I have two overriding memories of 2 February 1997. In the first, we are squeezed into the minibus – and I do mean squeezed. There are eight of us destined for Novgorod, plus two heading on to the even more remote town of Borovichi. Plus the guy organizing it, plus the driver, and plus all the luggage constituting everything the ten of us had brought to see us through the next six months of life. I have since travelled the road from Petersburg to Novgorod many times, and seen many other long and non-winding Russian roads, but at the time, it really was quite an alien experience. I’d never seen a road that went on, dead straight, for so many miles (or rather, kilometres), with only a few wooden houses on either side of the road, and beyond that, snow and forests, and not a lot else. The most amazing thing was realising that this went on not only as far as the eye could see, but much, much further. For a Brit brought up on a smallish, well-populated island on the edge of Europe, experiencing the miles and miles of nothingness that make up much of Russia for the first time left quite an impression.
The second memory is on arrival in Novgorod. We pulled up in a car park next to the Novgorod Kremlin (for the uninitiated, ‘kremlin’ means ‘citadel’ and quite a few towns still have them), where we would meet the families we were to be staying with for the first time. We were picked off one by one, and led off in different directions. And so it was that I went off to the bus-stop together with my new family. The strong bit of the memory, however, is when we got to our stop, and walked the 10 minutes from Prospekt Mira to our flat on Korovnikova. This took across the bleakest landscape that I had at that time experienced: long rows and random splodges of 10- or 12-storey grey concrete tower-blocks, scrappy roads, snow and ice everywhere…and a huge, empty concrete hulk, of a building that had started being built in Soviet times and then never finished. It didn’t scare me, or make me think ‘oh my god, what am I doing here’ – as it probably should have done – but it certainly made me realise that I was in a different world.
So there you go, that was ten years ago. Since then I have lived in Novgorod twice, in Moscow once, travelled to many other towns in Russia, lived in Ukraine, spent significant amounts of time in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, etc…In that time, my attitudes to Russia and the former Soviet Union have changed regularly, or at least, my moods towards them have. I often wonder why I didn’t stick with studying German, which surely would have been less hassle and exposed me, on average, to nicer, more stable places. Or why I didn’t treat my gap year experience like most people do – six very interesting months but now it’s time to get on with real life…
For whatever reasons, however, Russia and the former Soviet Union has come to be a very major part of my life over the last ten years. I’ve spent a large proportion of my waking life talking about it, studying it, speaking the language, travelling around it, etc. Some parts of it have been pretty damn tough, other parts pretty amazing. But you can’t really change your past, and I’ve certainly had quite an unusual and interesting few years, and made a lot of good friends in the process. And most importantly, I also found myself a wife as a direct result of my interest in that part of the world (see post below)!
So all in all, the ten-year anniversary was quite a significant date for me. In the end, we celebrated, Russian-style, with vodka, cold meats, salads and chocolate, with Justin and Dan, two good friends who I got to know in Novgorod and have stayed close to ever since. So, Russia, and the former Soviet Union, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, thanks for the last ten years, I guess.
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