Cash economy

Have discovered a minor but important difference. Everything is done in cash here (we get paid in cash at the end of the month in a brown envelope). Paying the deposit and first month’s rent is a bit of problem, with plastic cards more of a difficulty than a solution. Since I can only draw out a certain amount each day from the ATM – and with only some banks such as Gasprom and SBER not charging a fee - I have been haunting the local cash machines all week accumulating roubles – and living off my lunch vouchers for food.

Even handing over large wads of cash seems clumsy, I’m just not used to counting the stuff.

(and have just discovered that I am being charged a fee by my bank account)

Flat-hunting

Flat-hunting is a great excuse to be nosy about how other people live. In Moscow, of course, almost everyone lives in a flat, although some also have a summer house/dacha to escape to at weekends. Rents are high – currently around 45, 000 - 55, 000 roubles (about 1000 GBP) a month for a two room flat (that is, living room and one bedroom), so many Russians share; but on a British-level salary I can just about afford this on my own.

Entrance doors and common spaces seem uniformly pretty bleak, not grubby exactly but very shabby and unkempt, with hallways smelling of old cabbage. Lifts feel very rickety, some rather ineptly ‘glued’ to the outside of buildings. Lots of clanging heavy metal doors to be navigated with several big keys which I assume are left over from the economic collapse here at the beginning of 1990s when things were pretty hairy for a bit. (I haven’t asked anyone to check – it is just that Moscow feels reasonably safe right now)

Inside the few I visited was the usual private rented mix of miscellaneous furniture, from overstuffed, heavy and overdone to a few bits of cheap tat. Kitchens and bathrooms, though, have all been done up to high standards, and of course electricity is subsidised so heating is not a problem. I went for a compact IKEAed place on the seventh floor with a slightly bleak and ‘in-lived-in’ feel, because it has a fantastic view of two of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers – called the Seven Sisters here – and is a great location, about 15 minutes walk from Red Square. Now plan to add more IKEA in an attempt to make it homely as there doesn’t seem to be other ways of getting at secondhand furniture.

Some of my colleagues meanwhile have found themselves a two room flat in one of those Stalinist skyscrapers I see from my window, which is extraordinary. The rooms are huge with very high ceilings, chandeliers, oak parqueted floors and big glass doors. The flat has been decorated in the Moscow signature red/black combination with wallpapers of different abstract patterns, for example squiggles of black on a rich red background. Luckily the rooms are big enough to take it (just). The owner has it because her grandfather was in the KGB. There is also a mysterious door at the back which leads into a black hole. Until we get a torch we are making up lots of stories about KGB escape routes and hiding places.

Unidentified packages 1

One of the commonest games of being in another country is ‘guess the product’. Deciphering pictures and text can have some unexpected results; this is my first surprise – butter that turned out to be brown. My own fault really, this package was next to others with clear pictures of yellow butter, but I liked the wrapping so I bought one that turned out to be chocolate butter (at least I think that is what it is.)

Lines of escape

One of my new colleagues speaks such perfect old-fashioned English that it is difficult to remember he is Russian. It turns out he learnt it from the BBC world service; as he says, he wanted to do it really properly as one of the only ways out of “Iron curtain” times. There are still echoes of that longing to escape – and the importance of learning the English language to do so – from many people I meet. People who have studied or worked abroad, or who want to (England, America, but also India). People who see more opportunities elsewhere, but who are also fatalistic – realistic?- about getting out, about having visas revoked without much explanation, about the unavailability of jobs in the current financial situation.

And it makes me and the other English people I am working with, seem like strange beasts. What reason could we possibility have to want to make the journey in the reverse direction?

Handy hints for travelers 2: metro

The other thing that everyone said before I got here is that you need to count your stops on the metro, because there are very few signs on the platforms and the announcements may be difficult to understand. What they didn’t say is that at each stop, the announcement tells you what the NEXT stop will be. This is helpful to indicate you are going in the right direction, but certainly confusing for a Londoner where the tube system tells you which stop you have arrived AT.

(Actually, now I ave been back in London for a few days I notice that they also announce the next stop on the tube; something I have clearly never noticed before!)

Breakfast

I have to mention breakfast at the hotel. The food isn’t bad, it is nutritious and based on carefully measured portions. But things like flavour, taste and variety are not a central issue. There is something about 3 fried eggs, a piece of cheese, a piece of salami and a pot yoghurt which soon ceases to appeal. I find myself fantasising about carrying a little handbag kit containing a bottle of olive oil, salt, pepper and maybe some mayo. That’s what comes of coming to Moscow with all the history and culture of a fully-fledged consumer economy behind me, rather than a centrally planned one. Maybe the supposedly new Russia of conspicuous consumption hasn’t reached this hotel yet.

Handy hints for travelers 1: alphabet

Everyone I talked to before I got here says that the most important thing is to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. They are right. Russian letters are phonetic and only pronounced one way (unlike English) so it is pretty simple. Feel a real fool though, as I painstaking spell out each word, especially as they are often very like the English or French equivalent, for example, стоп stop and старт start.

Hotel

Being driven into Moscow and already trying to locate it in and against other European cities. My image of Russia has been so blurred by that sense of the otherness of communism, that I really didn’t expect it to feel so normal. Much like any large German or Eastern European city, but crossed with Nordic light and colours (ochres, sky blues, mint greens). Sprawling monumental neo-classical blocks, wide boulevards rattling with trams and trolley-buses.  Cleaner and less shabby then Budapest. Hints of Instanbul (easy to forget that Russia has borders with the Baltic, with Europe, but also with Asia, China, Japan, the Artic.)

 

And then just when I was settling into a city like Berlin/Helsinki, we reached the hotel. Which for reasons that were not quite clear, seemed to be in the centre of a military barracks. It also has an interior with peculiar interests, fluctuating between an off-key attempt at bling –bronze statues, waterfalls and flounced curtains (by the lift) - art celebrating heroic aspects of the locality (some weird displays in the foyer); and grubby plush crimson and gilt chairs in the restaurant, oh and a grandfather clock that is also a fish-tank. So, of course, I love it.

 

Except for the mosquitoes.

 

Going, going

What a fab flight for someone who loves flying, all the way up the western edge of Europe following the coastline and then over the top of the world - a curving blue and cloud horizon - and only finally southwards after St. Petersburg, creeping up on Moscow from behind.

 

And (unexpectedly) lounging in an almost empty business class, absent-mindedly listening in to the international business elite – 2 groups of 2 young men, as sleek and elegant as seals, impossible to pin down by nationality, just well-ironed and confident in their privilege. Also a shabby elderly Englishman who conformed to stereotype by turning out to be a diplomat (at least, that is the passport queue he joined at Domedevedeo airport). 

What do I know?

Been thinking about where I have got my knowledge of, and assumptions about, Russia over the years. It is an embarrassing mixture of John le Carre novels (Although A most wanted man is great for showing how British bankers, who think they are being clever on the edge of legality, are in fact completely out-manoeuvred by their most more dangerous Russian counterparts) and news broadcasts; leavened (perhaps) by reading historians of the Russian Revolution such as E.H. Carr and Richard Pipes.

Currently reading Jonathan Dimbleby's Russia: a journey to the heart of a land and its people which you can tell by its title is embedded in riddle-mystery-enigma thing; and having to work very hard not just to throw the book across the room. It is so self-centred, and so certain of the perspectival accuracy of a western european viewpoint.

How do I learn to behave like a Russian?

Some glib cliches immediately; Russians don't like being told what to do and the English are too artificially polite and say sorry far too much. There is certainly something going on, even in these initial and lightweight email exchanges and meetings, sorting out what the job involves. I think I am showing that I am knowledgeable and capable by outlining what I intend to do; but increasing feel that it sounds as if I am ordering everyone about - I assume a give-take (customer service?) relationship, when maybe it is a different kind of ritual. And I am well aware that I sound mealy-mouthed, with all my please and thank you and sorry....to the extent that I even want to say sorry for being so ingratiating. But of course, Russians often sound insulting to me, they say things so directly. The potential for taking mistaken umbrage on both sides seems huge.

And this is not trivial. I now learn that a previous (non-Russian) employee was thrown out of the office, not even given time to retrieve her coat and still months later trying to get money owed under her contract. Contracts just don't mean much here, so forging the right kinds of personal relationships (and having some solid leverage if things get sticky) seems the only way to go. But how? Or is this already a misunderstanding?

Making a move

So here I am - on something more than a whim but less than a fully thought-out career progression - leaving credit-crunch, fatcat banker, sleazy MP-ridden London for a job in mafia-run, bandit capitalist, blat-driven Moscow.

Thinking it is a good time to take some notice about what happens when you swop one place for an alternative, one set of stereotypes for another. So this is an exploration not just of somewhere else, but also of my own place in the world, wherever and whatever that is. Too much writing by the English on Russia is of the 'how to upwrap the riddle-inside-mystery-inside-enigma-inside-russian-soul-blah'. But moving to Moscow right now should be as much about what is going wrong with capitalism and post-communism in the early 21st century; and can surely offer a (personal) view into the complexities of cultural difference that we are all part of.