Mother Russia
Flew in from Miami Beach, American Airlines. Didn't sleep a wink last night. All the way I was thinking about ... well... my mother dying in hospital in Yorkshire. Her voice on the phone had indicated something I couldn't place immediately. "Come and see me ....soon Julian," she confided. This wasn't a dimly remembered catch phrase from the Music Hall. It was something much closer to home. She knew she could only live a few days longer. So, like an impecunious Charlie Bubbles, I got off the plane and got onto the train and traveled those two hundred sodden miles north, back to the cold damp fogs of Halifax in October with a deep Florida tan. In the rambling Edwardian hospital, I read her my holiday notes and regrettably - no, regretfully - told her I had to go to Moscow on business. She looked at me through the haze of drugs and with typical maternal selflessness said, "Go on. You get about your business." Her final words which have caused me much puzzlement over the years since were "We did all right didn't we, Julian?"
So now huddled in my late father-in-law's Crombie I nervously gazed down at the snowy ground as Captain Thompson, my last trustworthy contact with Britain, informed me that he would be setting us down at Moscow Domodevo airport in ten minutes. There didn't seem to be much happening down there. Just snow covered forests and the occasional road with sparse traffic, the yellow headlights illuminating the two lines of slush ahead. The seat belt warning came on. I tightened mine for what might be a slippery landing down a treacherous runway. The ground was closer now, this earth over which so many men had fought to the death. Napoleon was defeated here. Hitler's 1000 Year Reich was stopped in its tracks here after just ten - struggling for possession of these dimly lit houses in these bleak frozen woods and clearings and behind, the real prize, smoking petrol refineries. Forty feet off the deck, the hydraulic motors in the flaps suddenly whined and closed them to a setting nearer the wings - an unusual technique for descent, I mused - then, at maximum power, the engines spat fire as the brand new 757 soared skyward again.
I felt as if we were already leaving. As if we'd had a quick peak and collectively decided that it wasn't really worth the effort of actually landing after all. But at ten thousand feet we leveled off. "Captain Thompson again. I should explain that little manoeuvre back there. We'd been given clearance to land but I noticed another plane on the runway ahead and thought it best to go round again". Quite right Captain T. "We'll be landing in another ten minutes." Jesus. Was there anyone at all manning the control tower? What sort of organisation do they have down there? The second October Revolution happened only two weeks ago so maybe the country is still in a state of turmoil. Meanwhile you expect the airport to be operating to international standards, don't you? I had of course, yet to see the terminal.
Now we passed over the same forests, refineries and farms as before. Surprising how quickly the fleetingly-seen becomes familiar in the mind. This time the plane wafted down squarely and hurtled down the dimly lit runway. Outside everything looked brown, even the falling snow. The pilot taxied to the end of the airport buildings and headed for what Captain Thompson informed us was B.A.'s usual stand. One could only hope that decades of reliable daily service counted for something in this scarcely functioning country and that it would be merely a short walk to the baggage reclaim, should such a thing exist.
It did. One carousel for six incoming flights. Nothing on it at this time though , except for two young soldiers in tightly belted unisize uniforms, smoking and nursing AK47s. I stood around and tried to look like a regular. So did my plane load of fellow travelers, there was however a distinct sense of unease, an animal sensation that was tripping alert switches in the mind. Something about the dingy lighting and the all pervasive drabness of the decor ran a brain movie showing half starved wretches being herded into cattle trucks in some godforsaken Polish railway siding at night. By comparison, I was standing in the Ritz. The ceiling decoration for example seemed to be made up of thousands of copper cake tins strung together with paper clips. Perhaps an erroneous extra zero on an import order was to blame, and the airport designers had ingeniously found an alternative use for these undesired gastronomic items, their price too high for the Russian housewife. As the heating system blew jets of warm cabbage-scented air, they banged together gently stimulating the impression of distant culinary preparation.
I spotted the universal sign of a man in the pose of a V2 rocket and headed for the toilets. It was tiny, three latrines for the entire incoming half of the airport and it hadn't been flushed for some weeks. The aroma jerked me backwards, like coming round after breathing strong smelling salts. I was glad to be wearing boots with thick soles, as it seemed some other desperate travelers hadn't even made it through the door. At this point a thought crossed my mind. If this is the gents at the country's premier international airport, what chance is there in the whole of Russia of finding such a thing as a splash-guard?
Twenty minutes later I collected my bag from the over-coated scrum at the carousel and joined the single queue through immigration. October revolutions may come and go, but Communism's greatest achievement, bureaucracy, was operating with its eternal numbing inefficiency. The junior immigration officer, third class - thank you George Orwell - pored over his complex forms, then laboriously hand-wrote finely detailed paragraphs before ponderously authorising them with his rubber stamps of subtly differing blue hues. After a lengthy hour , I reached the final threshold. The gatekeeper of all that Russia had on offer was a grey stubble-faced young man with a loyal, earnest approach to his work. Cynical I may be, but haven't people for the last twenty years been trying to escape from this country? Why such painstaking scrutiny of a plane-load of businessmen trying to get in? Old habits, or simply a rehearsal for the barbed wire entanglement which would surely take place when we tried to leave?
​
​
​
