One of the most stressful experiences of my year in Moscow was calling home. International direct dialling only existed for diplomats and us mere students had to reserve an international call in advance. ffice
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In the central post office, this involved queuing up to book and pay for the call and then waiting for your name to be called in a cavernous, echo bouncing hall, with telephone cabins around the side. This was particularly stressful, as the loud-speakers were of the British Rail variety, the announcer could not pronounce foreign names and the echo dissolved sound into fluff. Furthermore, not only did you have to catch your name, but also the number of your allotted cabin.
Once you made it into the right cabin, heart pounding, blood rushing in your ears, you picked up the receiver and waited for the operator to make the call and ask the person at the other end if they would accept the call. My family quickly learned to say YES to any garbled Russian operator who rung them. You paid in advance for your call, and were therefore limited to a pre-set duration. One minute before the end of your time, the operator would interrupt to tell you there was one minute left, and then at the end you got a couple of seconds warning before you were cut off.
At least in the post office you could turn up and make a call there and then. Although I was lucky enough to have a phone in my student room it didn’t make international calls any easier. You had to book a slot in advance and it often took dozens of attempts to even get through to the international operator just to book the call – and this was using an old fashioned dial phone, not a push button one, so no automatic redial function.
With the time difference between Moscow and the UK, most of my calls home were made in the early hours of the morning. My dreams in Moscow were often shattered by an explosive telephone ring, a stroppy international operator and finally, my Mum.
Old women in Russia were (and probably still are) fearsome. A life spent handling Russian men and mercilessly fighting to the front of queues no doubt. They were invariably stout and ugly with bulging shopping bags, wrinkled stockings and a faint whiff of pickled beetroot. Oddly enough, they often made me think of Kate Bush. The Russian word for old woman or grandma is ‘babushka’, like in the Kate Bush song. Except that Kate Bush doesn’t pronounce it right – the stress is on the first syllable ‘babushka’ and not on the second like in the song ‘babushka’. So, now you know.fficeffice" />
These women do not hesitate to speak their mind, and they definitely do not mind their own business. As a heedless foreign youngster, I was often berated in public by old women for not wearing a hat. I would have died a hundred deaths of cold by now if their dire warnings had come true.
One such babushka sticks in my mind. I was standing on a street corner waiting to meet some friends and she approached, tank like. I mentally prepared my penitent why-I’m-not-wearing-a-hat speech.
‘Young girl!’
‘You have such a lovely smile, and wonderful blue eyes. You are so lucky to have such smooth skin and soft hair. You have made me happy today! Make the most of your life!’
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Well
I
never
During my student year in Moscow, I had lectures in the morning and free afternoons. I got a part time job in the British Embassy cultural section, issuing visas and doing general admin. Very occasionally, I acted as interpreter for when Soviet citizens were being interviewed prior to being issued, or denied, a visa. The embassy staff didn’t speak Russian you see. This could have caused much pandemonium :fficeffice" />
Embassy non Russian speaking staff : what is the purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom ?
Scruffy student interpreter (me) : what is the purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom?
Soviet citizen : I have a place on an exchange programme for 6 weeks in London to improve my English
Scruffy student interpreter : he’s a famous Soviet dissident writer and wants to defect and the KGB are waiting outside the Embassy gate to arrest him
Despite the potential for seeing famous Soviets queuing in the corridor for visas, disappointingly the most exciting day of my employment was The Day of the Visit of the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. I shook his hand. He was very tall.
The second most exciting event was being invited for drinks at one of the diplomat’s luxury ghetto apartments. There was caviar and champagne, fine art, terribly British conversation about the natives, about how dreadfully difficult it was to manage in a country where they didn’t even have the same alphabet and about how well Humphrey was doing at Oxford.
Returning home on the metro afterwards I felt very disoriented. If I ever had the slightest wish of working in the diplomatic service, I knew then that I could never do it.
Arguably one of the most significant events of my year in Moscow, was the opening of the first McDonalds. Young Muscovites were supposedly desperate to get a job there because you were issued with a western style uniform – a fetching maroon pair of trousers with cream and maroon striped shirt, complete with baseball cap. I was just intrigued by the concept of waiting in a queue knowing exactly what you were going to get and knowing it wouldn’t have run out by the time you reached the front. There were stories of whole herds of Kazakh cattle being bred exclusively to supply McDonalds and debates over whether the gherkins were flown in from the States or locally supplied genuine Soviet gherkins…… this is how myths are born.fficeffice" />
It was a day’s outing in itself to go and walk along the queue, stretching all around the square and down the next street and watch whole families come out with a huge takeaway, pile excitedly into a waiting car and speed away to feast on Big Macs back home.
I doubt the queue is anywhere near as impressive these days.
My most surreal cinema experience in Moscow, in fact anywhere, had to be the time I went to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander. The Soviet film industry at the time must have been either desperately short of money or seriously lacking in artistic sensibility. I shall explain.fficeffice" />
The film was shown in the original Swedish. So far so good, I prefer foreign language films to be shown in the original with subtitles, you don’t get the awful fake sound quality and mismatched dubbing.
However, the subtitles were in German (this was in Moscow remember, where most people speak neither Swedish nor German, but Russian).
Fear not comrades! The Soviet film industry is not foolish, the cinema provides a live voice-over to accompany the film ….. yes! You see the film on the screen, you hear the original Swedish, you can read the German subtitles and you have a miserable, sullen, monotone live Russian voice-over in loud speaker type quality with one person playing all the roles.
I really must go and see the film again, because the meaning and subtlety entirely escaped me.
I went to more opera, ballet, concerts, museums and theatre in one year in Moscow than in the whole of the rest of my life put together. Tickets were ridiculously cheap and I must have gone on average once or twice a week. Most of my knowledge of music, drama and dance comes from that time – anything from classic Chekhov and Tchaikovsky to avant-garde experimental theatre. At the beginning of the year when my Russian was rather basic, I went to the ballet and opera but as my Russian improved I went to the theatre more often.fficeffice" />
A visit to the theatre in Moscow always started with the queue to the cloakroom – handing over snow spattered hat, coat, gloves, scarf and boots to the invariably grumpy attendant. The interval was a dash to the bar for a glass of champagne and some caviar, or in the cheaper theatres a bit of salami (probably the best bit of the evening) and then at the end of the show, rather than the wild burst of applause I was used to, you would clap in sync with everyone else. This felt rather spooky at first, was it part of Leninist doctrine that everyone is equal and should therefore not express individuality in clapping? Was it disrespectful to clap out of time?
The only time I experienced non-Communist clapping was in the Bolshoi theatre at a star studded performance of Swan Lake – and I think that must have been because the majority of the audience were American tourists who managed to drown out the synchronicity.
One thing which was never difficult to find in Moscow and which became a staple food for me, was sour cream. I hadn’t seen it before I went to Russia – not sure if this was because it wasn’t yet trendy in the UK or whether my food horizons were limited. The first time I bought some was highly embarrassing. I had by this stage learned the mega inefficient shopping method: fficeffice" />
- queue to see what is on sale and how much it is
- queue at the cash till to pay and get your receipt
- queue to hand over receipt and receive goods
However, I hadn’t realised that to receive your sour cream, you needed to bring your own jar. Sour cream was sold in bulk, not in jars and definitely absolutely not in plastic pots with re-sealable lids.
To much tutting from the jar-equipped Muscovite housewives, I had to give up my place in the queue and return home to get a jar……..
It made a yummy pumpkin & sour cream soup.