For VE Day 75: Crossing A Continent Still Scarred By War
I STARTED MY LONGEST EVER OVERLAND JOURNEY on a London bus to Hammersmith. From there, I took the underground to St Pancras. On the Eurostar, I crossed the English channel below its busy shipping lanes. After an afternoon in Paris, I was at the Gare de l’Est, ticket in hand, but still marvelling at the fact that I could take a train from there all the way to Russia.
I had decided to travel by train to understand better the world I was writing about: a world of foreign correspondents in the early 20th century, when you could not just cross Europe by plane in a matter of hours. On the way, I saw a Europe which had known peace for almost all my lifetime, but which was everywhere marked by the wars which have scarred so much of its history.
The reminders began even before I boarded the train. At the station, plaques recalled the fate of more than 70,000 Jews, including 11,000 children, sent from there to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps further east. ‘French people, remember!’ demanded one inscription. No one hurrying for their train home stopped to look. I shuddered as I thought of the comfortable life I had known, and felt a shiver of guilt as I thought of the comfortable compartment in which I would travel onwards.
I had been away from Russia for ten years, and could not wait to return. My visit was to be a combination of book research, and meeting colleagues at two university departments in Moscow. Most of all, I wanted to see again the land I had known as a journalist throughout the transformative years of the 1990s and 2000s. Then, I would fly between Russia and western Europe several times a year. The train journey would be a chance to understand better the true distances between my homeland and the country on the opposite edge of Europe where I had spent so many years.
The train was a tiny bit of Russia resting in the west before heading east again. In their mannerisms, the crew embodied Putin’s Russia: neat uniforms, and polite but official chat with a hint of respect and nostalgia for Soviet order.
The first stop was Strasbourg. During a correspondent posting in Brussels, I would travel there every month to report on the European parliament, one of the institutions which had grown out of a common desire among former enemies for peace, cooperation, prosperity at the end of World War II. I patted my passport where it sat in my top pocket: a frequent habit on long journeys; on this occasion, perhaps, also to remind myself that it still said ‘European Union’ on the front–a privilege my compatriots and my government had decided I should not enjoy for much longer.
Night had fallen. I slept. I woke to a flat German landscape still winter grey and waiting the first green of spring. Shortly before dawn, the train had crossed the Elbe, the river over which Soviet and American troops had met in April 1945, before the final fall of Berlin, then capital of Nazi Germany.
That brief moment of comradeship for a common cause had ended soon after, of course. The Cold War which followed defined the Europe in which I had been born, and grown up: divided by the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism; armed with the nuclear weapons which so terrified and outraged me as a teenager that I took to the streets to protest.
IN BERLIN, THERE WAS A REMINDER OF THAT PAST WORLD not only because of the city’s own history, but also because of the Russians who joined the train here. In my childhood, Soviet citizens lucky enough to be allowed to travel could have taken the train from here to Moscow without once leaving the ‘socialist camp’, as I could now travel from St Pancras station in London to the Poland-Belarus border without leaving the EU of which I was still then a citizen.
Now the divide between east and west no longer lay there: commuters on one side of the imperceptible borders looked much the same as on the other.
When I first travelled east as a student in the late 1980s, the clothes I wore were different from those worn by the people I encountered. We had different stuff, like portable cassette players. Now those differences were gone. It seemed so long ago. Derelict communist-era factories by the side of the railway belonged to a political world almost as remote as Roman ruins.
One such lay outside the town of Mogilno. I do not speak Polish, so can only guess at how the name sounds in the language of that country–but on that grey late winter morning I could only hear echoes of the Russian word ‘могила’ (‘mogila’). It means grave, or tomb. At this dead time of year, this falling-down factory seemed a memorial for a vanished era, and for those who had died throughout history because of Poland’s place on the routes taken by armies commanded by Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
MY JOURNEY WAS ABOUT TO END EARLY. My preparations had not been as thorough as they should have been. Having imagined that my EU passport and Russian visa would be sufficient for the whole trip, I had not got a transit visa for Belarus. Not wanting to risk deportation and a fine–not least because I was due to give a lecture in Moscow a few days later–I reluctantly left the train in Warsaw. The train crew were not sad to see me go. They had seen my missing paperwork as a matter that might cause them a headache. I was, I think, the only non-Russian on the short train–so their little piece of Russia could now go on its way without the outsider.
I spent the night in Warsaw, and flew to Russia the next day. In two weeks there, I visited Moscow, Volgograd, and Saint Petersburg. You can read the post about my trip here. My train journey had given me a better understanding of the life of journalists of an earlier era, when travel probably offered more time to think, but was also accompanied by the worry that any reporter knows as to whether others have got there first.
One of the books I read for my research was Charlotte Haldane’s Russian Newsreel. Haldane was one of a tiny number of western correspondents permitted to enter the Soviet Union during World War II. Taken west of Moscow to see Soviet progress at the front, she and her fellow reporters were once permitted to interview a captured German aircrew who had been shot down after bombing a town.
As a journalist in London before her assignment to the eastern front, Haldane had also worked as an air-raid warden. It turned out that one of the captured Germans, a navigator, had also bombed London. ‘I remembered the corpses of mothers and little children,’ Haldane wrote, ‘I had inspected as part of my duties, in St Pancras Mortuary.’ No wonder she concluded, ‘I could not see any hope, in a civilized world, for such as he.’
My train journey had begun at St Pancras, and my trip ended ended in St Petersburg, a city which, as Leningrad, suffered so greatly under Nazi blockade during the war. Some of the physical scars–damage to the marble of Russia’s most elegant streets–have been left to remind the onlooker of the city’s bloody past.
I never witnessed Europe in wartime. In my life, the continent has mostly known peace and prosperity. As a correspondent in Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and elsewhere I have seen enough of others’ wars to make me value peace.
In an age when my country–perhaps never having valued the EU as an instrument of peace–has decided to turn away from its European neighbours, when nationalism is on the rise across the continent, and xenophobia is fuelled by fears of a virus that scares us all, let us hope that–unlike the captive airman–there is hope for us in a civilized world.
My journey had reminded me of what we remember today: a time in living memory, when, for millions of my fellow Europeans, there was no such hope.
London, 8 May 2020.
My book, Assignment Moscow: Reporting On Russia From Lenin to Putin, will be published in July.