourage, from which she drew her retinue of lovers. Negro footmen and horses were rumoured to visit her rooms.

With more mundane things on my mind, like where I will sleep tonight, I consult the Lonely Planet, sitting in a waiting room in the lofty station.

The resting rooms are full. I make a local call to find some cheap accommodation in this expensive town, which boasts of the most billionaires – in Russia.

I take the metro to the city centre and appear above the ground at just the spot to be pointed at by Lenin, who stands on a pedestal in his overcoat. It is comforting to find Lenin everywhere. Stalin's presence of course, has been toppled. The last remaining statue of Stalin, in his native Georgia, was brought down in the middle of the night, so as not to arouse the local communists. I know this because I read it in the paper yesterday, on the train.

I trudge the streets. It is early. The pedestrians are workers, students, city folk. I have walked a distance. The street numbers are confusing, and I have mislaid the number I need.

A woman in high heels and a suit walks my way.

'Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help me? I want to know where number...?'

She does not break her stride, or acknowledge me, as if she neither heard nor saw me, as if _I weren't there._

I've never felt invisible. I drag my case back to the main thoroughfare, back to my old mate Lenin.

Yekaterinburg is a city which throbs with optimism (read: money). European buildings bow and curtsey. The Town Pond (with paddle boats), about which these charming edifices posture, sets them off without stealing their limelight. One nineteenth century building is spearmint-iced, like a toothpaste wedding cake. Around and about are architectural incongruities, and towers are stacked in the distance like stage boxes. An unfinished high-rise, the developers no doubt caught short by the 'crisis', as the Russians call it, has been draped with a tarpaulin, on which a woman in an evening gown and a man in a tuxedo kiss. The bottom of the tarpaulin is torn and a fragment of it dangles.

This city could be called elegant. The main boulevard is six lanes across and traffic seethes and rumbles. I make a crossing in stages, feeling like a cousin from the country.

My destination is a place listed in the Lonely Planet with reasonable rates. But my journey takes one hour. The main drag has to be conquered, then I turn right and pass a babushka in a headscarf selling a bunch of garlic spinach. A leafy side street. I'm unable to fine the lane off the side street that I'm looking for. Instead I spy a banner advertising cheap flats to rent, so I take the flight of stairs to the office. I find what I'm looking for.

700 roubles per night. This is the most I've had to pay for any lodging, but it is no surprise as prices are set in this city, for the wealthy. My room is elegant with two beds, a TV, drapes. The shower is across the hall.

To pay for the room, I have to get roubles from a hole in the wall. I chat with the blonde law student who is looking after the place. She is mistrustful, as if I will sneak out and won't return. To set her mind at ease I tell her about my trip across Russia, my husband, and my sons.

When I return, the law student is still sitting with her books in the black-walled dining room with the crystal chandelier. I take my sandwich to the table for another chat. The law student's husband is a soldier. (She says 'husband' so proudly, I know they are recently married.)

'Aren't you worried about him being in that line of work?' I ask.

She looks mystified.

'It's not dangerous,' she says, as if her husband were immortal.

I guess she was glad of him having a job, not a thing to be taken for granted in Russia. I hoped for her sake, there would not be another war in Chechnya. She never got why I was in Russia alone. Her incomprehension felt like a drizzle of cold rain. She was studying, her husband was away in the army, as a pair they were establishing themselves for a family. So what are you doing?, was her unspoken question.

I leave her to her books.

June 23

Today, I take a bus to visit the graves of the gangsters killed in the gang warfare in Yekaterinburg, in the 1990s. The Central gang and the Uralmash, slaughtered each other in a fight to get hold of the wealth that lay underground in the mines. These mines and their Ural Mountains' gems, formerly were the property of the Soviet State and the Russian people.

The gangsters shot each other in the streets, planted bombs in each others' cars, chopped off each others' heads. So many bullets ricocheted that citizens held their breath and blinkered their eyes in terror as they sped for the cover of home. For years.

Then Putin clamped down on gang warfare, endorsing the winning gang's mine-ownership, and the Uralmash Gang became big business. They achieved respectability. People in this town like Putin. He represents law and order.

The Pyramid of Power is something President Putin has been busy constructing for the last five years, in which every official – from top to bottom, the entire bureaucratic hierarchy – is appointed either by him personally or by his appointees. It is an arrangement of the state which ensures that anybody given to thinking independently of their immediate superior is promptly removed from office.

Nothing But the Truth, 2010, Anna Politkovskaya, p.3.

As the bus makes its way out of town towards the cemetery, I think of the murdered journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, and her book, _Putin's Russia._ I read it before I made this trip. As a journalist writing the truth about Putin's Russia, she was not unusual in being killed, unfortunately. Since the end of communism, approximately 160 journalists across Russia have been murdered.

The bus rolls along and I give up my seat to a babushka, thinking back to Anna Politikovskaya's descriptions of how the Russia mafia came to own the precious gem mines; how judges and the police got behind the process.

At the Cemetery

At the graves I fall into a state of melancholy. I think about Dad and Leon. We still have no headstone for Leon. I wander among the graves and tombstones, reading the epithets and feeling close to death, as if in the shortest time, I too will be lying in the ground.

All my years of wanderlust and mental anguish well up. It's as if I've opened my life's file and pulled out the painful dossiers, and have them before me, needing to be put away. If I want to conquer sadness.

So I keep up my detective work. This is the way I've found to withstand the stress and physical challenges of my endless walking around, in search of...By naming the foot-slog, doggedness, perseverance, and forbearance needed to locate the sights of a city, or the shelter I need for the night, detective work – I find it bearable.

In this instance, my goal is to find the life-sized engraving on the tomb of a thirty-five-year-old mafioso. He is one of the hundreds of victims of the 1990's gang war for the control of formerly state-owned mineral enterprises. (See Anna Politkovskaya's book, _Putin's Russia_.)

The man with the Mercedes' car keys dangling from his fist evades me, but in the meantime, I make another discovery.

A gathering of people, a cream-white car blocking the path, a banquet table piled high with grapes and champagne...Are the big boys bodyguards? Are they all gangsters?

In my hand, I hold a plastic flower I found on the path. With the flower I feel less conspicuous. In my mind, a imagine this scenario: I am the widow...( then I change it)...I have come to pay my respects, at my husband's brother's graveside...

I sit beside a grave (most graves have a seat and many a table too, because once a year Russians enjoy a picnic with their deceased), in a spot near the revelry. I wipe a tear. There are a lot of goings-on.

A man speaking with that strange cadence of authenticity and formality that characterises public speech... Then, singing floats through the wood-smelling air. High above, sun-rays pierce the tree-roof, light is filtered through leaves. The zone is dark yet clear, like Russian tea.

There is no better place to be than here, in the cool... But my mind begins to work. I imagine being spotted by one of the men drinking champagne, right now seated with their backs to me... A simple command, and I would be man-handled by those two bears leaning against trees.

How strange to have a party at a graveside, I think. Then I give up spying.

I traipse around. Many graves boast of professions: 'Dr So & So', depicted on his tombstone with his surgeon's mask covering half his face. Imagine back home, in our cemeteries: Here lies Peter Rudd, real-estate agent, or Forever next to God, Julia Goodwin, dental hygienist.

Interesting: amongst the graves of those departed in the communist era, the most ostentatious tombstones belong to those in elite fields of work: Dmitri Petrovich Ivanov; MIG pilot, decorated with a bas-relief of a plane; or Alexei Mihailovich Medvedyev: General. His likeness showing rows of medals. Clearly, in death, a citizen was permitted to drop the veneer of equality, and the departed one's position in the social hierarchy that persisted (unofficially) throughout the era of communism, was proudly revealed.

The eeriest tomb is the idol of, Ekaterina Shara----, who was gifted with two lives:

A Queen Arisen

27 \---,1970-

22 \----,1997

Gifted with talents

A face Model

An Artist

A Dress Model

Two lives you deserved

Living in Heaven

And on Earth

Arrested by this display of yearning, costing more than a Russian waitress earns in her lifetime, I gape. Ekaterina, an alabaster goddess, flanked by columns, wears a clinging dress split to her thigh, her tresses fall to her perfect breasts and pert nipples. She poses in white marble, for eternity. The epithet is engraved in gold letters on either side of her, an urn with peonies stands before her. Her crypt is bigger than any other.

What befell Ekaterina? I imagine her blown to bits by a bomb planted in her boyfriend's car, killing her, by mistake. Perhaps she and her mafioso argued. Perhaps Ekaterina took the car keys, fleeing into the night, heading for her mother's flat in the suburbs...

I have to pee. I creep into the undergrowth. My eye is drawn to the marble. Freshly planted chrysanthemums sit in in boxes at the sides of the crypt. Behind the headstone is a plastic bag filled with plastic bottles. The bottles are filled with water. I wonder who waters the flowers.

Visiting the Romanovs

The Tsar, the Tsarina, and their three daughters and son, have been beatified. They are saints. The Russian government recently built the Church upon the Blood, on the site of the Ipatiev house, where the Romanov family was murdered upon Lenin's orders, in July, 1918.

In 1977, President Boris Yeltsin gave the order for the Ipatiev house to be demolished. It had become a museum of atheism. Lenin was fearful of the Romanovs inspiring the Whites; Yeltsin was scared of the Ipatiev house becoming a symbol for monarchists.

Inside the Church upon the Blood, amongst the wall of gold icons, hangs the most expensive icon ever commissioned in Russia.

The Church has golden cupolas, and is built in a modern Byzantine style. It is ugly. Never to become one with its environs, it sits on a concrete ridge, and concrete has been poured into ramps and terraces all around it. There are no trees here, there never will be. Traffic speeds past the Church of the Blood.

Bullets tore into the Romanov family; some needed many bullets to kill them – jewels had been sewn into clothes, which deflected the bullets. One of the shooters shot the lapdog cradled on the Tsarina's lap. At least three shooters, firing randomly and simultaneously to avert individual culpability for the murders, executed the assembled Romanov family and their attendants, in the early hours of the morning – at a deliberately discrete hour.

Black and white photos of the Romanov family have been blown-up and printed on stretched vinyl, and these have been erected outside the church, where souvenirs are sold. Four beautiful girls – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, dressed in muslin and lace, hats and boots – smile at the camera. These were the princesses. The Tsar and his son, Prince Alexei, stand in a wood. The Tsar is dressed in a Cossack uniform, while the prince is dressed like a real soldier. Here is the Tsar in robes embroidered with the double-headed eagle. Ermine clads his shoulders, festooned with black-tipped sable tails. The Tsar is about to crown his wife, who kneels before him in matching robes.

Here is a more intimate portrait of the Tsar and Tsarina. She is gazing at their newborn, wrapped in lace. The Tsar stands behind her chair and stares stonily at the camera.

On the train from Yekaterinburg, towards Moscow

June 24

This train is new and clean. A carpet runs the length of the wagon, on top, a length of turquoise cotton with yellow edging. A protection for the floral carpet beneath.

I am on the upper bunk to the side, running in the same direction as the passage, место 48 (place number 48), the same position I occupied on the trip from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg. The booby place. There is no sanctuary here: people march to the samovar and the toilet at either extremity. It is impossible to glimpse the countryside: I am above the window. However, I am grateful for being on the upper bunk, not the lower, which can only be made into a bed when the table is down.

In this compartment, two fat Russian women are holding court. They are the authority on everything. One woman, the main speaker, a blonde, about 50-ish, her hair up, in a striped singlet, her thighs encased in leggings, is telling her listeners how she cooks cherry jam. She is asked how she deals with the cherry stones: With a slotted spoon...

How to make cherry-lemon compote:

'Add lemon to make it sour, or vitamin c... or make a compote from half blackcurrants, half cherries...by the middle of June, the cherries are finished...

Currants are around from to end of May to the beginning of June, also in September – they are available twice.'

This woman used to live in Uzbekistan. I join the conversation.

'Do you live in Uzbekistan?' I ask.

'No, I live in Omsk. But I was born in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.'

She left because of her children. 'One lives in Moscow, the other in St Petersburg. They couldn't get residency to live in Uzbekistan. But the standard of living is better in Uzbekistan, than in Russia: they have gold, cotton, oil. The prestigious children all study English and there are international banks.'

The Tashkent-born woman, with nostalgia, describes her life in the time of the USSR, in Uzbekistan. She had a four-room flat, French clothing, there was food in the shops, the pay was better.

Now, after becoming independent from Russia, after the collapse of communism, many Russians have left Uzbekistan, leaving behind their old folk, who have no-one to look after them.

Like the old Russian woman she saw, who came to the market poorly dressed. An Uzbek stall-seller taking pity, gave the old woman a handful of fruit. The Uzbekistanis feel sorry for these old Russian folk. The Uzbek custom is for the elders to live with the youngest son. Their old people would never be left to die alone, like the Russians have left their old folk.

I have drunk too much coffee. My heart is going like a jack-hammer, my mind is racing, my face feels old, my feet cold, I'm sweating, my bladder is full.

I can't help thinking about the dispossessed Russians in the former republics of the USSR. The Soviets are not wanted. They are the detritus of history and of communism.

* * *

This is the fast train to Vladimir. Shortly, we will stop at Perm, formerly Kirov.

Kirov was the Bolshevik murdered by a secret agent, which was the excuse Stalin needed to start the show trials (where elite Party members were tortured and threatened into confessing they were 'enemies of the people', then shot). Then came The Great Terror.

A brunette, about fifty years of age, notices me writing in my journal. She turns away from her friend, and begins to chat to me.

'From New Zealand? What do you think about Russia?'

'You have excellent trains, good, cheap municipal transport, a free education...'

'Free? No, you're mistaken. Early education, maybe, but at the good universities, you must pay, only the rich can afford it.'

'I thought...'

'What did you think? Look out there, look at those shacks, those hovels the people live in. What do you think about that? They have to go to the toilet outside. Old people shuffling through the snow, can you imagine what that's like?'

'Well, no, but...'

'But what?' (Voice rising)

'But would you prefer to still be living under communism?'

'Yes!' ( A chorus: the woman beside her, her friend, agrees)

'You would?'

'Under communism – everything was cheap, even free! I flew to visit my mother twice a year – only 43 roubles for the ticket. (Eyes bulging.) I travelled on a train like this – what did it cost? Kopecks. I stayed in a sanatorium for a month, every year – free!'

'Da, da', agrees her friend, nodding her head.

'Education – all universities and schools were good, and free. Hospitals – free. Housing – free. Everything – free! (Eyes popping.)

'You're shouting at me.'

'Now, look at us here in Russia. Look at the miserable lives we lead. We can't go on holiday, like you. We can't afford to go anywhere.'

'Don't shout.'

'What have you got to say about Russia now?'

'Nothing is free,' I say.

At Perm, the vituperative brunette gets off the train. Such a relief.

Now, I am listening to the lovely sound of a man speaking in the next cabin. His rising and falling voice is rhythmic, with a nasal tinge. He discusses the problems of Russian life. (The brunette who got off the train has got people talking.) Now, he is talking plaintively about the broken water heating; now about cheap Chinese shoes and clothes: [kashmar] (crap).

Chapter 15

**Vladimir & Suzdal**

June 25

Arriving at an early hour of the morning, I wander the train station like a homeless person, trying to figure out what to do.

I find a waiting area on a mezzanine where there are soldiers sleeping on the metal seats and on the floor. I lie on my sleeping mat and sleeping bag, put on my eye-patch, and have a kip. I'm woken by the station manager, whose large breasts are encased in a uniform.

'Show me your ticket and passport,' she says.

I feign incomprehension, for the first time acting like a foreigner who can't understand Russian. I begin rolling up my kit, ignoring the woman standing next to me. I'm not going to hand over my passport... a fact she seems to accept.

Something has come over me. A craving. I haven't yet put it into thought. Time zones – I have crossed nine in the past four weeks – and my diurnal-clock-disruption are taking their toll. It is about five in the morning, but already light. I leave my case in the left-luggage booth and hit the quiet morning streets of Vladimir.

I know what's wrong with me. I'm ravenous for eggs. It is five weeks since I've eaten an egg, not since that omelette in Hotel Amursk, in Komsomolsk-Na-Amure, in Siberia. I want an omelette exactly like that. A tender one with tomatoes and cheese, accompanied by Russian bread and lots of coffee...

A ringing of bells signals the time: 6am. I follow the chimes to a monastery, cover my hair with a scarf, take up position in a small chapel. This is the Church of the Nativity*. I am the only woman and only attendee at the morning service. The novice monk misses his lines, receives a prompt from the priest, and for the first time I realise the enormity of the commitment monks make; to be celibate; to memorize those long liturgies; to forsake family, friends; to think only pure thoughts...

*A snapshot of the legacy of communism:

The Nativity Monastery of Vladimir, one of the oldest in Russia (established in the 11th century), was closed by the Bolsheviks, and the buildings were taken over by the KGB. In the 1990s, the buildings were handed back to the church. In one building, the priests found human bones. These were the artefacts of the KGB's activities.

Before seeing more sights of Vladimir, I'm determined to find breakfast.

The main drag is a series of closed bars and shops, and not-yet-opened cafés. Vladimir must be a party town. A sign says, 'Breakfasts from 7 am'. The café's entrance is under an arch. I climb the stairs, open the door, see two waitresses. They are chatting, one is wrapping cutlery in serviettes, the other is smoking at a table set for breakfast. A table that is waiting for a hungry customer.

'Yes?' the smoker asks, turning a little.

'Good morning.'

'Good morning.'

We both fall silent.

The smoker:

'What do you want?'

'Breakfast.'

'We're closed.'

'But it says on the sign, 'open from seven'. It's seven thirty.'

'What do you want?'

'Eggs.'

'Eggs?'

'Yes. Eggs. An omelette.'

'Eggs, no.'

I stand there. I think if I wait long enough, the waitress might understand how hungry I am.

'Look, I want a plate of eggs. An omelette, with a bit of cheese and a sliced tomato.'

The waitress turns her back on me. She grinds her cigarette into an ashtray.

'We're not open. Go and eat across the street. There's a 24-hour-place over the road.'

My heart sinks.

'Do they serve eggs?'

'Eggs?'

'Yes. Eggs.'

'They serve everything.'

Across the street is a McDonalds-type place serving hamburgers and fries. The music is thumping and a group of kids who have been up all night, slouch at a booth. They don't serve eggs here.

I decide to find Lenin instead. It has become a game of mine: all towns in Russia have a statue of Lenin: I must find it and photograph it. Bigger towns have more. They pop up here and there. For now.

One day they will pull the statues of Lenin down. They did it with every bust, marble, and bronze of Stalin. There will come a time when no one will want to see Lenin on a plinth either. Those in power will weigh up the cost of seventy years of communism. A reckoning will be taken of what Leninism-Marxism did for the country; how many Russians were murdered in its name; the environmental degradation it caused; the persecution of the clergy, which now holds so much power again; the destruction of the peasant culture, along with the rural heritage of the Russian estate, (the nation's asset), and the damage to the future of Russian agriculture, to Russian food security. Vladimir Ilyich will go.

I find Lenin. Astounding a young man with a request for him to take my photograph, I take up position and pose.

Lenin is today wearing a waistcoat and tie, his right hand is open near his pocket, his left is held close to his puffed-out chest. I stare at Lenin, trying to guess at the symbolism of these gestures. I decide Lenin's left hand says, 'Look at the mess we've got here,' while his right hand says, 'Don't worry, people. I have everything under control. You peasants must get alongside. I will have to ban vodka.'

Lenin is bald, but his face is young and his eyes reveal his Mongol blood.

The young man from Vladimir probably doesn't even know who Lenin is. But he does as the foreign woman asks.

I follow my nose down a side street. There are different roof-lines here, and dilapidated European buildings in earthy colours. Spires poke out amongst the trees. I find a church overgrown with ivy, with a glorious painting on its street-facing wall peeking out from the foliage, A cat is creeping across the road, making for the cover of weeds. A woman in a housecoat pumps water into two buckets with a wrought-iron lever.

It is delightful to walk these streets. I forget my hunger. I end up at Hotel Vladimir, back near the station, having passed it nearly two hours ago. At the hotel, I eat.

After breakfast, I finish seeing the main sights of Vladimir. I walk beneath the trees through the park, to see the monument to Vladimir Monomahk, the man who, in 1108, founded the Vladimir-Suzdal principality. My heart contracts. I take in this statue of a man on a horse, black against a white sky, a brackish river, the smog of distant Moscow, the landscape of European Russia.

I stand beneath the statue of Vladimir Monomahk horsed so handsomely. He is mighty and majestic. I am a speck.

Vladimir is like an oven.

Suzdal

(After a 35 km bus ride from Vladimir)

36C!

So hot I can't think. I'm lying naked in bed on the bottom bunk, outside a rooster is crowing. I locked my padlock on my trolley-case and the key is in the pocket of my jacket, inside the case.

I was so heat-struck in Vladimir, I couldn't think. I did this silly thing.

This morning, I paid 250 roubles ($11.50), for a buffet-style breakfast at Hotel Vladimir, and ate: cereal and salad, bread and cheese, boiled eggs and sausages. I drank coffee and tepid fruit juice.

In the dining room gathered the oddest and at the same time, the most ordinary of people. All prosperous, well-fed. A Japanese couple feasted on salad. The plump man at the table next to me poured a pot of yoghurt down his throat. These people seemed like actors. They were conservatives.

I saw a woman leaving the buffet with a plastic bag filled with boiled eggs. I could do that.

I gorged and at odd moments, tripped to the buffet. Into my backpack, on the chair next to me, I plopped two pots of yoghurt, two cakes, a salami and cheese sandwich, four boiled eggs, and three apples.

It was my first good meal in a while.

Saved by Lyuba, in Suzdal

Lyuba appears with a hammer and a chisel. She looks like a wrestler. A big, cheerful, mat-banger. With the tools she lays into the lock on my bag and deals to it. I laugh. Now, I can have a shower.

It was an hour on the clattering bus to Suzdal, under a dazzling sun. We drove along a highway, past green fields, the landscape like my second skin. It could have been Northland, New Zealand. That is, until I spied the domes and the spires of Suzdal's thirty churches, paid for by wealthy merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries. But not there yet. Another bus trip from the station, to the centre of town. Then, clad in white muslin and a floral skirt, I pulled my trolley-case over cobblestones, down a lane towards a river, asking whomever I met, 'Where is Godzilla's?'

Godzilla's is a new hostel run by Lyuba from the Ukraine, who looks like a wrestler.

There are other guests. A middle-aged French woman from Paris. A young Spanish couple, from Barcelona. There is Lyuba, and me.

I find myself speaking French, Spanish, and Russian. I help everyone understand each other. This is very novel, jumping around in three languages. I report on my Trans-Siberian journey, because the Spaniards are taking the train to Mongolia. But in the end, the interpreting feels as if I'm giving too much blood.

'You look drained,' the woman from Barcelona, says.

If there is a kind of churchy heaven on earth, it exists in Suzdal. Actually, we must thank Ivan the Terrible, and Vasily II, before him, for this celestial place.

These two despots funded major development in Suzdal. But, even earlier, from Muscovite times, it was always an important monastic centre. (The Church in Russia was a huge and wealthy landowner, rivalling the Tsar in wealth, with its own retinue of serfs to work its land. Then, in the 17th century, first Peter the Great, then Catherine the Great, appropriated the church's lands, claiming them as government property.)

Suzdal is unspoilt, because rail never came here. In Soviet times, the state limited development.

Today, churches and monasteries sit on hilltops surrounded by walls, tickled by trees. The sleepy river flows by. Above, only the Russian sky. There is nothing obscene. No McDonalds. Only transcendent beauty.

Bells are chiming when I set out in the morning. I follow paths, taking short-cuts and by-ways. I get lost. By a river, I scramble through weeds as high as my head. Stinging nettles lash my legs. At last, I spot the road. People in a car nearly drive off the road when I burst through the forest of weeds.

At a morning service in the Nativity of the Virgin Cathedral, I prefer to stand outside and listen to the hymns, enjoying the flower gardens; the cosmos and the poppies. Behind them, white walls; above them, blue and gold-spangled cupolas. Old women in heads-scarves scuttle about like mice in charge of heaven.

My Notes:

Russian population statistics in 1991:

73.9% urban; 26.1% rural

46.90% male; 53.10% female

Russian population statistics in 2010:

74% urban 26% rural

Religion:

73% Russian Orthodox Christians

6% Muslim

1% believe in other faiths, the remainder not religious at all.

Life Expectancy in 2010:

Females 74.87.

Males 63.03 years;

The average life expectancy of 68.98, is ten years shorter than the average life expectancy in European countries, and the United States.

Population of Moscow, 2010: 13 million

Communism and Literacy:

Russia's free, in-depth educational system, with almost no changes since the Soviet era, has achieved an almost 100% literacy rate.

Chapter 16

Moscow

Hostel Suharevskaya

June 26

A massive pair of jockey Y-fronts pulled over a humpty-dumpty stomach; a hairy chest rising and falling (the hair is fair); the face of this person obscured by a breathing mask. This is what greets me on my first night in Moscow.

Here I am, sitting on my bunk, in my blue-and-white striped Russian sailor's singlet and my knickers, in Moscow at last, 9289 km from Vladivostok, where I began my journey.

As humble an achievement as it may be in the eyes of the world, for me it is a doctorate, a birth, an encyclopedia, a return trip to the moon. It is completion, where I once left off.

Along the way, on my journey across Russia, apart from the geographical journey I made, I achieved something momentous: I accepted myself. For some, this might be a given. It may be a natural attitude. It may be part of the protective fabric that cloaks them as they live in the harsh world. Not for me. For me, self-acceptance is a new triumph.

Hot!

I have the bottom bunk in a nine-bed, mixed dorm and tonight there are people in nothing but their underwear in here with me. Apart from the oxygen-deprived man in his jockeys, a Malay mother and her daughter from Kuala Lumpur are in the bunk opposite, and we have whispered greetings.

June 27

I am eating breakfast in the kitchen. I am the only one up.

I slept badly. In the early hours of the morning, a young man, hiccuping loudly, clambered into the bunk above me. The bed rocked as he climbed up. As if earth-shattering sex was going on. A hell of a fright. Now, he's loudly snoring, (along with his other drunken, night-clubbing mates who filled the other beds), wearing nothing but Calvin Kleins and body hair. The clubs in Moscow, so they say, are the best in the world.

I found this place in the _Lonely Planet._ It took three attempts to locate it, first one Metro exit, then another. Bewildering: no sign, no indication that at this number, somewhere above, there was a hostel. Finally, I spied a buzzer, buzzed, and was let in.

A lift like a cage.

The receptionist with Tatar eyes agrees on a price for four nights. I pay, conscious of a man with black hair sitting behind me on a sofa. Paid-up, I turn to him. He is American, he says. I explain that I'm from New Zealand.

He replies that he is an environmentalist.

'Well you've come to the right place,' I say.

'Oh, really?,' he asks.

'Yes,' I say. 'The rivers across Russia are so polluted, its terrible...'

I expect him to take up my theme, but he lets me me do the talking.

'Wow, he says, 'I didn't know that.'

I go to get food for the next day's breakfast, out into Moscow, to find a supermarket.

When I return, I meet the American again, this time in the kitchen. He is eating an enormous plate of macaroni with no sauce, not even olive oil, only salt.

I put my food in the fridge. Now the American is telling me he is a political refugee.

'Really?' I say.

'Yes', he says. He adds: 'I'm the first American to ever apply for political asylum in Russia. You're gonna see me on the news.'

'Really?'

I sit down opposite him.

'Why are you a political refugee?'

'Because I opposed George Bush's illegal war in Iraq.'

'Oh, I see.' Then I thought a bit.

'But there are lots of Americans who were against it. Why does that make you in particular, a refugee?'

'Because they poisoned my taco at Taco Bell.'

'They poisoned your taco?'

'Yes, they did. I had the most terrible pains in my stomach after I ate my lunch. They knew they could get to me, at Taco Bell. That's where I ate lunch everyday. And I lay in hospital for four days, nearly dying. That's when I knew I had to get out of the States.'

Lenin

Lenin. I see him today. I am the first in the queue. My previous two visits to Moscow, I had given up. The queues were too long, or the day was wrong. But at last, I get to see the man I've photographed across Russia.

A young English boy is the second in the queue. He has been studying Russian in some place like Daghestan or Turkmenistan, somewhere like that.

Filing past in single file, I whisper to the English boy but the guard orders me to be quiet in 'the presence'. We don't get to pause, not even for a minute, as we shuffle past the glass sarcophagus, where the man lies, white, bald, and shrunken.

The recipe for the embalming process is a state secret.

One day, so they say, they will bury him. It is too macabre a spectacle, and as time passes the reasons for keeping him there seem to diminish. As the old communists in Russia die, why should the Kremlin promote the cult of Lenin any longer?

**At** **VDNH**

(USSR Economic Achievements Exhibition)

If there is one place in the world that inflames my hatred of Stalin more than anywhere else, it is this living hell. Stalin created these hideous grounds in the 1930s. Obscene Rococo statuary and golden fountains were built to show the world how successful communism in Russia was.

I loathe the little train that pulls me along the asphalt, despise the designers who failed to plant trees along the boulevards for shade, and feel superior to every single Muscovite who chooses to visit this wasteland for fun.

I put a coin in a machine for a glass of mineral water and it steals my money. (I refuse to buy a bottle of water from a stall at ten times the normal price.)

'But its only ten roubles', says the man I complain to, the one in charge of maintaining the vending machines.

'That's not the point,' I say.

He takes my plastic cup and fills it.

Gorky Park

An old man and an old woman, his girlfriend, make me cry.

I meet them beside the lake at Gorky Park. I stand there, looking at the people in the paddle boats, imagining the lake frozen in winter and the boaters transformed into skaters, like the scene in Anna Karenina, when Kitty meets Levin at an ice-skating rink.

The couple are sitting on a bench, dressed in their best – she wears a purple dress, he wears a sailor's cap. The woman cradles a radio. They are listening to it. I ask if they can please take my photo, beside the lake. We strike up conversation.

They love Stalin.

'But he murdered millions of your people.'

'To be a leader, you must be tough,' the old man says.

'He destroyed the peasantry, he created famine...'

'He brought this country out of misery. He made us great. And the streets were safe.'

'But all those years of shortages, and queueing to buy cheese, while the Party leaders lived like kings?'

'But there was work. Russia made everything. Trains, tractors, submarines...'

'What was your work?'

'I used to help run the Pioneer camps. For the children. A whole month. The children would be put on buses, with their suitcases, and they wouldn't see mum or dad after that, until the time was up, camp was finished and we brought them home. But they could write letters.'

'I can't imagine sending my boys away for a month.'

'Yes, it was hard, many children would be crying. But it was good for them. They had so much fun. They went swimming, boating, forest walking. They would eat well, fruit and veges every day, fish and eggs and meat. They would come home healthy and tanned and happy. And their parents got to have a break. Sending their children away was good for them too. All parents need that time away from the duty of parenthood. It means you can be a better mother or father. A whole month every year, paid for by the state. That was communism. That is what we had. And jobs, and healthcare, and recreation.'

'And now?'

'And now, well now only the rich can afford to send their children on camp in the summer. It is terrible. These poor kids with nothing to do all summer long, in the cities. And now... the streets are dangerous, you can get shot down like a dog and no one cares, no one will come to your aid. And there's no hope. There is no work. There is no work for the young people, and if I take a job, even a humble one, I'm taking work from a younger man. So I sit here.'

'You wonder why we are sitting here in the park? We come here all the time. Every day in the summer. Why? Because it is free. We don't have to pay because we are pensioners. We get a pension, but what can it buy in Moscow? Have you seen how expensive it is? Have you seen the prices of food, here?'

'It is very expensive.'

'The way we live now. It's existing. No, Stalin was good. He was good for Russia. And communism.'

'Would you like to return to communism?'

'Yes. I would. I am a communist. It was better.'

The woman, so thin and so pretty, holds on to the arm of her friend, and nods at me, as if to agree with everything that has been said.

* * *

Moscow... the noise of the traffic outside my window on Suharevskaya Square is as unbearable as the heat. At last, I am alone.

I'm missing Doug. I feel like I'm in a dinghy without oars, cast adrift in a sea of males, without a tie. A big city is an overwhelming place. I know these feelings are normal. I am functioning alone, it strikes me how much work it is...and Doug seems so distant.

After visiting Gorky Park, I bought a t-shirt and a very short skirt. I wish I had enough to buy a sun-dress that suited me. $45 NZ Dollars – it doesn't seem much, but then, I have to survive for three more days in Moscow.

Moscow – The biggest city in Europe. All Russian roads lead here.

The capital has grown and grown, in part I figure, because no provisions were put in place for the newly emancipated serfs back in 1861, to become land-owners. So they drifted to the big smoke. And this is still the paradigm. Russia is a rapidly urbanising nation. And guess where all the ambitious young Russians want to be? You got it – Moscow.

(Actually, one million Russians have preferred to emigrate permanently – since 2008.)

I am going to sleep now. It is still light outside. Eye-patch on, ear-plugs in. Goodnight.

Pen and paper again. Why? Why am I writing when I should be asleep? This is why...

Damn! Awoke to hissing and grunting. What is that? The bunk wasn't moving, Gas-mask man has gone; what is that?

Oh. It's only the curly-haired American Environmentalist-Politico-Refugee doing sit-ups on his bed. He has a fine physique; a six-pack, a mat of chest hair, wearing his trousers, thank God. Very manly. I scan the other beds. We are alone in the room. Pull eye-patch down. Grunts. Hisses. Ignore them. I can't. The direction of the sounds has changed. What's going on? Pull up eye-patch. Now my room-mate is doing press-ups on the floor next to me. Pull eye-patch down. Direction of noise changes. Pull eye-patch up. Now, he's standing doing chest openers, exercising his pectorals, positioning his body where I can see his form to best advantage. Now, he's on the bed again, more sit-ups. Is this ridiculous?

I'm lying here in knickers and a singlet...thinking about the other things this odd man has told me in our chats...how he's going to marry a Russian girl whose parents came from the village to meet him, how he doesn't drink, he's from California, (where nobody drinks.) We are all too healthy.

I ask him, in Russian, 'What's your name?'

'Pardon me? Oh, no. I don't speak much Russian yet.'

He drawls on in American. I listen because he is...because he is an enigma. A sane, self-validating, sexy NUTCASE.

June 28

I am here in Kitai Gorod (Marsh town = translation more historically correct because there used to be marshes here, but everyone knows it as Chinatown). One of the oldest areas of Moscow, from the 13th century.

Ruslan sent me here. Ruslan was the young gay receptionist, who took over from the young Tatar-eyed woman at the hostel in Suharevskaya. He asked me to pay more money. Tired after returning to the hostel from the day's sightseeing, I burst out with angry words in front of a new guest who had arrived, and was checking in. This guest and I had ridden in the lift together.

I said to Ruslan, in Russian:

'I am not going to pay one kopeck more. I haven't slept in two nights; it is so noisy from the traffic outside, then I get drunk guys waking me at all hours of the night, climbing in above me, shaking the bunk. Try as you might, you're not getting any more out of me.'

I stormed off and sat in the kitchen eating bread and cheese.

The tall man, the new guest, followed me from reception.

'Excuse me, are you Russian?'

'No, I'm from New Zealand.'

Then he spoke English. 'But I heard you speaking Russian?'

'I studied Russian at school, at university.'

'Oh, well, you are very good.'

'Thank you.'

'You're welcome.'

I resumed eating. The tall man continued to stand there, watching me, filling the doorway. He obliged me to look up. I ask him:

'Are you Russian?'

'No, I'm not.'

'Where are you from?'

'Israel.'

'But you speak Russian?'

'I lived here until I was seven. Now I am twenty seven. I wanted to come and see the place again. I have not been in Moscow for twenty years, but my Russian is coming back to me.'

'Oh.'

'Yes. Actually, today I went to see where we used to live. They've pulled the building down. But I asked a woman, a local, and she said, there, that's the spot where you used to live.'

'I see.'

'Can I ask you a question?'

'What's that?'

'You, being from New Zealand..New Zealanders don't like us Israelis. Is that correct?'

'Most people disagree with what the Israelis have done, and are doing to the Palestinians.'

'I also am not proud of what my people are doing.'

'Oh?'

'I disagree with the violence. Yes, and the Gaza Strip.'

'I see.'

'Yes. And actually, in the world cup, the Kiwis did quite surprisingly well, for a small country. I have been following them. What are they called, 'The All Whites?'

'Yes.'

'And can I ask you a question?'

'What's that?'

'I overheard you say to the receptionist that drunk men are coming in all night to this place. Can you tell me, is this a bad place? Will drunk men disturb me? I have paid for a private room. All the reviews on the internet said it was OK. Many travellers recommended it...'

I lost patience with this tall Israeli who could afford one of those private rooms I had spied opposite the kitchen, the ones with double beds, the sheets turned down, flowers in a vase, beside the bed.

I snapped, 'If you've paid for a private room, why should drunk men come in to it? I'm in a dorm. There are ten beds in there. It's mixed. That's why I have to share my room with drunk men.'

'Oh yes, I see. Quite,' said the tall Israeli man. There was silence between us.

Ruslan takes pity on me. He says I can transfer to their sister-hostel, brand new, and have a room to my own. Really? Yes, really. And pay no extra? Pay nothing more.

Ruslan gives me a map with the hostel circled, but neglects to point out a landmark for me to take a bearing, assuming everyone knows Moscow. I have no idea which exit to take from the Metro, and keep popping up above ground like a lost rabbit, only to find that I'm on the wrong side of the road. It takes me half an hour to walk here pulling my case in the heat and through roaring traffic, across roads sliced up with tram lines. He said it would only take ten minutes. I could have killed him.

But, when I get here, I'm happy. It's almost like the Hilton.

The Kremlin Armoury

June 29

Agog at the Fabergé eggs, the silver plate, the thrones studded with gems and pearls; one made of solid silver; one for the boy-child Tsar with a secret window so his advisers could prompt him as to what to say when receiving in court; another carved from ivory. Carriages, crowns and gowns. I am lead from one extreme extravagance to the next.

I feel meek here on the red carpet, viewing 600 years of Russia's riches amassed. (The biggest diamonds are not here on display – you have to go to see them separately.)

No wonder Stalin could do what he did. He sat on all of this. The Bolsheviks plundered the artworks from the Hermitage to fund their Party, but what a small fraction of the treasure of this country, that was.

Ismailovsky Market

I am searching. Scouring the stalls. Do these Muscovites selling their matroshkas and beaver hats understand? Have they crossed the world, only to find the love they left behind is always with them, like the beating of their blood, thudding in their ears? Perhaps they see that I am not any tourist. An intense focus to my eyes tells them I will part with roubles.

What does a woman buy her lover in Moscow's biggest souvenir market?

I flirt with a handsome man in a checked shirt and khaki shorts selling antiques, who looks like an American. But he's not, of course.

'I've just crossed Russia. On the Trans-Siberian.'

'OK. You're crazy. What do you want to come here for? I go to Turkey every year. Beaches, very warm.'

'My husband's at home, looking after our three sons... A good man. So hard to find.'

'But he let you wander, husband? This is very strange. Russian men don't let our wives do this.'

'I know, I know. OK. What would you like your wife to bring you home from Russia if you were a Kiwi guy?'

'Why, a Red Army belt, of course.'

'A Red Army belt? Of course!'

'Here is a fantastically splendid one.'

'No, that one's not real leather. It has to be real leather.'

'OK. Here is one, but this one is a thousand roubles. This one is the genuine article. A general's buckle, not a private's.'

'Yes. A general's. That's what I want.'

Fifty dollars for a leather belt and a brass buckle with a hammer and sickle on a five-pointed star.

Tretyakovskaya Gallery

First in line. Soon the freezing temperature has me trotting through the halls in my mini skirt and sailor's singlet.

Staring at Repin's masterpiece, I feel the desperation of Repin's Old Believer, her skeletal face and bone-fingers pointing in two-fingered defiance to the heavens, to God. The old Boyar is being carted away to exile and imprisonment in a horse-drawn sleigh. (Old Believers would not accept the change in Orthodox ritual, from the two-fingered sign of the cross, to the one-fingered sign.) Her, 'I maintain my belief,' gesture is an image that to me symbolises Russian dissent through the ages.

The affluently-dressed old woman doing the 'up yours' sign, while around her Russians dressed for the snow look on, embodies the continuum of the fighting spirit of Russian rebels. Old Believers; Decembrist-Revolutionaries; writers and poets. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Belinsky, Gogol, Akhmatova, and Pasternak, to mention a few I've written about in this book – all were repressed by the state for matters of conscience. And then there was the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya; the murdered writer, Gregory Vyatkin. Don't forget the brave members of _Memorial_ , like the chemist Marina Kuzmina in Komsomolsk-Na-Amure, who has been fighting for years, for a proper monument for the local victims of political repression. These are the Russian freedom fighters.

The women guarding the exhibition halls, in typical fashion, admonish me for my scanty dress: how right they are. Russian romantics, realists, and impressionists require a warm viewer, who doesn't have to caper, to do them justice.

Downstairs, among the Russian icon collection, the greatest in the world, my chill is forgotten.

The icon tradition came down through Byzantium and developed alongside Orthodoxy, into the distinctive Russian expression of the icon form.

The figures in earth tones of coffee, sienna, umber, and carmine, throb against backgrounds in gold. The monk artists must have held passionate feelings for the Holy, for the Saints, for Him, for his Son, and the Mother. These works are mysterious. I try to penetrate the overlapped figures and flattened perspectives. It is a Russian kind of beauty.

June 30

Last night at the hostel, I was asked to act as interpreter for a group of young people visiting Moscow, as part of an international youth conference.

'Tell them they need to bring me their passports and visa documents, so I can register them,' the Ukrainian woman, who runs the hostel, told me to translate.

'Them' are twenty-something students from Mumbai, Karachi, Cairo, and Delhi.

I tell the students. Then every minute after that, I am bombarded with questions. Can I use my wifi? Where is the nearest supermarket? What time do the trains stop? Where can I change dollars?

I say to them: 'Say, Excuse me. Say, Please. I'm not an employee here, I'm a guest like you, and you are being rude.'

'Oh, sorry,' one skinny man says, but he doesn't seem sorry at all. He has more, more polite questions.

In the kitchen downstairs, there is a group of hostellers drinking beer around the table.

I cook my dinner, listening to a blonde American complain about being thrown out of Moscow University's hostel, because there was no water. And, furthermore, she had paid for a month's accommodation and now, she has to pay here for two nights, until the water comes back on. What kind of backwards, third-world country is this, she wants to know? So I tell her.

'Summer is the only time they have to repair the water lines that have burst or broken during the past winter. So there is often disruption to the water supply at this time of year. This country is emerging from seventy years of bad management during communism; and state bankruptcy; and the collapse of the infrastructure that followed.'

'Oh, wow,' said the woman who was a law student from Texas, 'I see what you mean. I never really thought about it like that.'

I leave them to their beers and their world-problem-solving. I pass a man sitting on the floor, in the hall, with his laptop on his long legs, which I must step over.

'Are you connected?' I ask.

'Yes.'

'Would I be able to check my emails on your computer?'

'Sure. I'll just finish.'

I check my emails.

'Where are you from?' the man asks.

'New Zealand. You?'

'Cairo. Are you on Facebook?'

It is 10pm, my last night in Moscow.

Tomorrow at one, I fly out of Domodedovo Airport, to Zurich, via Dusseldorf. In Switzerland, in a village called Benken, I will spend four days with my friend, Jennifer.

Eye-patch, Ear-plugs. Sleep.

Noise. A door slamming. Raucous laughter. Pull off eye-patch. Blinded by the light. See tall Egyptian entering room where girl from Mumbai is laughing hyena-like. Pull out ear plugs. Jump up. Go to door, pull it open. Four faces look at me, Mumbai girl is rolling around the floor. Lanky males lounge. A computer screen glows blue.

'What time is it?' I ask.

'Um, let me see,' says the girl from Mumbai looking at her watch, 'It's 3.15.'

'3 o'clock in the morning?'

'Yes, 3 am.'

I am speechless. The audacity. I am shocked at the stupidity of these people. I know they have never been in Moscow before in their lives, and can guess that they will never set foot here again. But they are flirting all night when they should be asleep... ready for the day's sightseeing.

'I can't believe it. So inconsiderate. It's three o'clock in the morning!'

'OK, OK. No problem,' says the girl.

'There is a problem!' I scream, 'Lights! Doors slamming! Laughter!'

The Egyptian looks guilty. 'We're sorry. We'll be more quiet.'

I am so furious, I can't sleep. It's useless. Outside it's light. There are no curtains to prevent me looking at the blue church next door. It's my last day. Get up.

Kievsky Markets

On the train by 5 am, I have tickets to use on the twenty-ride pass I bought for the Metro. The markets at Kiev Station are my destination.

I walk far from the station, asking directions. Men are staring at me. They are looking at my legs. I get a wolf-whistle and mutterings by the men who pass. In the rest of Russia, I drew attention to myself by covering up. Wearing a mini skirt helped me blend in. But here, it's different. It's the market zone.

Inside the main building are stalls selling fruit and vegetables, pickled mushrooms and dried fruit. Hanging from hooks are whole carcasses of lamb. The meat, I learn, comes from Daghestan. The melons, apricots and cherries are from Azerbaijan. All around people grin at me. I take their photos, and a stall-seller takes mine, standing in front of the carcasses. People are staring, wondering what a tourist is doing here so early.

I wander over a bridge built by the infamous Moscow Mayor...and arrive at Red Square. It is empty. Passing St Basil's Cathedral for the last time, I trek across the cobblestones to the far side of the square. A young man in tight jeans, a nightclub patron, takes my photo standing on the plaque from which every distance in Russia is measured. 'Smile,' he says. 'Not good enough. Come on, really smile. You're in Moscow.'

I pass beneath the statue of the hero Marshal Zhukov, who led the Russians to victory in the Second World War. Stalin later banished Zhukov to a posting in the Urals, before he was finally written out of Soviet history books.

A stall displays ranks of T-shirts pinned to its sides. In T-shirt design, Soviet nostalgia vies with the politics of Russia today. Lenin and Stalin, and Putin and Brezhnev make good T-shirt subjects, I decide, but so does Gorbachev, who ushered in the fall of Communism, and Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man in space.

I demur at the hammer and sickles, instead buying three T-shirts with capitals screaming, RUSSIA. An extra-large for Doug, one which also carries the emblem of the double-headed eagle, for Dante. A small, for Tennyson. For Orlando, I choose the spaceman Yuri, with the letters СССР on the back.

Before I descend into the Metro, I take a last look at Moscow, or what I can see of it from this point. On my right is the Metropole, the most expensive hotel in the city; in front of me is the dome covering the underground mall of Oktyabrisky Station, where global brand stores jostle for custom; on my left are the stalls selling souvenirs, and behind them, the yellow walls of the Kremlin rise.

THE END

Bibliography

The Whisperers, Private life in Stalin's Russia, Orlando Figes, 2007

Lonely Planet, Russia, 2009

Russia in Revolution 1900-1930, H. E Salisbury, 1978

Born of the October Revolution, Progress Publishers Moscow, 1977

Russia, the Wild East, Granta, The Magazine of New Writing, Issue 64

The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917-1929, E.H. Carr, 1977

Russia, A Concise History, Ronald Hingley, 1972

The History of the Great European War, Vol. X. W. S. Macbean Knight, 1920(?)

Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, Stanley Kunitz, Max Hayward, 1989

Putin's Russia, Anna Politkovskaya, 2004

Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1958

Stalin's Secret War, Nikolai Tolstoy, 1981

Nothing But The Truth, Anna Politkovskaya, 2010

Alexander Dolgun's Story, An American in the Gulag, Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson,1975

The Psychology of Orphans, Dr. Ludmila, Shipitsyna, 2007

The House of Meetings, Martin Amis, 2007

Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes, 2002

Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy, 1873

The Lubok, Russian Folk Pictures, 17th- 19th Century, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1984

Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Alison & Busby, 1977, Trans.by A. Holl, from 'Kommunistka', 1920

The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, Camilla Gray, 1962

Russian Cooking, The Foods of the World, Time Life Books, 1969

Komsomolsk-Na-Amure: Legends, Myths and Reality, Marina Kuzmina, 2002

Light and Shadows of 'Memorial', Marina Kuzmina, 2009

Leningrad,Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-1944, Anna Reid, 2011

Websites

Women's NGO's in Russia, Struggling From the Margins,

Lisa McIntosh, University. of ColombiaNorillag – wikipedia

The Volga Germans – wikipedia; The Centre for Volga German Studies

www.livingwarbirds.com/alexandr-kolchak

An Overview of the White Forces in the Russian Civil War – Military History@suite 101

Illegal Logging in Siberia – Illegal-Logging. Info.com

The Russian famine of 1921, wikipedia

The Soviet Famine of 1932-1933, wikipedia

Romanov archives – Alexander Time Machine, www.alexanderpalace.org

Russian Orphans – www.iorphan.org

Alcohol abuse – The University of Oxford website

Ecology of Vladivostok – www.oocities.org

Catherine the Great; Ivan the Terrible, wikipedia

