* Sergei had told me about this too, and even taken me on a train ride to Kievskaya station where, he claimed, you could see the beginning of one of the secret tunnels. As the wall and wires rushed past I saw nothing, of course.

 

* ‘Utter shit’, the Beano, 18 May 1997.

 

* Federal Security Service, the Russian successor organisation to the Soviet KGB.

 

* Vadim is not the only Muscovite to dislike the Mayor. Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, became Russia’s first female billionaire in 2004. That she made her money in construction in Moscow, a field in which her husband has some influence over who receives which contracts, has led to accusations of corruption in City Hall. Can’t imagine why.

 

* Via a drain behind the Karl Marx monument facing the Bolshoi Theatre, if you’re interested. I asked Vadim about it.

 

* Although real taxis exist in Moscow, they are rather expensive and few people can be bothered to use them. It is far more common to use gypsy cabs – usually beaten-up Ladas driven by ex-professors of theoretical physics, immigrants from the Caucasus region or people working jobs where the pay is so bad that the only way they can get by is to pick up strangers and shuttle them around for a few roubles.

 

* ‘My Friend the Crowbar’.

 

* The metro during wartime is a fascinating story. Construction continued on new stations as many existing ones were put to alternative use. Mosaics were flown in from besieged Leningrad to decorate the ceiling of Novokuznetskaya, just south of the Moscow river. Perhaps over one million people died during the siege; some resorted to cannibalism; but still the commitment to resist the invader saw such extraordinary feats of resilience. Other stations have wartime stories too: Kurskaya, in the east of the city, became a library. Arbatskaya, in the centre, was a bomb shelter. Subterranean classical concerts were held. A whole shadow life went on beneath the city during the war.

 

* ‘Are you joking?’

 

* Yes, there is political correctness in Russia too.

 

† But not a lot.

 

* And for readers of a less literary bent, I can tell you exactly who he looked like: Alan Moore, author of the graphic novel Watchmen.

 

* Later I learned that Roma had married Rosa’s elder sister, with whom he had produced Father Grigory’s first grandchild, who was older than at least one of his uncles.

 

* ‘Sorry – I’m a cunt.’

 

* Poltava has over the centuries been held by Lithuanians and Poles as well as Russians and Ukrainians and was the site of a famous battle between the Russian Empire and the forces of the king of Sweden.

 

* Colloquial term for a female Ukrainian. A man is a hohol. Can be offensive, depending on whether it’s a Russian or Ukrainian using it.

 

* Unlike Jesus, who favoured simple language and parables, Vissarion liked to elaborate at great length on his ideas. His Last Testament stood at seven volumes and was still growing. And even allowing for the problems of a bad translation, it was convoluted and difficult to follow. Try this single sentence on for size, from a section called ‘The Last Hope’: ‘Then there comes the period of the disintegration of the force outlines which lasts for a certain number of days, after that all the information connected with the former organism joins total information which is kept by the more powerful Strength of Mother-Earth.’ And so on and so on for many, many pages.

 

* A note on the Trans-Siberian Express: after living in Moscow for many years I had never met a Russian who had travelled on it, or would even consider travelling on it, unless he was too poor to buy a plane ticket. The notion that it contained some romance was exclusively the province of foreigners. Those I knew that had made the trip reported seeing: (1) fields, (2) trees, (3) mountains and (4) poor people drinking copious amounts of vodka to escape the crushing boredom. Brilliant!

 

* Though at least they had doors. Traditional Soviet crappers were so communal they were open to the view of passers-by.

 

* Friendship.

 

* Russian word for heaven.

 

† A type of Central Asian bread.

 

* Actually, Mutter Erde.

 

* Evil alien overlord who 75 million years ago transported billions of people across the cosmos to our planet, where he lined them up around volcanoes and then dropped hydrogen bombs on them. Their disembodied spirits cause a lot of problems on our planet to this day, apparently. For more information, visit your nearest Scientology centre.

 

* Vissarion stayed in a B & B in North London, not far from my brother’s flat. So we had something in common at least – the experience of waking up in the shitehole of Hendon, if not the jumbo sausage breakfast at the King Café. He clearly hadn’t made any converts, however, or I would have been introduced to them by this point.

 

* A thirteen-metre-long stone platform in front of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. Popular legend has it that many heads were severed there, while tedious historians claim that it was simply a place from which important proclamations were read.

 

* And in fact, a year later I consulted the Last Testament directly to check for accuracy and discovered that I had misheard this question. The son was not gripping his mother’s tits but rather his aunt’s; and so even this answer was more banal than it seemed.

 

* As I write this, in May 2007, he is sitting in a jail cell awaiting the results of a trial for fraud, after he took money from an undercover journalist to reincarnate someone who had never actually existed. Oops. Grabovoi has complained that the government is trying to demoralise him by keeping him in isolation. He claims Putin and co. are afraid he will convert all the other prisoners in the jail to a belief in him.