Dresden, a Contradiction

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep, wrote William Wordsworth as he stood on Westminster Bridge in London at dawn over 200 years ago. Standing on a bridge over the river Elbe in Dresden at sunset on Saturday, the exact opposite seemed true. The statues of the Baroque old town, silhouetted against the glowing sky, appeared to be coming to life. The blackened forms of the startled seagulls or darting swallows became indistinguishable in colour and tone from the frozen human forms that tower above the riverbank. They became part of the city, their raised hands and open books seemed suddenly urgent and contemporary. The ghosts of Dresden were among us, talking to us, preaching and arguing.

At least that's the way it seemed to me. The world has always been pervaded by a sense of timeless historical dialogue. Just because Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche or Albert Camus are no longer living does not keep them out of the public domain. We are free to attack them, defend them, disagree with them or develop their ideas. And in Dresden as night settles onto the city, I have to wonder whether it was the sculptors' original intention that the birds and the sunset should somehow awaken their creations in the ambiguity of darkness. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, Hegel told us. That is, knowledge (the owl) comes always after the event (the day). But in Dresden it seemed like an illustration of that truth. The representatives of history, knowledge and wisdom, like Hegel's owl, come alive only as the sun begins to set.

Dresden was once one of the most beautiful cities in Europe before it was destroyed by controversial Allied bombing raids towards the end of World War II. It has been impressively rebuilt and is once again a wonderful, if scarred, place. The lovely old town was bombed into near oblivion, but has been painstakingly reconstructed. So, too, has the Church of the Three Kings. The next afternoon we climbed to the very top of the rebuilt church to get a view of the city. Sprawling before us against the lush green backdrop of the Elbe valley and the Saxon Wine Road were resurrected Baroque masterpieces next to the East German high-rises, and the still-recognisable zig-zag layout of medieval street plans leading to the gleaming glass constructions of post-1989 capitalism. And yes, there they were, my statues. Frozen still and a stony grey in the early autumn sunlight, their voices had dimmed since the previous evening.

After 20 minutes or so staring out at 'the Florence of the Elbe', we climbed back down through the clock tower. Casting a last glance at the three giant bells in the steeple, motionless and silent, I descended the next flight of stairs. And then there was a sudden, frightening explosion of sound. An apocalyptic racket was raging and shaking the tower; the bells had started up. Instead of escaping the deafening noise, I hurried back up into the tower, where I found Olya, Spider and Debby standing by the bells, their fingers jammed tightly in their ears as they stood on the trembling wooden floor. It was beautiful; it annihilated all other thoughts and words, an extreme silence that shook us to our very bones.

Another Dresden contradiction was in full swing. This was no historical dialogue with the statues; this was the voice of unconquerable Time, drowning out mortal words and deeds as it rang its wrought-iron truths across this strange city. Sometimes, the bells told me as their violent, beautiful cacophony echoed through our bodies and vibrated in our toes, history isn't a dialogue at all. Sometimes history is just telling us to shut up for a minute and listen.

Moonshadow, Moonshadow

This week, I realised for the first time that a moonshadow is not just a Cat Stevens song. Having spent most of my life in cities, I am used to viewing the moon as a rather tame object, rolling around above the neon and the high-rises in a pale soup of light pollution. But out here in the vast, lake-littered forests close to the Russian-Finnish border, the moon is a violent thing. I stepped out of our cabin one clear night at 2. 30 am and there they were; long, sinister shadows cast by the silvery light in the sky, the mud and the shacks of the little settlement shimmering in a ghostly pallour.

This moon is a strange creature; the shadows it casts in our imaginations vary wildly between different people and cultures. My favourite dictionary definition of all time, from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), is the superbly lazy description of the horse as a Beast well-known. A little unfair to horses, perhaps, but reasonably accurate. The moon, on the other hand, may be described as a Beast unknown.

Let's look at the evidence. The Polish anti-Stalinist poet Antoni Słonimski, with a healthy dose of Central European idealism, saw the moon as possessing great symbolic value. It was the last outpost of purity in a world that was both politically and morally corrupt. In his poem, 'In Defence of the Moon', he urges:

Let the moons turn unchanged in their courses

Let the sky, at least, remain pure

John Keats, on the other hand, saw the moon as the head of a sort of celestial royal family. His famous 'Ode to a Nightingale' states, with satisfaction:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

Beautiful words, and I think of them often as I gaze up at that Buckingham Palace in the sky. But trust the British to put everything into a hierarchy!

My favourite, however, will always be the wandering Tang Dynasty poet and scholar Li Po, one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. As he spent his life roving around the enchanted forests of ancient China, he saw the moon as a friend and a drinking companion. He had only to lean up against a tree with a cup of white wine, look up at the heavens and he would be in good company.

I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

Plenty to mull over, then, as I sit here back in St. Petersburg typing up my notes on this Beast unknown; no, the Beast unknowable. Outside the window is the noise and the glow of the big city, the glare of the misleading electric lights. Here, too, we cannot quite trust what we see. What was it that Nikolai Gogol, St. Petersburg's own glorious weirdo, warned us all those years ago?

Beware the hours of darkness, when the devil himself lights the streetlamps in order to show everything in a false light.

But that's another story.

Imagined Communities

The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? No problem.

Times, however, are notorious for changing. Cycling to work today, proudly sporting the new 2010-2011 Brentford away shirt, I was basking in an irrational sense of pride. The sun was shining, I had the excellent new Invalids tunes on my iPod as I raced over the bridge, and I was wearing the colours of my local team. But why should a thirty-year-old man feel proud at the ability to pull a T-shirt over his head in the morning?

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities defines a nation as a community that is dreamed by a group of people who, by and large, will never know each other personally. Membership, as it were, is "perceived". We have a common history. We remember the same things, forget the same things. We can feel proud that a writer or a band or an athlete happens to come from our particular political entity. Nationalism feeds on the irrational. As A. J. P Taylor once observed: If men were sane, there would be no history.

If men and women were sane, there would probably also be no football. In many ways football clubs, like nations, are also imagined communities. We have our "government", the people who run things on a day-to-day basis, but much of what we understand as a football club revolves around memories, rivalries and shared myths (FA Cup Quarter Final 1989, a 4-0 victory over Fulham in 1992, promotion at Peterborough the same season) that can set even the most rational of pulses racing.

Why is it that we can feel offended by the existence of rival teams, without whom the entire game would be meaningless? And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat in June because of my disdain for our local rivals, and yet I get on very well personally with every Fulham fan I've ever met?

This is where the tribal element comes into play. As England's nationhood was shaped by defining themselves 'against' French culture and values, football supporters, too, are fond of defining ourselves in the context of what we're not, rather more than as what we are. Even the Brentford matchday programme now bears the legend: Real Football, Real Fans. But where are the football and the fans not real? It is tempting to answer: The Premiership, that rich breeding ground for fairweather fans and glory hunters who mistake a Sky TV subscription for a season ticket. But then, I know plenty of fans at that level of the game who are much more dedicated than myself. The truth is back in that pesky grey area, and grey is a lousy colour for a football club.

"In football," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

But as I arrived at work and got off my bike, I remembered that we're pretty damned complicated ourselves.

The Roaring Twenties

One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century (which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century (which ended with the collapse of communism in 1991). It is therefore extremely likely that many lives also cannot be conveniently divided into decades like pieces of birthday cake, but seem instead to be one sticky pile of chronological dough that refuses to take any recognisable form. A messy clump of years.

So I'm reasonably happy with this tidy, well-ordered gift to hindsight that, should I ever inflict an autobiography on this world, will neatly fit into one chapter entitled something awful like 'The Wild Years'. My first, rather modest order of business as I stare forward at this gaping, blank slate of a decade, is to yet again try to maintain this blog on a regular basis. This will range from the usual (currently extremely sporadic) output of articles and poems, to simply pasting links to news items or videos that I feel like sharing. I'll say it now publicly so that there's no reneging on this promise to myself: Anyone who visits Quality Footwear regularly will find frequent updates and new material.

Timothy Garton Ash has been a regular source of quotations on this blog so far. Presumably unwittingly, he also played a part in the course that my twenties took. It was reading his book The File in my late teens that definitively tipped the balance in favour of my later choosing, aged 20, to study in Berlin as opposed to one of the more picturesque and venerable southern German university towns like Freiburg or Heidelberg. Likewise, his writings on the Solidarity movement inspired me to attempt to learn Polish in 2001. Although I later switched to Russian, it was those long-gone snowy afternoons drinking tea by candlelight with my Polish teacher in an unrenovated, crumbling Prenzlauer Berg tenement block that cemented my passion for the strange new (or renewed) geographical and cultural entity known as Central Europe.

It is fitting, therefore, to celebrate this new decade's resolution with a video of a recent talk given by Garton Ash on his latest book, Facts are Subversive. Highly recommended if you have 27 minutes to spare. Hearing him refer to a pedantic colleague as the 'Ayatollah of fact-checking' seems to make it be worth the virtual journey alone.

Night Train

Russian jazz has come a long way since the days of Valentin Parnakh's First Eccentric Orchestra (pictured) and Stalinist repression. This second abandoned poem is about a night in late December when we attended a jam session at a basement jazz club in central St. Petersburg. It also includes a couple of scenes from the journey home, through the centre of the city and under the river with the last metro back to Vassily Island. Somehow these frozen nights out on the town and the dash (or should I say ice-skate?) through the streets to make the last metro have become so tangled in my memories that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.

In a sense, it could have been anywhere. The quality of the musicianship and the standard bop repertoire would have been equally at home in Amsterdam or Berlin. But there were tell-tale signs. The peculiarly Russian faces and careless dress sense, and the rich ethnic mix of Slavs and musicians from other parts of the former USSR. The couple of bored, pretty girls at the side, ignoring the music and just hoping to meet a rich foreign businessman. Right down, of course, to the drinks that never arrived.

Russki Dzhazz

Fleamarket nudes spoil beige walls
Above ill-lit front tables
Glowing faces flowering from
Woolen polo neck sweaters
Nicotine nails
Scratching greasy once-blonde hair

Girls
Inspecting the blue shadows for wealth
Deaf to our cacophony
Alert to the cut of the silk
The stuffed leather
Here hiding out
Amidst the dusk of Armenian eyes
And lightbulb foreheads
- A thankless task
They'll go home sighing

And
On bandstand
Portly pianist
Some rogue bank clerk, shirttails ousted
Grimaces into ivory
Punctuates
Nods, shows teeth at
Drummer – what to say – he drums
Swipes, slaps, smacks, alliteration
Of a kind

Waiting on drinks, still
American jazz, yes, but Russian service
Banker just quoted Gillespie
Salt-peanuts salt-peanuts
Where’s champagnska to wash them down with?

Baritone bell raised gleaming street level
Bassman hunched like yesterday’s washerwomen
Over his mournful charge
Wringing those old guts dry
Misses cue, nods at polished bar

-All change over
I’d sit in I don’t know how-

Midnight run for metro
Man at grim coatcheck’s
Polar moustache moved by laughter
Really it’s just getting started
But paka
Patchwork chords locked in cellar
Paka

Home over the Nevsky Prospekt
Snow piles swim
In the restless grand Christmas lights
Million dreamless colours evade
Nikolai Gogol's ragged ghost, hunched in the shadows
Madly

Under the Neva in the tunnel's death rattle
Out past frozen sodium-bright kiosks
And the Soviet grocery
Up darkened, complaining stairs

Into the flat where warmed icicles
Whisper unseen, electric
Joining courtyard drains
Echoing now, I hear them clearly.

All You Need Is Love

The whole meeting had the air of an illegal gathering. There were about 25 of us sitting in a small attic room in St. Petersburg, Russia, watching black and white Beatles movies and surrounded by massive Beatles flags, posters and memorabilia. Occasionally a giant John Lennon or Paul McCartney board would drop from its hinges onto the head of some unsuspecting guest.

In fact, until around 20 years ago, this kind of thing was illegal here. The organiser, Kolya Vasin, is a Soviet underground legend who converted his St. Petersburg apartment into a Beatles museum in 1966 and has never looked back. He was the only Russian to exchange correspondence with John Lennon, and a founding member of the first Soviet Association of Rock Musicians in 1971 (which collapsed when one of its members was arrested and imprisoned). Now he’s spent the last couple of decades trying to get the world’s first Beatles Temple built on Vasilievsky Island at the mouth of the River Smolenka. In the meantime, his office/apartment is the temporary home of the temple.

With grey hair, wild eyes and a big Woodstock-style beard, Vasin takes the microphone and rambles on cheerfully about John Lennon for a bit. He uses Russian diminutives, affectionate nicknames for friends and family, when referring to the Beatles. Johnik, Paulchik, Georgeik and Ringochik. In Vasin’s worldview, John Lennon was sent by God and now lives in a monastery in northern Italy. (This theory, if it were ever proven, would have interesting legal repercussions for Mark David Chapman, his killer). Then he suddenly emits an ear-splitting yelp into the microphone; the audience’s collective heads practically explode. Everyone ducks and winces. Vasin grins. If you’re the type of person who dedicates their life to building a Beatles Temple, I guess you’re allowed to do things like scream annoyingly into microphones without people getting too upset.

Then the musical entertainment appears, an American named Jan Britten Owen who plays Beatles tunes on a 12-string guitar. He’s all decked out in a Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band suit, and would seem rather eccentric himself were he not sharing a stage with Kolya Vasin. After an hour or so of belting out the hits, the show is over and the guest star is besieged with requests for autographs and photos. I’m introduced to Mr Vasin, who tells us that they’re going to the temple in a minute and we’re welcome to drop by. “Sounds fun,” Olya tells me. “Expect indoctrination, though.”

I wasn’t quite sure what form Beatles indoctrination would take. Enforced ingestion of LSD? Sticking pins into Yoko Ono voodoo dolls? As we trudged down the 5 flights of stairs and back into the snow, we resolved to find out. At any rate, it wasn’t far to walk. The gig, like the makeshift temple, was on John Lennon Street. Vasin successfully convinced the local government to rename the city’s smallest street in his hero’s honour. The sign on the little door announced:

In the name of peace, love, music, and John Lennon

We knocked and it swung open from the inside. It was a bit like the scene from Being John Malkovich where he steps inside his own head. Every single spare inch of the small office was covered with Beatles pictures, life-size cut-outs of every member of the band, a papier-mâché model of the proposed temple on Vassilievsky Island, badges, stickers, tapes, books, coffee cups and homemade memorabilia. Jan Britten Owen, tonight’s guest of honour, sat in the VIP armchair at Vasin’s insistence. Another member of the church gathered up some mugs and filled them with dry red wine. It’s difficult to find good red wine in Russia- if they drink the stuff at all here they usually go for the sickly sweet variety- but then I suppose you’d expect good taste at a Beatles Temple. They handed drinks to everyone and we drank the health of the Italian monk John Lennon and his associates.

The American guest jammed some more classics on an old acoustic guitar and then our hosts turned the stereo on. Even Beatles fans need a bit of variety sometimes, so this time it was a John Lennon solo record. If you had told me when I was 17 years old that at some time in the future I would be dancing around in a temple with a bunch of hippies banging tambourines and singing Give Peace a Chance, I would have probably thrown myself under a bus. But back then I was younger, so much younger than today. Tonight I was drinking the blood of Christ, or Harrison, or one of the other Lads from Liverpool, and happily singing away.

I glanced around. There was a badge on the wall that said, “We have the temple, now we just need to build it.” Paul McCartney stood behind me, frozen in 1963, observing everything through his black fringe. He looked on with his cardboard gaze as the VIP guest stood up to say his goodbyes. Kolya Vasin hugged him vigorously.

The architect refilled our mugs and chatted a bit about the design of the future temple. Vasin announced that anyone who wanted to catch the last metro had to leave now. We hung around a bit longer. After all, there are last metros every night, but how often there are Beatles religious ceremonies?

And then, finally, it was time to quit. We thanked our hosts and put on our coats, scarves, hats, gloves, thermal shirts and all the rest of our arsenal for keeping the Russian winter at bay.

I shook Vasin’s hand and felt like I should say something profound. I am English, after all, a son of the Mother country that spawned the Fab Four. I decided to stick to the rules and repeat something I’d heard earlier.

“All you need is love,” I said, as soulfully as I could.

“Love is all you need!” Vasin exclaimed.

Not a bad mantra, I must admit. Then the door closed and we were left outside in the snow. Cold has a very sobering effect, both physically and emotionally. Had it all been a dream? We walked out towards the main road, past the giant, three-dimensional yellow submarine and the Revolver-era Beatles images engraved into the walls of John Lennon Street, past the proclamations of peace, love and music. It was definitely real, and it’s still there if you want to find it. I guess, to paraphrase the English World War 1 poet Rupert Brooke:

There’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever Beatles.

Weirdly, that’s quite a reassuring thought.

(First printed as a column in the Queensday Festival 2010 fanzine)

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

"A poem can be finished," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti many years ago, "a translation can only be abandoned."

But can an original poem ever truly be finished either? Even great poets are notorious for returning to old poems throughout their careers and tinkering with them, re-working them constantly until it is difficult for anthologists to work out exactly what the definitive version is. All a poet really does is drag thoughts or scenes or ideas from the subconscious and translate them into words in one of our flawed, limited human languages, and perhaps this is the same thing all along.

My plan now is to publicly abandon several of the poems I wrote in Russia last winter on my blog over the course of the next few weeks. I'm used to surfacing in this medium only at the occasional poetry reading at a bar or café in Berlin, where the words fly by at a merciful rate and the audience only has a chance to reflect on the poem once the flurry of sentences has vanished into the ether. Nothing needs to be fixed, and you can ad lib or change bits that didn't work for next time. It's a different, rather more daunting prospect to hang the words out to dry, but here we go.

Poem number one was written on Christmas Eve in St. Petersburg and is addressed to the Siberian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I'd been reading an old Penguin edition of his early poems, and knew absolutely nothing about him apart from that. I typed it out in Olya's mother's warm little kitchen as we hid ourselves away from the brutal Russian winter, using the few pages of verse ('Zima Junction', about his hometown, being the apparent masterpiece, but my favourite was 'In Georgia'), a translator's introduction written in 1962, and an old photograph of an angry young man smoking a cigarette as my research material.

Here it is, then. Unfinished, perhaps, but I hope that these poems collectively will serve to explain what I'm trying to say in the awkward silence that I fall into whenever people ask me, "Well, how was Russia?".

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

The ash-cat tangles
with emptiness on the linoleum
Crumples the autumnal pages on
discarded Yevtushenko

The tight bay window
Holds a wheeling barrage of snow
Stifling the year-heavy cobblestones beneath
Sighs disrupt the dust
in the used light

Cream cupboards scrubbed cleaner
and the gas flame
chewing patiently, blue gold
at the charred rear of the squat silver saucepan

Yevtushenko!
You’re young!
and wearing a cigarette
and a tie clip
Pale and Irate, writing the blonde truth
Lacking Mayakovsky’s sinister
handsome shotgun darkness

And the
Introduction
tells me you were attacked 21st June 1957 in Komsomolskaya Pravda
A publication which I actually saw yesterday
behind the smeared glass of
the counter as I waited in line at the shabby
Vassilyostrov post office with its bored ponytails
Who don’t chew bubblegum but should
Writing raucous rhythms in saliva as they spit
Davai, davai
Give me your documents
A tragic old Siberian song
Heard once upon a time in bearded mouths
At Zima Junction

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich, your name is a tug of war of the consonants
I, too, would like to be “a fearless spokesman of his generation”
(Any generation would do)
And I’m jealous of your adjectives

- Yevtushenko 52 years and 6 months and 3 days after they slandered You
Are you still muttering new words
above the anemic linoleum
of some lucky girlful Moscow kitchen?

Or are you a literary footnote deep
Beneath the subdued, lamp-bitten courtyards
In this one evening’s surrendering light
And unbroken snow?

It would be easy enough to find out.

Death of a Patriot

In the first verse of the song 'Radio Maryja', recorded in 2007, the Zatopeks criticised the homophobic, anti-Semitic Catholic radio station in Poland of the same name. More specifically, we were attacking the ruling Law & Justice party for its connections to Radio Maryja and the degree to which the station's values were shared by members of the Polish government. It won't have escaped many peoples' attention that the head of this government, Lech Kaczyński, was one of the 96 people who died in a plane crash at Smolensk on Saturday.

The reaction in Poland, even among Kaczyński's political enemies, was and still is one of shock and devastation. This is natural given that the crash took so many lives, regardless of who they happened to be. As it turned out, it was a presidential delegation comprised of many major figures from various walks of life, from politics to the military, finance and academia.

In the tributes to Kaczyński that trickled out after the tragedy, it is difficult not to detect the contradictory nature of his life and career amidst the cautious words of praise. "It was one of the great ironies of Polish history," notes the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "that a nationalistic, ultra-conservative Catholic who may have counted some anti-Semites as his supporters was a pivotal figure in the post-Communist healing of grudges that have so long divided Poles and Jews."

Further food for thought is provided by Adam Michnik, a leading dissident during the 1980s and later editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, who wrote:

"We often differed in political views. However, I've always remembered what a great patriot Lech Kaczyński has been all his life. This was the first thought that came to my mind when I heard about this terrible accident."

It's worth examining this comment in a little more detail. The tainted word 'patriot' is, in itself, a rather dubious compliment. However, regardless of how it appears today, for the duration of the Soviet occupation this same Polish patriotism was a tool of resistance and unity against the authorities. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash recalled striking shipworkers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk watching a meeting of the communist party Central Committee on television. As the party leaders rose to sing the Internationale, the workers responded by singing the Polish national anthem.

Perhaps Michnik is trying to gently remind us of this as we remember the uglier sides of Kaczyński's patriotism. It is easy to forget that his earliest political involvement, from 1977 onwards, was with the unique cooperation between workers and intellectuals that began with the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and culminated in the massively influential Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union. Kaczyński was a member of KOR, lectured workers on labour law, wrote for dissident publications and served as an adviser to Solidarity's leaders in their negotiations with the authorities.

This patriotism served, then, as a kind of binding force for what the Czechoslovak dissident Václav Havel referred to as parallel culture in a 1984 essay:

"All those hundreds, perhaps thousands of people of all sorts and conditions - young, old, gifted, untalented, believers, unbelievers - gathered under the umbrella of 'parallel culture' were led to it by the incredible narrow-mindedness of a regime which tolerates practically nothing."

It is a shame that Kaczyński himself would come to represent that same narrow-mindedness and intolerance, this time in the name of ultra-conservatism and reactionary Catholicism. Several years ago I asked a girl in Kraków what she thought of the political situation in Poland; she just groaned and put her head in her hands. Not a particularly wordy critique, but somehow a rather eloquent summary of the situation (at that time Lech and his twin brother Jarosław were still a political 'double act', President and Prime Minister respectively).

The political career of this walking contradiction serves as a lesson in the complexity of Central Europe's recent history, and a warning to those of us outside of Poland who would pass judgement too quickly. The man I criticised (and will continue to criticise) in 'Radio Maryja' for his regressive socio-political attitudes was also fêted for his reconciliatory work with Poland's Jews and played a part in one of the great resistance movements of the 20th century. A resistance movement in a country where, once upon a time, 'patriot' was not yet a four letter word.

I Rememember Rock n' Roll Radio

Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head
Radio playin' so no one can see?

It must have been around 1988. A friend of my parents left the UK for 6 months and she let me borrow her small, white portable radio. It was the first time I'd ever had control of a wireless receiver, and being able to drag the little line over the dial and rest at random on the musical islands that populated the hissing, crackling sea of white noise was a new kind of freedom. I was thrilled.

Unlike the Ramones, I didn't need to pull the covers over my head. When everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I shut my bedroom door and turned on the radio at a low volume. At the flick of a switch, the adult world of political debate and euphemistic pop songs filled the room.

I would love to pretend that I suddenly realised something profound; that I yelled Eureka! and ran out to Tesco in search of hair dye and the complete works of Albert Camus. But I was eight years old, and the young are notoriously wasteful with their youth. I just sat there spellbound and drifted in and out of the stations, not really understanding or enjoying what I was hearing. Unintelligible broadcasts beamed in miraculously from another planet, for my ears only.

It would also be great to say something profound like I sat up 'til dawn with the radio glued to my ear, eyes wide open in wonder. That, too, would be a lie. It may only have been 5 minutes, probably just an hour or two before I got tired and went to sleep. The quality of the experience, not the quantity, has kept it lodged in my brain for the last 21 years.

This first magical encounter with radio has stayed with me since then, and I still occasionally recall that initial excitement as I search the Berlin radio waves in vain for something worth listening to. Alas, like a disenchanted lover, I'm bored. The promisingly-titled Jazz Radio plays health club music rather than real jazz, the rock stations favour the cheesy, eyeliner-wearing bombastic anthems that leave me cold, and the alleged cutting-edge stations all play that new wave of British bands I just feel too old to understand or care about.

This cynical approach to the medium was put to the test recently when I picked up Matthew Collin's book This is Serbia Calling, which tells the story of the underground Belgrade radio station B92. The station started out in the 1980s as a counter-cultural student radio project, and rose to become a national voice of resistance to the Milošević regime in the 1990s. Their critical news coverage, which included information from like-minded stations in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia made them a natural target for the government.

B92's subversive musical selection, however, was just as important to its philosophy of liberation through culture. For many young people, they represented a lifeline to the outside world through in a country that was stewing in government-sponsored hatred and paranoia. While the rest of the nation was listening to patriotic turbo-folk and swallowing the official lies broadcast by Radio Television Serbia, B92 chose "the international call-signs of techno and rock'n'roll over the parochial, folksy paeans to nationalism".

"Art is more important than truth," said Nietzsche. Maybe so, but B92 was fighting for both of them at once against a government that respected neither. This led to an interesting hybrid of the two abstract concepts in March 1991 when, in the wake of mass protests for a liberalised media, the station was forbidden by the police to broadcast news. Strangely enough, they were still allowed to play music over the air. Station boss Veran Matić (pictured) explained:

"We were able to say through music what we would have said in the news if it had been allowed."

So The Clash, Thin Lizzy and Public Enemy were their spokespeople instead. B92's dissident DJs broadcast all sorts of calls to arms, sending out rallying cries in a foreign tongue to be decoded by the listeners as the police censors dozed in the corner of the office. The station had ceased to simply reflect information and events: it was now actively attempting to shape them with its soundtrack. And while radio has been a component of warfare since the 1930s, I doubt if it ever sounded this damn good.

Fast forward a few years to 2000 (hey, you can read the book or check out B92's own chronology of events here) to the collapse of the Milošević regime. B92, having spent the last few months broadcasting from secret premises as B2-92 after government cronies took over their station, returned to the air on their old wavelength and with a new television channel to boot. Today the station remains a major media voice in post-Milošević Serbia.

Curious, I searched Google for B92 and found the station's website. I can now listen to this once-guerrilla outfit's breakfast show, or tune in late at night to hear the obscure rock songs and the low, grainy voices of Serbian DJs chatting to their regulars across the airwaves hundreds of kilometres southeast across the vast, darkened continent.

There's something very romantic about it. I don't really know what's going on, I just enjoy the strange music and the incomprehensible monologues and feel excited and uplifted that I'm making some kind of contact with these cool people in a far-off place. And I can remember exactly what it felt like, sitting alone in West Ealing after midnight sometime long ago in 1988.

Eyebrow Literature

On Friday, my older brother forwarded me a Twitter campaign asking people to visit the Daily Mail's website and take part in the following poll:

Should the NHS allow gipsies (sic!) to jump the queue?

The poll was successfully hijacked. 93% voted in favour of prioritised healthcare for gypsies and it was removed from the website. The Daily Mail, presumably very embarrassed, hastily replaced it with a poll asking whether Commons speaker Michael Martin should resign ("He resigned four weeks ago," notes the Christian think-tank Ekklesia). This impressive -and extremely funny- piece of media sabotage was an interesting example of how new social networking devices can be successfully used to political ends. And it's a nice retort to my last post about British apathy.

Now, criticising the Daily Mail for being offensive is a bit like criticising a dog for barking. It may be annoying as hell, but it would be exhausting to get angry every time it happened. And the author of the column that triggered the poll, Richard Littlejohn, seems to be a living parody of the worst bits of the Mail's output. A quick bit of research has revealed that he is notorious for his hatred of gypsies, muslims, Palistinians, asylum seekers, gay people and liberals. All of this hating clearly doesn't leave the poor guy much time for thinking.

That's not really what I want to talk about. Dismantling Littlejohn's poorly-written, tasteless column line-by-line would be rather like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel. But something else attracted my attention about the rant, namely the cartoon (above) that accompanied it on the page. I showed it to a friend at the weekend and told her it was from the Daily Mail. She asked what year, and to her amazement I told her it was printed last week.

"I thought it was from the 1930s!" she exclaimed.

This is exactly the point. Because, in spite of Littlejohn's claims that the gypsies are not an ethnic group at all and are therefore not entitled to any governmental safeguards, this picture looks suspiciously like a Nazi-era racist caricature. Note, for example, the father figure pulling the horse into the hospital waiting room. He possesses a fine monobrow, as does the child to his right being dragged into the frame. As a monobrow wearer myself, this makes him an instantly handsome and admirable fellow in my book. We all know, after all, that monobrows are the Rolls Royce of the eyebrow world. To the cartoonist, however, this is simply negative ethnic shorthand.

Then there is the implied violence in the cartoon. The British tax-payer figure is being trampled into the ground by the grotesquely-drawn gypsy stampede. This may be figuratively intended, but it's extremely irresponsible and adds an element of physical threat to the fictional scenario (NHS research shows that gypsy communities' approaches to healthcare makes them very reluctant to seek medical treatment). It's the classic Joseph Goebbels logic: if you want to take people to war, tell them they're being attacked.

The Economist recently wrote with regard to Silvio Berlusconi's anti-immigration rhetoric in Italy: "The danger is that many a racist thug may now think he has tacit support from the prime minister."

How long until a racist thug in Britain feels he has tacit support from the British press in getting his own back on gypsies? Since its inception, the Daily Mail has been nurturing a climate of intolerance towards minorities. The disturbing thing when its cartoonists follow suit is that the historical precedents for the demonisation of ethnic groups become even more evident.


Now, however, we have new weapons to fight against the old methods. The reactionary media may still be taking people to war but, with the increasing shift towards interactive digital media, the battle lines are being redrawn. Social networking sites, as we saw with last week's successful Twitter campaign, provide us with the opportunity to mobilise large numbers of people in a short space of time and make a statement through direct action.

"Don't die in the waiting room of the future", says an old East German punk slogan. I couldn't agree more. Let's jump the queue instead...

Resistance is Fertile

Berlin is a morbid kind of town. You never quite know whose grave you're walking on. Bronze plaques in the paving stones outside houses tell you the names of murdered Jews who once lived there. And cycling into West Berlin today I realised I was extremely close to the area where 16 dissidents, including the academic Albrecht Haushofer, were shot in the night of 23rd April, 1945. No signs or plaques, just a shudder down your spine as you pass on through.

Haushofer is one of the poets featured in Charles W. Hoffmann's Opposition Poetry in Nazi Germany, a study of writers who attacked the Third Reich from within. 23 pages alone are dedicated to his Moabit Sonnets, a collection of verse he scribbled as he waited for the inevitable in his prison cell. Like putting names to faces, when you've read somebody's innermost thoughts, dreams, fears and reflections, the 64 years just melt away and you find yourself meeting them on every street corner. The ghosts of Berlin have felt even more present than usual lately.

I feel more than just a little bit pathetic, then, in the wake of the neo-fascist British National Party's successes in the European parliamentary elections this month. The BNP received fewer votes than they did in 2004, and yet won 2 seats in Brussels because mainstream voters stayed at home. There's been a lot of talk about apathy towards Europe and disillusionment with the major parties. But whatever the cause, the result is a nightmare come true.

Friedrich Schiller's theory of mankind's inner conflict offers an interesting explanation for the original advent of Nazism, and the resistance poet Rudolf Hagelstange elaborated on the idea in his own work. On the one hand we have our material impulses, and on the other we have morality and reason. Basically, it is the immediate versus the eternal. Today versus forever. We really need to keep a grasp of both, since if we had no material impulses at all we would be unable to feed or dress ourselves in the first place.

The Third Reich, according to the Hagelstange, came into being because this delicate balance was screwed up and we lost a sense of the universal, lasting values. Germany ignored spiritual matters for too long and allowed absolute Evil into the world in the form of Hitler and Nazism, the ultimate expression of short-sighted, destructive human vanity. The result was hell on earth and the systematic murder of millions.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who clearly spent so much time and energy reading and analysing the stuff, Charles W. Hoffmann argues that most opposition poetry is of little or no artistic value whatsoever. It will not last as poetry per se, and will be of purely documentary interest for future generations. What counted more for Germany at the time, however, was the moral fibre of the men and women who risked (and often lost) their lives by attacking the Nazis in words or deeds. To put it another way, in the midst of the bloodshed and the chaos, creating high art was not a top priority. What was important for Christians and Marxists alike was the content rather than the delivery.

The poets, especially those in prisons and concentration camps who were effectively writing for themselves as they awaited probable death, realised that the most important thing was to transcend the idea of self. Worrying about your own life is an animal instinct, and these brute instincts had driven Germany crazy. What really mattered now was to go on the record as having resisted, no matter what the consequences.

"Even if we die," wrote Harro Schulze-Boysen from Berlin-Plötzensee prison, where he was murdered in 1942, "we know: the seed will grow."

Günther Weisenborn, a member of the Soviet espionage ring known as the Red Orchestra, used the same motif in a poem written whilst in incarceration:

The wind travels through the wheatfield
I lie under a tent of stars
And soon I will lie under the wheat

I'm still looking up, smiling
The whole thing doesn't stop with anyone
The dead have plenty of seed
For your world to inherit

"This is not good poetry," announces Charles W. Hoffmann with characteristic bluntness. He accepts, however, that the basic idea is a fine one. The whole thing ("das alles") implies something more important than any one life. For the communist Weisenborn this may have been the collective - the future socialist utopia. For the Catholic and Protestant poets it was God. But, as our own Shakespeare once asked, what's in a name?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed up the poets' sacrifices perfectly when somebody asked him why, as a Protestant pastor, he supported the plots to assassinate Hitler. "When a madman is behind the wheel of a car, and driving down the street," he replied, "as a pastor who is present I can't just console or bury those who get run over. I have to jump in between and stop him."

And now Britain in 2009 is experiencing its own version of the Schillerian imbalance. Instead of doing everything within our power to prevent the Nazis from winning seats, we focussed on temporary personal afflictions such as apathy and disillusionment and let them sneak in the back door. Even if it means voting tactically for a mainstream party we don't necessarily support, it is our duty as human beings to ensure that a political group which openly endorses the crimes of the Third Reich remains a lunatic fringe element and nothing more. A pretty straightforward challenge sent to us by God, or Karl Marx, or whoever you want, and we failed it with flying colours.

The opposition poets in Germany also wrote about the idea of collective guilt, that Hitler was something 'we' (as opposed to 'they') had allowed to happen, and everybody had something to answer for in the tragedy. This approach is as valid today as it ever was. On Sunday 7th June 2009, Britain, we, blew it. I didn't even bother to see if I could vote from abroad. I just crossed my fingers, went to bed and checked the BBC website the morning after to find out that we are now represented in Europe by two holocaust deniers.

In this city of ghosts, we are reminded on a daily basis of what happens when you let a madman behind the wheel. We've got two of them driving to Brussels now, and it's our fault.

Save Berlin?

I was interested to see that the Exberliner, Berlin's English-language magazine, is going to hold a Save Berlin exhibition in November to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Their manifesto is simple:

Mega-malls, fake Prussian palaces and luxury lofts are threatening to turn the city into a sterile global capital. Don’t let grey bureaucrats and investors lacking imagination shape our future. DO SOMETHING!

But as frustrating as this is, it is also both logical and inevitable. The historian Timothy Garton Ash put it beautifully when talking about the commercialisation of post-dictatorship countries, in Europe and elsewhere. "Every cloud has a silver lining," he notes. "But every silver lining also has a cloud." Up until now, the relaxed lifestyle and unrivalled underground scene constituted Berlin's siver lining, and the lack of work and pathetic wages were the cloud. Soon the gradual increase of pay, jobs and living standards as the money flows in will be the silver lining. The Alexa shopping mall, the monstrous 02 World and the Kreuzberg McDonald's are merely parts of the accompanying cloud.

What is remarkable is that Exberliner itself thrives on the changes occurring in Berlin. The city has become incredibly hip and attractive to English speakers, who are drawn to it in increasing numbers by its bohemian nature. But the more people move here, the higher the demand for apartments and the bigger the rent increases. Without all of these Anglophone neo-Berliners, Exberliner would not exist in the first place.

Anyway. How does the magazine propose we deal with this looming cloud?

Get your bold ideas – new buildings, urban planning schemes, targeted demolitions, annual events and festivals, performances – all kinds of “urban interventions” together and help SAVE BERLIN! Take the first step: send us your ideas in writing, about 50 words per idea, telling us: • what you'd do • why it's important to you • how you want to present it - through drawings and models, or through film, dance, music - any medium you want.

While their hearts are clearly in the right place, I'm not entirely sure how an abstract dance routine is going to save our city. And who is going to finance these grand new buildings and urban planning schemes? Nothing on the website suggests that the massive amounts of capital required are going to come from the magazine itself.

As usual, the better course of action is rather more difficult and a lot less glamorous. I'd suggest that it would be more productive to simply get involved with the various local German-language grassroots groups working hard at limiting the damage that commercialisation is inflicting upon the city we all love. The Media Spree project, the plan to line the riverfront with huge corporations and entertainment venues rather than nightclubs and beach bars, was successfully challenged and defeated in a referendum. (Although it now looks as though democracy may be swept aside and it will all go ahead as planned after all). Currently the extensions to the A100 motorway through central districts of the city, amongst countless other things, are being fought tooth and nail by residents.

The other, more straightforward thing that can be done is to simply support the existing squats, independent businesses and non-profit events taking place every day around the city. Berlin already has plenty of platforms for the talents of the English-speaking community. Put whatever artistic ability you have to use by playing solidarity gigs and inviting friends to show up, pay entrance and buy drinks to help the threatened local venues live to fight another day.


It would be wildly unrealistic and naive to think that Berlin can be 'saved' from the onward march of history. But if people really want to get involved, maybe they should just dust off those German dictionaries, roll up their sleeves and get stuck in where it really matters.

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.