Glimpse behind the Iron Curtain
Cup gives us a chance to see past politics
SERGEI the taxi driver stopped at a red light near the centre of Ekaterinburg as he got close to the end of the journey to the Church on the Blood. He was an earnest young man with a wispy light beard. He had got bored of not being able to communicate so he got out his phone, held it away from his mouth horizontally and began to speak.
His words were translated into English for me to read. He wanted to know what I thought of Russia. He handed me the phone. I told him I was surprised by how much I was enjoying being here. I said I had been struck by the kindness and warmth of ordinary people and how, foolishly, it was not what I had expected. He nodded and put his phone to his mouth again.
‘You are forced to think it is so bad for us here,’ his words read, ‘but when you come, you will be happy.’ He let me out outside the church, built on the site of the Ipatiev House where the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were shot, stabbed and clubbed to death by Bolsheviks almost a hundred years to the day after the World Cup final is played next month.
Before I shut the door, Sergei turned round and spoke again, without the phone this time. ‘Russia good,’ he said, smiling.
Clusters of Peru fans, who had gathered for their match against France, stood by the church, taking selfies. Once, Communist Party officials used to come to the Ipatiev House to pose proudly next to the bullet holes in the walls in the cellar where the Romanovs were executed but now this site, a brutal symbol of the birth of modern Russia, has become a place of pilgrimage for a different reason.
The Church on the Blood is a shrine to the Tsar and his family and to imperialist Russia. Inside, in pictures on the walls, they are portrayed as saints and martyrs. The Tsar’s daughters, the Grand Duchesses, are depicted in white nurses’ uniforms, working in hospitals during the First World War. Next to the altar, which is situated directly above the cellar where they were killed, another painting shows them praying with a priest on the day of their deaths.
One group of fans had hired a guide to show them around. The guide told them the story of the killings in terms that were critical of the brutality of the Bolsheviks. There was no attempt to be faith- ful to the ideology of the heroes of the Russian Revolution. Some fans wearing shorts had to wrap flags around themselves to cover their legs. This is a holy place now.
That evening, I went to dinner with a couple of friends near 1905 Square where a statue of Lenin gazes down on a fast food restaurant where staff wear ‘KFC 4 U’ logos. Our restaurant was, inevitably, packed with Peru fans.
Renzo and Juan Carlos were part of the Peru diaspora. Renzo lived in Grand Cayman. Juan Carlos worked in Florida. They were still agog with excitement at Peru being at a World Cup for the first time in 36 years but they, too, were trying to make sense of the country they were visiting and how it differed from their preconceptions. They, too, had encountered only kindness from Russians.
This was a tournament that was supposed to be damned from the moment it was awarded to Russia in 2010 and, indeed, the last eight years have been peppered with stories of corruption in the winning of the bid, state-sponsored doping in sport, racist chanting at football matches, concerns about the treatment of LGBT people and the annexation of Crimea.
It’s a long list but among the magical things about a World Cup are the ways it gives fans glimpses of ordinary lives and encourages cultures to mingle and break down ignorance and propaganda. In the West, we seem to assume Russians are victims of state propaganda in their vision of us. It is an interesting moment when it occurs to you that maybe we are victims of state propaganda in our vision of them.
It is not just Russian culture you are exposed to. Renzo told us of the jokes Peru fans were making about rivals Chile, who failed to qualify. He told us about an advert a restaurant in Lima had placed in a newspaper, for a job as a waiter. ‘Preferably Chilean,’ it said, ‘so the successful applicant won’t get distracted by the World Cup.’
At the train station two days later, I sat in a cavernous waiting room heading for the Trans-Siberian Railway train to Vladivostok. After a while, a woman walked past and crumpled to the floor. A host of people were with her in a flash, helping her up, giving her water, giving up their seat for her. Station staff fussed around her until she had recovered. I thought about the time my wife fainted on the London Underground and commuters stepped over her as they got out at their stop.
I got the train for the 20-hour j ourney t o Nizhny Novgorod where England play Panama today. It wended its way through valleys and forests, past wooden houses, concrete houses, fallen down houses, factories and little communities that if we were in South America we would call favelas or shanty towns.
The train arrived yesterday morning. On Twitter, a debate was raging about whether English j ournalists should have suppressed pictures that purported to show the line-up for the Panama game. It felt particularly pertinent in a country where some of the nation’s media ignored questions about drug use in sport in the cause of helping the team.
Nizhny was once a closed city, off limits to visitors because it was a centre of weapons manufacturing. It was called Gorky in the Soviet era, just as St Petersburg was known as Petrograd and then Leningrad before it reverted to its original name.
One hundred years after the Tsar’s execution, this is a country writing and rewriting its history so fast it is hard to keep up. The World Cup has at least given us a chance to glimpse more of what once lay beyond the curtain.