INTERLUDE: FROM THE DIGGER ARCHIVE

The film opens in Arbatskaya metro station, a vast pagan temple under the very heart of the city, with impossibly heavy chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, chandeliers that illuminate a deep, deep cavern connected to the surface by long escalators. It is winter, and so everybody on the crowded platform is wearing the classic Russian uniform: fur coats for the women, fur hats for the men.

Cut to the interior of a train: the benches are heaving with people. Their faces are grey and grim.

The filmmaker explains he spent a few months in Moscow in the early nineties, making a documentary about the metro. Cut to images of the stations: the stained-glass windows of Novoslobodskaya, the grim-faced bronze sculptures of Ploschad Revolutsii, the bright mosaics of Ukrainian farm life of Kievskaya, the tall white marble columns of Kropotkinskaya, fossilised trees on the dead ocean bed of an alien planet … and then, amid all this wonder, more shots of Russians in fur hats and big coats, cold, grim, depressed. The iconography is Cold War. The New Russia of mafia glamour is yet to emerge.

And the narrator is still talking about this marvellous underground world, these palaces beneath the grey dystopia above, the worker’s paradise, the proletarian cathedrals, this glittering Hades …

But then suddenly the film changes tack. ‘And then one day I heard of a man creating a new world under the city.’

And there is Vadim, holding a flaming torch. Turning his back on civilisation, creating his own world, just like Sergei told me. Vadim knights new members of the Diggers, trembling on their knees before their leader and guide, their spiritual father …

Next we see Vadim, running in fear down some vast wet tunnel. He has spotted something terrible, something dangerous lurking round the corner. The camera shakes as the narrator flees. His voice: ‘I stayed months, enraptured by this …’

Cut to Vadim, frozen, hand outstretched: ‘Can you hear that?’ A strange, groaning noise, in the distance, coming from the end of the tunnel. But then it passes. ‘It’s OK, we can go on …’

Cut to Vadim: ‘People! Look out!’ And fleeing again –

Cut to Vadim, approaching a door. ‘It’s inhabited.’

He kicks it open; Vadim is, after all, a master of the martial arts. There is darkness, the camera isn’t focused yet, a sound of scrabbling, like rats, but much bigger. Vadim knows what it is.

‘Don’t worry, we’re Diggers. Good people. We’re friends.’

The scrabbling stops. The camera focuses. The torchlight picks out the form of a bomzh, sodden, filthy with a scum-encrusted beard, trembling in the corner of this abandoned store room. He is alone.

‘Who are you?’ asks Vadim.

‘It’s not important.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘It’s not important’

‘How did you get here?’

The tramp looks at Vadim, shrugs.

‘Fate.’