Oct 2, 2000
The young fellow who came to us in the morning to ask if we would like a tour of the city was tall and blond, and smartly dressed in a well cut suit, whose jacket had however been designed without collar or lapels. Presumably some Moscow tailor had decided these capitalist fripperies served no useful purpose and in a rationalist state should be sternly dispensed with. He (the guide), spoke good English, and offered to take the steering wheel, which I was only too glad to accede to.
He drove with an easy confidence, but once he discovered that the Viva, with its short gear lever and quite lively motor could be made to perform a bit, he made a habit of waving a challenge to any vehicle that happened to be alongside us at the traffic lights, and without concern for the tyres or the clutch, gunned the motor and drag-raced away with evident satisfaction. He showed us around the University, the sports stadium and the Kremlin, somehow, at Lenin’s tomb, getting us priority over the long queue of Uzbeks and Khazaks, (and doubtless also Chechins), who were probably no more at home in Moscow than we were. Lenin, in his glass case, is, as Harold Welch had told us in Canada, “obviously a pickle job,” but I suppose one has to see him. We also watched the changing of the guard on the hour, the grey clad soldiers performing their exaggerated goose step with great precision and much clicking of heels and clattering of rifle butts.
We had a peep inside St Basil’s basilica, with its multicoloured toffee-pop domes. It is quite tiny really, being more of a shrine than a church. It is just that Red Square is so vast that when St Basil’s is posed in the front of the picture, as it often is, the buildings of the Kremlin look relatively small in the background. And we saw the great bell, weighing forty tons or something, that Catherine the Great had had cast, but which had fallen and cracked when they were trying to hoist it into place, and has remained ever since on the ground. I bet Catherine had something to say about that.
Our guide also took us to an old Russian Orthodox cathedral somewhere over the river, and rather rudely, I thought, explained in a loud voice, the features of it, quite disregarding the religious service that was going on at the time. (Later however, I was to observe similar arrogance on the part of guides in Venice, Florence and Rome. Perhaps it is just antipodean naivety to respect the sensibilities of others.) The little congregation was almost entirely composed of old women, a fact which the guide, presumably a brash young atheist, did not fail to point out.
For lunch he took us to a large, high-ceilinged restaurant off Red Square, where we were waited on at table, but I can’t remember what we had to eat.
When we got back to the camp we found someone had been into our tent and had failed to zip it up properly. We assumed it was the KGB searching for a cache of firearms or something. We had nothing worth stealing, if that was what they were after.
The next day I asked the girl on the desk where I had to go to cash in my high octane petrol vouchers. She turned with a patient sigh to a map of Moscow on the wall, and pointed out the route which was, I now saw, already well grimed with desk attendants’ fingermarks, in response to the requests of a thousand previous drivers.
At one point, on Tchaikovsky Street, the route should have involved a left turn across the traffic, but as that would have involved crossing the sacred white centre line, it was necessary first to make a right turn into a side street where there was no centre line, and there one could do a U turn with impunity. You then crossed Tchaikovsky Street directly, whether courtesy of the right hand rule, or at the behest of a traffic officer. I can’t remember. Traffic officers on point duty were much commoner than traffic lights in Moscow at that time.
When we actually got there, I had just turned into the side street when people on the footpath started pointing at my wheels. I stopped to investigate and found I had a flat tyre. This was my first experience of the “mutual improvement” culture of the soviets, but it was not to be my last. Russians have an easy, sort of rural commonsense in their relationships with others, be they friends or strangers. I quite liked it, most of the time. They accept responsibility for one another’s actions or shortcomings even on occasions when it is not specifically asked for. They don’t hesitate, whoever they are or wherever they are, to draw your attention to any matter where they feel you are letting the side down, in somewhat the same manner as the English will deal to anyone who tries to jump a bus queue. They don’t resort to prodding with an umbrella, but address you more in a spirit of “really, you ought to know better!”
With no luggage in the boot it was a simple matter to change the wheel, and we then went on to the petrol station. Here I learned something else. In the Soviet Union, petrol stations are not associated with garage facilities, so they could not mend the tyre. Mechanical matters were the function of a separate enterprise, an engineering shop. (Twenty years later I observe the same trend here, where petrol stations are tending to have more in common with supermarkets than with repair shops.) The tyre repair had to wait till we got back to an engineering shop near the motor camp.
Meanwhile, with a tank full of petrol we were on our way to find the Helminthological laboratory where Svetlana, my entomolophilic nematologist colleague, worked.
On the way we stopped at a roadside stall that sold ice cream. Someone in the Ministry of Health must have recognised that ice cream can be quite an efficient culture medium for bacteria, for the lady who scooped it out wore a surgical mask as well as her head scarf, and handled even the cone with tongs. She also weighed the ice cream before she handed it over. All this seemed to me quite laudable, particularly as their ice cream contained a fair proportion of real cream, (sometimes you could notice when it was going rancid), as opposed to the dried skim milk and glycerine that gets called ice cream here.
On the other hand there were other stalls where they sold raspberry cordial which you drank from a glass that was chained to the stall. After each customer it was inverted over a sort of fountain which rinsed the inside of it, but as far as I could see it did nothing for cleanliness of the rim. Perhaps the sale of cordial comes under a separate ministry. At one suh stall, little Malcolm, the silent and observant Malcolm, tugged at my sleeve to draw my attention to the smile of the lady in charge. Surgical masks are not required for serving raspberry cordial, so we had a clear view of her full set of stainless steel teeth. They must have been government issue, because we came across them often afterwards, either singly or en masse. Svetlana’s friend Olga, whom we met later, flashed us a non-corrosive smile. As far as I can recall they were mostly worn by women. Men of an age where they might have needed them seemed to prefer to go gummy. The idea is perhaps typical of Russian slightly misguided practicality. Stainless steel is lighter, harder, stronger, and cheaper than gold, and is just as easy to keep clean. It also, I suppose, lacks gold’s capitalist connotations, and it leaves the nation’s gold output available for the purchase of hard currency..
The Helminthological Laboratory is on one of the radial streets, Leninsky Prospect. It must be eight lanes wide and is as straight as a yard of pump water. On either side of it, once you cross the river from Gorky Central Park, it is flanked by blocks of six- or eight- storeyed apartments, with a chimney like a power house in the centre of each block. This, Svetlana told us, supplies the central heating for the whole surrounding city block. At the street level, as in Paris, there is a complete range of shops, so that in theory at least you could survive the winter without ever going outside.
The helminthologists were all or nearly all women. There was a middle aged man in charge, but I think he was mainly administrative. He smiled a shy welcome, but apparently spoke no English.
The ladies, scientists and technicians, seemed quite young. Svetlana was probably the eldest of them, and she could hardly have been forty. Only Svetlana spoke English, but Irena, a scientist who had enjoyed a spell in Cuba, spoke German as well as Spanish, so we could make some sort of conversation with her. All the ladies were well turned out with their hair set etc., and they made a great fuss of our kids, as ladies will.
The lab equipment seemed adequate for what they were doing. Svetlana’s microscope was top quality, (you can’t study nematodes with anything less), and was Russian made. Of course the lenses may have come from Germany. I had no way of knowing.
Svetlana took the rest of the day off, to show us around some more of Moscow.
She took us to the Pushkin Museum, with its spectacular collection of French impressionist originals, and she took us to the Arbat, a collection of narrow cobbled streets which had somehow survived Napoleon’s fire of 1812 and Hitler’s bombardment of 1942. We had lunch there in a little café with marble topped tables with ornate iron legs, such as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy might have eaten at, and perhaps they had. We were served little ravioli type things, pillows of pastry filled with savoury mince. Svetlana said they were called pelmini, or sometimes orichini, meaning “little ears”, on account of the pastry being pinched together at the ends.
We also visited several parks, of which the city has many. They were pleasant and well planted with flowers, but lawnmowers seem not to have caught on in the Soviet Union. By one park there was a cemetery. The graves were marked by headstones which were mostly without religious imagery, but quite a few had the star of Lenin in the place where the cross might have been. People seem to like to surround their departed with symbols.
Svetlana expressed mild disapproval when she saw the toy revolvers that our kids had bought at Disneyland. Children should not play with firearms, even in fun. Certainly we saw no such things among the modest range of toys available in the shops; just dolls and animals, trucks and cooking pots, and an electric bulldozer, which we bought. Svetlana was also concerned that we were feeding our children on margarine. Children should have butter. She took us into a grocery store, and somehow got priority in the queue to buy us half a kilo of chocolate flavoured butter, and half a kilo of plain. These were cut off a big block and wrapped in a fold of grease-proof paper. It was enough to last us to the Caucasus and back.
