Sunbathing in Siberia (30 page)

Aeroflot Flight SU1482E. January 5
th
2014. Moscow – Krasnoyarsk

For some reason the plane back to Krasnoyarsk was barely half full. We'd been placed in the centre row, meaning we had four seats to use as our own. Nastya lay across three of them and fell asleep sharpish, leaving me to think about what we were going back to. After six to ten months of living in Siberia, I had felt like I needed to get out and be somewhere else. Then after walking around Sweden for a couple of days Nastya and I couldn't help but miss Siberia. But from the moment we had to leave Stockholm and turn back towards Krasnoyarsk we both felt slightly miserable. We had been spoilt. The streets of both Stockholm and Helsinki were human friendly. The buildings weren't crumbling, the paving was even and had been laid well, there were no metal poles protruding from the ground right in the centre of the pavements, and there were no giant factories billowing smoke out into the sky or packs of wild hounds. As much as I have loved living in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia and Russia, towards the close of 2013 my experience of it was slightly marred.

At the end of June, Russia passed a very vaguely worded law banning the ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations'. This was drafted in as some measure to prevent young people from accidentally turning or choosing to be homosexual. Although the measure didn't affect me directly, I found it disturbing that there was a large group of people that I could no longer talk about, and who couldn't talk about themselves without fear of persecution. The law itself is actually aimed at talking to minors about homosexuality, but even talking or writing about ‘non-traditional sexual relations' in a positive light anywhere can be construed as propaganda. Therefore I now have to refer to some as ‘people I cannot talk about legally without the threat of prosecution (PICTALWTTOP).

After the law was passed, I asked some of my friends in Krasnoyarsk what it meant for them and whether they had any feelings on the subject. Few people were against it. The majority thought the law was necessary, and some even thought it didn't go far enough. These people I now refer to as anti-humans. As far as they're concerned Russia isn't a place for anyone and everyone. There are able-bodied ‘traditional' Russians, and then there is everyone else. Consequently, the PICTALWTTOP cannot clearly identify themselves as being so. To avoid the threat of violence they have to mask their sexuality/personality/ identity. It's rare to see openly PICTALWTTOP in Krasnoyarsk, which furthers the view shared by anti-humans, that there are ‘no PICTALWTTOP in my city'. I've heard that phrase so many times now. Sometime before Christmas, a friend of mine, a female of middle age, came to me with a bruised face. She had been assaulted by a group of men because she was quite open about her being one of the PICTALWTTOP.

Russian men, for the most part, proclaim to respect women to the ‘-nth degree' – they help them take their coats off and open doors for them, as if women can't do these things for themselves; it's claimed they have ‘an old-fashioned respect for women' – just not women who love women. When I discussed this violent attack with some of my friends, they simply shrugged it off. ‘It's what people get for being unnatural' apparently. Unnatural is a term I heard said a lot towards the end of the year. When I asked another anti-human if he/she thought the PICTALWTTOP should be segregated from society to protect the rest of Russia, he/she said ‘yes but then the world would cry genocide'. This same person then went on to explain that the Roman Empire had fallen because there were too many PICTALWTTOP, who had weakened the level of masculinity required for Rome to continue its empire.

Most of the anti-humans seem to think that ‘non-traditional sexual relations' are something you choose when you're in your teens, if you're exposed to propaganda. Though when I asked one anti-human when he/she chose to be heterosexual, he/she replied that no choice was ever necessary as no one ever spoke of the PICTALWTTOP in Soviet times, and no PICTALWTTOP were ever seen anywhere. The fact that being one of the PICTALWTTOP was an actual criminal offence before 1993 was apparently not worth taking into consideration. Listening to the anti-humans run off their fascist diatribes often turned my stomach. There is such an air of hostility to those who don't conform to ‘the ideal', that it would come as no surprise to me if the Russian government announced some sort of removal, or ‘cleansing' programme tomorrow.

In Russia, men must be men. They must buy Swiss army knives (which are sold nearly everywhere), they must have a swagger, wear beanie hats, look as if they have big muscles, go fishing, climb mountains; be ‘men', or ‘men's men' without literally being a man's man. Women on the other hand must look attractive, climb mountains, but climb to a lesser height, wear dresses, keep their figures, and be mothers. There is little or no room for people outside these expectations.

The second thing that negatively affected the magic of living in Krasnoyarsk was the transferral of Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from the prison in Mordovia to a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk. I knew the prison, because I had walked past it on my way to rugby matches. At first I was angry about the transferral, but for all the wrong reasons. Now people would be able to say ‘Pussy Riot sent to Siberia', which of course would reinforce the old negative stereotype. And with her detention being in my home city, Krasnoyarsk would therefore only become known in the Western world as ‘that place where Pussy Riot were sent to'. I didn't want that, because Krasnoyarsk is so much more than the detention centre. Before this, the Pussy Riot saga had been something far away, outside of Siberia, and therefore something outside of my life. I was able to comfortably distance myself from it, as Siberians are able to feel a distance from Moscow. But then it landed on my doorstep, and what it revealed was that I had less concern about the life of a person, sentenced to two years in prison for singing a protest song, and more concern for the reputation of a city. I had to check myself, because my love for Krasnoyarsk had blinded me to the suffering of others. Although I wasn't actually an anti-human, I couldn't say I was a humanitarian either. It became obvious from then on that Krasnoyarsk and I had become inextricably linked, that I was also undeniably complicit in the detention of a young woman from Moscow. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Thankfully both members of Pussy Riot were released from prison in late December under a new amnesty bill, along with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the famous oligarch dissident who had been imprisoned back in 2003. Though the amnesty bill was widely seen as a political stunt to make Russia appear more human friendly before the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, I was still glad of the fact. This time for the right reasons.

I don't want to be seen as someone who condemns Siberia as a backward land; because I'm not, and it isn't. ‘People are people, and people have a right to life', is another expression I heard in 2013. And though I heard it less than the anti-human views, it goes to show that there is hope. Though I occasionally like to think that I am more civilised, because I don't believe in regular apocalypse, domovoi, or humans being ‘natural' and ‘unnatural', I too have been forced to admit that I have my own faults. Both Nastya and Siberia are equally responsible for this realisation of contradictions within myself, and I am a better person because of it.

As the plane began its descent into Krasnoyarsk, my feeling of gloom subsided. I was glad to be getting home. Krasnoyarsk was, after all, the place that granted me amnesty. If it wasn't for Russia, Nastya and I would never have been able to live together, we might never have married and our relationship might have ended back in 2011. Though other people's rights are not recognised in Russia, the right of Nastya and I to be a family had been. This is something I am ever thankful for. Though there is much room for improvement in Russia, there are many things that it gets right, and credit must be given where it is due. If it weren't for Russia, not only would this journal have no reason for being, but my world would be so much smaller. I would be roughly the same person I had been before I left for Moscow in March 2011; because of all the things, people and possessions I left behind in Wales, what I miss the least is me, the ‘me' of the past. When I first moved to Siberia, my biggest complaint was that I had to bring myself with me. I thought that the person I was could never be separated from the person I would become, that there would be so many trace elements it would be impossible to be anything other than precisely who I was. For so many years I often dreamt of meeting my past self, and giving him a kick in the arse. I wanted to change the man I used to be so much, because I couldn't admit that I was still that same person. Today, if I were to meet my pre-Siberian self, I would probably have nothing to say to him; nothing at all. For we are strangers now.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the archives and staff of one of Moscow's museums, Marina Tsvetaeva; the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago
– all so useful when researching this book. I also found the following websites invaluable during my fact-finding missions:

bbc.co.uk

independent.co.uk

siberiantimes.com

usinfo.ru

go2add.com

csmonitor.com

armscontrol.org

www.fas.org

state.gov

lonelyplanet.com

stolby.ru

ceuweekly.blogspot.ru

symbolic-mirage.blogspot.co.uk

memorial.krsk.ru

newworldencyclopedia.org

dommuseum.ru

rt.com

theday.co.uk

telegraph.co.uk

russiavotes.org

nytimes.com

forbes.com

metro.us

rferl.org

forbes.com

themoscownews.com

themoscowtimes.com

huffingtonpost.co.uk

theguardian.com

greenpeace.org

bellona.org

washingtonpost.com

projectavalon.net

perezhilton.com

Further Acknowledgements

For putting me up for the night or acting as a pillow or mattress, I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to Gaz, Alex Werner, Ryan, Brad, Guto, Ed, Mace, Sam, Ruth and Ed's Crocodillo.

For looking at early chapters of this book I would like to thank Peter Brooks, Lynne Rees, Dad and Mali Evans.

For offering support, helping me out in a variety of other ways, and being nice when they could have been otherwise, I'd like to thank the following people and organisations: my mum, my dad, Lindsey and Jon, Siw Hughes, Parthian Books, Meic Birtwhistle of Trefenter, Susan and Etienne Evans of Abertridwr, JJ, Ruth Barnett, Chapter Arts Centre, Aeroflot, especially the pilots who could probably pilot a plane through hell and still land it safely, Russian Immigration, The Russian embassy in London, The British embassy in Moscow, Alun Burge, Alun's neighbours, Evgeny Nikitin, everyone at
Blown Magazine
, Rachel Trezise for telling me ‘what not to write', Zoë Brigley, Bill Rees, Katy Evans-Bush, Alan Perry, Jean Perry, Aida Birch, Amanda Birch, Siôn Tomos Owen, Siôn's mum and dad,
The Moscow Times
,
The Siberian Times
, and everyone else who I can't recall.

For giving me a place to sleep on a million occasions, generally saving my neck from ruin and death, and being a decent sort of fella, I offer blokeish manhugs to Torben Schacht. Without you, not only would it have been ten times harder moving to Siberia but I would have no cover for this book.

For their patience and supplying me with five different Russian visas, I offer huge thanks to realrussia.co.uk

I would like to offer extra special thanks to my wife, for being able to read my mind, general love and gooeyness, and inspiration; my mother and father-in-law, for their support,
pelmeni
, and for putting up with my Britishisms, and everyone I have met in Siberia this past year who have helped me forge a new life.

Lastly, I offer the biggest and bestest thanks to editor extraordinaire Susie Wild, for those nights in the Uplands, kicking me in the arse, and turning a pile of notes haphazardly written into… this. Without you, this whatever it is, wouldn't be whatever it is.

Parthian

The Old Surgery

Napier Street

Cardigan

SA43 1ED

www.parthianbooks.com

First published in 2014

© M.A. Oliver-Semenov 2014

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-910409-07-7 epub

ISBN 978-1-910409-08-4 mobi

Editor: Susie Wild

Cover design by Torben Schacht

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.