For Russians, there’s nothing bleak about a bracing midwinter

Winter has come, thank God. For the past two months the Russian capital has suffered a hopelessly British approximation of the coldest season – a mush of low skies, rain, and snow that didn’t settle. Most horrifying of all, the temperature defiantly hovered several degrees above zero. Yet more proof, as if anyone here needs it, that the global climate has changed radically.

Just as the mechanism of the seasons appeared to have failed for good, the mercury plunged. By new year the air temperature was a glorious 20 below zero, the snow settled, and the ice on Patriarch’s Ponds was thick enough to skate on.

It has started late, but these are the glorious early days of winter, when the snow is white, the ice smooth, and the frost doesn’t sting so much as punch you in the face. It is beautiful, exciting, and potentially deadly.

The novelty won’t last, however. By March the snow will be piled greyblack in filthy man-high drifts by the roadside, excitement will warp into surly depression, and dreams will turn to the dwindling number of sunny getaways still open to Russian tourists.

Seen like this, it is easy to understand why Russians can refer to a “good, real” winter, and why they get upset when it fails to show up.

It also may explain why you’re more likely to be told that Margaret Thatcher and the CIA brought down the Soviet Union with mind control techniques they learnt from the Nazis (as I was recently informed), than to hear anyone deny climate change.

It is less a matter of debate than an obvious, irritating fact. Leo Tolstoy remains a national treasure here. Last month more than 1,300 people took part in a 60-hour marathon reading of War and

Peace on national television. So the BBC’s new adaptation of the epic masterpiece has inevitably gained a fair bit of attention. Most of it has been positive, with commentators and bloggers airing a mixture of suspicion and proprietorial pride, faux-shock at the “sexed-up” script, and sheer delight at the idea of casting Scully from The X-Files as Anna Pavlovna Scherer. The decision to film on location in Russia appears to have met with near-universal approval.

There are, however, things that inevitably get lost in translation. The obvious one any (monolingual) English adaptation of War and Peace skips is the way conversational French interrupts the Russian on almost every page in the early parts of the book (a device I find intensely irritating, but that apparently makes a profound point about Russia’s defeat of Napoleon).

But it was something else that leapt out at me last week. Episode one included a brief scene that saw Pierre Bezukhov and Helene Kuragina, his future wife, blundering around on a frozen lake in an inept and jolly attempt to ice skate.

In Britain – where rivers seldom freeze, snow is something that stops trains once every few years, and equipment is expensive – there would be little particularly embarrassing about that.

But this is Russia, where a “good” winter is one between 10 and 20 degrees below zero, anyone can pick up a pair of Chinese-made skates in any sports shop for 20 quid, and children seem to learn to ski almost before they can walk.

So floundering around like poor old Pierre – who is, of course, meant to be a misfit – is a mark of a buffoon or a foreigner. Kuragina must have been humouring him. She’s probably been doing backwards spins at high speeds since she was seven. I was, perhaps, particularly sensitive to this because, after several years of procrastination, I’ve finally spent 20 quid on my very own cheap Chinese skates.

Vowing finally to master this basic element of winter life, I daily hobble on to the pond in the local park, attracting half-sympathetic, halfpitying glances from seven-year-old figure skaters and ferocious schoolboy hockey players.

So far, it has proved an intensely humbling process that demands immense levels of concentration in order to get almost nowhere.

Not unlike learning Russian, I found myself thinking as I stumbled for the tenth time on Friday. Or reading Tolstoy, come to that.