Kansk

‘Bet you anything you’ll arrive, spend twenty minutes there, and then get on the first train back to Krasnoyarsk.’

I was discussing my upcoming trip to the little Siberian town of Kansk with Kirill, who was revelling in the prospect of my imminent discomfort.

‘Come on Kirill, it can’t be that bad.’

‘Oh it really is. You know Cheryomushkin, the really dodgy district of Krasnoyarsk?’

‘The one where you saw two break-ins and a car theft in one afternoon?’

‘Yeah that’s the one. Well Kansk is like a whole town made up of just Cheryomushkins.’

Kirill is not alone in holding Kansk in such low esteem. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone with a kind word to say about the place. The common responses when I told people I was going there for the weekend were either hysterical laughter or ‘don’t take anything valuable.’ Renowned Soviet author Arkady Strugatsky spent a few years there, and concluded that it was thoroughly depressing and full of criminals (this isn’t an actual quote because I can’t find the source, but it was along those lines trust). Searching for some solace, I looked up images of Kansk online. None of them were particularly appetising, but my favourite was the sixth image to come up – a picture of a street brimming with watery mud, with the caption a dying hopeless cesspit.

During the five-hour train trip, my imagination ran riot with images of mafias, cartels, and walking skeletons. But, to my disappointment, none of these things were in evidence when we arrived in Kansk. It was quite an unlovely town, it has to be said, but nothing compared to the hell on earth that my friends’ descriptions had led me to expect. The view out the train window when you arrive at the station is a bunch of cranes and a ton of snow, not much else. As the crowd of disembarking passengers crossed the track and entered the station building, Zuzana pointed out that ‘it doesn’t smell very nice’.

The view from the train

The train station was pretty much the centre of Kansk, and gave out onto a town square of sorts. I would describe the square, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it looked like. It was here that we met Irina, the teacher who had invited us to Kansk. The first thing that struck me about Irina was that her English was very good. It’s rare to find someone in Krasnoyarsk who speaks comprehensible English, never mind good, and I expected the situation in Kansk to be even worse. But Irina’s English was the best I’d heard since arriving in Siberia (other than when my parents visited, and they’re at an unfair advantage what with being English and everything). Irina teaches at a private language school, which offers extra lessons to kids hoping to actually learn English (an almost impossible feat if you’re just relying on state school education). As we drove through Kansk towards her school, we passed another town square. This one was grander than the one that the station was in. On our right was a newish orthodox church, with white walls and a green roof, complete with a series of impressive domes and towers. On the left was a rather fetching brick building that looked like it had once been a merchant’s house. It had been divided into shops now. Only the building on the far side of the square ruined the effect somewhat: the burnt out shell of what looked like it had once been a similarly fetching merchant’s house, but was now a set of crumbling walls with no roof. Fire seemed to be a common theme in the stories I’d heard about Kansk. One friend proudly showed me a video that he’d taken of a Kansk building burning down, with black smoke billowing from the windows. ‘I’ve got a photoshopped picture where I’m walking away from the building wearing shades and carrying a rocket launcher’ he’d said, grinning.

‘That’s a nice building on the left.’ I said to Irina, pointing to the merchant’s house.

‘What the brick one? It’s a fake. The real one burned down a couple of years ago.’

This would soon become a recurring trend in my Kansk trip. I’d try to point out something good about the town to a local, who would stubbornly hijack my attempts to be positive about the place and turn them into further evidence of its inadequacy.

Irina took us for lunch in a local restaurant called ‘Peppers’, which she chose because it had a soft play area in which her two young (very energetic) boys could terrorise some teddy bears under her watchful eye. Over lunch, she discussed her upcoming trip to London with me. Not only was she going to London, she was taking a bunch of students from her language school with her. Going to London from anywhere in Russia is a significant undertaking. You have to get a visa, which we Brits make about as complicated and expensive as possible for all Russians. Getting to London from Kansk is even harder: you have to take the train to Krasnoyarsk (five hours), then get a taxi from the station to the airport (one and a half hours), then get a plane to Moscow (five hours), possibly change airport in Moscow (another hour and a half), and finally, hop over to rainy London (three and a half hours). Now add a bunch of kids, most of whom have never left Russia and hardly speak any English. I marvelled at Irina’s ambition, and felt just a little bit sorry for her.

Then our hosts turned up. Andrew and Maria were both students of Irina’s language school, and they were going to give us a tour of the town before our presentation in the town hall that afternoon. Andrew (my host) was smiley, good at English, and hoped to go and study something computerey at university in Kaliningrad (as far away from Kansk as it’s possible to get in Russia). We sauntered to the square with the church in it and stopped. Then Maria turned to me and Zuzana.

‘So… what do you want to do?’

‘Er… what is there to do here?’

Both of our hosts shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Oh come on… what’s your favourite thing to do in Kansk?’ I asked Andrew.

‘Stay at home.’ Said Andrew, without hesitating.

We decided to go and look around the glitzy new church.

The church was indeed glitzy and new. It had a beautiful tall icon stand and a cavernous interior filled with incense and votive stands. Clearly none of our party felt too comfortable in there, because we soon found ourselves back in the middle of the town square debating where to go next and inspecting a shin-high sculpture of a person drawing.

‘How about you’, I asked Maria, ‘what’s your favourite place in Kansk?’

‘I like Irina’s language school. It has pictures of London on the wall, and it’s kind of nice when you feel like you’re not in Kansk.’

Next, we headed to the Town Museum. The woman at the reception desk almost fell off her seat when she saw four whole people walk into the museum.

‘Well well’, she said, ‘it looks like it’s going to be a busy day! Now, I can offer you all a guided tour for a total of four hundred rubles. What do you say?’

‘No thanks, we’ve only got half an hour, we’ll just get standard tickets.’ Said Andrew.

The woman was crestfallen. ‘I could make it a quick tour if you like?’

‘No, we really ought to just pop in and then leave. Thanks though.’

But the woman couldn’t be shaken that easily. She took our money for the standard tickets and followed us into the museum. ‘Where are you all from then?’ She asked.

We explained that Zuzana and I were foreigners and Andrew and Maria were from Kansk. It would be difficult to overstate how exciting this news was for the woman, who, I was beginning to suspect, didn’t get very many visitors. As soon as we were through the door and in the museum’s main room, she herded us over to the corner, where there was a roped-off section. She unhooked one of the cordons and ushered us through, saying ‘you must see our new exhibition.’

The new exhibition was essentially three painted plywood walls with some rusty agricultural implements hung on them and a model of a big old oven in one corner. There were also several opened tins of paint and some dust sheets lying around. ‘Actually I guess the exhibition isn’t finished yet’, observed our guide, helpfully. ‘But you must take some pictures of yourselves while you’re here! Look how big that oven is!’ I dunno maybe this is spoilers for those of you who were hoping to go to the Kansk Town Museum and see the new exhibition, but here’s a picture of the oven. It has a freaky stuffed cat balanced on top of it just in case… you know… the exhibition was in danger of coming across as vaguely normal.

Next, we saw an exhibit entitled ‘Kansk, litter capital of Russia.’ Apparently Kansk residents are known for their scant regard for nature, and when the snow melts, it leaves piles of wrappers, cans, and plastic bags lazily decomposing on the street. This charming characteristic had been transformed into an artistic homage to Kanskers (Kanskians? Kanskabridgians?). A pile of rubbish was placed in front of a dusky orange backdrop. When a light was shone on it, it cast a shadow resembling a thoroughly fed-up person. It’s clever in an utterly depressing kinda way.

We skipped the History section, which had a load of pieces of coloured paper glued onto a cork board, and headed straight for the ‘animals of the Krasnoyarsk Region’ section. Here, some sticks had been propped up to look vaguely like leafless trees, and were surrounded by stuffed animals in front of a large picture of a river which had been stuck to the wall. Now I’m no expert in taxidermy, but I can confidently say that whoever stuffed these poor animals wasn’t either. They had bulgy bodies and contorted faces stretched into grimaces. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. ‘Ooh take some pictures!’ Prompted our guide, who had forced me to photograph every inch of the museum, and didn’t plan to stop now. Andrew pointed out that our time was up, and we gratefully made a beeline for the exit, but our guide was having none of it.

‘On your left as you leave you’ll see one final exhibit. It completes our little collection of animals.’ Her voice betrayed her excitement. This was the exhibit she’d been waiting for. The cherry on the cake. The big flourish. She raced ahead of us as we went through the door back into the reception, so she could get a good look at our awestruck faces as we caught a glimpse of the magnificent… cuddly toy mammoth. It was a cuddly toy mammoth. A pretty large cuddly toy mammoth, to be fair, but a cuddly toy mammoth nonetheless. In comparison with the Krasnoyarsk Town Museum (which has a REAL mammoth skeleton in it), this was slightly disappointing, but we did our best to look excited for the sake of our guide. She nodded smugly in a kind of ‘bet they don’t have THAT in museums in England’ kind of way and said ‘well then. I suppose you’ll be wanting me to take a picture of you with it?’

ANiMaLz

Rawrr

The next stop on our grand tour of Kansk was the town hall, where we were due to give a talk. It was a bit of a shambles, because we’d prepared the talk in English, and were asked to give it in Russian with only an hour’s notice. We threw together a translated powerpoint, but apparently the translation wasn’t brilliant, because every now and then when we changed slides the words on the screen would elicit a stifled chuckle from the audience. Zuzana and I pushed through to the questions bit of the presentation, hoping that it would be a little more manageable than the ‘Ecology and the Environment’ section. But the questions kinda threw me too.

‘What’s an English joke about variations in dialects of English? Also can you translate it into Russian without losing any of the meaning?’

‘Don’t you think Kansk is a dump?’

‘How do you react when gay guys hit on you?’

‘Why did you choose to come to Russia?’

This last one is always a tricky question for me. I never know how to answer. Rather than sitting down and actually trying to remember what attracted me to Russia, I choose to challenge myself by coming up with a new answer every time I’m asked the question. It’s a fun game, a great way of getting hilarious reactions out of people, and also allows me to put off confronting whatever it is lurking inside me that’s drawn to one of the world’s most corrupt nations. I’ve tried ‘I REALLY like vodka’, ‘I’m a huge Putin fan’, and ‘I’m interested in bear-baiting’, but I outdid myself this time with ‘I’m in the market for a wife’, which drew some very satisfying gasps from the audience.

Then Andrew, Maria, Zuzana, and I went to see a play in the surprisingly opulent theatre. The play was called Someone Else’s Child. Even considering it was written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, this play was offputtingly Soviet. It’s about a woman struggling to play the role of a pregnant woman onstage, and deciding to allow a rumour that she’s pregnant spread just to see how everyone reacted. Values of empathy and humanity abound, and there’s a set of nauseatingly neat morals (and a decent amount of lauding Russia’s natural beauty) at the end. Normally, I find that art and ideology make a pretty grim cocktail, but this was like going back in time eighty years, and it was brilliant. The actors (ironically for a play which is premised on the main character’s inability to act), seemed to inhabit their characters so well that I kept on having to remind myself it was just a play. The comic bits were sufficiently slapstick that even I could enjoy them with my lousy grasp of Russian, and the plot was twisty enough that I stayed awake through the whole thing (an accolade of which few plays or films can boast, embarrassingly for me). And I kept on thinking ‘I wonder if a Soviet audience would all stand up and start singing the national anthem at this point, or applaud for twenty minutes to show their approval for the socialist values…’. I think my three friends all found the play thoroughly boring and objectionable, but I’m very glad we went just so I could have the immersive Soviet experience (minus… you know… the fear and hunger).

This says 'I love theatre' which is only occasionally true, but this was one of those occasions tbf

Andrew’s smiley dad drove me back to their flat, where he proceeded to positively hurl food at me. Yet again, most of the stuff on the table was homegrown and homemade. The highlight was wild strawberry jam, which was INCREDIBLE. When I said this, Andrew’s dad filled a mahoosive jar with jam and gave it to me ‘for the journey home’. I appreciated the gift, but I decided against eating an entire jar of jam with my bare hands for lunch on the train home the next day on account of… not being a bear. Andrew’s dad was a former fireman, and showed me all his family’s medals. There were old soviet ones from when his dad fought in the army, and newer ones for bravery in his career. In all, there must have been at least ten, and they all looked pretty smart. It made me think: what medals does my family have? All that springs to mind is a ‘participation’ medal from a five-a-side birthday party I went to, my brother’s croquet medal from choir camp, and a medal that I got for coming fourth for cha cha cha in a university dance contest in Cambridge last year (clearly this medal had been recycled, because it just said ‘Sheffield Dance Society’ on it. These medals, it struck me, were far less glittery than Andrew’s family collection, and we were yet to get them framed with a red velvet background and glass casing. Note to self: do that.

As I left for the train station the next morning, clutching my jar of wild strawberry jam, I reflected that maybe a place is about more than its buildings, the cleanliness of its streets, or its wild dog population. Maybe a place is really defined by the people who live there. Kansk was nothing like the dump my friends had led me to expect, and, thanks to the good company I had while I was there, it will remain forever in my mind as a happy memory. I shared this theory with Andrew, who scoffed. ‘Yeah try living here mate.’