Funny what it can take you ages to discover. I have a friend whom I’ve never met, but who I’ve got to know online. He works in the mathematics department at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.
Actually – he doesn’t. His daughter is a journalist in Moscow and he’s an academic, but such is life under Putin’s regime that he asked me not to use his real name or place of work.
I got to know Grigoriy while writing about his university – that was back when I was a science journalist, and he was the only researcher with adequate English. That was 30 years ago when the world seemed relatively normal.
Now – because Grigoriy has reservations about Putin’s war in Ukraine, and because Putin, like so many other “strong men” leaders, views universities as hotbeds of liberal dissent – we talk in code. Nilmerk: “Kremlin” written backwards. N-t-p: “Putin” written backwards with letters removed for extra security. And then special military operation: which, as you’ll know, is “illegal war” written backwards.
I know lots of peculiar stuff about Grigoriy. I know that until 2023 when his mother died, she lived in a railway carriage in Crimea, somewhat ironically. It had been left in a siding following the second world war, and was converted into temporary housing for displaced people. But she stayed on, and for 77 years she lived inside a Muromteplovoz AS5 Soviet railcar. Growing up, Grigoriy didn’t realise other kids lived in rooms that weren’t long and thin.
I know Grigoriy’s sister was at school with Olga Korbut, once the world’s greatest gymnast. And that Olga wasn’t allowed potatoes, in order to keep her in the manner her coaches wished her to be kept.
And, best of all, Grigoriy told me a story about pigs which I have relished for years. A chap turned up in Vladivostok with two pigs. On one he’d painted a number one, on the other he’d painted a number three, and he set them running free in the city centre.
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Cue public concern and calls to the police. Officers quickly rounded up pigs one and three and then spent the rest of the week desperately searching for pig number two, before eventually arresting the perpetrator for wasting valuable police time. It’s a beautifully instructive tale, for revealing the frailties of human instinct, and the inherent comical character of officialdom.
But what I didn’t know about Grigoriy until a chance photograph was shared last December was this. He owns a Scalextric set. I also didn’t know that before the iron curtain fell (we can safely say it’s back up again), Scalextric had a factory in Leningrad. We’d discussed everything from borscht to Battleship Potemkin to English cheese-rolling competitions, yet not once did I suspect that a professor in the maths department of the Far Eastern Federal University races slot cars.
Despite approaching 60, I too have a Scalextric set and enjoy nothing more than drinking beer and whizzing toy cars around a plastic track. So, three decades after first meeting Grigoriy, I’m happy to relate that, thanks to the wonder of online synchronicity and software invented by someone smarter than me, we can set up identical tracks and race each other on Friday evenings. We even have a championship with drivers named after political figures from Russia and Ukraine. Don’t tell Putin he’s running last otherwise out the window I go.
I hope this is an encouraging story – two middle-aged blokes from nations which are ostensibly enemies, still pals amid the enmity. And who knows what’s going to fix the problems humanity faces today? Perhaps it starts with the trivial. Perhaps it shows that protest can come in many forms: toy cars racing around a miniature Silverstone while their child-men handlers drink beer and use code words to insult people who might otherwise do us harm. Or maybe it’s simply a couple of middle-aged fogeys who’ve realised they’ll never sit in a real racing car, living out their childhood once again.
Mick O’Hare is a freelance journalist, author and editor
