Blahwg in the USSR

“The air attack warning sounds like…”

As a child born into the second half of the Cold War, long before Frankie Goes To Hollywood purloined the above prose as the opening salvo for their single Two Tribes, I lived in frequent fear of the doom laden drone that followed.

Cheerful Public Information Bulletins like the one linked below advised what to do in the aftermath of a nuclear strike, should you be unfortunate enough to survive. Frankly, without the means or indeed Planning Permission to construct a nuclear bunker, I doubted my family would endure a several megaton blast, but - as instructed by the government - I dutifully practiced sheltering beneath the kitchen table for days at a time during my youth.

I’m pretty sure that at the time of their inception these Protect & Survive films were widely ridiculed, however what I remember most is their gloomy cloak of unease that permeated my childhood in an area of the UK housing so many US Air Bases that we may as well have painted a target on our house.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any bleaker, Raymond Briggs followed up his heart warming adventures of the Snowman with When the Wind Blows, a jolly animated tale of an elderly couple dying from radiation sickness.

These were the cornerstones of my happy childhood and may explain why I‘ve grown up with an uneasy sense of foreboding.

Thus, with so much misery and a big dollop of propaganda swimming around my head since very young, Russia - the pesky ‘Red menace’ - was never top of my list of places I Must See Before I Die - whether from nuclear fallout or otherwise.

So arriving for the first time in Moscow a couple of weeks ago on business, the day after Putin’s widely criticized re-election campaign with large-scale public demonstrations underway, didn’t exactly fill me with glee. Just as long as it didn’t fill me with polonium 210, I might be okay…

Moscow is apparently home to some 11.5 million people, all of whom - at any given time of the day - appear to be on the road at exactly the same time. Each with a casual abandon and impervious oblivion that one suspects that most believe they’re still driving tanks.

Wherever you go there are the bronze busts of stern faced dudes with impossible stately facial hair, their etched dead eyes seemingly following you around the place. I just imagined that, right? Quite possibly, because until I’d experienced -20c with the sun still shining, I had no idea that my face could freeze mid-sentence unless I was having a stroke.

In a country where you have to go through three passport checks just to enter an ordinary office building, there is still that sense of unease and guardedness. During my stay I felt close to making a KGB list merely from pointing out an error with my bar bill. This instigated a lengthy altercation with the management and referral to a ‘special team’ hidden away in some mysterious back office, labouring night & day checking CCTV footage because in Mother Russia, the customer is - apparently - always a lying cheating scumbag. I bet the Gulag played host to many arising from disputes over a £4 beer.

Luckily I did escape briefly from the soul-destroying Groundhog Days of airport/hotel/office/hotel rinse/repeatedness and enjoyed a brief sojourn into Red Square in the icy shadow of the Kremlin. A lady that resembled an angry potato sold me souvenirs and none of the massed military or police recognised me as a potential beer thief.

An ice-rink erected there in Red Square, I was told by my native colleague, would have been unthinkable up to a couple of years ago and shows signs of a very gradual thaw within the permafrosted state. One hopes that this continues under the newly reinstated but widely reviled Putin.

In a land where the corpse of a long dead revolutionary has been on display to the public since 1924, one could joke that Russia has trouble in burying the past. One could, but one would probably be spirited away to a back room for a private visit with the ‘special team’.

So let’s keep that one between ourselves, okay?

　

How I learned to start worrying and fear the bomb: http://youtu.be/3HFm1t0lq8Q