At least this doll is better than the handmade guns
THE ‘express train’ from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow on Friday evening was actually a blissfully slow seven-hour meander west to the capital, providing a vivid view into immaculate vegetable patches and the one-horse towns of Russia’s vast emptiness.
It was cheap. Yours for £25 was a compartment bunk, mattress, sheets and pillow. A carriage attendant sold soft drinks at curiously precise prices (73.3 roubles, or 87p, for a bottle of Coke) from a fridge at the end of the carpeted corridor. She then toured compartments clutching an odd assortment of food for sale: bars of chocolate and packs of salami. It was punctual, clean, companionable and a devastating argument for the merits of nationalised railways. LOOKING for a career break? Postcard production in Russia could be the opportunity.
No sign of a card anywhere yet, apart from an artist’s depiction of a snowbound scene in Bauman Street, Kazan. Which is not even in my personal Kazan top-10 list. I bought up the shop’s supplies. It didn’t break the bank. KAZAN wears the wealth that most other host cities lack.
A spectacular modern vista, viewable across the River Kazanka, now includes the Kazan Arena stadium. But there’s been a heavy price to pay.
The city is part of Tatarstan, a vast and proud region which voted for independence in 1992, but which has been showered with money by Russia in return for abandoning dreams of secession and remaining part of the mother country. At Kazan’s charming little Museum of Tatarstan, they’re so proud of their culture that they ask you to slip plastic coverings over your shoes. But images of Vladimir Putin dominate. There is no mention of the millions of Tatars deported by Russia to the Gulags in the Stalin era. NIZHNY, the most beautiful stop on tour, requires a memento, though souvenirs are rudimentary in the city which, as a site of secret weapons’ programmes and where dissident Andrei Sakharov was exiled, was closed off to foreigners for years.
Handmade wooden pistols and machine guns don’t do it. There’s better karma with the matryoshka doll, painted with a football straight out of the 70s, who is now aboard. AMID the displays of military might on show at Nizhny Novgorod’s Kremlin is a reminder of the human cost of the Second World War, so understated that it hits you like a hammer blow. Set into a redbrick wall, it is a mosaic formed by thousands of images of those who died. They are mainly men. Someone’s son, father, friend, lover. They reduce all the flash armoury to utter irrelevance. THEY call St Petersburg ‘the melancholy city’ — the place to fall in love and write poems while sheltering from the rain.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which is set there, leaves you wondering how those romantics ever got any work done. The new generations get to the point with messages like the one painted on a pavement near Moskovsky Prospekt: ‘ Masha I Love You! Marry Me!’