Summer in the arms of ‘Mother’
Away from the bling of Moscow lies a very different country — of towns that have dozed for centuries, writes Sara Wheeler
RUSSIAN cars shrink as one leaves the capital, and hairstyles get weirder. Over the course of a 1 600km circular journey through the European heartlands of provincial Russia, I discovered a land foreign to Moscow and St Petersburg. It was nothing like the agricultural hinterland of the west, either. But it closely resembled the past. The gulf between urban and rural can seem as wide as it was before the government liberated the serfs in 1861 — a particularly Russian irony in the technological foothills of the 21st century.
Mother Russia begins 160km southwest of Moscow in the Tula region, where furrowed fields open like a fan. The land was fresh and fertile and the butterscotch light of a July evening settled on still stands of birch and sharp-roofed smallholdings. Painters call it hayrack country, and between June and September it glows. The roads were empty. New Russia had already dissolved, replaced by honeyed flashes of golden orioles.
Tula itself, the regional capital, once marked the southern border of the powerful Moscow principality. Tula factories have produced samovars for centuries, and the pleasant town with wide streets and golden-domed kremlin has entered the language: you don’t take a samovar to Tula (just as you don’t take coal to Newcastle).
The converted tram in which I ate lunch was characteristic of the latest wave of provincial Russia’s pop-ups now that entrepreneurial citizens have free hands but empty wallets. The owner, a friendly Tulak with purple hair, cut in an entirely different style on one side of her head to the other, had done up the vehicle herself and equipped it with a kitchen and a blaring television. She sat with me as I wolfed down her beef solyanka (thick salty soup) and golubtsy (stuffed cabbage), both served with lots of tea.
I had been learning Russian for four months and struggled with talk of the uncertain economics of a tram café (closed in winter, like many places, as it was impossible to heat) and the unreasonable, though not incorruptible, demands of the local administration.
But a speech about the glories of the old days was easy to follow, as I had heard it so many times.
“We all earned more or less the same,” Natasha complained. “Everyone used to be friendly and take one another as they were, but now it’s all about money and what can you do for me?”
She lived for 10 years in a communal flat with her parents; they had a single bedroom and shared a one-burner kitchen and a bathroom with two other families. Those were the halcyon days, or so she said.
South of Tula, the wide open spaces of the Oryol region (meaning eagle) patterned the gentle slopes of the territory geographers named the midRussian highlands. Bright green fields of beetroot alternate with wheat and rye; farms are larger than in Tula, but many miles of land remain uncultivated, and there is no agribusiness.
The scent of dog-rose hung in the air as I hiked across the fields, and the pages of my notebook for those days are stained with raspberry juice. The climate is temperate — ni zarko, ni kalodno (neither hot nor cold), as Russians say. A summer shower was over in minutes, rinsing the fields.
Compared with the bling of Moscow and St Petersburg, with their acres of designer shops, the countryside looks poor. It is poor. Wages in the public sector are impossibly low: no wonder an estimated 50% of policemen take bribes. A speeding ticket costs a driver R40 - R100, payable on the spot and into the pocket.
I saw this happening in Mtsensk, outside a square where ziggurats of watermelons framed a dusty bus station. This quiet town in the north of Oryol was first mentioned in the Russian chronicles in 1146, a year before Moscow made an appearance.
I had lunch in the flyblown Zushka restaurant (named after the local river) on the ground floor of a decayed block of Khrushchevera flats. A lively party in the corner waved me over. They were employees of the bakery that supplied all Mtsensk with bread, and one-eyed Yelena was celebrating her 47th birthday with
vodka shots, token mouthfuls of solids, dancing and many renditions of Happy Birthday in a language tantalisingly close to English.
On the edge of fields lining the arrow-straight road from Mtsensk to the town of Oryol (another regional capital), people had parked to display pails of mushrooms, blackcurrants, potatoes — whatever they had dragged out of the earth before the next winter freeze.
One man had plastic juice bottles of “full-fat milk” on the top of his Hillman, the latter converted into a warehouse by the removal of its back seats. He told me he owned one cow.
A 13-hour train journey took me to Pskov, where, in 000, Vladimir Putin famously announced, “Russia starts here.” Just 19km from the Estonian border, this ancient settlement on the River Velikaya joins the Baltic via a network of lakes and once-navigable waterways and formed one of the earliest Russian trade routes to foreign lands.
By the 1140s the town was so wealthy that burghers invited Greek icon and fresco painters to decorate its churches. Within a couple of centuries, a distinctive Pskov school had developed, using rough-hewn limestone slabs, simply plastered and whitewashed. Disaster came in 1510 when Moscow took Pskov: a contemporary chronicler wrote that people “cried until their eyes almost fell out”. But the distinctive architecture continued to flourish. At one point, every street had a church. “When you live close to a border,” my local guide told me, “you learn to depend on God and yourselves.”
Perhaps that explains the cosy human dimension that characterises such churches as the black-domed Transfiguration Cathedral of the Mirozhsky Monastery — the opposite of our own Gothic style, which makes man small.
A short drive from Pskov, the fortifications of Stary Izborsk are even older than the Pskov Kremlin. I found remains of the first settlement on the other side of a cemetery in which medieval mourners had carved graves with geometric patterns. A meadow stretched out overlooking the Izborsk valley and the waters of Gorodischenskoe Lake. My guide and I looked out in silence at orchids bending in the cool breeze, at a black mare swishing its tail, and at sunlit uplands on the other side of the valley. Eventually, in a quiet voice, Anna said: “This is Russia.”
Later we climbed down to mineral springs where families in bathing suits were leaping into the lake from a knackered jetty. The impressively monstrous fortification walls reveal how important the site once was. But after Peter the Great founded his new capital in the northern marshes in 1703 and it grew into a major trade centre, Stary Izborsk declined. The population remains stable at 700.
I don’t know why more tourists don’t see the Russian provinces. Most go only to Moscow and St Petersburg. Independent travel is not challenging, even if you don’t speak the language. People welcome strangers, trains are cheap, and decent hotels and restaurants are easy to find, even if you haven’t booked in advance.
A night train took me south from the spa town of Staraya Russa to Tver. We proceeded slowly and stopped for long and mysterious periods. I didn’t care: it was still light at 11.15pm and what could be more agreeable than watching Russia unfurl while helping oneself to tea from the samovar at the end of the carriage?
The Tver region covers an area the size of Austria. But it has 700 rivers and 600 lakes. The eponymous capital stretches along the banks of the Volga, and in the 14th century it was the foremost settlement in Russia; as several proud residents told me, “Moscow paid Tver taxes then.”
After a quick visit to Catherine the Great’s un-Russian Palladian cathedral in Torjok, 60km downriver, I jumped on a Sapsan, the Petersburg-Moscow fast train that runs 14 times a day and stops at Tver. Leningradsky station was packed when we pulled in to the capital, and long, black-windowed cars jammed the noisy riverside boulevards. Another world indeed.