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From Saint to Saint (And Back Again)



As I sat drinking rough Belarusian vodka in my Brezhnev-era apartment, my flatmate Sean picked up his phone. A forceful Italian voice, belonging to his mother Barabara, urged him to get out of the country as soon as possible as the situation in Ukraine is evolving rapidly. ‘What’s the earliest flight you can get on?’ She asked. We opened up Skyscanner, snapping out of our vodka-induced torpor. ‘Tomorrow, 06:45, Lufthansa via Frankfurt.’ A momentary pause and then, ‘Book it. Right now.’ Fearful of making a rash decision, I protested, ‘But that’s less than ten hours away! Plus, I’m already booked on a KLM flight to Amsterdam on Monday.’ But she was insistent. By then it was going to be too late; all flights leaving Russia would have been grounded. I called my parents to get a second opinion; they wasted no time in giving me an answer: ‘Just go for it. Don’t worry about the money now.’


Sean and I packed in a desperate rush. We ordered a taxi through Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Uber. Five minutes later, an Uzbek driver turned up at the front entrance and started rambling about payment in unintelligible Russian. ‘We’ll pay whatever you want, just get us to the airport!’ I said, frustratedly. We arrived at Pulkovo Airport at 1am, weary, bedraggled and stressed up to our eyeballs. I watched nervously as boot-faced policemen wearing ushankas strolled past at regular intervals. We got through check-in and security no problem, but the two minutes standing at Passport Control felt like hours. In the departure gate, I received a notification from KLM: all their flights, including mine, have been cancelled. Sean’s mum was right. I breathed a sigh of relief.


When I sat down for breakfast on Wednesday morning, I felt as though I were witnessing history in the making as Vladimir Putin delivered an ominous speech in which he declared Ukraine a fundamental part of Russia. It left no doubts as to his intentions. My astonishment at this horrific turn of events was partly down to the passivity of my Russian teachers. ‘Rebyata, rebyata (guys, guys)!’ exclaimed our eccentric oral tutor, Maria, ‘I promise you, there will be no invasion. If I am wrong, I will give you thirty kilos of chocolate.’ Later, after the class was over, my friend William quipped, ‘She might as well give us it all now, because the invasion has already begun.’


On Friday the 25th of February, the Global Office made the decision to temporarily suspend its study abroad programmes in Russia, instructing St. Andrews students to return ‘with immediate effect’. Sad though I was to be having to leave, it was the right call. Within the space of twenty-four hours, all pretensions of normality disappeared as police cars swept across the city and protesters took to the streets in droves. I shed a tear as I watched on live news anti-war protesters being dragged into police buses on the very spot that, only two days ago, I had been standing myself, gazing wistfully at the grandeur of Nevsky Prospect. But it was only when the text messages began streaming in from my family and friends that reality hit. The last few days were a nightmare for me and my fellow British classmates. As the panic set in, everyone frantically made their exit plans whilst getting out wads of cash from the ATMs for fear of further sanctions. A wise decision, as days later, Russia was cut from the SWIFT international banking system.


Though my semester in St. Petersburg was cut short under awful circumstances, the time I spent there — three weeks in total — felt like an age, and a golden one at that. By the end of the first day, I felt as though I had known my classmates for years. By the end of the first week, I had picked up more of the language than I had learnt in the whole of last semester in St. Andrews. And by the time I had left, the city felt as familiar to me as my hometown of Inverness. I loved everything about it: the kaleidoscope of magnificent architecture ranging from baroque to brutalist; the ornate metro stations infused with their own unique character; the network of rivers, the rusty Ladas, the golden domes, the majestic spires, the monuments dedicated to men that history has since forgotten….


But that’s not to say it was all good. St. Petersburg, especially during the winter months, when the snow is relentless and the waterways are frozen over, can be quite a soulless place. The recent protests were the first instance of coordinated human activity I had seen in my entire time there. When I visualise a typical street scene, I think of a uniform array of glum Slavic faces, stung by the cold as they make their way up to ground level from the metro. I picture grey Soviet monstrosities; grand but deserted boulevards unchanged since the Cuban Missile Crisis; and austere imperial palaces looking lonely in the wintry gloom, with no one — not even a group of western tourists — to stop and admire them. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but St. Petersburg was. Created from scratch on a piece of marshland at the orders of an emperor whose vanity was matched only by Nero. Consequently, it feels a little artificial, unsure of itself, lacking its own identity: a smorgasbord of Venice, Amsterdam and Copenhagen with a thin layer of Moscow.


My interactions with ordinary Russians were not always happy ones either. On the trolley bus to Smolny, the glorious cyan-coated convent where I was studying, an old man sitting next to us asked if we were British. When we answered in the affirmative, he swatted his hand at us as if to say, ‘Your presence offends me’. Then there was the time I went into a corner-shop run by two rather thuggish Caucasian men. As I pulled out a couple of beers from the fridge, I felt a heavy presence behind me. I turned round and was met with the menacing glare of the owner, who growled something to the effect of ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I clocked just in time that there might be some alcohol law I was unaware of, so, in a quivery voice, I replied ‘I’m a foreigner; I don’t understand Russian laws.’ With a dismissive nod, he let me go. Sure enough, a new measure had been introduced, making it illegal to buy alcohol after 10pm.


The string of unpleasant experiences in alcohol shops did not end there. One time, Sean and I entered a store along the road that, at first appearance, seemed completely deserted. As we made to get some premium Czech lager, all of a sudden, an elderly woman popped up from behind the counter and seemed to stare right into our souls. We presented the bottles to her; she neither moved nor spoke, but simply shook her head. ‘So which ones are we allowed to buy?’ I asked. Without giving us a choice, she handed us two cans of some cheap Danish junk called Vyborg. I could only guess that the good Czech stuff was reserved for her regulars; in any case, it was off limits to perfidious foreigners like us.


Being British brought with it other inconveniences. For instance, without the Sputnik vaccine, we were unable to get into any state-owned museums. A group of us, eager for an outing, went along to the Siege of Leningrad Museum only to be turned away by a surly old man, who did not think much of our NHS certificates. As we begged him to relent, he paused for a second and asked if, by any chance, we were German. Telling him the truth, we were promptly shooed away. Had we lied, perhaps he would have made a special allowance on account of Germany’s mild reaction to the military buildup. In a more general sense, something that shocked me about Russia was the pervasiveness of the police, who would disproportionately single out men of Central Asian origin and ask for their papers. I learnt later that they did this on the dubious grounds that migrant workers from the ‘Stans’ tend not to get registered and are (allegedly) responsible for more crimes.


But if my stay in St. Petersburg was marked by the occasional bad experience, then the good ones more than made up for it. I could not have been luckier with my host, Elena, a sixty-five-year-old babushka who was incredibly sweet and treated Sean and me like her own sons. She could be controlling, even smothering, at times, but this only made her more endearing in my eyes. After Sean left his bedroom light on for the hundredth time, she plastered signs on literally every door in the flat, exclaiming ‘turn off the lights!’ in badly written English. She was extremely zealous when it came to feeding us, too, and made it her mission to introduce us to every Russian delicacy she could get her hands on. On one occasion, she made us a whole stack of pancakes, or blinis, for breakfast. After extracting a garish packet from the depths of her fridge that looked as though it had come straight out of the Soviet Union, she reached over me and began squeezing it onto one of my pancakes. I looked down at the disconcerting dollop of creamy liquid and asked what it was. Her curt reply was: ‘Prosta kushay!’ — ‘Just eat it!’.


Once, I fell into a tourist trap by asking for a photo with two men who I had seen marching up and down in pre-revolutionary uniforms, bearing fake rifles. One of them, a young bloke called Nikolai, added me on VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook. We got on like a house on fire and arranged to meet at a student-run theatre, where we watched a play about the poet Mayakovsky’s vibrant, but ultimately tragic, love life. On another occasion, William and I were on a bus to the centre so we could join in the Defence of the Fatherland Day celebrations (ironically, the night before the invasion started) when we were approached by two smartly dressed young men, about our age, who were obviously surprised to encounter foreigners. They asked our thoughts on Ukraine. William was on his guard, entertaining the possibility that they were FSB agents. They certainly looked the part: the Russian equivalent of the bespectacled Oxford grads that fill the ranks of MI5. But I humoured them and said I thought it was a shame — hardly a criminal offence. When one of them said something about the war being necessary, the other rolled his eyes and said, ‘Don’t listen to him; he’s an idiot.’ Despite our initial unease, we ended up having a very interesting conversation, half in English, half in Russian. I fell in love with St. Petersburg that night. Magnificent fireworks were set off over the gilded splendour of Petropavlovsk Fortress to the accompaniment of eighteenth-century cannons which sent shock waves reverberating off the iconic facade of the Winter Palace.


Other than the title ‘Saint’, St. Andrews and St. Petersburg (or Peter, as it is known colloquially) have little in common — particularly when it comes to student life. Something that struck me about the student community in St. Petersburg was just how dispersed it seemed to be. Prior to my arrival, I was informed that the area I was in, Decembrist Island, is the main student district. Yet there were no bars or, no sports clubs or libraries — and the majority of the people you saw around were pensioners, not students. I hesitate to say that we are spoiled for choice in St. Andrews, but we do have the comforts of bars, cafés and study spaces all on our doorstep. In St. Petersburg, at least where I was staying, you really had to seek out such places. At long last, I came across Sidreria: the archetypal hipster-chique café which I can’t stand back home, but which I found comforting in an otherwise bewildering city. I also managed to find a decent gym; altogether, it was no different from our own, except that the weights section was dominated by jacked middle-aged Russians with backs as hairy as a grizzly bear’s. I struck up a conversation with one of them, who was curious to know why I was learning his language. He commented, ‘so you’re going to be a professor, then?’ A modern languages student can only dream of such flattery back home.


I know that St. Andrews night life is nothing to write home about, but they really don’t make it easy for students to have fun in St. Petersburg. Not only is there a curfew in place which means that most bars and clubs have to close early, but public transport all but ceases by 11pm anyway. One bar we did manage to get into cheekily carried on past the curfew, dimming the lights and enforcing a cash-only policy so as to avoid a crack down. So, for me anyway, drinking became very much a private affair. Many a night was spent drinking cheap Russian lager in Sean’s room and sneaking out for the occasional cigarette in the landing with an empty pickle jar for an ashtray. Looking out the window, behind rows upon rows of homogenous apartment blocks, we could see the Lakhta Centre, the tallest building in Europe: a reminder of Russia’s impressive economic growth, perhaps soon to be reversed.


But, as with anywhere, students’ experiences of St. Petersburg vary; since I was living with a host and attending daily language classes tailored specifically to Brits, mine was very unique. To be sure, there were advantages that came with living with a host, particularly from the point of view of language progression. But lacking the freedom to cook was something I found hard to deal with. You cannot go too wrong with blinis, but the likes of cabbage-filled pirogis and pink, plasticky sausages I had no choice but to scrape into the bin when Elena wasn’t looking. One thing I missed about life in St. Andrews was the ability to nip out to Tesco and get whatever I felt like for dinner.


Having come from the relative luxury of an apartment in West Port Court in St. Andrews, it was quite a shock when I was dropped off at the foot of a crumbling Soviet monolith (what is known as a Brezhnevka). Every time you crammed yourself into the sardine-can that was the lift, it felt like you were taking your life into your own hands. The worst part was the shudder when it went through the hair-raising process of opening onto the eighth floor. Just as I was about to leave for class on my first day, Elena came up behind me and jerked my body round so that I could see myself in the mirror by the door. She gave no explanation, but I can only assume that, rather than a ‘you go girl!’ confidence-boosting attempt, it was a superstitious reflex — perhaps to stop the elevator-demon from causing me to fall to my death. I was touched, but I’m afraid a glance in the mirror is scant defence from Soviet engineering.


As for the course itself, it was more intense than anything I was used to. Every morning, I would have to commute forty minutes by metro to Chernyshevskaya station, before walking a further twenty to get to Smolny for 10am. The classes, each lasting an hour and a half, went on until 3pm, with only a short break for lunch. Not a word of English was permitted. So, for example, when you were asked what a word meant, rather than just giving the English equivalent, you would have to give the full definition in Russian. The convent, built in the mid-1700s, was very reminiscent of St. Salvators’ Quad with its look of faded grandeur, its winding corridors, and its maze of cold stone steps.


Throughout this crisis, I have lost no love for Russia and its people. In fact, my desire to learn the language and familiarise myself with the culture has only strengthened. So it really pains me to watch as Putin and his cronies single-handedly destroy the country’s reputation, making it a byword for belligerence and oppression. I was heartened to see President Zelensky’s direct address to the Russian people, in which he called for them to take the path of peace and emphasised the deep links they share with their Ukrainian brothers. It goes to show that this is not a war between two peoples, but between two governments. The sooner we in the West understand that, the better. As I gazed out the window of my Lufthansa flight, I was relieved but also sad. I thought of the kindly tutors at Smolny, enthusiastic about teaching their majestic language to a class of foreign students. I thought of the Uzbek woman in the Stolovaya who came and chatted to us as we sat down to a plate of freshly made pirogi. I thought of the smiley waitress in Sidreria and my wonderful host Elena. I thought of Nikolai and his patient attempts to improve my Russian. I thought of the creative young students revelling in their country’s literary achievements as they acted out scenes from Mayakovsky’s life-story. I thought of the Georgian woman with radiant eyes serving me Khachapuri for the fifth time in a week, for whom the memory of what happened to her country in 2008 — again at the hands of Putin — is no doubt still very much alive. All these people are about to face the effects of crippling economic sanctions for a war none of them really wanted. But most of all, I thought of the Ukrainian families whose lives have been turned upside down almost overnight, and whose bravery and resilience in the face of the Russian onslaught I can only admire.


I closed my eyes to the haunting melody of ‘St. Petersburg’, a song by nineties Britpop band, Supergrass. A total coincidence, by the way. The chorus resonated: ‘’Cause in three days, I’ll be out of here, and it’s not a day too soon’. Swap days for weeks and that describes my own situation pretty well. Except I vow that one day — hopefully not too far away — I will go back there. And when I do, I hope that I will find a new, better and safer Russia.




Image: WikiCommons


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