In December 1993, I was living in St Petersburg as part of the year abroad for my university course in Russian. This was in the heady days of glasnost, perestroika and newly opened branches of McDonald’s where you met Russians who burst into tears of disbelief when they realised you were from “tam” (over there).
It was the innocent time of trading Levi’s and hard currency in the street. People would ask endless earnest questions about the Beatles, Deep Purple and King Crimson. With the strains of the Scorpions’ Winds of Change ringing in our ears (“Let your balalaika sing / What my guitar wants to say”), it was completely normal to assume that Russia was on its way to becoming a beacon of democracy and freedom like any other responsible independent eastern European state, just a rather large one. How times change.
I was travelling to work, teaching English (with great passion but spectacularly ineptly) to Russian adults. I took a tram every morning at 6.30am. It was the most picturesque commute imaginable, with a daily clear view of the Winter Palace. As the dawn broke over the Neva river, I would gaze out of the tram window, marvelling at how the waves had frozen into crests of ice. I could feel my nostril hairs freezing. It was -20C outside. It was time to buy a Russian-issue winter coat.
Through a friend of a friend, I ordered a “simple black winter coat” (my Russian could stretch to this) from someone who worked in a garment factory. I was faintly aware of the fact that by handing over my $150 cash, I was participating in the black market. But I didn’t feel bad about this because I had not found any shops that sold coats. I also knew that anyone who worked in manufacturing anywhere got by in life by selling items on the side because often their salary would not have been paid for months. (Spoiler alert: a year later I did find a shop called LUXURY, which sold the white ski jacket pictured here. But these events happened pre-LUXURY.)
The coat was delivered in mid-December and much was made of the fact that the seamstress making it was obsessed with “Kreestmas” and wanted me to see this coat as a Kreestmas gift. Christmas is not celebrated in Russia – and certainly wasn’t during Soviet times. Instead, New Year’s Day is the time when gifts are exchanged. There was glamour and exoticism associated with Kreestmas. The questions about Deep Purple fell away and, instead, people asked about 25 December, turkeys, Father Kreestmas and Coca-Cola. There was great excitement about this coat being ready before Kreestmas; a whole group of people gathered for the unveiling.
As the coat emerged from its ceremonial glittery wrapping paper, well-meaning Russians beaming around me, I felt my face turn ashen. The coat was lavishly trimmed with what had once been several foxes. Because I was a “special foreigner”, they had decided, in the factory, to upgrade this coat by attaching multiple animal pelts to it – a generous festive gift.
Everyone oohed and aahed and wanted to take pictures of me wearing what was an entire zoo of dead animals. Obviously I didn’t want to be rude, but I could not accept a coat with dead fox draped all around the edges of it.
At that moment, I finally became an adult. I was 20. I was not used to saying no or speaking up. I got by at that time by nodding a lot, and looking things up in a dictionary later. Now, I realised I had no choice but to be rude to people, disappoint them and possibly make them very angry.
My friend’s mother – an extraordinarily beautiful and sensitive woman – cooed words of encouragement about the beauty of the coat and the workmanship. She was doing this to flatter the woman who was delivering it: she could see from my face what I was about to do and she was trying to soften the blow.
I took a deep breath and mustered the best Russian I could to explain that obviously the coat was the most beautiful thing in the entire universe but it would be socially unacceptable to wear it at home in the UK because my people are ignorant and do not appreciate such beauty. (I know. But this would just not have been the moment to explain Peta.)
I think I may have managed to shed a tear. There were gasps, murmurs of disappointment, expressions of disbelief. But, in a precursor to events that would unfold 30 years later, it took about two seconds for everyone to accept the idea that foreigners are profoundly stupid and don’t understand or appreciate anything whatsoever. One person murmured that they had seen an item on the news once about protesters in New York who threw paint at people who were wearing fur coats. They had not believed it until now. Because imagine how crazy that would be! There was a lot of tutting. The coat was furled back up into its elaborate packaging with heavy sighs.
It was returned to me a week later, stripped of all animal parts, the package bound in brown paper and string, as if to say: “You wanted something drab and unobjectionable? Well, this is what you asked for. Merry Kreestmas.”
