No showers 'til Moscow.

It's over half a year ago that I was in Russia, and I'm finally getting around to finishing this blog. The problem I had wasn't finding things to write about- every day threw up new experiences, stories and pictures which could each occupy their own blog- but learning how to edit the experience into several representative anecdotes and photographs that will give an idea of what happened over those 3 weeks.

Last night, talking in the kitchen to Olya's mother in my appalling, stuttering, grammatically anarchic attempt at pidgin Russian, the distance from St Petersburg struck me. In Berlin in January, daylight is something of a cameo appearance in the great nocturnal sitcom. St Petersburg in June enjoys the wonderful, disorientating phenomenon of the White Nights, when the sun (or at least the grey clouds) remain in the sky until way past midnight. By the time 21st June arrives, the city just simmers in a kind of post 2am twilight for a couple of hours before dawn swings back in.

We stayed at Olya's mother's flat on the island of Vassily Ostrov, connected to the rest of the city by a bridge which opens at night to let boats pass and leave the nocturnal drinkers and drivers stranded for an hour or two. Romantic, watching the lights on the other side of the river and the giant, gaping bridge raised towards the glowing sky, but I always somehow failed to appreciate this at 3am.

Russia itself struck me in a similar way; a beautiful, infuriating place. In St Peterburg you could overdose on beauty amidst the grand, crumbling apartment blocks and the interconnecting networks of dark, atmospheric courtyards which bred the sinister Dostoevskyan anti-heroes who seem to be the city's most famous ambassadors. The third night when we said goodbye to our friends and went walking the streets, pausing occasionally to descend into tiny 24 hour cellar grocery stores to buy strange 50 rouble microwave pizzas and bottles of the omnipresent Baltyka beer to sustain us on our journey, it felt like we were in some kind of dream. Whenever I felt like I had adjusted to my surroundings we would turn a corner and catch a glimpse of one of the Orthodox churches, all gold stucco and candy-coloured bulbous towers looming over you, a reminder that for all the Venetian canals and Italian/German-designed architecture, you're dealing with something else entirely.

Fleamarket in St. Petersburg.

Kirill in a St. Petersburg cafe.

Moscow punks in St. Petersburg.

Insane queues outside the Metro at Vassily Ostrov

. 'Archive'. Olya and her mother in a Vassily Ostrov courtyard.

The bridge to Vassily Ostrov. 3am, stranded again.

With Vanya and Kirill on St. Petersburg's beautiful metro system.

With Kirill at the Gulf of Finland. It's 10.30pm and sunny.

White Nights in St. Petersburg.

Hanging out in a park near St. Petersburg main station.

Pretending to understand a sailing boat at the famous Hermitage museum.

White Nights on the canals.

Olya and her niece Karina in a St. Petersburg bar.

This was confirmed after day 3 when we realised that the city's water supply was to be shut off for three weeks. Not three days, three weeks. We learned this after I'd just had a sweaty practice with the Cretin Boys from Moscow, who were in town for the weekend to play a show with their other band Give 'Em The Gun and with whom I was going to play two gigs, in St Petersburg and Moscow, the following weekend. I was standing in Olya's mother's flat in disbelief, but the Muscovites looked less than surprised. They'd already experienced this in May; it shifted from region to region like a carefully distributed drought.

'Why the hell would a civilised country leave its citizens without water for so long?' I asked.

The response was a grim smile, and a simple answer which might not be too far from the truth.

'Putin hates us.'

So, showers were taken by pouring pre-boiled buckets of water onto your partner's head as they squatted in the bath and then scrubbing furiously. Something soulful, I suppose, about getting back to basics like that. And something very fucking dubious about the government's attitude towards its citizens.

Months before we arrived I'd been put in touch with Kirill, who sorted me out a solo gig in St Petersburg in a laundrette/pub, and was responsible for putting me in touch with the Cretin Boys. He was to act as our unofficial host during the stay; a soft-spoken, dedicated pop-punk kid and all-round top chap. Through him we also met others, such as the wonderfully-named Aleksandr Nikolayevich. We asked why was the only person in Russia under the age of 90 who used his formal name. 'Oh, we tried to give him a punk nickname but couldn't think of anything.'

Before the laundrette gig I walked around the market with Olya, me clutching the guitar and nervously thinking through my setlist. 'Radio Maryja', a song which suggests that Putin's government was behind the assassination of dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya, should probably stay off the list, as well as the cover of 'I Wanna be a Homosexual' in notoriously homophobic Russia.

'Why?' asked Olya. 'Play them, it'll be interesting.'

I did, and it was. Down in the basement laundrette and cocky on adrenaline I sang Radio Maryja, slowing down the Politkovskaya verse for good effect, whilst against every expectation the Screeching Weasel ode to homosexuality turned into a full-on sing-a-long with the pop-punk kids. Music sans frontieres, after all!

In so many ways Russian punks are risking a lot more than their European or American counterparts by being open-minded and choosing to stand out from the crowd. The number of murders (often pre-meditated) each year in the Russian Federation of punks and anti-fascists, not to mention people from various ethnic, political and sexual minority groups, is truly shocking.

'We've been pretty lucky,' I was told casually after the last gig in Moscow 'We didn't get beaten up after either gig!'

With Kirill, Alyosha, Artur and Anya on the canal before the launderette gig.

In the launderette.

We're a happy family.

With the Cretin Boys at Griboyedev's, St. Petersburg.
With the Cretin Boys at Tabula Rasa, Moscow.

This Machine Kills Fascists... bilingually.
The gigs

After a very fun show, happy, sweaty and no longer entirely sober, a group of us made our way to the train station to catch the overnight train to Moscow. When the train was finally ready to board at around 2am we took our seats, only to find that we were all seated in different carriages. Olya and I were on our own opposite a very strange couple, a trashy middle-aged man who blared disco music from his headphones and a much younger woman, badly but expensively dressed whose purpose in life seemed to be to deprive me of any leg room with which I could reasonably sleep.

Soon, however, a storm of Ramones and Queers t-shirts passed through the carriage, taking us with them and we all ended up drinking a duty-free bottle of Famous Grouse in the small connecting part between carriages, a fine impromptu party which was framed on both sides by the most fantastic, stunning sunset I've ever seen. Maybe it's just a better class of sunset at 2.30am, but as we rattled east across the barren countryside it was putting on one hell of a display for us. The vast sky was a mess of greens, pinks and oranges. Russian trains are still the old-fashioned kind which rattle and smack satisfyingly against the tracks, and juddering along in the midst of all this across a foreign, mysterious landscape with a group of new friends and a bottle of whiskey was something truly beautiful.

Around 5am we retired, a very fancy way of saying that we staggered back to our seats, curled up and passed out.

Waiting for the night train to Moscow outside St. Petersburg main station.
Party in between the carriages.

Artur catches the Grouse.

Sunset in the wilderness, 3.30am.

Moscow

For the two days after the Moscow gig we hung out with Bagi and Alyosha from the Cretin Boys around the city. I've heard many times before that 'St Petersburg is Europe, Moscow is Russia', at least in an architectural sense, and the difference hit us as soon as we emerged bleary-eyed from the central station on Monday morning .

Bagi humoured me by taking us to see the museum dedicated to the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, his old apartment and several spots where the action in his masterpiece, 'The Master and Margarita', takes place. Having witnessed the peculiar rituals acted out in the little Orthodox ceremonies near Red Square, I was surprised to see I had my own little ticks at the altar of literature. I removed my hat, scribbled schoolgirl notes to the long-dead writer and threw them in a box specially reserved for fan mail as though he would show up in 5 minutes to check them.

The morning after the show we were sitting eating toast in an insanely wealthy apartment in a drab Moscow suburb which was the scene of the after-party and our subsequent crash pad. A young chap who has just arrived is cheerfully discussing how he was beaten up by fascists the night before, and possibly only survived because he was too drunk to feel anything.

'Anyway,' he said. 'I hear some fucking bourgeois played here last night?'

'Bourgeois?'

'Yeah, Westerner.'

'Oh, yeah. He's opposite you drinking tea.'

(Courtesy of subsequent translation)

We sell puppets. Medvedev and Putin are everywhere.

A kiosk in Moscow.

With Mikhail Bulgakov outside his flat in Moscow, where The Master and Margarita is set.

Bagi and Olya at Patriarch's Ponds, where the devil appears in the first chapter.

Night train from Moscow - St Petersburg

A diary entry, written on the night itself:

Carriage half-asleep.
Crackled announcement in Russian, followed by some laughter and several cheers. Football: Russia have scored against Sweden and are 1-0 up. It is the only announcement of the 9-hour trip.
Antiquated gas water boiler for making tea. It looks like an amateur science experiment from World War 2. Vase with cold water and bronze pipes. I creep up to take a photo. Caught red-handed by the ticket lady who asks me good-naturedly if I'm a spy. Niet, I reply, hoping she's joking. Ya turist. Not entirely sure which answer will get me in less trouble.
Remarkable sky. Vast, shimmering lakes litter the wilderness.

My James Bond act. Tea, anyone?

Early morning connecting train from St Petersburg - Zielona Gorska - Basa

A lady with a mullet listening to Kylie Minogue's 'Do the Locomotion' over her mobile phone while her young child bops.
Middle-aged lady passes through the carriage selling pens, plastic gloves and plasters. Very successfully.
Sour-faced blonde listens to techno too loud while her kid stares bored and twitching at the passing forests.
Pass village houses. Largely wooden.
Socks for sale.
Magazines for sale. Scientific American.

On the train to Zielona Gorska, in between sales pitches.

Basa

During the summer months Olya's mother works at a place in the middle of the forests between north-west Russia and the Finnish border. During Soviet times it was closed off and the only visitors were select groups of young pioneers for summer camps. It remained in pristine condition until the 1990's, when the restrictions fell and people from the surrounding towns and St Petersburg now travel here to enjoy the scenery. The only problem is that when they leave, their rubbish stays. Walking through these beautiful forests, pock-marked with hidden ice age lakes, it absolutely kills you to see the giant bomb craters from the Soviet-Finnish war, now filled in with mounds of rubbish formed by thoughtless, ignorant holiday makers. Unfortunately, the government appears to care even less than the visitors, and the pits keep on growing.

But still it was fucking wonderful. We took a long walk and, upon our return, realised we were out of water so stomped down to the well, lowering the wooden bucket 15 metres down and immersing it in the icy spring water before dragging it back up on the rope. We then gathered up vast clumps of stinging nettles using thick gloves, and Olya's mother made a delicious soup from the nettles, water and potatoes. While the two of them chatted in Russian I drifted away into my book. One of the glorious things about being permanently surrounded by a foreign language is that you can enjoy company without necessarily needing to be socially active. We shared a couple of beers in three 'stakhan' glasses and I very much regretted that we would be leaving at dawn. I felt like Dylan and The Band getting back to nature up at Woodstock. Next time, I told Olya, we should come back for a week.

Around midnight we took a boat out onto the lake closest to the 'Basa' camp. The only sounds were the oars hitting the water and the sky was filled with a wild pink sunset. There's no electricity in Basa so when the semi-darkness finally closed in the oil lamps came on in the cabin.

Former Finnish territory, in the forests near Basa.

Bringin' It All Back Home.

Half past midnight, sunset on the lakes.

I could get used to this.

Olya and her mother by kerosene lamplight in one of the few hours of darkness.

Three days later we finally said goodbye to Russia, and we were just about ready to leave. Through the punk scene we'd met so many amazing, intelligent people who were willing to put their neck on the line for the music they love in a hostile environment. But that environment itself, and the harshness you deal with from strangers on a day-to-day basis gradually wears you down. Coming from a cushy western European background, and with the awful exaggerated English notions of politeness and manners ('I'm sorry, my face appears to have hit your fist') which had already caused me problems at the Russian embassy, experiencing such a great deal of negativity and aggression in everything from buying a drink in a shop to getting off a bus is something beyond culture shock. Olya seemed to get even more frustrated by it, perhaps because it's closer to home and the connection to this mindset can't be escaped simply by leaving town.

Away from it all, though, batteries recharged, sifting through the hundreds of photos in an attempt to find just a few for this blog which will somehow sum everything up and represent different aspects of places and events (how the hell, though, can you pick just 5 pictures and call them 'Moscow'?), I've got one eye on the calendar for August 2009 and the other on my Russian phrasebook.

Do widzenia, Russiya.