Sunbathing in Siberia (14 page)

At the apartment we turned on the TV to pass the time and fill the air with noise. There was a breaking news item about Krasnoyarsk's Cheremshanka Airport, the sister airport just two miles west of Yemelyanovo. Even though it was snowing like billy-o, the terminal building and control tower had burned down during a mysterious four-hour blaze that took thirty-eight fire engines to extinguish. It seemed the fates had conspired to remind me that I had no travel insurance. Still, it was a few days before I went online and actually bought some.

That same day, after only a few hours' rest, we left for the city centre to see the Christmas decorations. The central avenue, Prospekt Mira, was fantastically decorated with lights in the trees, lights between all the buildings, and lights running up the street lamps. Every fountain had also been switched off because all the water had been replaced with light displays. I felt like I was alive inside a Christmas card, one of those pop-up cards that also play music. It may sound garish, but it didn't look or feel that way at all. It was a very different experience from the Christmas feeling I had known in Wales, and it was easy to become excited by it. There were no shoppers running around like headless chickens, instead I saw couples arm-in-arm – sometimes with a child wrapped up in fur – stopping to admire carousels in toyshop windows.

The central square located between Ulitsa Bograda and Ulitsa Dubrovinskogo becomes the gathering point for locals and tourists alike. This is because Krasnoyarsk has the largest Christmas tree in all of Russia, which stands at 46 metres. Surrounding this tree are dozens of intricate ice sculptures, ranging from 6 to 12 feet in height. There are many obvious subjects for the statues such as frozen people dancing, ice ships and wolves balancing balls on their noses but they also carve a few things you wouldn't expect such as giant sewing machines, penny farthings and ice telescopes. To keep the children amused they even make playgrounds – fortresses, labyrinths, and palaces – complete with staircases and slides that both children and adults play on. Beneath the Christmas tree was a large painting of Grandfather Frost, the Russian equivalent of Father Christmas. He is the same as Father Christmas in most ways except that he apparently brings children presents in person, instead of when they are sleeping. As well as a long white beard, big black boots and a long red coat, he is often depicted as carrying a magical staff and is always accompanied by his granddaughter, Snegurochka, dressed in long silver-blue robes and a furry shapka.

The Russian winter attire is exactly as you would imagine. Thick coats and warm snow boots, though many people who work in offices wear fur-lined smart black shoes and woollen office coats over smart suits. Russian women, for the most part, wear full-length coats of various shapes and materials, and only those with large incomes, or rich husbands, wear black mink. I saw many of these wealthier women floating around with mink hoods obscuring their faces from view. There are an unusual number of tall women in Russia, and when they have their mink coats and high-heeled boots on, they look like goddesses, similar to the smartly dressed women I have seen floating about in Paris. The majority of these women are, as my mates would say, ‘smokin' hot' with high cheekbones and perfectly-sculpted eyebrows. The men are less attractive – they are either tall and skinny or short and stocky. Men's haircuts are also less appealing, they often have very short fringes and mullet style locks at the back of short-cropped hair. Nastya and I would often comment when we saw a Siberian goddess float by with a small Russian man on her arm. It just didn't seem right. I think this is because old-fashioned gender roles are still common in Russia. Women are expected to look flawless, while men are expected to be very hard and very strong, which they are.

Being a Welshman I'm not afraid of much, but I do have a small list of things I wouldn't like to meet down a dark alley; Siberian men are on that list, along with Charles Bronson, and the scary robot-lady from
Superman 3.
Not only do Siberian men have a harder life, what with the weather and the dacha lifestyle, but the majority of them have to do compulsory military service before the age of twenty seven. By the time they are thirty they are tough as bears. The only reasons a man is exempt from military service are having two or more children, having a medical certificate declaring them unfit, or studying at university. All full-time students are free from conscription, but they can be drafted for one year after graduation. Those who continue full-time postgraduate education are not drafted. This, I suspect, is why Russia produces an inordinate number of great scientists and why their technology, especially their military technology is scarily advanced.

Although I had brought my own fake-fur ushanka from the UK, and I had a large woollen cardigan under my coat, it was insufficient to keep out the driving wind. My shapka let out too much heat and my coat, which was heavy and weather proof by British standards, felt thin as paper. Boris, who has a wardrobe full of spare hunting clothes lent me an old black winter coat that was two sizes too big for me, but very warm, and a real black mink ushanka. Because my British shapka was so thin, Boris asked me to give it to him. When he was climbing mountains in the taiga, while fighting off bears and stalking deer, his head would sweat too much under real fur, so a poorly-made British ushanka was perfect. With my huge black coat, black furry shapka and black snow boots I looked the part, and as I was now disguised as a Russian, Nastya and I were free to enjoy walks throughout the city and along the banks of the Yenisei without me freezing to death. One of the winter pleasures we often indulged in was buying
shashliks
from street stalls near the giant Christmas tree. From the middle of December to the first week of January a fleet of street merchants stand around the tree with mobile barbeques, selling a range of chicken, pork and beef
shashliks
on skewers. Despite the snow, the meat is always well cooked and very hot, although a bit pricey at times. Still I didn't mind paying over-the-odds for hot food, because it is so much better than anything available at the cafés.

Like the UK, Russia has a variety of cafés that differ in style and standard. The worst of them, which are mostly chains, offer lukewarm food that is often dry and boring. Instead of getting a full meal on one plate, like you can in any British café, you have to order things separately, which are then served on plastic disposable plates. There is normally a queue system in these cafés. They are designed so that you pick up a tray as you enter, collecting little dishes from counters as you shuffle along towards the till point. When you reach the till, the already lukewarm food is cold as British seawater. Known as stolovaya, this type of café was created during Soviet times and based on the school dinners system. Some of the other cafés are different in that they don't have a tray system and you only get your food when you pay for it at the counter or it is brought by a waiter. I preferred these places as they were the closest I could get to proper independent British cafés that serve proper hot grubbage, plus they were usually well decorated with wooden beams and soft lighting. I didn't often get to see them, however, as Nastya preferred to visit the cheapy-cheapy stolovaya she had grown up with. Although some of them were a modern take on the Soviet style, they were all quite similar in that they housed very tired and uncomfortable furniture. There is always a noticeable difference in clientele also. While the better cafés were usually full with people who knew how to smile, the stolovaya were crammed with the joyless faces, people who looked lost in thought and who I assumed weren't able to bring themselves to break free from Soviet discomfort.

While the older generations always wrapped up warm, younger folk occasionally didn't. I saw men wearing trainers, and women in their twenties wearing short skirts and thin pairs of tights. They must have been freezing. It seems wherever you go in the world there are always a few people who would rather sacrifice their health in order to look fashionable. Nastya told me about a friend of hers from Moscow who often went clubbing at night in a short skirt and busked in the street by day without gloves on. She contracted pneumonia and died in her mid-twenties; an early death for the sake of looking good on the dance floor.

The Mormon Invasion

There are a high number of Mormons in Krasnoyarsk. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, they came in droves from America to preach their God stuff. Once they had set up a big church they started giving free English lessons as a way to attract people. Before we met, Nastya used to attend these English classes just for the practice, and though she quite enjoyed being part of the community and being able to speak English for an hour, she wasn't taken in by what she referred to as their ‘fake smiles'.

Being a staunch existentialist, I'm uncomfortable listening to anything remotely religious. I think this has a lot to do with my father, who, when I was young, would shout abuse at the television during any news items related to religious affairs. Although I really loved singing hymns during school assembly back in the eighties, when I became a teenager, growing up in poverty in a seriously run down neighbourhood, the idea that some bearded holy man created everything ‘for a reason' just didn't wash with me. Since then, much like my dad, if anyone talks to me about religious matters my ears automatically begin to switch off. Nastya usually had a lot of good things to say about her experiences with the Mormons, and made a great effort to convince me that they were a decent breed of people. We had to agree to disagree. However there were some points where we did see eye to eye: after each English lesson, the American Mormons apparently give an hour's speech on gospel-related blah, and are normally very well dressed when they do this. Of course, these well turned out individuals attract a lot of attention. After all, they are foreigners, who are not only extremely polite and friendly, but smile when they talk. When a young Russian expresses a slight interest in the Americans they are then offered a private visit at home at a later date. However, instead of being visited by the actual person they spoke to, an ‘elder' usually goes to their house with the intention of talking the curious person into joining the Mormons. This is, in part, due to the fact that it is forbidden for the American Mormons to have casual relations with the natives while on foreign missions. They are also not allowed to drink, smoke, or do any of the things I loved doing in my mid-twenties. When someone succumbs to the elder's pitch, they are then invited to become a member, where they get to attend regular gatherings. This so called fellowship doesn't come free. For a Russian person to join the Mormons they are encouraged to pay the minimum of 10 per cent of their income, which even Nastya could see was rather a lot of money.

As Nastya is still on good terms with the Mormons, despite having never joined up, we were invited to drink berry juice with one of her Mormon friends. During our meeting this Russian Mormon convert told me a controversial story that had happened about twenty years earlier. In the 1990s, when the Russian economy was at its lowest point, and security was a little lax, there was an incident involving a few American Mormon elders. Part of Krasnoyarsk is militarised, in the same way that part of St Athan in Wales is; and of course, while it's fine to walk in the non-militarised areas, it's completely illegal to walk through the gate into the military zone. Even so, this is precisely what the Mormon folk did, if they were indeed Mormons. When caught they gave the excuse that they had gone to preach ‘the word' to the military. Apparently the barbwire and rows of electric fencing weren't big enough clues that they weren't welcome. This didn't wash with the Russians who quickly deported them. Thinking about it afterwards I wondered just how many of these Mormons were actually spies. It's the perfect cover. Mormons take particular care of their bodies, in the same way that the CIA do; it's not unusual for them to wander around annoying people by asking too many questions, plus they have access to special religious visas because they are sponsored by the church. I still can't help but smile to myself when I think of this story. There would have been no other way into that military complex, other than simply walking in. Those spies were either really arrogant, really desperate; or both.

Nastya, her parents, as well as a few of her friends and colleagues, told me that they thought the Mormon missionaries from America were mostly spies. Thinking about it, the notion that Americans would plant sleeper spies in Russia wasn't so far-fetched. It wasn't so long ago that the British government was caught red-handed during the spy-rock-scandal of 2006. Left near a tree just outside Moscow, a fake rock was fitted with all the latest gadgetry that could send and receive information from spies as they walked past it, using small computers in their hands to interact with it. What the British didn't know was that they were being watched the whole time by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). The affair became even more embarrassing when a video clearly showing British embassy staff walking past the rock, with eyes darting this way and that, was shown on Russian State TV. Following this there was the 2010 incident of ten Russian sleeper spies being discovered in the US, who included Anna Chapman, who became a national hero in Russia and a worldwide name. As a direct result of the discovery of spies in America there was another spy scandal, only this time it was a Russian accused of spying on the UK. In August 2010, Ekaterina Zatuliveter, a parliamentary aide to Mike Hancock, MP for the Liberal Democrats, was accused by MI5 of being a Russian sleeper spy and faced deportation. Although she was later released without charge, it came to light during the investigation that Mike Hancock had asked many questions in the House of Commons related to Britain's nuclear weaponry; not only that but his office had requested information on the location of the entire British nuclear fleet, including an inventory of missiles.