The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 24: To The Caspian
(Cover image ©Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 24: To The Caspian
It was dark when the taxi delivered me to my crumbling hotel near the Kremlin. An east wind scraped dry leaves across the cobblestones as I lugged my bags inside. Moscow was as drab and grey as I recalled it from my first visit a year or so earlier.
Our Soviet hosts – a mixed group of Intourist and ministry officials and, no doubt, a few KGB - had arranged for us to depart early the next morning to an aircraft design bureau – Yakovlev - located close by. There, we’d be met by the bureau’s chief designer, taken on a tour of the facility, given lunch, then permitted a short rest before paying a non-negotiable visit to the Moscow State Circus.
The next day, we were told, the tour would begin – following a visit to the Soviet Air Force’ s test facility at Zhukovsky, just outside the Moscow Ring Road, we’d be delivered to our river-cruiser, which, from its berth on the Moscow Canal, would set sail during the night to the first of our waypoints: Uglich and Rybinsk.
From there, sailing mainly at night, we’d turn east, then south, heading into the hinterland, which, as a defence editor, until recently, I never dreamed I’d see.
Three weeks earlier, the USSR – creaking under President Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms – had teetered on the brink of civil war.
Hardliners in his government, abetted by high-ranking members of the military, intelligence, and security forces, had placed him under house arrest at his vacation villa in the Crimea before declaring a state of emergency. But the plotters hadn’t counted on Boris Yeltsin and his supporters in the Russian Parliament.
Outside the building, Yeltsin had climbed on to a tank – part of a regiment that had been dispatched by the hardliners into Moscow to quell any dissent – and called on the Russian people to protest.
They did – bravely - and within a few days, the coup collapsed. The plotters were arrested (and later pardoned), and Gorbachev was released. But the blow to the Soviet Union had been mortal – it would survive barely four more months.
That September, you could sense it – a change was coming, but nobody quite knew what it would entail.
From that perspective, our trip down the Volga felt auspicious, historic, even; but, nevertheless, tinged still with a sense of threat.
A couple of days in and I began to get a better sense of my co-travellers.
There were around 25 of us – four journalists with the core comprised of aerospace industry officials from the US, the UK and Continental Europe. Only, it was pretty obvious to my journalistic compadres and me, that many were, at best, only partly who they claimed to be. Unsurprisingly, for a trip that represented one of the first occasions the USSR’s formerly top-secret military establishments had been opened up to the West, our little expedition was heavily subscribed to by spooks.
No surprise either, they were being monitored by what was now an unsubtle KGB presence, who, thanks to their faux-leather coats – borrowed, it seemed, from the wardrobe department of Central Casting - were even easier to spot.
Our home for the next couple of weeks was a vessel that had been built in a shipyard in East Germany, which, owing to the fall of the Wall two years earlier, no longer existed.
The ship was huge – as big as a cross-Channel ferry – with a couple of bars, two restaurants, and a hundred or so cabins. These were as basic as the food and drink, which was served sparingly. Every morning, we were awoken in our cabins by speakers that blared martial music.
My next sense of the surreal was provided several days into the voyage.