DAY FIVE OF the Russia job was a travel day, flying from Moscow to Archangel, near Murmansk, nearly 700 miles north-west of Moscow. We didn’t have any days off, we were either filming or travelling every day on this nearly four-week trip.
We landed in the afternoon and I did a piece to camera (PTC in TV jargon). James, the director, has the programmes planned as best as he can in advance, but we also have to react if something happens. As I’ve said, nothing’s ever scripted. James has been doing it a long time, so he’ll know if the programme needs an extra bit from me to help tie things together, and those are when I’ll be asked to do a piece to camera. Not all of them are used, but it’s better to have them and not need them. This one was about the Arctic convoys from 1941 to 1945, because Britain and Russia were allies in the Second World War. There were 100 ships and 1,000 men lost taking supplies of tanks, planes, tractors and food to the Russians through the back door, so they could defend themselves against the Germans moving east. Archangel and Murmansk were the main ports the convoys were sailing for, but the German navy and Luftwaffe knew it and would try and pick them off.
The main reason we’d travelled up there was to visit the partly state-owned Archangel diamond mine. Misha had been working hard to keep things on track because the plans were changing all the time. Places we were told we could visit changed their minds or said we couldn’t have the access they’d already agreed to. We didn’t know for sure, but we all felt it was down to the diplomatic problem over the Salisbury poisoning and things weren’t quite as we expected when we rolled up to the mine, but James and Misha managed to work things out.
I was told this place was the biggest diamond mine on the European land mass, but I didn’t realise Russia was part of Europe and when I said that people looked at me like I was a dickhead. I found out later that Russia is split into two anyway – European Russia and Asian Russia, and there’s a lot more of it in Asia, so I wasn’t being totally stupid. Anyway, it’s the biggest diamond mine in Europe, because it’s west of the Ural Mountains, the range that splits Europe from Asia.
We drove to the mine on the morning after flying there. All the rivers and lakes in the area were frozen, with cars driving on the ice. A boat was frozen in. I wondered how long it had been stuck there. It was minus 20 here, much colder than Moscow had been. This was the only time I felt I didn’t really have enough clothes with me, but I was all right. The crew had brought a load of cold-weather clothing, and I could’ve had it all bought for me, but I didn’t, because I’m hard. I had my Pikes Peak woolly hat.
Archangel was the nearest town to the diamond mine, but it was still three hours’ drive away, so it’s pretty remote. The mine has its own power station. The people who work there do shifts of two weeks on, two weeks off. There’s a sports hall, a swimming pool, a bar and a shop. It’s a well-catered-for place.
The mine is open-cast, a big hole in the ground, not underground like you might think when you hear the word mine. They use a big Bucyrus crane, with a big Caterpillar V8 in it, that excavates in a certain way that claws the ground and loads the dumpers in fewer movements. Ruston-Bucyrus was a joint British-American company, with the British side based in Lincoln. It’s just Bucyrus now and they make these massive diggers.
It maybe took six bucketfuls to fill the bed of a 90-ton dumper truck; 90 ton is what it can carry, and I got to drive one. I had 92 ton on the back and set off driving out of the mine. Even though it was the biggest thing I’d ever driven it felt very familiar, probably less complicated than my John Deere tractor. It’s that big you have to keep an eye on a few screens, displaying camera angles positioned to help the driver see the corners. It had the choice of four gears, but it was a CVT system, constant and variable, with a hydraulic system that worked off oil pressure. When the engine got to this speed, it changed gear automatically.
On average, they reckoned, you get one carat of diamond for each ton of dirt that comes out of the ground. A carat is 0.2g. It’s not exactly trying to find a needle in a haystack, but it isn’t far off. They’ve refined the process, though.
There’s no human contact until right at the end of the process. The 90-ton load gets tipped into the graders, where it is puckered up, until it gets sorted, then X-rayed and scanned by an ultra-violet light. Any diamond in there shows up under the ultra-violet light. There’s an air system that blasts that certain part of rock out for further inspection. That piece goes through another heating process to get all of the moisture out of it, then into a clinically clean room where nine people are sat, dressed like surgeons, with hairnets, sorting through the rocks and stones they hope contain diamonds.
Obviously when the air blasts what it recognises as a diamond out of the mixture of rock and dirt there’s only a small percentage of diamond; it’s also taking normal rock with it. These folk are sorting the shit from the diamonds. The gems look like dirty glass at this point, all different colours: yellow, blueish, white.
I got all togged up to help look for the diamonds. You get checked in and checked out. You have your hair, earholes and arsehole checked to make sure you haven’t hidden anything. All the windows are sealed so nothing can be dropped out. You have to get your shoes cleaned wherever you go. You put your shoes, still on your feet, through these machines to make sure you haven’t hidden anything in the grips in the soles, and those machines are sealed so no one can hide something on their shoe, knowing the machine will find it, thinking they can just get it out of the cleaning machine later.
Everything was immaculate. The workers searching for the diamonds were lining up the stuff they were sifting through like I’ve seen people in films line up cocaine before they snort it. But they’re doing it real fast. It’s mostly women, with only one bloke in there the day we visited. And they have to get their arseholes checked on a daily basis, during the two weeks on of their shift pattern, too. There’s a bloke whose job it is, arsehole checker, that was his full-time job. The folk who worked there weren’t small. There were a lot of places to hide a lot of things. They ran a fine-tooth comb through my hair.
I think we did well to get any permission to film there at all. They were that impressed with how into the whole process we were.
We also went to Alrosa, the diamond company’s Moscow headquarters. We were told they’d never let any media see behind the scenes at this place, but they liked our enthusiasm. After Misha contacted them they’d agreed to let us in.
Nearly 30 per cent of the world’s diamonds come from Archangel, and, according to their own figures, they extracted 37 million carats of ‘rough’ diamond in 2016 alone. They sold that year’s haul for 317 billion roubles (the equivalent of about £4 billion at the time of writing this).
The final process, the next step on from the nine folks sorting them in a sealed room in Archangel, is where the company decides what they’re going to do with the diamonds. Some might be too rough to be gems, so they use them for industrial purposes like grinding wheels and drill tips and that sort of stuff, then there’s all different grades of jewellery.
For the diamonds that are good enough to become jewellery, Alrosa have a computer program to help them work out if they should leave it as one big stone or cut it into smaller ones. It also depends on the demands of the market. They had a big bugger there, the size of a good potato, still uncut. The Alrosa folk told me they’ve had it for six months, but they were still waiting to see what the market would do. They have meetings to decide what to do with it. It’s rare to find one that big, so they could leave it as one big gem if they thought someone had the money to pay for it.
Once they’ve sussed out how they’re going to cut any particular diamond they rough-cut it with a laser, a million-dollar Swiss machine, then polish it with a special abrasive wheel. They have a special tool that can hold the tiny diamonds and it’s indexed so you can turn it for 6 degrees or 45 or whatever angle you want. I had a little go at cutting and polishing that. It was interesting and something I’d never really thought about before.
They had a group of five cut diamonds that they called the Alrosa Dynasty Collection, a world famous thing that they take to diamond shows all over the world. The five stones are cut from one 179-carat rough diamond the company recovered from one of their other mines, way out in the east of Russia, in 2015. The biggest cut diamond from this one rough diamond is 51 carat, 10g. Quite a thing. With so much about Russia, I hadn’t thought of it as a diamond producer. Luckily there was no anal cavity search leaving this place.
After we’d finished at the diamond mine, we drove the three hours back to Archangel that night, got up the next morning for another travel day. This time we flew south-east to Moscow before getting a connecting flight to Irkutsk in Siberia. It was a six-hour flight, with a six-hour time difference.
We landed in Irkutsk, at maybe eight in the morning, then went for a brew before driving to a railway yard on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The idea was to meet the permanent rescue team based here.
There are maybe 20 of these on the length of the railway, the longest in the world, each team covering summat like 200 miles west and 200 miles east of their depot. The trains don’t break down, I was told, but they deal with derailments, springs breaking, livestock on the track, bogies coming off, trees falling onto the lines … They have a massive train with a 200-ton crane on the back to go and recover any derailed carriages or deal with anything else chucked at them.
The line is 5,722 miles long, starting in Moscow and ending up in Vladivostok, travelling through eight different time zones along the way. It pre-dates the Russian Revolution, going back to the time of the tsars. It made me realise how far the bicycle ride to Magadan will be. I want to ride through Siberia, so I thought I’d have to get to Moscow and go north-east, but Siberia forms all of the middle part of Russia. It borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, does Siberia. I didn’t realise almost the whole east of Russia was Siberia. They reckon that 9 per cent of the world’s dry land is Siberia.
While we were there, the Russian crew practised fixing a derailment and replacing a bogie. Just watching them work was impressive. They let me do bits and bobs, but I could see they knew what they were doing. The temperature was a bit above freezing, so it wasn’t the harsh conditions those boys have to go out in, halfway through a Siberian winter. The temperature can be minus 40 when the wind gets up, but it wasn’t that cold when we were there. We had beautiful blue skies, and there was snow everywhere.
They let us get involved in a practice of how to deal with a derailment, how they get the train back on the track, how to fix the bogies on, how to change the bogies, use the crane. It’s a practice they go through every couple of weeks. They’re not messing about.
Trains carrying wood and container boxes were rattling by while we were working. They are massive. You can be waiting five minutes for one to pass, and they looked like 150 carriages long.
Again, they were lovely people and it was a good experience. How many British people have worked with a rescue crew on the Trans-Siberian Railway? I don’t know either, but I’m guessing not very many.
The next day we had a long drive from Irkutsk into the Buryat region to visit a village and meet some of the local shaman-like folk. We drove on the main road out of Irkutsk for an hour before turning onto a dirt road for another hour and a half to get to the village. We were in the Asian side of Russia now, south-eastern Siberia.
The village was on the edge of Lake Baikal. This massive lake holds more freshwater than any other lake on earth, more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined. But it is over a mile deep in places, so while it holds more water, it is only the seventh biggest lake in terms of surface area. The bits we could see of it were frozen over, people driving on it, lads cutting holes in it to go fishing.
The Buryat we met weren’t shamans, or I don’t think they were. I reckoned they were just playing the part of how their previous 17 generations had lived. A shaman is someone believed to have an influence on or a connection to the spirit world, so I suppose it depends on your point of view if any of these folk were shamans or not, but they believed in it. When we arrived they had a welcoming committee singing and dancing in the traditional dress of long, bright, satiny type of robes and round hats. They looked the business, but don’t normally dress like that; it was all part of the re-enactment to keep the traditions from being forgotten.
It had been arranged that I’d be involved in a couple of the important old traditions, the first being making alcohol from fermented milk.
We boiled up this cheese-like milk stuff. As it boiled off the steam condensed on the inside of this upside-down bucket thing with a shovelhead in it, ran down a spout and the liquid was caught, ready to drink. Or they reckoned it was ready to drink. To me it smelt like what it was – fermented milk alcohol – and it didn’t taste much better than it sounds. The process took a couple of hours, but I can’t remember a lot of detail, because I was pissed by the end of the day.
This vodka-like drink, that smelt of off milk, was used as part of a ceremony that they involved me in. Every now and then I’d get a nod and that meant I had to take a drink, and I ended up finishing a cupful. The crew had a drink too. Get your lips round that. We had to taste the fruits of our labour, after all.
During this ceremony they gave me this hefty bone, a cow’s thigh bone or summat, and told me I had to break it. I said, ‘Give it here,’ and I was about to break it over my knee, when they said, ‘No, no, no, you must break it like this,’ and showed me I had to punch it with my bare hands. I had a go, but I told them I’d break my bloody hand if I tried that again. Stu and Aldo, the ex-Marine hardmen that came with us, they both tried and said, ‘Fuck that!’ Aldo reckoned he did break a bone in his fist, and he’s a handy lad. The Buryat got in one of their sons, a big unit, and he did it, but it smarted him. Fair play to him. I was ready for a kip in the people carrier on the way back to Irkutsk.
The crew are all good people. They’re not complainers. As long as they’re fed and watered they keep on working till it’s done. James, the director, was happy with the footage we were getting.
Day ten was another travel day, this time to Bratsk, where we were travelling to do some logging. Siberia had a lot more towns than I thought. Like I said, it’s a much bigger area of Russia than I realised before I visited. Russia has a bigger proportion of area covered by forest than any other country. It has over 2.3 million square miles of forest; that’s more than the land mass of the whole EU. I was told a third of the world’s CO2 is sucked up by Siberian forests. I was also told the forests are growing back faster than they’re cutting them down.
We were supposed to fly from Irkutsk to Bratsk, but the TV lot weren’t sure the plane would fit all our stuff on, so the plan changed to a ten-hour drive.
We did some nattering on the way. We’d stop at a level crossing, wait 20 minutes for the train to pass, and jump out to do some quick filming about the trains, talk about where we were going, talk about the USSR. The journey wasn’t the worst. I looked out the window. Everything looked very Soviet here. I was talking to Misha and finding out more about Russia.
I’d been given an iPod for Christmas and finally managed to work out how to get it going and got into downloading podcasts. I listened to Garry Kasparov on Desert Island Discs. By now I’d met plenty of Russians and we’d had next to no bother, except for a few changes of plan. Nowt major, and nothing like we’d all imagined it would be before we landed. I’d built bridges in my head, thinking, It’s all right is Russia and the way it’s run. Then I listened to Kasparov. He was the world chess champion, a hero in Russia, where chess is a big thing. Born in 1963, he grew up in the USSR, in Baku in Azerbaijan in the deep south of the Soviet Union, but he’s lived outside Russia since 2013, because, he says, ‘Visiting Russia would be a one-way ticket.’ He isn’t a fan of Putin: he says Russia has a criminal regime and is a police state and that it’s a ‘one-man dictatorship’. He’d spent time in prison after protesting against Putin, who Kasparov says is a KGB dictator who has been involved in killing some of his journalist friends. On the Radio 4 programme I’d downloaded, Kasparov said, ‘If you have only one restaurant in town serving only one dish, this dish is popular.’ He said a lot by saying not much.
On the way to Bratsk we saw some lads playing cricket, or their version of it, with a ball and stick at the side of the road. We pulled over to speak to them. We’d done something similar when I was riding the Royal Enfield in India: just go and have a natter to them. They didn’t have a proper bat, just a stick, but they were fit-looking, country kids, about 15 of them all between the ages of 10 and 15. I sat and watched for a bit, then asked them some questions through the translator.
They were in shorts, but there was snow at the side of the road. I asked what they were up to and they told me they were just mucking about. They seemed dead happy kids. A couple of them were about to leave school. One was going to be a welder, one was going to be a builder. None of the kids were saying they wanted to be famous or work in IT, there was none of that. I liked their enthusiasm for life, not that I haven’t got that, but it was interesting to see their outlook on life. We talked about the World Cup coming to Russia and they were excited about that.
Back in the van I listened to an audiobook of Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. I got four hours into it then lost it on the Cloud or somewhere. Harari wrote Sapiens, that I’d read a few years ago, and the new book was fascinating. Listening to different liberal views and how the measure of a country’s happiness is the suicide rate. As a species, we’re never happy. I learned that more people are dying from eating too much than eating too little.
We ended up at the hotel in Bratsk at ten at night. We were picked up early the next morning, and taken to Ilim, a paper pulp producer. They make something daft like 60 per cent of the world’s paper pulp. The factory is massive. From there it was another three-hour drive to get to the area of forest they were felling at the time. There was a full team of workers there: mechanics, crane operators, truck drivers, everything you need to run a lumber operation.
The PPE – personal protection equipment – was a big thing there so I got a jacket, embroidered with my name in Russian, and a hard hat, then I could sit in on a bit of tree felling with the driver of a Finnish machine called a Ponsse. It was a very complicated machine. It grabs the tree, cuts it down, strips all the bark and branches off it, cuts it up into sections and loads it on the trucks in one fluid motion. You want to see it. Amazing thing.
Because it’s so complicated, with dozens of knobs and switches, they have a simulator, exactly the same, back at the factory. New operators get used to the controls before they’re let loose to start cutting down 40-foot pine trees that weigh more than a ton. I’d sat with the driver for an hour or so, so when I got in the simulator I got my eye in pretty quickly and I could do it. I love the idea of a job like that, but it would be rubbish for getting stuff done in the shed, because of the two weeks on, two weeks off shifts.
Some of the felled trees are transported on trucks, but some are dropped in the river and towed down with tugs. They leave them floating in the water till they need them.
The factory has millions of tons of wood in their yard; you’ve never seen so much wood in your life. Even though we’d done all this travelling I was still up for listening. The bloke showing us around was called Alexei, one of the top managers. He told me that he and his daughter raced go-karts on the ice in winter and he’d come second in the local championship, so he was quite proud of that.
It had been a long day, and on the back of a ten-hour journey the day before, but Alexei, who’d been showing us around all day, invited us all out for tea. The crew were knackered, so I ended up going with James, Aldo and Amy. I could’ve done with getting my head down, but it was great. They’d made enough food for all of us; only half of us showed up, but they understood.
Alexei gave a speech saying that when all the politics are put to one side it’s good to spend time with people who are interested in what you’re doing and interesting themselves. Which, of course, is dead right. Then the vodka came out. I’m not much of a vodka drinker, but when in Rome …
The next day, day 12, was another travel day, first to Moscow then another connecting flight to Izhevsk, a place I’d never heard of but is the nineteenth biggest city in Russia. It’s west of the Urals, so in European Russia, in the Volga region. It’s famous for its industry and weapons manufacturing, dating back to when the Russians were preparing for Napoleon to invade, and we flew there for a visit to the massive Kalashnikov factory.
When it comes to a product, not a person or a culture, Kalashnikov is probably Russia’s most famous export, and everyone knows the name of their AK-47. The A stands for Automatic Gun; the K is from the inventor’s name, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and 47 is the year it was first manufactured. The AK-47 is the key to modern revolution and made killing people easy. They’ve sold over 70 million AK-47s, made in over 30 countries and supplied to over 100 nations’ armies. The silhouette of an AK-47 is even on the official flag of Mozambique.
Mikhail Kalashnikov was a bit like the atomic bomb man, Oppenheimer: he saw his creation as a tool to defend his nation and blamed politicians for ‘resorting to violence’. He was a Communist man of the people. He came up with a great idea, but it was all backed by the regime. He combined ideas from German and American guns to come up with his own.
They make loads of different rifles and guns there and they’re assembled in this very modern manufacturing plant, as cutting edge as Jaguar Land Rover or any company you can think of. It has a floor of CNC lathes, mills and other machinery and, above, a floor of assembly.
The production line had had some money chucked at it. Considering who their customers are, I shouldn’t have been surprised that everything was made with military precision. It’s not a surprise to learn Russia is the biggest exporter of arms after America, but I hadn’t thought about it before. Since Putin got in charge Russia has more than doubled its military spending.
After the tour they took us to the shooting range. I’d fired guns before, when me and my mates Gunster, Jim, Chris and his brother went on a road trip to America when I was 24. We went to a shooting range in Las Vegas and had a go with a .357 Magnum and you knew about that when it went off. At the Kalashnikov factory I shot a 103 and an AK-47. The rifles have a mechanism in them that counteracts the recoil. The charge that pushes the bullet out of the barrel is also used to move a piston to counteract the kick of the gun into your shoulder. It still gives you a belt, but not as bad as you’d think. I don’t know how accurate you’d say I was. I hit the bit of paper, but I was letting rip. I was trying to empty a full magazine in one go without the gun knocking me off my feet, which takes some doing.
We were a full two weeks into the job when we turned up at the massive Kamaz truck factory in Naberezhnye Chelny. I’ve wanted to visit the factory, on the Kama River, since I read about it in a magazine when I was in New Zealand a few years ago. The story was about a Russian-built truck that had won 15 Dakar rallies against the best from the rest of the world, including Tatra, MAZ, Iveco, MAN and Renault. They’re the seventh biggest truck manufacturer in the world, making over 40,000 trucks a year.
They didn’t let us into the regular factory, but we visited Kamaz Master, the race team, who build the specific rally trucks. It’s the target of most of the folk who work for the company to land a job in Kamaz Master. Get promoted to the competition side of things and you’ve made it. I was excited to be there, like a rabbit with two tails, checking everything out. Kamaz was the main reason I’d wanted to visit Russia all along.
The 4326 racing truck uses a Finnish chassis with a Swiss engine with Belgian suspension, a German gearbox, brakes and axle. The 1,000-plus horsepower, 16-litre, V8, Liebherr engine is also used as a crane engine. The German truck manufacturer MAN use a similar one, but with 650 horsepower, but you don’t see many of them on the road. They’re as rare as rocking horse shit.
It’s a combination Kamaz has got working very well but it’s still a massive team effort to go and win the Dakar. I have no interest in doing the Dakar on a bike – I’m not much of an off-roader – but I’d like to do it in a truck. These are four-wheel-drive, four-wheel trucks. Each truck needs a three-man crew, driver, navigator and mechanic, but each of them has to be able to do each other’s job.
We were taken to the test track to have a go in this year’s Dakar-winning truck. The track was in snow-covered woods with frozen lakes. We drove there in people carriers and when we got there the truck was waiting for us. I asked how it had got there and they told us that this year’s Dakar-winning driver had driven the 2018-Dakar winning truck there from the factory. I was impressed.
The driver, Eduard Nikolaev, who has won the Dakar four times, was really humble, but very, very proud of the whole Kamaz success. He’d worked there since he was a kid. He was a mechanic originally, and he explained he was just a small part of the whole effort. I was told only Russians have ever been on the Kamaz team.
The racing truck weighs nine ton, but it’s got 1,200 horsepower, with a normal 16-speed truck gearbox, so it moves. Eduard was jumping the bastard! In the cab you’ve got cooling fans, all the GPS and gauges, but it isn’t comfortable. The Dakar is 14 days of racing and you’d know about it, spending that long in the cab of that truck at speed. It was brutal: the heat in the Atacama Desert, in fireproof suits, sat three abreast across the cab on top of a racing truck engine and the heat it’s kicking out.
It was a good end to a part of the trip that involved flying here, there and everywhere around Russia. The next day we’d fly back to Moscow. We were 14 days in and had another 12 days to go, before we left for home.