The crucial informer Xan Smiley
The much-maligned taxi-driver is really the foreign correspondent’s best friend, writes
The other day, when I was in Central Asia to write an article on how the five former Soviet republics in the region (‘the Stans’) were doing, I was reminded of the virtues of taxi-drivers as sources of information. When I started as a foreign correspondent about 45 years ago, I was told to beware of ‘the rubbish you pick up from taxi-drivers’. The most derisory crime, I recall, was actually to quote a taxi-driver in an article, albeit disguising his wisdom with some well-worn weasel phrase, such as ‘analysts say’. In fact taxi-drivers have always been the most useful sounding boards, informants and tipsters.
On my trip to Central Asia I saw people – as I invariably do – at the British and American embassies. I saw politicians of all stripes, a clutch of businessmen and bankers and academics and think-tankers and human-rights campaigners, in fact the usual array of people across the widest possible spectrum.
But too often, after endless worthy meetings with professionals, you realise you have talked to nobody normal and nobody down in the dumps. That is why the taxi-driver is so crucial. He (rarely she) represents the low life, the bit that most people inhabit.
The sort of thing you notice is what the drivers listen to on their radios. That was the first useful surprise: it was always Russian, never Kazakh or Kyrgyz or Tajik, though officials were all keen to tell you of the local linguistic revival as part of their national search for a new or reinvigorated identity. Several times in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, I asked to go to an address in a street renamed after some hero of the mythic pre-soviet past and the driver responded, ‘Oh, you mean Karl Marx Street?’
The second thing was that, far from wanting to slough off the Russia yoke that had held them down under the Soviet Union until a generation ago, nearly all my thirty-odd drivers were nostalgic for the communist past. Not because they loved communism, but because it represented stability and jobs, however humdrum. Several drivers echoed the same mantra: ‘We used to have jobs and factories and no goods in the shops. Now we have goods but no jobs and no factories.’
You usually edge into taxi-driver conversation warily. The driver often wants to know who you are, what you want. But in general they are disarmingly frank. ‘They’re all crooks’, is the commonest theme, referring to the politicians who run the country. ‘And President X is the biggest crook of all.’ In a flash you hear a litany of abuse hurled at the top man’s wife and family.
‘Gorbachev, he ruined us,’ said a driver in Almaty, the commercial capital of Kazakhstan, where the president is the same person appointed as boss in the twilight of the Gorbachev era. ‘An American spy.’ Really? This surely was going a bit far. But to my surprise, when I dandled the name of Gorbachev, exactly the same far-fetched accusation came up, with equal vituperation, several times. With some drivers, even Stalin got a good rap, though his depredations in Central Asia were as savage as they were in any of the domains in his thrall: Kazakhstan was host to one of the most brutal strands of the gulag web.
It is the taxi-driver who invariably gives me the basics for the cost of living at the lower end of the scale: a menial worker’s salary, the cost of rental accommodation, the cost of a basic meal and the staple food, the price of fuel for car and kitchen. Then I often ask who’s the richest man in the country and who’s the most popular (often a singer or footballer). Another bonus of the taxi-driver chat is that many of them, in the post-soviet Union, are professionals who have fallen on hard times – I’ve had former colonels and professors behind the wheel – or who are part-timers driving for cash to supplement what they get in their meagerly paid formal jobs, so you hear a lot grumps.
But taxi-drivers invariably tell you the basics, sometimes the oddest of things that you’d never hear from professionals. Uber drivers seem particularly prone to divulging unintended insights. Last summer, in Moscow, when my Uber driver passed the dreaded Lubyanka, I asked him what he thought of the removal of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, which once graced the square. ‘A terrible shame,’ he said. ‘He was the one who was so kind to children.’ Can you imagine a German Uber driver singing the praises of Himmler?
My Uber friends were equally helpful before the British referendum on the EU. It was when so many of them – nearly all immigrants themselves – assured me that a whole raft of national shortcomings, including high house prices, were ‘because of Brussels’ that I deduced that Brexit was on the march (and I did bet on it winning).
The big question on my Central Asia trip was who was winning this latest Great Game – Russia, China or the Americanled West. Talking to officials, China was clearly winning the commercial bit of it, whereas Russia still played the biggest part in security because of its old connections. On paper, everyone was equally welcome. But the West was not much in the picture. And it was the taxi-drivers who made it clearest to me that the Russians were still well ahead where it matters – in people’s heads.