On a Russian road-trip to remember, Ben Oliver takes a route through Europe's biggest car market, en route from Moscow to St Petersburg
FORGET THE salt mines and the gulags. Nothing compared to the misery the Soviets had ready for a comrade who tired of walking or waiting for hours for trainsin minus-20 Moscow, and aspired to own an automobile.
First, he would have to get his name on a waiting list; difficult, but bribery helped. Then, after just five years if he was lucky, he might be assigned an abominable, antiquated Lada or Volga, the automotive equivalent of thin cabbage soup. The price was about two years' wagesand, he would have to pay it in one lump sum.
To raise the money he would club together with friends and family and do some illegal minicabbing. In return, he got a car which was probably already rusting, and which he would expect to repair before he could drive it for the first time.
We're not talking about the privations of the Stalin era here; this is how things were for Russian motorists right up until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In just 17 years, Russia's car culture has been utterly transformed. On the day we flew into Moscow, figures were published showing that from a virtual standing start in 1991 Russia overtook Germany as Europe's largest car market.
So what happens when a vast country suddenly acquires vast wealth and goes on a colossal car-buying spree? The plan was to fly into Moscow, collect a supercharged Jaguar XF and drive from the capital to St Petersburg, capital of Russia's burgeoning car industry, along a 700km road we'd heard some bad, bad stories about.
Why an XF? There's something very New Russian about a big, black, powerful prestige saloon on a set of 20-inch rims.
The New Russia might have chosen a better ambassador than the taxi driver who brought us in from the airport. His Focus estate had a knuckleduster taped to the dash, a knife stabbed into the door trim and a hammer under the seat. There was a picture of a soldier taped to the rear view mirror (brother, boyfriend or army buddy killed by the Chechens?) and once we were under way he rolled up his sleeves, trouser legs and the body of his shirt to reveal some horrific scarring, which he proceeded to scratch vigorously for the hour-and-a-half it took to get to the centre of the town, a journey lengthened by regular pauses to shout at women by the roadside.
He used a novel driving technique in which he slowed to 30km/h when the road was clear, but weaved at insane speeds through traffic like a crackhead on the run in Police Camera Action.
In those brief periods when my eyes weren't tight shut with fear I marvelled at Moscow. The Russians might have come late to capitalism but they've embraced it with extraordinary enthusiasm, symbolised by billboards that are bigger and more evident than anywhere else - every wall carries some advert.
The cars on Moscow's roads are mostly foreign brands. There is an underclass of ancient Ladas, vast, square Volgas, but the bulk of the traffic is your standard international small hatch or saloon - Toyotas, Hyundais, Fords and Renaults.Government officials treat themselves to long black S-classes, A8s and 7-Series with discreet blue lights on top. In one day in Moscow I clocked half a dozen Maybachs, three Murcielagos and my first F430 Scuderia.
And Moscow's roads are a wet dream for those militant motoring-rights nutjobs you hear on radio phone-ins; 14 lanes across in places, with no toll tags needed, petrol at 80 cent per litre and virtually no cyclists. With the exception of Scratchy the taxi driver, the standard of driving is pretty good too, but for reasons which would later become apparent.
He got us to the Jaguar dealership mentally scarred, but physically intact.
The quantity of forms, stamps and signatures required to do anything in Russia is overwhelming; partly a hangover from Soviet full-employment bureaucracy, and partly, you suspect, an opportunity for the bureaucrats to make little extra by making some of the bureaucracy disappear.
The next morning we left our eye-wateringly expensive hotel in Red Square at 6am, accompanied by Moscovite Artem Betev, editor of the Russian edition of CAR magazine.
Given the heavy police presence we'd noticed the day before, we were amazed at how long we were left unmolested when photographing the car in Red Square, the seat of Russian power.
But it didn't last. A skinny, spotty youth of about 19 in a baseball cap and rucksack approached; I thought he was some sort of tourist tout, but a flash of his red ID card showed him to be from state security.
The runt was soon joined by a fat cop in a liveried Lada, already sweating heavily into his polyester uniform in 30-degree heat and with his vast cap perched atop his cannonball head like Elmer Fudd.
Runt disappeared, but Elmer stuck around, probably expecting the kind of bribe Muscovites have to hand over on a daily basis. This is why the driving in Moscow is pretty good; if police see the slightest infringement they'll stop you and expect a bribe.
In their defence, they've had to pay a bribe of up to five grand to join the force, and this is how they make it back. There's an unofficial but well-understood price list, pegged at about half the official fine; the cops won't ask directly for money, but might flash you a note if you're not savvy enough to subtly hand over the appropriate amount.
Fortunately, there is no agreed bribe for naive western journalists taking pictures in an historic place, and Artem manages to get rid of Elmer with the latest issue of his magazine; we have a large bundle on the back seat for this very purpose.
The road between Moscow and St Petersburg has 100km or so of motorway at either end, but the vast majority of it is one lane in each direction, with occasional overtaking lanes. It's pretty woeful given that this is one of Europe's major trade routes and links Russia's two biggest cities.
You can just about make the trip in one very long day but our Russian friends had told us horror stories of crashes that left the road closed for hours, so we planned to stop in ancient Novgorod, around 200km short of St Petersburg.
I had absolutely no desire to either hand over large sums of cash to bent copsso I preferred an itinerary that allowed me to set the Jag's cruise control to the speed limit and just relax.
The XF started to feel like a very smart choice. It rode well despite those huge wheels, even when the stationary queues of HGVs on the tarmac forced us to join the other cars in the improvised, 30km/h fast lane on the cratered soft shoulder.
Much of the truck traffic is car transporters. Virtually all of the cars imported into Russia - even those from Japan - dock near St Petersburg and are trucked down to Moscow. A boat bearing Mitsubishis must have arrived; we passed thousands heading in the opposite direction to feed Russia's insatiable appetite for the automobile.
Sticking to the speed limit meant we had more time to enjoy the views. When the road was clear it could be spectacular, cut arrow-straight through endless pine forests, crossing broad rivers or vast, shimmering lakes. You focus instead on the roadside details; the ornate wooden cottages alternating with vast, decaying, soul-crushing Soviet apartment blocks, and the frequent memorials to the millions who died here in the second World War's biggest, most brutal and most dismal campaigns.
These military monuments, the bored, bare-chested conscripts spilling out of their trucks at roadside stops and the occasional overflying pair of MIGs had an odd effect on me. I grew up in the 1980s near Aldermaston and Greenham Common and was persuaded by Ronald Reagan that I was unlikely to make it to my 10th birthday un-nuked.
Russia might officially be our ally now, but out here it feels as if you have somehow penetrated the evil empire. I also felt oddly nostalgic for a time before al-Qaeda when the enemy lived in one place, wore a uniform and planned to kill us en masse.
Taking our time meant we could also stop and enjoy some Russian road food. There are three major options. Local smallholders array their produce on rugs or tables by the roadside; we stopped for some carrots and strawberries picked probably an hour before. Then there are the samovars; fragrant wood-burning stoves tended by ancient babushkas that produce hot, strong, sweet and lemony tea.
And for something more substantial you stop at a trucker's café, where for about a euro per dish you can have borscht soup, endless kinds of dumplings or a huge shashlick kebab.
The food is infinitely better than your typical motorway service station, but the level of customer service is about the same. Russians might have adopted capitalism with enthusiasm, but they are refreshingly resistant to America's fawning service culture.
We had to check out our XF's local competition, so we stopped at Novgorods Lada dealership. Saleswoman Aliona showed us around.
It would be journalistically remiss not to mention the constant danger of distraction posed by Russian women to foreign male motorists unaccustomed to their appearance, particularly when the sun is out.
Aliona, frankly, could have sold me a month's holiday in a gulag; as she fixed me with a dark gaze and described in halting English what you can't have on the bum-basic €5,000 Riva saloon ("you cannot haf raaa-dio. It is not allowed") I had to stop myself reaching for the credit card.
It might not have been a bad purchase; after 40 years in production the Riva has an appealing simplicity and an indestructible feel. The doors and boot close with a pleasing mechanical click, the square cabin is finished in thick, bouncy plastics and once repaired there are stories of them doing 300,000 miles. But although Russians might not have to queue for Ladas any more, the queues are now for foreign cars: you could wait up to a year for a Honda Civic, but guess what? Slip your dealer a grand, and you'll find it comes much quicker. Plainly, some things never change.
After two days on the road we reach St Petersburg. Its beauty matches Venice, with which it shares its canals and many of its architects and stonemasons. Maybe our view of it was coloured by making it in one piece, without being subjected to major extortion, and on one of the 25 dry days the city gets each year. Maybe it was the fact we were drinking vodka chilled to slow, syrupy consistency by a rare smiling waitress that made us like it so much.
But the world's car industry seems to agree. Six global carmakers either build here already, or have announced they will; St Petersburg's mayor plans to make it "the new Detroit", and in the departure lounge on the way home we bumped into Fritz Henderson, president of General Motors, and Carl Peter Forster, president of GM Europe, here to build their second Russian factory. It won't be their last.