The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  In the immediate post-war period, the Soviets made what would later seem rather poignant efforts to win hearts and minds in their satellite states: having freed them from Nazi oppression and rebuilt their cities with sensitivity for the past and the hope of a brighter, communal future, they not unreasonably expected some gratitude at the ballot box. The mood seemed to be shifting across Europe: after the 1945 French general election, the Communists emerged as the largest party. But when the first free elections were held in Soviet-occupied lands, the results were disastrous. In November 1945, the Hungarian Communists won just 17 per cent of the vote, humiliated by the principal centre-right party, which romped home with 56 per cent. The year after, Berlin’s first post-war election saw the Communists beaten into a distant third place.

  Stalin must have felt as confused and betrayed as Churchill, whose reward for winning the war was a crushing electoral defeat by Labour. But unlike Churchill he had a few options, and chose the one marked ‘bollocks to democracy’: the Red Army came in to, um, oversee all future elections across his empire, rival parties were nullified and any display of dissidence ruthlessly punished. No matter how trivial – after a fourteen-year-old East German schoolgirl admitted putting lipstick on the portrait of Stalin in her classroom, she spent eight years in prison. (The GDR just loved to incarcerate naughty schoolkids: in 1950, a group of young boys in Jena received ten years each for throwing stink bombs during a celebration of the president’s birthday, and the day after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, a seventeen-year-old boy who wore black to school in protest was sent down for five years.)

  I stayed at Juodkrante˙, in a four-square, dark-wood Germanic chalet hotel with fog-fuzzed views of vintage gables, decorative balconies, a smear of Baltic and the looming concrete angles of a derelict Soviet leisure complex. Or so I assumed: lovingly careful as they were when restoring old buildings, Communist architects had a gift for imbuing their every new one – even the seaside fun palaces – with a certain hulking malevolence. Their creations weren’t so much designed for communities as inflicted upon them; on the holiday spectrum, this example suggested a retirement home for tanks. Some day, perhaps, such buildings will find a new life of their own, though in the age of consumer choice that day may not be imminent.

  My hotel’s downbeat but approachable manager was an ethnic Russian with an embattled outlook. ‘Our president hates Russia and all Russians, she speak of us like dogs. But we remember in socialistic era she study in Leningrad and for many years was member of Communist Party.’ He glowered at the mist-haloed streetlights outside and I wished I hadn’t brought the subject up. Except I had to, really, as this was a fact-finding discourse for my morning date with destiny: the next day Comrade Timoteya would ride again – deep breath, girding slap on both cheeks – into the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Lunched in this sylvan haven behind the dunes. Jacket STAYED OFF.

  Fear and fascination had battled it out when I learned my journey would take me into this anomalous Cold War relic; the former claimed victory after an initial online route-plan through Kaliningrad turned up the legend, RESTRICTED AREA, NO ACCESS POSSIBLE. The hotel manager assured me this was a false alarm, but otherwise went easy on the succour. ‘For sure, the drivers there will try to kill you,’ he said, smiling for the first and only time. Together we looked at the MIFA, chained to a picket fence outside reception, and his smile widened. ‘But even a Russian, I think, will not steal this bicycle.’

  The border straddled the spit two hours south. The first full-beam summer’s morning of my trip had burned the fog away before I got there; with the Lithuanian frontier post in sight I pulled over to Russia-proof the MIFA. For want of Ben Hur wheel spikes and a pannier cannon I pumped up the tyres (for the first time since Finland), gaffer-taped the wobbly front carrier to the head-tube and tightened a perpetually recalcitrant mudguard bolt so hard it sheared straight through the thin aluminium. Right: once more unto the breachski.

  In fact, it took longer to get out of Lithuania than back into Russia. Putin-side, I stood before a glass window so heavily smoked as to be impenetrable: all I saw was a pair of immaculately manicured and very expressive hands working away in the small gap beneath it, bidding me with wordless efficiency to hand over my documents, remove my helmet, and then in very short order to proceed into the motherland’s disembodied western extremity.

  The road at once narrowed and decayed; the sandy forest around was a mess of toppled, mossy trunks, suffused with a smell of mulchy neglect. At regular intervals this unappealing hinterland was impaled with stern multilingual warnings: ENTRY BY SPECIAL PERMIT ONLY – NO ECONOMIC OR RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES. It hardly seemed an exhaustive ban: ‘It’s all right, officer, I’m spying.’ A gigantic hare lolloped out of the trees, and the building heat brought some curious companions to the tarmac: there can’t be many places where red squirrels and lizards cross the road together. For a long while there was no traffic, and I harvested endless facefuls of gossamer spider threads, like Scooby Doo running through a haunted mansion.

  My death-averse route guide had discouraged EV13-ers from even entering Russia proper, and urged them to cross as much of Kaliningrad as possible with their bikes in a railway carriage. Given this and the hotelier’s jauntily morbid counsel it was no surprise when corroded Ladas began to crowd the road and brush me off it. Even here in a national park the verge was clustered with death-shrines. But at Zelenogradsk, a rather fetching seaside town full of ice creams and strappy tops, my spirits rose and the traffic largely vanished, siphoned off down a new motorway. Two hours later I was, I’m afraid, eating a Big Mac with a load of sailors in the Kaliningrad city sunshine.

  Ensconced in our little island under the banner INVASION-FREE SINCE 1066, it’s hard for us to envisage the ethno-political ebbs and flows that have swept through continental Europe. And I’m not talking about the migration of the Celts or some other distant shuffling of ancient cultures: over recent centuries, huge folds of Europe’s indigenous fabric have been torn to shreds and stitched randomly back together. After the last war, the ethnic cleansing went on a boil wash: entire peoples abruptly fled their homelands or were forcibly herded out. Let us try to imagine, by way of example, the population of South Wales being shipped out en masse to Denmark, and replaced with Belgians – all in the space of a couple of years. For any number of reasons – a Lego Huw Edwards prominent amongst them – it’s inconceivable, yet in terms of numbers and distance this is precisely what happened to Kaliningrad.

  Until 1946 this was Königsberg, longstanding home to an almost entirely German populace. The city had been the capital of Prussia for more than 200 years; the very German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born and died here (and in between never travelled more than 10 miles from the place). In 1944 things took a war-shaped turn for the worse, and when the Red Army marched into the devastated aftermath of several RAF raids they found the city and its environs almost totally deserted. Over two million Germans had fled westwards by the time Königsberg and a Northern Ireland-sized area around it was subsumed into the Soviet Union, and rechristened in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, a recently deceased Bolshevik who had never been near the city and was best known for being Stalin’s mate.

  In just a few years, Stalin made Kaliningrad the home of his Baltic fleet, closed it off to foreigners, and bussed in almost a million Russians – a group that today form 87 per cent of the population. This extraordinary reinvention was enhanced after the surrounding Baltic states declared independence, leaving Kaliningrad distantly cut off from Russia (and hence apparently an exclave rather than an enclave, so that’s me told). In the way of these things – think Gibraltar or the Falklands – the disembodied territory has succumbed to ex-pat syndrome, applying itself with some diligence to becoming more Russian than Russia. I rode down streets called Lenin this and Soviet that. In Russia I saw one hammer and sickle in five days; in Kaliningrad I lost count after an hour.
The McDonald’s was an exception that proved a rule, in a city otherwise bereft of the Western logos that had decorated downtown St Petersburg. Most remarkably, one might say most absurdly, the trains run on Moscow time – as I verified cycling through Zelenogradsk, all station clocks in Kaliningrad are set an hour ahead. And yet in 1990, the Soviets – strapped for cash and panicking – secretly offered to sell Kaliningrad to the Germans for a few billion. If you fancy starting a fight here, simply remind a local of this episode, using the pictorial flip-chart that platinum-club readers will find attached to the inside back cover of this book.

  *

  The air was balmy and the pavements bustled with happy families and young couples, taking selfies and window shopping. A disproportionate number of retailers, I noted, offered nothing but translucent ochre trinkets: back in the Königsberg centuries, the city made its millions from amber – a substance whose precious allure I have never fully grasped, and which to my mind was very fortunate to have retained its prized aesthetic appeal following the invention of barley sugar. But my mind obviously knows nothing, and every other shop window was filled with galleons, miniature Orthodox churches and other crude and exorbitantly priced yellowy-brown stuff that doesn’t even taste nice. Almost all the world’s amber comes from a submerged swathe of Eurasian boreal forest, which has seeded Kaliningrad’s Baltic seafloor with nuggets of fossilised resin. Just a couple of months beforehand, a big storm had bestrewn the coast with washed-up amber pebbles, sparking a feeding frenzy that required heavy policing. Imagine the mayhem you could wreak on the beach here with a bucket of boiled sweets.

  Then the pavement broadened, the mood shifted and I was soon weaving the MIFA through the early-evening crowds with a sense of ratcheting unease. In a few days, Russia would celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day with a nationalist gusto unparalleled in the post-Soviet era. On my ride through the motherland, preparations had been in full swing, all the many memorials freshly whitewashed, polished, often refaced with sparkling new granite. Even at hopeless Gostilitsy someone had slapped a new coat of paint on Marshal Zhukov. But Kaliningrad, ever the tub-thumping, over-excitable exile, was gearing up with a manic intensity: nowhere else would the end of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War be marked with greater patriotism. Entire buildings were clad in banners full of many-medalled war heroes and Cyrillic slogans fervently rounded off with exclamation marks. The main square, a totalitarian expanse of North Korean magnitude, was girdled with Communist flags and dominated by a soaring column topped with a bronze Soviet star. A monumental Mother Russia gazed down at a parade ground planted with orderly ranks of garish red tulips, like one of those clumsily over-coloured glory-of-socialism postcards we sent home in 1990. Coming hard on the heels of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the message was loud and clear and freshly redecorated: We’re back, and we’re winning wars again.

  ‘Maybe one repeat beer?’

  It wasn’t the first time the waiter had asked, nor would it be the last. I was in no mood to return soon or sober to my vacuous, marble-floored suite at a gated ‘biznizman’ hotel, whose staff had greeted me and the MIFA with unblinking stares of mute horror (as advised by my Lithuanian friend, I had booked it online the night before; the receptionist’s ‘there must be some mistake’ look as her eyes darted from the confirmation email to my grubby, helmet-topped face and back was in vain). The restaurant I had somehow wound up in was a rustic pastiche with chunky Camelot furniture and staff dressed like off-duty musketeers, tucked away in a corner of the only shopping centre I’ve ever been to with a door policy: after I walked in the bouncers stepped forward to thwart a presentable young man who evidently didn’t look as if he’d be spending enough. My menu was awash with appetite-shrivelling translations: Breath of Italy, Stewed Neck of Own Production, Big Man’s Snack with Rap-Rap Sauce and Pork Ears. I ordered several dumplings and a succession of soupy, potent dark ales, then at length reeled out past the security guards with a rippling belch.

  The promenading families were long gone now, replaced by an after-hours cast of chest-out tough-guys, disfigured beggars and two-bit oligarchs waddling across wide, dim pavements to their scuffed BMWs. I looked up at the war banners and felt a wave of righteous drunken fury course through me. Don’t any of you lot think this whole business is getting a bit out of hand? Even in reflective sobriety Putin’s worship of all things Soviet had begun to trouble me deeply of late. How alarming to learn that Stalin, a murderous dictator airbrushed from history by his appalled successors, was now being rehabilitated: a museum had just opened in his birthplace, telling a cosy, atrocity-stripped story of Uncle Joe’s life, and a recent poll found that only 20 per cent of Russians harboured ‘negative feelings’ about a man demonstrably to blame for the peace-time deaths of several million of their own countrymen.

  Just before leaving home I had watched a new film about Stalingrad, an effectively official account by a staunchly Putin-ite director. At least I tried to – half an hour of the insufferably macho glorification of war and its noble Soviet practitioners proved more than enough. Did you know that Vladimir Putin recently made it a criminal offence to criticise any aspect of the Red Army’s wartime conduct? If, as I shall do now, you mention the well-documented mass rapes carried out by Russian troops as they marched towards Berlin, you will be liable, as I apparently now am, to five years’ imprisonment. I pondered this as I stumbled through scabby Khrushchyovka tenements held together with what looked like giant strips of gaffer tape, and at length pitched up at my hotel compound’s entry intercom. ‘Come on, Vlad,’ I drawled into it after punching the button, ‘you’ll never take me alive!’ But then – bzzzz, click, burp – that’s the beauty of polonium.

  *

  The road out of Kaliningrad was a barrel of laughs, only with the laughs emptied out and replaced with liquidised shopping cyclist. Here was the homicidal traffic I had been warned about, along with the weather I hadn’t been. The morning before it had been 22 degrees; it was now 5, and bulleting down. The world always hates the hungover.

  Gutters gurgled and frothed; old ladies scuttled between shop doorways, bags and newspapers held uselessly over their heads. Every passing vehicle slapped a full-length iron curtain of chilled rain over me at point-blank range. I stopped under a bus shelter when the downpour built to a ridiculous, machine-gun crescendo. This can’t last, I thought, but it did, and as I really, really wanted to get out of Kaliningrad I remounted. Within seconds I was the squelchy embodiment of one of the great fancy-that biological facts: did you know the human body is 108 per cent water?

  I’d had regular previous cause to celebrate my MIFA’s mudguards – this was the first large-scale ride I had ever undertaken with frame-fitted weather protection – but with a veritable torrent of rainwater rushing down my gutter zone, they were soon irrelevant. I began to tackle the deeper stretches of standing water with my feet high off the pedals and splayed hugely apart, vainly hoping to spare them the front wheel’s bow-wave. These were perhaps the daftest and least dignified moments in a trip festooned with daft indignities. Pointless, too: my flat-soled mountain-bike/après-cycling hybrids were already drenched through. They had cost twice as much as my MIFA, and were at least seven times as shit, eagerly blotting up sweat from within and rain from without, and clinging stubbornly to a malodorous distillation of both overnight.

  As the border approached, the smeary buildings along the road acquired a steadily more military aspect, guarded with razor wire and sentry boxes. The related vehicles busily displacing rain from tarmac to cyclist grew larger, greener, meaner. It was down to 3 degrees now; every downstroke on the pedals forced cold soup between my toes, a soup that came garnished with carpet-tack croutons as numbness took hold. The strafing rain stripped trees bare and blasted the verge to bits. Multicoloured flecks of gravel and grit, thick wodges of leaf mulch and other plant matter were spattered and clotted together in my sodden leg hairs, all over the bike, my panniers and that stupid yellow tabard. Ev
ery so often my ale-damaged skull and innards would add their discordant drone to the whole wretched, blaring symphony of torment. Slooshing listlessly through no man’s land I didn’t look, or feel, as if I’d ridden through a storm. I looked, and felt, as if God had been sick on me.

  ‘Stop!’

  I’d begun to assume that the gormless, hi-vis innocence of my bike and outfit would see me waved dismissively through every frontier crossing. This assumption would not survive my seventh border. At the first booth my documents and I had been subjected to an unusually prolonged Dead-Eyed Stare of Towering Bureaucratic Indifference. This was followed at the second by the classically Russian feminine repertoire of huffy head-shakes and incredulous squinting, and by the time I reclaimed my paperwork the litres of filthy rain had stopped evaporating from my hot, bare legs in steamy coils. Now I was shuddering miserably before a thin-faced young guard in a huge military cap, who had just rapped my front wheel with a mirror-ended stick normally employed for inspecting the undersides of vehicles.

  ‘Otkryt!’

  A tap on the MIFA’s nearside rear; I levered the bike up onto its twin-leg stand and effortfully unclipped the designated pannier.

  ‘Otkryt!’

  Accompanied by another brisk stick-flick, I understood this as an order to disgorge its contents. The guard stepped back under the border post’s concrete canopy and observed as I bent over the pannier in rain of undiminished vigour, hauling armfuls of clothing and maps out and piling them up on the puddled, scabby tarmac.

  ‘Otkryt!’

  As I disembowelled the other pannier on request it became clear that the guard was increasingly preoccupied with my demeanour. By now I was shivering uncontrollably and noisily drawing in wet air through chattering teeth, displaying all the pale-faced symptoms of extreme cold that unhelpfully mirrored those of extreme guilt, and indeed withdrawal from class-A narcotics. My frozen fingers soon struggled to dance to the tune of his mirror stick, and when he rapped the tightly double-strapped front carrier it was a frosted fiddle too far. The meaty GDR strap, a challenge in any conditions, proved an insurmountable one in a state of compromised dexterity.