Michael Oliver-Semenov - Sunbathing in Siberia

It was early on in our affair that we decided to marry. Our long-distance courtship was taking its toll on us; I guess all people in these kinds of situations find it hard. Not only that but I couldn’t really say I had a home to go to and because of the global economic crash there was little chance of me finding a regular, decent job in the UK. British immigration law states that I would need full-time employment and a permanent residence in order for Nastya to be allowed to live in the UK. Pigs might fly by the time that happened and so the only option available to us was for me to move to Russia.

It turns out that finding someone who wants to marry you isn’t the hardest part of getting married. For a British citizen to marry abroad one needs a lot of forms. Firstly you must apply for a Certificate of No Impediment to Marry (CNIM). Once you have this it needs an Apostille (this is a stamp from the Foreign Office based in Milton Keynes). A standard Russian tourist visa at the time had to be applied for forty-five days before the intended travel date which prevented me from booking really cheap flights. Once I applied, I had to wait around two weeks for a decision. This was to allow the FSB (Federal Security Service formally known as the KGB) adequate time to investigate me (the application was very long and asked if I had any ‘special skills’ or military training).

When I had my passport back, I thought I was in the clear. Research on several Russian travel websites soon informed me that when I arrived in Moscow I would still need to get everything translated and stamped again. Then all my documents, both original and translated, would need to be presented to an International Wedding Court. Worse than this I read that we could only be married a month or two months after application, which would have been impossible with a single month’s visa; although the same websites stated that the wedding courts would likely accept bribes to make it sooner. Determined that we wouldn’t be separated by bureaucracy, or economics, I left for Moscow with a suitcase full of warm clothes, and a rucksack loaded with Jaffa Cakes.

The doors to all the wagons of the train opened simultaneously, and a number of heavyset, extremely intimidating female guards stepped out in black greatcoats and grey ushankas (classic Russian trapper’s hat). Our passports and papers were checked and we boarded. The engine itself wasn’t anything like I had expected. I had been hoping for some great big steam engine, instead it was a large industrial one. Like a green brick on wheels.

There are three different classes of tickets on the Trans-Siberian. The first and most expensive is a compartment all of your own. The second is a compartment of four bunks – two lower bunks that convert into beds, and two upper bunks which are always beds – and third class, which I am told is six bunks to a compartment. We had chosen second class. I wasn’t actually aware of the etiquette and so as soon as we entered our compartment I sat on the seat opposite Nastya. This seemed only natural, but not long after I had sat down, a large, muscular Russian man entered and gave me The Look. I was sat in his seat, which would also double as his bed, so I changed sides quickly.

Sat next to Nastya, with our knees pressed against the tiny table in the centre, it was hard to imagine how anyone could travel third class. But people do, and often. In Russia, because of its size, it’s normal for people to commute to meetings via two, three, four or sometimes eight-day journeys. Our compartment, second class, felt like a sardine tin and for the next three days that sardine tin was home. There was a dining cabin on board the train, although eating there would have required leaving our bags with a complete stranger. Having anticipated this situation, we had bought a picnic – some sausage meat, a large pack of cheese, some Brie, a loaf of bread, a pack of pastrami and a few sachets of herbal tea – from a half decent supermarket we had found earlier that morning, which surprisingly sold a wide selection of Western produce.

When it was time to prepare our meals, which involved cutting our bread and cheese on the itsy witsy table, our travelling companion, although large and scary, turned out to be the perfect gentleman and would always leave for a walk up and down the train. I regret not learning his name or plucking up the courage to thank him for his good manners and generosity before he left the train for good. The Trans-Siberian is a popular tourist attraction and so it was normal to find a Brit on the train with an extremely poor grasp of the Russian language. Therefore our companion only communicated through Nastya, and only to make polite conversation or to ask if we would like to share his beer. The afternoon was long – from the small window we could only see pines and birches morning and night – except for a few stations, which all looked alike. There was no shower facility and the toilet made a high-pitched sound when flushed that hurt our ears if we weren’t quick enough to cover them. Anyone who takes that train across the whole of Russia is not only going to have severe cramp by the end of their trip, but is likely to smell as bad as a wet dog that has been rolling in his own poop.

Despite all this, our first day passed without incident. However, as we hadn’t got to know our travelling companion yet, after he procured a 6-inch Bowie knife from his boot to cut his meat in the afternoon, I found it near impossible to sleep that first night. Nastya had brought her own knife to cut meat but it was only an inch long. I knew this would have been of little use in defence against a burly Russian who carried a blade big enough to chop off my head in one fell swoop. Lying there on my bunk above Nastya’s as we were hurtling further into Russia in the dead of night I was struck by fear and panic. With the ceiling of the wagon so close to my head I occasionally reached up, put my palms against it and pressed myself deeper into my bunk, as if this would somehow make me safer. As the hours went by I began to doze slightly, my mind filled with images of Moscow.

As the plane touched down in Sheremetyevo airport, I could see it was going to be hard to dispel the stereotypical view of Russia I had come to know from Hollywood films. A bleak sky mirrored the dirty snow surrounding the airport; the blanket of grey-white absorbing the airport sign’s blood-red glow without a trace of reflection. I was met at Sheremetyevo by Nastya, who had taken the Trans-Siberian to Moscow three days earlier and had arrived that morning. She had already booked us a double bed in a hostel where we planned to stay for two nights. I had arranged to meet an up-and-coming Russian poet in Red Square the following day and we also needed to get documents translated. To give you an idea of the scale of Moscow, it took nearly four hours to travel from the airport to the other side of the city (it takes four hours to travel from Cardiff to Heathrow Airport, via National Express). Moscow could be a country all of its own. It is a vast maze of roads and underground train stations. I had left the UK on a four hour flight at around 1.15 p.m. GMT and arrived in Moscow at about 8.30 p.m. because of the time difference. After travelling across the capital and checking into our hostel it was close to midnight, so there was little time for anything other than sleep.

My first day in Moscow had begun with a trip through the underground to a translation office in order to have my CNIM, Apostille and passport translated. We left photocopies of my documents there and went for my first lunch in a Russian café. The food was worse than anything I could have imagined. The jacket potato I ordered was not potato, but Smash, smothered onto a rubbery potato skin. The sausage was not actual meat, but rather some kind of Spam-like meat substitute. The bacon wasn’t actual bacon but a rolled-out Spam-substitute with bacon colouring. I discovered that all the crap you wouldn’t even feed to a stray dog is sold to humans in Russia; not only that, but many of the products available are also out of date. Even the packets of cigarettes I bought should have been binned months earlier. I assumed this was due to the global economic crash of 2007 but Nastya assured me that the decline in quality of products had begun in the late nineties.