Notes from Underground

70-dollar journalism. (Cashed in quickly for a great many roubles, a tin of fish and two bottles of cheap drink).

Aged 22, just before my next birthday, I was suddenly paid quite generously for being curious - nosy, verging on intrusive, perhaps - instead of as compensation for stacking supermarket shelves, clearing overgrown gardens or attempting primitive carpentry, which had been my sources of income thereto.

Journalism seemed like a decent alternative to a ‘proper job’. I was determined to give it a go.

Being a reporter was certainly preferable to anything the university ‘milk round’ of accountancy and consultancy firms had touted a few months earlier: cheap wine and canapés at a better college than mine, glossy recruitment brochures to take away, and the promise of a salary advance to help purchase your first sensible suit if they decided to sign you on.

A law conversion course had also been an option, but I didn’t greatly enjoy the company of the student lawyers in my college and couldn’t imagine a schoolful of them would be a promising environment to pursue some much-needed additional growing up.

So instead I left my village in West Sussex, famous for its many antique shops and its draughty stately home, and went to live in a ramshackle flat in the Moscow equivalent of Acton. I wanted to see if I could learn the Russian language and to find out if I could write.

My passport was stamped with a six-week visa, and the worst that could happen when it ran out and I failed to achieve anything, I rationalised, was that I’d have an adventure to talk about when I got home - possibly at the dinner table where I would be served a hefty portion of humble pie to chew on as I confessed I would be off to Guildford Law School after all, and only a term or two late.

In the event, I remained in the Russian capital for five years, and lived there on and off for another five after that, departing as BBC bureau chief in 2005.

My first piece of paid reporting appeared in The Moscow Tribune, a free-of-charge newspaper printed for the expatriate community and left in the early morning in stacks at strategic vantage points - such as hard currency shops and sports bars.

The Moscow Tribune was second only to The Moscow Times in terms of quality and readership, and the amount it paid aspiring journalists. (Second of two such newspapers in the city.)

Anthony Louis was the Tribune’s editor, and must have funded the project with the help of money earned by his father, Victor, who had made an eye-popping fortune in a tenebrous career that bridged KGB collaboration and corresponding for the London Evening Standard, the New York Times, France-Soir and many other foreign newspapers. Viktor Louis owned a vast dacha at the elite writers’ colony in Peredelkino, a fleet of western luxury cars, and enjoyed the company of a pleasant English wife, Jennifer, a former nanny from Dorking in Surrey who had worked for British diplomats stationed in Moscow.

The New York Times recounted this anecdote after his death:

‘"Why do you people always call me colonel in the K.G.B.?" he once asked Ronald Payne, a British author and journalist, who replied, according to The Daily Telegraph today, "Goodness, have you been promoted to general at last, Victor?"‘

No memoir has been published, as far as I know, and his son, my old boss Anthony, died relatively recently himself. Louis Snr.’s obituary from July 1992 had this explanation for a gilded existence:

“[Victor Louis] was arrested at the age of 19, while a student. The reason for the arrest remains unclear and he spent nine years in various camps of the Gulag. The KGB defector Major Yuri Nosenko suggested in 1964 that Louis was recruited while in the camps. He was approached, no doubt. The KGB always tried, but what sort of agreement there was between them remains unknown. There is no doubt that there was an agreement, because in 1956, out of the blue, Louis, then aged 28, started driving a Volkswagen around Moscow, wearing foreign suits and visiting a bar at the American Embassy club under the full surveillance of the KGB. It was there that he used to meet foreigners. Anyone else behaving in such a fashion would have been arrested and accused of spying.”

What he certainly excelled at was denigrating dissidents and planting stories the Communist Party wished to be read at western breakfast tables or in government offices in hostile nations: about Khrushchev’s defenestration, for example.

In 1992, I was keen to plant my own stories in the press, for less momentous reasons, and when The Moscow Times turned up its nose at my efforts, the organ of Victor’s son was more than acceptable to me.

Anthony was a decent employer, extremely hard working, and spotted quite a lot of young hopefuls who would go on to careers in far bigger organisations. I submitted a few freelance pieces and soon afterwards Anthony offered to pay me $700 a month to join the staff. Financial détente was achieved for both of us, and such a sum of dollars went an awfully long way in early post-Soviet Russia, so long as you stuck to local shops. (Which I nevertheless had no choice about - one needed a salary in the thousands to visit Stockmann or other western stores with any regularity. I remember buying a twelve-dollar iceberg lettuce once that had come all the way from Finland. For that money, it should have been hewn from genuine Arctic sea-ice.)

There wasn’t a great deal to buy from the local shelves at the time, however - I survived mostly on tins of processed left-over fish or meat that was branded, appropriately enough, ‘The Tourist’s Breakfast’. So my wealth was more notional than extravagantly expressed.

The Tourist’s Breakfast - beef edition

After pocketing $70 for my freelance première, transcribed below, I treated myself to some ‘portwein’ - fortified wine, commonly known as ‘bormotukha’ from the Russian verb for mumbling - an inevitable consequence of more than a small glass. (One always managed a measure or two above that in the early 90s.)

I tended in any case to buy two bottles. Portwein bottles were sometimes capped with foil and cardboard seals that allowed in air and yeast cultures, or just mould spores, and you might need to discard the whole contents unless you were both very thirsty and very hard up indeed. And now that I wasn’t, I could afford to buy several at the same time, just in case one was spoiled.

My go-to brand of ‘mumbler’ was Agdam, named after a town in Azerbaijan. Up to 250 million (!) litres of portwein were produced each year in Azerbaijan, and Agdam - nicknamed ‘Kak Dam’ or ‘Bukharich’ - was more highly thought-of than other, also-ran Azeri brands (which were not highly thought-of at all).

A bottle of Agdam portwein, originally sold to Soviet drinkers at a very affordable 2.02 roubles. [Photo: AzerNews]

Agdam production ended during the first war over Nagorno-Karabakh, soon after I swigged my celebratory bottle of ‘mumbler’. The city was utterly ruined during its capture by Armenian forces in 1993.

Agdam destroyed, pictured in 2011. The city was reoccupied by Azeri forces in 2020, and Armenia was forced entirely to relinquish Nagorno-Karabakh last year. [Photo: Stepan Lohr/Radio Free Europe]

I worked happily at The Moscow Tribune for roughly a year before falling into television production, and the NBC News Moscow offices, almost by accident. But in the interim, I met some wonderful people who helped me immensely and with whom I made the kind of friendships which are only possible when you are young and romantic, somewhat crazy, and living in straitened circumstances. I met several of them a few years ago on a rare return to Moscow, but was not able to see Anthony. By then, too, my closest comrade at the paper, Kirill Koriukin, was also dead.

Kirill was deputised in 1992 to keep an eye on me and help translate press conferences which would likely go beyond my rudimentary Russian but were expected to touch on pretty weighty matters: international arms control, and violent insurrection, for example.

Kirill Koriukin, a good friend, much missed.

One of my reporter’s notebooks was repurposed for learning vocabulary on the fly.

The words noted down seem very apt for the times in which I first heard them.

“Notes from Underground” was a work by Dostoevsky I had read in translation at university (I didn’t have any useful Russian before I went to live there). I found it to be a sort of proto-existentialist disquisition on how torment and pain were good for you, and helped a man to be free. Very Russian, very 90s Moscow.

It seemed a slick title for the article transcribed below that took as its subject the abject epidemic of begging in the metro stations and underpasses beneath Moscow’s famously wide highways. The gear change from a command economy to Wild East capitalism mashed millions between the cogs.

I haven’t altered the piece (although I would have liked to) more than three decades after I wrote it out in long hand with the fountain pen I used to sit my final exams at Oxford. I must have been reaching for a certain style, which I fell quite well short of.

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Notes from Underground

The Moscow Tribune

Friday November 13th, 1992

“For anyone more accustomed to the London Underground, the Moscow metro remains one of the most reliable and beautiful features of life in the Russian capital. Yet increasingly here in the bowels of the city, amid the marble columns, mosaics and stucco grandeur, is to be found one of the least digestible elements of the post-Soviet reality: desperate, undignified poverty.

“I am a sick man… I am an angry man, I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” Some might say that these opening words of Dostoevsky’s anti-hero in “Notes from Underground” scarcely serve to differentiate him from much of today’s male population. The metro underpasses support a defeated army of scab-faced drunks, slouched at impossible angles on piss-stained granite flags, beards crusted with dry spittle. But here are also pensioners and invalids, for whom no fog of sweated alcohol betrays the reason for their presence.

Above the echoes of a busker coaxing approximations of jazz standards from a broken saxophone further up the underpass, Svetlana Ivanova explained that this evening was the first time she had come to beg in the metro:

“Yesterday I went into a food store and the girl at the counter said to me ‘I’m sorry grandma but these prices aren’t for you.’ I left with half a cabbage and not enough money to buy a fresh loaf of bread. Half a cabbage!'“

She was propped on a pair of taped crutches, wrapped in a greasy black anorak, and she clutched a small plastic icon. Seventy five years old, she had discharged herself from hospital, afraid of what might become of her apartment. “And anyway,: she continued, a smile flashing across watery eyes, “an old lady can’t live on hospital food! A couple of bowls of kasha doesn’t go far, young man.” She shuffled to one side to avoid the latest echelon of commuters disgorged at the platform and marching up the Paveletskaya underpass. Lifting the ear flap of her shapka the better to hear the question, she said:

“I’m not very good at this - only two roubles so far - but people are kind and anyway, times are difficult for everyone.” She pointed to the babushka on the opposite side of the underpass and said, “I think she’s making better money than me. But then she needs it, her husband being a hopeless drunkard. Me? Oi! What husband?! Lord, he was killed in the war I don’t know how many years ago.”

Since her documents were in order, she was in receipt of 900 roubles a month from the state. Less than $3 at the current rate. She hadn’t heard that Yeltsin had recently issued a decree to up social security payments in the near future. “Boris Nikolayevich has done badly. To begin with I think everybody liked him. But now… there’s a congress in December, isn’t there? Don’t see how that’s likely to change very much.”

Valentina Sergeyevna’s documents were not in order. She had moved to Moscow from the country illegally, renting a flat in a town until the landlord decided he could find more profitable tenants and unceremoniously threw her out. No documents meant, of course, no pension. She spoke softly, a torn carrier bag in each hand pulling down at her shoulders to give her the appearance of a broken set of scales. One cataracted eye staring uselessly at the plastered ceiling like a child’s marble in a dirty puddle, a few crooked teeth like lichened tombstones in a long-forgotten graveyard.

“I have to come here every day. I tried the railway station earlier on, but I scarcely made a kopek. Of course, I feel terrible doing, you know, this. But then there’s so many beggars these days that it makes it a little easier.”

Some, like the blind couple at Okhotny Ryad station, are strikingly matter-of-fact about their present circumstances. Ludmilla Fyodorovna’s ample frame was squeezed into a dark green overcoat. In one hand she held out a hat for money, in the other she clasped the arm of her fragile husband.

“Yes, the state pays, but it simply isn’t enough. We both receive 1000 roubles a month, and we can’t get by. So we both decided to come down to the metro today for the first time to see what would happen. So far, people have been very kind.”

Asked whether they had any children that could help them out she replied they had a son. “But he went off to live miles away,” she said with a shrug, “and we have no idea what’s become of him.”

“No, I don’t think the government has done especially badly,” put in her husband. “It’s trying to do the right thing. It simply hasn’t come through for us yet, that’s all.”

Kirill Yakovlevich also thought Yeltsin and his colleagues were doing well enough, “at least, as well as could be expected.” But he was less able to cope with the indignity of his situation. A small man, with a puffed, livid face sown with an irregular stubble of snowy whiskers, he shook in his broken crutches.

“I’m just trying to get something for a crust of bread, do you understand?” He struggled to produce his words, lower lip starting to tremble with the effort of biting back tears. “But… you see… it’s so, God, shameful for me… all this.” He wiped small, clear, old man’s tears from his cheek with the edge of his shapka.

Stained olive trousers wrinkled down to his feet, crossed crazy over one another, his legs smashed in a factory accident. His children lived with their mother in the Kuzbass region and were unaware that he spent his nights the waiting rooms of the Leningrad or Yaroslavl railway stations.

“I suppose things are different for old people where you come from? Because what kind of life do you think this is?” Voice cracks. “Just what the hell do you think it’s like?”

I do not know the author of the poem at the bottom right of the page, or whether it was in fact somebody’s translation of a classic by Akhmatova or Tsvetayeva. If anyone recognises it, please say. I don’t have anyone at the paper to ask now.