Published: 19 October 2022 ~ Toast Making in Russia an Important Tradition
One of the great joys of making friends in Russia is the party invitation. Birthday, anniversary, public holiday or simply a get together in someone’s home, whatever the occasion and scale, you can always be assured of a warm welcome, tasty food, plenty of vodka and good company.
Like any party should be, Russian parties are a celebratory experience, an opportunity to bring family and friends together in an atmosphere of goodwill and conviviality. But Russian parties are more than that. They enable the participants to express their feelings openly to the person or persons to whom the event is devoted, and to pledge their admiration, esteem and/or love for them before and in front of the company present.
Toasts, personal speeches in someone’s honour culminating in the act of drinking to their health and good fortune are, you might be surprised to learn, even more traditional and realistically Russian than bears, snow and furry hats with ear flaps. No matter where you are or who you are with in Russia, once the drinking starts a toast or several is unavoidable.
As someone who has no difficulty saying ‘cheers’ before I raise my glass (don’t even think of it!) but is by no means qualified as an after-dinner speaker, the seemingly natural public-speaking faculty of ordinary Russians never ceases to amaze me. If anything exceeds this skill, then it can only be the speaker’s ability to thoroughly bare his or her soul to the loved one or dear friend to whom the toast is pledged.
Toast making in Russia is an important tradition
I was once inclined to believe that Russians must spend ages learning, rehearsing and polishing their toasts but, having witnessed toasts every bit as touching and verbally accomplished at impromptu gatherings as at pre-planned ones, I am driven to conclude that the Russian nation is endowed with a certain remarkable and natural propensity for oratorical genius. It is a national characteristic that tends to belie the notion that the only toast you need to know in Russia is the one that hardly anyone uses, Na zdorovye! ~ which literally means ‘To health!’ But if you are lost for anything better to say, then this is better than nothing.
It is expected of all party guests that at some point in the proceedings a toast will be presented. Sometimes toasts are organised on a formal, rotational basis but mostly toasts are performed ad hoc, when and as occasion dictates.
It is to be reasoned that the necessity of committing oneself to such a public undertaking is not to be relished by shrinking violets, a plant with which I am personally acquainted and one to which I am most endeared, but if long experience has taught me anything it is that necking sufficient vodka before you take centre stage is often conducive to a fair result. If you are more than a trifle self-conscious, it helps considerably to make your debut at a later rather than earlier spot in the course of the festivities, by which time, it is to be hoped, you will have accumulated enough Russian Courage (which is not dissimilar to the Dutch variety) to impress yourself and the rest of the room. And even if you do muck it up, chances are by then that most everyone around you will be safely in the same squiffy boat and your falling headlong overboard won’t be particularly noticeable.
The art of toast making in Russia
There’s a very good chance that if you have been called upon to make speeches at UK parties and have developed a knack for it, that it won’t help you in Russia at all. Unlike in the UK, where short party speeches err towards the frivolous or are laced with suggestive digestives and saucy innuendo, the intimacy of Russian toasts tend to be pitched on a quite different level.
Some may be intellectual, some political, some artistic, but almost all Russian toasts, whatever form they take, are philosophical, frank, open and sincere, and resonate with the quality of unalloyed genuine feeling. When Russian relatives and friends toast fellow relatives and friends, they do so from the bottom of their heart. They do so with unreserved emotion and a poetry of the soul that is the touchstone of love and integrity. There is nothing to ask and nothing to doubt. The sentiments expressed emanate from and reaffirm the importance of traditional values, the core values of family and friendship, and their intimate public disclosure strengthens inter-family and community ties on which social cohesion depends.
Good Russian parties, like everything else in life, eventually come to an end, but the feel-good factor lives on, not just in the individual in whose honour the party has been held but in each and everyone who has attended and contributed to and embraced the ethos of kinship and camerarderie.
The photographs included within this post are from a recent party of innumerable toasts. I could have lost count of the number of toasts and could have remarked, had I been sober, on the emotional, poetic and linguistic integrity with which these toasts were delivered, but I was too busy raising my glass (there he goes again!) between taking turns on the dance floor.
Six of the best for raising my glass too often!
Toast at undercover Soviet Spy Centre UK
Note the retrospective Soviet theme and the wonderful, old, industrial building in which this event took place!
My first visit to Kaliningrad in 2000: 23 December 2000
See you in Kaliningrad Russia! is one in a series of posts that recount my first visit to Kaliningrad in 2000, and my first impressions of the land, the people and its culture.
Updated: 11 January 2021 | First published: 8 July 2019
I am not, and have never been, a traveller, so my first trip to Russia was as much a surprise to me as it was to everybody else.
The story of my first trip to Russia has been told so many times that it is almost legendary, but for the uninitiated it goes something like this. From my unlimited knowledge of the country, having grown up in the late 60s early 70s on Len Deighton’s and John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers, Michael Caine spy films and Callan, and having been force fed Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, at school, as far as I was concerned Russia was the USSR and in deciding to go there I was off behind the Iron Curtain.
In the weeks leading up to my departure I took advantage of the internet, using computers in the offices of the publishing company where I was supposed to be working to research my travel arrangements and Russia in general. In those days I was not particularly switched on to the British establishment’s trashing of everything Russian, so I took all of the warnings and don’ts very seriously. Admittedly, it was not all fabrication. This was the year 2000 and the catastrophic after effects of perestroika were still ricocheting throughout Russia.
It was my intention to access Kaliningrad, Russia, via Gdansk, Poland, about which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) warnings were also dire. At this time Poland was independent. It had its own sovereignty and had not yet become a vassal state of the European Union.
The end result of my internet research was that I ended up with a hulking great Lever Arch folder bursting at the seams with the scariest stuff imaginable ~ not a reassuring read for a novice and nervous traveller.
Why Go?
My decision to fly to Russia had not been made on the basis that I wanted to discover Russia or anywhere, for that matter. As I said earlier, I was no traveller. The thought of flying was anathema to me. I had not flown since a school trip to Switzerland in 1971. But, in the summer of 2000, all that was to change.
I met a woman who was later to be my wife. Her name was Olga. Olga was an English language teacher. She was spending a month in London, having brought a group of Russian students on a cultural trip to England. We met, I showed her around London ~ mostly around the pubs of London ~ a relationship developed, and when she had to return to Russia as her visa had expired, and I was faced with the unthinkable prospect of never seeing her again, I decided that if she could not come back to England then I would go to Russia. That this decision was taken after several pints in Clerkenwell’s Wetherspoon’s pub in London is immaterial. I had made a promise, and I had to stick to it!
But I would not be going alone. My fear of flying was so ingrained that I needed a co-pilot. I found one in my younger brother, whose flippant, frivolous and devil-may-care attitude was exactly what was needed on a dangerous mission like this.
See you in Kaliningrad Russia!
What Brits don’t know about Russia you could write on a postage stamp ~ billions of them ~ but one thing we do know is that it snows out there: Russia is very cold.
I cannot recall a single Russian spy film or television series made in the West where there is not a surplus of snow and furry hats, so you can be certain that we spent the weeks leading up to the trip equipping ourselves for Siberia, filling our oversized bags with woolly jumpers, great thick socks, big hulking overcoats, thermal shirts and the must-have cotton long johns. As it happened, even though we were travelling to Russia’s westernmost point, where the climate is not dissimilar to England’s, on this occasion we had been wise to take precautions, as the temperature sank whilst we were there to minus 29C.
In addition to clothing baggage, there was another type, the kind that comes with security. Having read over and over again that we were likely to be robbed at knife point or, at the very least, succumb to spates of pickpocketing, we had taken every precaution and more.
Credit cards were stashed away in various places; credit card company emergency numbers had been written down in at least two pocket books; the names of family, friends and close associates, all of whom could help us if we found ourselves in a jam, were meticulously listed along with contact numbers and emails (where they existed!); and money? ~ we were taking US dollars, some of which I had cunningly concealed in a money belt.
The money belt that I would be using to keep my dollars safe was no ordinary, bog-standard traveller’s belt. Having read somewhere that savvy robbers went straight for the type of belt that you buy from travel-clothes shops, I had acquired from an old army friend an ordinary leather belt which had a zipped liner at the back into which notes could be threaded. This belt wasn’t additional; it was the one that held your trousers up; the notes were very tightly stashed in a thin threaded line, so you can imagine the difficulty of paying for something, especially in somewhere busy such as a supermarket! Still, the currency that I had stuffed inside the leg of one of my socks was not such a difficult enterprise.
After a
month of fretting and dwelling masochistically on what it would be like to be
plummeting earthwards in a doomed airliner, I was ready to say goodbye.
Before departing (I was inclined to say ‘leaving’), a close friend of mine did all he could to reassure me: “After all,” he said philosophically, “it’s not the flying you have to worry about, just the crashing.”
Published: 8 November 2021 ~ Restoring the Polessk Brewery in the Kaliningrad Region
The former East Prussian province of Kaliningrad, known today as Kaliningrad Oblast, is a territory rich in history. It is a cultural treasure trove of historically overlooked, essentially undiscovered and time-abandoned places and buildings. Even if its immense restoration and development potential is realised, it is as yet largely untapped, waiting patiently for the overdue arrival of the curatorial entrepreneurs who will restore, rebuild and conserve it for generations to come.
Above:Labiau coat of arms
Among the many instances of this long-awaited rehabilitation is the small town of Polessk, known in German times as Labiau. Located approximately 50 kilometres northeast of Kaliningrad on a long, recently resurfaced, tract of road, Polessk debuts as a tired, run-down and struggling municipality. There are sporadic instances of once regal buildings and the two small municipal parks form welcome green oases, but mirages in an urban desert waiting with weary buildings for the miracle to come merely serve to ask the question when?
It is not just for any old reason that Lenin, standing alone on his plinth, looks out across the deserted concrete plateau where homage once was paid to him, preferring these days to fix his eyes on the waterways beyond rather than look behind and be reminded of Boris the proletariat bodger, with his concrete blocks, two sheets of asbestos and bucket of cement.
And yet you instinctively know, or feel, from the moment you cross the railway line, which is the threshold of the town, to the point at which you meet the canal and river, that this is a town that deserves much more, that it could be so much better!
The Deyma River, an offshoot of the Pregolya, and the Polessk Canal, which links the Pregolya and Neman Rivers, form a natural boundary at one end of the town as the railway does the other. To the north lies the 625-square-mile Curonian Lagoon, a haven of biodiversity and a coastal habitat of unaffected beauty. In essence, Polessk is a gateway to a multi-faceted cultural region steeped in historic significance, blessed with natural beauty and profusely invested with ecological importance.
It is also home to Labiau Castle, described on the internet as an ‘historical landmark’, but which in its present-day condition looks more like a beggar waiting for the feast than deserving of the grandiloquent title which speaks of better days. Alas, both castle and Lenin’s statue occupy the same proximity, somewhere in the space between the power and the dream.
The few who belong to the exclusive Polessk club, those who have actually visited the town and who may have even stepped inside of what remains of Labiau castle, are less likely to be aware of the presence of another historic building that is tucked away obscurely behind the backstreets of Polessk.
This building, a former German brewery of mid-nineteenth century origin, is currently the recipient of an ambitious restoration project that is rescuing it from oblivion and progressing its renaissance to a working brewery and museum.
Restoring the Polessk Brewery in the Kaliningrad Region
Invited to attend an open day and tour of the brewery, I felt particularly privileged. The excursion embodied three of my major interests and by default principal weaknesses: social history, historic architecture and ~ yes, you’ve guessed it ~ beer!
At the risk of repeating myself, Polessk is by no means a large town. Nevertheless, its compact nature does not make it any easier to locate the brewery, which is hidden away behind a cluster of average Soviet flats on an expanse of ground at the end of a side street.
These flats, or to be more precise, their blandness, do the brewery no disservice. By screening it from view they ensure that the first encounter with the building is considerably more dramatic than it otherwise would be.
Admittedly, whilst zig zagging between the flats, the sight of a balcony strung with socks and pants is, to put it mildly, a disarming one, but take heart! ~ just when it seems that all is lost, the scene suddenly opens up to reveal a view that is guaranteed to set the pulse racing of anyone who is infatuated with social and economic history.
There stands before you a wonderful Red Brick neo-Gothic edifice, astonishing in its turreted and towered simulation, atmospherically magnetic, beloved in recognition of the beer it must have produced and will, with a little bit more than a gentle nudge and a shove, soon be producing again.
Star-struck, I recall the profound reaction and words of my Uncle Son, who was a builder, when he first clapped eyes on Norwich Castle: “How did they get that ‘stun’ up there!” he said. And with the same degree of wonder, as I stared transfixed at the brewery’s magnitude, made all the more awesome by the thankful absence of the Soviet predilection for pre-cast concrete, I whispered to myself, “How did they get those bricks up there?”
At this moment, I was reflecting on the buildings pseudo-Gothic tower ~ one of the most awesome chimneys that I have ever encountered. Not that I am a stranger to tall chimneys, having lived in English counties where the skyline was dominated by rows of them belonging to the brickworks. But the brewery’s chimney, being rectangular rather than cylindrical in form, and its solitary presence, gives its ground-to-skyline taper a singularly novel and striking effect.
The dynamic of the front of the building depends for its impact on the complexity in shape, size and angularity of the contrasting component parts: the tall tapering chimney, the rectangular tower with its curious knop, currently under scaffolding, and the lower sloped-roof structures. The accentuated Gothic arches within which the windows are set and, in some instances, embroidered with decorative brickwork, possess a dramatic personality of their own but seen together their inverse graduation makes this already tall building seem loftier still.
The window configurations, concomitant decorative detail and structural elements project an industrial power that is best appreciated from the prospect of the end elevation (shame about that Soviet blockhouse knocked up at ground level in con blocks and cement) and from close and awe-struck scrutiny of the far side of the building. From this perspective the viewer receives a first-class rendition of the intrinsic importance of arches in Brick Gothic formations, here creating a dynamic uniformity in which contrast plays its subtle part across the horizontal plane and within the vertical sections.
If you look carefully at the photographs of what is effectively the back of the building you will see that approximately 50 per cent of its interior is already a beneficiary of restorative work. New double-glazed windows have taken the place of the old and through them a glimpse of smart walls and retro lighting emerges.
Arched configuration of windows , Polessk Brewery
The original entrance to the brewery appears to have been through one of two doors that open, front and back, into the same traversing corridor, but the restoration has seen fit to provide a grander approach, using a two-tiered wrought iron staircase that leads to large glass doors cunningly inserted into one of the first-floor window arches.
Entrance to Polessk Brewery
First impressions count, and the two that spring to mind on the other side of the front door is overwhelmingly spacious and infinitely solid. Next comes the detail, which feeds into the first two.
The ceiling and upper storeys of this vast reception room rest on a series of three double H-beams that span the room’s width. They are raised on prodigious, iron, load-bearing columns fastened where they meet with bold connection plates bolted one into the other. These, and the visible undersides of the H-beams that travel the length of the ceiling are finished in a suitably industrial-looking matt red-oxide paint. Between the sunken ceiling beams the intervening space is arched, each arch resembling the convex half of a separated tube, so that taken as a whole the ceiling adopts an undulating character, each lengthwise arch the equidistance of the other.
In one corner of the room, suspended from the ceiling, hangs a large triangular-shaped grain funnel, studded with rivets and finished in the same red-brown paint as the beams. Diametrically opposite, on the other side of the room, a giant wood-burning furnace is at work, roaring fiercely away. It is more than capable of keeping the vast room, already operating as a tourist information centre and ear-marked for expansion in this role, at a pleasurable ambient temperature.
Connoisseurs of nineteenth-century Brick Gothic architecture will enjoy the contrast in the construction principles and materials used on the first and second floors.
The second floor, which is accessed via a short, curved, boxed-in staircase, trades its metal industrial credentials for a more medieval wood construction, substituting the iron vertical supports of the preceding floor for great rectangular posts with offshoot branches to the beams that cross above them. No wonder then that the burly brewer who occupies the second floor is a larger than life-sized wooden carving!
On this floor, as with the previous one, there are a series of history boards, all of which are designed and presented to professional museum standards. Not that my elementary grasp of the written Russian language enabled me to educate myself as much as I would have liked, but I did glean some information both from the boards and from the various relics and artefacts scattered around the rooms.
The second storey also contains a large circular grain tank that would have fed into the hopper on the other side of the ceiling. This great metal tub studded with rivets is as impressive as it is solid as it is tactile!
A part-completed staircase and a large hole in the floor above provides an excellent viewing platform and vista from and through which to gaze up into the rafters. The beam construction is truly magnificent here and in remarkably good condition considering the age of the wood and the long period for which the building was unused, untended and deteriorating. I believe I am right in saying that when completed this section of the building is where the brewery museum will be housed.
Restoring the Polessk Brewery in the Kaliningrad Region
Although an attic-man myself, basements and cellars do possess a certain Jene sais quoi.
From an architectural and atmospheric standpoint, the cellars of 19th century breweries are fascinating places. It is in these underground chambers that the rather tedious task of throwing grain across the cellar floor with wooden shovels and then spreading it about with rakes was undertaken in the pursuit of procuring germination prior to drying and milling. The cellars of the Polessk brewery may not have been the most salubrious environment in which to work for long periods when the plant was up and running, but architecturally their vaulted ceilings are superb examples of mid-19th century Gothic style, a specific feature of which was the use of iron columns as opposed to stone or brick supports.
To access the cellar it is necessary to descend the lower half of the curved stairs that runs from the first to second floor. It brings you out into the corridor that I referred to earlier, which runs the width of the building. The corridor marks the point where one half of the building’s interior restoration nears completion and the other is work in progress. The ‘in progress’ 50 per cent gives an accurate idea of how much work has been accomplished so far and how much devotion, planning, blood, sweat, tears and sheer hard graft is yet to be undertaken before the standard of finish in this half of the building will equal that displayed in the other. Not so much as a round of applause, please, as a medal, I think, is needed!
Above: More work to be done. Any volunteers?!
History of Polessk Brewery
Anyone whose Russian is better than mine which, like 50% of the Polessk brewery, is every day ‘work in progress’ for me, should encounter little difficulty in harvesting all the detailed information that they could wish for about the history of the brewery, from its inception to the present day, from the biographical story boards distributed around the building. But to give you a leg up, here is a succinct outline of that history:
Labiau brewery, which changed names several times during its productive years, was founded and built in 1840 by oneAlbert Blankenstein. The business was a family-run concern and, after his father’s death, was inherited by Albert junior (as the Americans would say), who embarked on a complete reconstruction programme and thereafter increased the range and productivity of the plant’s output.
Soon the brewery was producing about 5,000 litres of beer a day, mostly dark lager but also a light variety known as Labian March Beer, as well as a selection of non-alcoholic beverages.
Unlike many other breweries in the region, Labiau brewery’s fate was not sealed by the outcome of the Second World War. The Soviets decided to restore, modernise it and leave the day-to-day creation of beer in the hands of a German brewer.
By February 1946, beer was flowing from the brewery again under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Novovi, its first Soviet director. By all accounts the colonel was a hard task master, who had no qualms about disciplining his workforce, the majority of which were German. Not only did he dismiss three Germans for skiving off work, but he also sent them up before a disciplinary tribunal.
Germans not dismissed and sent to disciplinary tribunals continued to work at the brewery until October 1948, when they became casualties of the mass expulsion of Germans from the region.
The last Soviet brewer to work at the plant was one Mikhail Myasoedov, who had learnt his trade since 1946 in breweries based in the Caucasus. As competent as he no doubt was, his tenure of the brewery was short lived. The post, which he took up in 1954, was, two years later, surplus to requirement owing to a large brewery opening in Kaliningrad. In consequence, lager production ceased in Polessk in 1957, although for a short while afterwards the plant continued to produce fruit juice drinks, lemonades and wines made from berries.
The man who is making it work
The inspiration and driving force behind the renovation and preservation of Labiau brewery is Alexander Natalich. Never forgetting that first impressions count and that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Alexander Natalich comes across as a man with a genuine love of history and a passion for his restoration project, in fact, his family’s restoration projects.
To date, the Natalich family have successfully restored a school in Ilyichevka, close to Polessk, a former Polessk printing house, which now serves as Alexander’s office, and a kindergarten, which its original owners abandoned before it could be completed. And now there is the brewery.
With a track record of this calibre, it is hardly surprising that Alexander is often asked whether his next project will be Labiau Castle, to which he wryly, but no doubt accurately, replies that what he has taken on so far could keep him occupied for the rest of his life.
The future of Polessk and the region
It may seem that Alexander and his family have cast themselves unofficially in the role of Polessk’s (Labiau’s) cultural saviours. If so, Alex has a good teacher. It was his mother, Inessa Savelyevna Natalich, who restored the old German school in the village of Ilyichevo, district of Polessk, to heritage standard. And whilst no one could blame her son for thinking that he will have his work cut out restoring the brewery, further light is shed on his ‘enough work to last me the rest of my life’ remark in that the brewery is seen as the focal point of a more extensive project, which encompasses turning the brewery grounds into parkland, cutting back the wetland reeds that are choking the Deyma River and opening up a boat station, the intention being to run a sight-seeing shuttle service to and from Zalivino Lighthouse, which is a renovation success story in its own right!
Epilogue
Intentionally or not, Alexander Natalich, his family and band of volunteers, are putting Polessk and its corner of the East Prussian region back on the historical map. There is incredible potential for sensitive tourism in Polessk, where history meets nature. Inessa Savelyevna Natalich’s German school, Alexander’s restored printing works and kindergarten, Labiau Castle, Lenin on his plinth, Eagle Bridge, river boat rides, Zalivino Lighthouse and enough natural coastline and man-made waterways to explore, enjoy, photograph, sketch and paint than I have drunk beer in a lifetime (I’ll have to think about that one!) ~ oh, and don’t forget the brewery. I can’t wait for it to open!
9 May Victory Day 2021, and in Kaliningrad, as in the rest of Russia, young and old turned out in thousands to pay their respect to their forebears ~ those who survived and those who died in the awesome and bloody struggle to deliver their country from Nazi tyranny and to honour the inestimable contribution made by the Soviet Union to the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Last year Victory Day was a rather muted affair owing to coronavirus, but this year Russia’s second most important holiday after Easter was firmly back on track, led by the traditional Victory Day parade in Moscow and marked elsewhere throughout the country with celebrations and remembrance services.
9th May Kaliningrad Victory Day 2021
At 12pm, Olga and I rendezvoused with our friends, Arthur and Inara, at the Home for Veterans on Komsomolskaya Street, Kaliningrad, a large complex of buildings which, as the name suggests, provides homes to veterans who no longer have kinfolk to support them.
Although the service is a private affair, held behind closed gates, it was still possible to see something of the formal ceremony and the cadets of various denominations who took part in acknowledging the debt that is owed to one of the most remarkable generations in modern history.
Cadets at the Home for Veterans
Cadets in Kaliningrad hold placards portraying family who fought in WWII
From the Home for Veterans, we walked the short distance to the Мass Grave of Soviet Soldiers and placed red roses on the eternal-flame-lit monument, before driving to the city’s foremost WWII remembrance site, the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen, an impressive obelisk and statue-flanked shrine to the soldiers of the 11th Army who died in the assault on Königsberg.
Mass Grave of Soviet Soldiers
Mick & Olga Hart placing flowers at the Mass Grave of Soviet Soldiers, 9 May 2021
Russians do not seem to have the same problem that Brits and Yanks have when it comes to remembering their allies!
Victory Park, an elaborate, grassed, landscaped area criss-crossed with winding pathways and studded with series of steps, lies at the foot of the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen. Today, it was a sea of people, many of which were family groups, proudly carrying the national flag, and also in many cases the flag of the USSR, along with placard-mounted portraits of their relatives who had taken part in the battle of Königsberg or the wider conflict.
As well as photographs, flags and flowers, numerous participants wore medals and many more were wearing the black and orange striped Georgian ribbon, one of Russia’s most powerful symbols of national pride and patriotism. Some children were dressed in the type of military uniform that their grandparents would have worn during WWII, or, as the Russian’s refer to it, the Great Patriotic War, and both children and adults alike had in some instances donned the Soviet army side-cap, the olive-green pilotka, with its red or green-painted Soviet star badge.
Olga Hart & Inara place roses at a monument in Victory Park, Kaliningrad (9 May 2021)
Sadly, but inevitably, with each passing year the veteran population diminishes, but today we were fortunate to meet a 91-year-old lady veteran, who had braved the crowds and temperamental weather to attend the annual ceremony.
During the Second World War, she had contributed to the war effort by providing vital work in the Soviet munition factories. Today, she wore her medals with pride.
Her husband had been amongst those Soviet regiments that had fought their way across the East Prussian region, a punishing military campaign that had culminated in a ferocious artillery assault on Königsberg followed by gruelling street-by-street close-quarter combat in and out of the web of ruins.
One of the lady’s granddaughters, who spoke perfect English, told me that in recognition of her grandfather’s bravery during the Königsberg campaign, not only had he been highly decorated but also a street had been named after him in one of the region’s outlying towns.
It was an honour and privilege to have met and talked with this veteran and her family today and to have had the opportunity to witness such a profound and open expression of respect and patriotism here in Kaliningrad extending across the entire generational spectrum.
Monument to 1200 Guardsmen, Kaliningrad, Victory Day 2021
Updated: 12 March 2022 | Published 29 September 2020
Warning! In response to Russia’s special operation aimed at ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying Ukraine’, the UK media has embarked upon and is actively pursuing an intensive propaganda programme which is resulting in widespread anti-Russian sentiment and Russophobia. Aimed at cancelling Russian culture and demonising Russian citizens at every level, incidents of verbal abuse and physical aggression towards Russian nationals have been reported in various western countries, including the UK. This comes against the backdrop of reports suggesting that Facebook is greenlighting hate speech against Russians on its social media platform. You are advised to travel to the UK only for essential reasons and whilst there to exercise caution.
It is not easy for Russians to emigrate to the UK, although it has been cynically suggested that possession of an extremely large bank account might go some way to oiling the wheels. Failing that, you could always apply the right shade of make-up, throw away identification and thumb a lift on one of those little boats that roll daily into Dover. However, if you are not into making things up and have no desire to be treated as a VIP, you could always try the normal route, which is? At the end of this article, you will find a reference section containing a list of UK Government websites outlining the daunting process which you must undergo should you wish to enter the UK, apply for Leave to Remain and possibly later citizenship.
Not that I am trying to put you off or anything, but the following account is taken from my diary. It is a personal record of what we had to go through, my wife and I, in order for her to live with me in the UK. Admittedly, all this took place a long time ago, back in 2000/2001, but I have no doubt that the process today is no less turgid, complex and frustrating.
Advice for Russians moving to the UK
As outlined in my first post I met my wife to be, Olga, when, as an English language teacher, she brought a group of Russian students to London for a month’s cultural visit.
I visited Olga in Russia, Kaliningrad, during the Christmas holidays and New Year celebrations at the end of 2000, and I returned to Kaliningrad again in 2001, staying twice for a month at a time.
A few days later we separated, and I returned to the UK to prepare for my interview at the British Embassy in Moscow, where I would have to go in order to obtain a British visa for my wife.
For Olga this meant a long train journey from Kaliningrad to Moscow; for me, it meant flying back to Russia about two weeks after returning to England.
Advice for Russians moving to the UK
From the time we decided to wed until mid-September 2001, I had spent six months or more compiling a dossier on Olga and myself which I would need to present to the British authorities in Moscow as proof that our relationship was ‘kosher’, in other words that our marriage was legit and not an arranged immigration scam.
As well as the official bumph, for help on which I had engaged the services of an immigration solicitor, it was necessary to include documents and evidence of a more personal nature, such as photographs of us together on outings and social occasions with family and friends, as well as copies of our private correspondence. It was a labour-intensive, costly and time-consuming task, and once completed the documents assembled easily filled one of those large Lever Arch files.
On my flight to Moscow, I could not resist comparing my situation with the thousands of so-called asylum seekers that Tony Blair & Co were importing into the UK on an almost daily basis. The irony was inescapable. Here was I, a British citizen, my English lineage stretching back over hundreds of years, having to go cap in hand to the British Embassy in Moscow to beg them to allow my wife to join me in England, whilst immigrants from every corner of the globe were being shipped in wholesale to shore up Tony’s indigenous electoral base, which was destined to collapse once the Socialist faithful tumbled that New Labour was in fact nothing to do with old Labour at all. The irony made me smile. I felt that I had been left on the shelf to make way for Labour’s ‘Buy into it now and get another thousand free’ policy.
Notwithstanding, I made the most of my time in Moscow. I had never been to Russia’s capital city, and I had furnished myself with the luxury of taking a few days off from work to ‘see the sites’ and recuperate once the ordeal was over.
It was an ordeal, make no mistake of that, but, like most things in life, it had its satirical moments.
We arrived at the British Embassy in Moscow at the appointed time. Outside and inside the doorway there was a group of Asian-looking fellows being corralled by three or four military-looking personnel touting automatic weapons. I rather stood out from the crowd as I was wearing a blue suit with a needle-point pinstripe and carrying a black briefcase. One of the soldiers, espying me at the back of the horde, came forward and asked, “Can I help you?” I showed him my British passport and explained that I had an appointment at 4 o’clock. He must have presumed that I was some sort of official diplomat or other, for he and his colleagues suddenly became extremely polite. A route was cleared for us through the crowd and, with a cheery and civil “Come this way, sir”, we were taken past the stairway, shown into a lift and saluted most decorously as we took off.
Well, you know what they say ~ every dog must have its day!
It was a different kettle of bureaucratic fish when we arrived in the vast open-plan waiting room upstairs. Once we had ‘booked in’, we were sat there for one hour before our interview and almost one hour afterwards. As with all bureaucratic institutions, making the public wait seems to be de rigueur. Admittedly, this protraction gave us plenty of time in which to get our story straight. What I mean by that is that we had been alerted to the fact that it was standard practice for the Embassy authorities at some point in the interview to split couples up, and whilst one person went back to the waiting area, the remaining person would be asked various personal questions about the other. Then, the role was reversed: the waiting person would be wheeled in and asked the same questions about himself or herself to see if the answers tallied.
You are no doubt familiar with the axiom that ‘it is the waiting that is the worst’, and our two hours waiting at the British Embassy proved the rule not the exception.
Down one side of the waiting area there was a series of doors leading to the interview rooms. The appointments worked on a numeric system, in other words you were issued with a ticket with a number on it and when your number was up ~ so to speak ~ as shown on the electronic indicator boards, off you not so merrily went.
During our wait, we saw several people enter the rooms. I am not sure whether they went in merrily, but what I can say categorically is that most of them came out looking anything but: at least one woman came out in tears and another looking distraught.
It was something akin to being at the dentists, with the patients ahead of you screaming whilst you nervously waited your turn
And then, suddenly, just when we had begun to suspect that they had forgotten us, it was our turn!
The little interrogation, sorry, interview room, could just about hold three people; there were four in ours ~ us and two interviewers ~ a man and woman. It was terribly claustrophobic.
Having witnessed the condition of interviewees prior to ourselves we were both ready for the third degree, but it never happened. From the moment we entered the room to the moment we left, the interviewers, contrary to our expectations, were the epitome of good humour, even joining in with and complementing my quips ~ which, I instinctively knew, I should not be indulging. There were formalities, with regard to the visa application and checking of sundry documents, but my Lever Arch file, so painstakingly compiled, hardly received a glance, and I was rather put out that they did not want to scrutinise it.
The questions that they asked each of us about each other individually were also taken in good part and raised a few laughs in the process.
At the end of the interview, we were not exactly told that Olga’s visa would be granted, but we were confident that things had gone well and reassured that we were on the right track from the advice that we were given on what we could expect officially when Olga arrived in the UK.
Whilst our visas application story has a happy ending, contrary to popular belief legal entry into and settlement in the UK is by no means guaranteed, and I cannot emphasise enough the need for assiduous preparation and the importance of taking legal advice.
In fairness, the UK is not alone in this: there are very few countries where legal entry with intention to remain is not onerous; it has certainly been no cakewalk for me moving to Kaliningrad, but like everything else in life, you must do your homework first.
In my follow-up article I will try not to deter you even more by outlining how much it costs to live in the UK ~ in London in particular ~ how much you need to earn to live, where your money will go and how fast your money will go.
