Moscow Calling by Angus Roxburgh

Author:Angus Roxburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

23

The KGB Gets Me

NOBODY PREDICTED THE convulsions that would occur in the world in 1989. I certainly didn’t predict those that would happen in my own life. Though perhaps I should have seen the warnings – like the unexpected appearance at our door in January of our old friend Boris, with a bouquet of flowers for Neilian’s birthday.

‘How did you know it was her birthday?’

‘The all-knowing Yuri told me.’

So Yuri Romanov – and his stooge, Boris – were still on our tracks.

Life was too busy, and too much fun, to bother with them.

We went for a family weekend at Zavidovo, where UPDK, the diplomatic services organisation, rented out wooden dachas to foreigners. Somewhere nearby, behind tall green fences, the Politburo had their own dachas, and a hunting reserve. This is where they used to ply bears with honey and vodka, or tie them to a tree, so that an old dodderer like Brezhnev might have a fair chance of potting one.

On some other weekends we went sledging with our friend Varya in the Moscow suburb of Kuzminki. In a clearing in the woods, hundreds of children and grown-ups, muffled against the frost, enacted a Bruegelesque winter scene – skating, tobogganing and throwing snowballs.

Then there was the day when Ewan, now two-and-a-half-years-old, almost had his appendix out. He was violently sick one night and by morning had a fever, so we took him to the local polyclinic. Two matrons in white overalls prodded and poked him, and recommended, first, that we rub down his body with vodka, and second, as a precaution, that we take him to hospital for a second opinion. We drove to a hospital in the centre of town, where another pair of motherly but utterly clueless doctors prodded him some more, muttered darkly to each other, then pronounced that he had acute appendicitis and must have an operation at once. The thought of our son going under the knife in a Soviet hospital was terrifying, so we said we’d ‘be back’ but wanted to go and get a second opinion. It was Sunday, and the British embassy doctor’s surgery was closed, but a notice directed us to the US embassy, where a GP was on duty for Western citizens. There we were quickly seen by a doctor who immediately did something that none of the four Soviet medics had done – he took an otoscope and looked in Ewan’s ears. He had an infection. It was this that had caused the vomiting and fever.

‘So he doesn’t have appendicitis, then?’ we asked.

The doctor stifled a laugh and assured us that an ear infection was not a sign of appendicitis. He prescribed some penicillin, and by the end of the day, Ewan was fine. And still had his appendix.

A friend called Slava Cherny, who worked on the newspaper Sovetskaya kultura, invited me to a theatre performance, based on Yevgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs of the Gulag, Into the Whirlwind. The production, at the Sovremennik theatre, used a sparse set that served to represent prison, court, convoy or camp, as required.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.