'Russia' - A Journey to the Heart & Land of its People by Jonathan Dimbleby

Copyright © Jonathan Dimbleby 2008

Extract from pages 103-105…

I walked into my first Russian bath-house with trepidation. Armed only with a leaflet advertising the delights promised inside – which made it sound as though it were run by a gang of torturers’ apprentices - I entered through an ornate portico on the corner of a quiet street in the heart of Moscow. Then I ascended wide stone steps that curled around for three flights to a hexagonal ante-chamber that might have come from the rococo interior of an eighteenth-century palace in downtown Vienna. A pair of huge young heavies, with ill concealed pistols clamped to their jambon hips, viewed me with that combination of suspicion and contempt that minders reserve for the weak and impotent. I walked past them, essaying nonchalance, through a set of varnished wooden swing doors into the banya itself.

Inside I found a magnificent chamber with an ornately carved wooden ceiling and glass chandeliers. Beneath this splendour, naked male bodies – ghastly bellies sagging shamelessly on to fat thighs – sprawled on their haunches on what looked like pews looted from an English church, except that they were covered in green leather, as if from the cloakroom of a gentlemen’s club in St James’s. This nostalgic illusion was dispelled by the panelled walls, which were enlivened by erotica – if that is the right term to describe a set of paintings depicting naked women demurely pouring tea for naked men in a fantasy bath-house. Bacchanalia it was not. Almost all the men – all public banyas are segregated – were on their mobiles in animated and, as it seemed to my uncomprehending ear, aggressive dialogue. As I watched this belly-scratching, phoneclasping array of stressed humanity I was graphically reminded that Russia has an alarming death rate from heart disease, and a male life expectancy that, defying the trend of all other developed nations, is not rising but falling. My young guide, a Moscow law student, confirmed that they were indeed conducting rough-and-tough business, adding with distaste, ‘They are all crooks and bullies giving orders to their staff.’ I remembered the henchmen outside and those reports that the Russian mafia are prone to conduct their business in the banya and occasionally to conclude an especially tough deal in the showers, where, as a consequence, white-tiled walls and floors are reputed on occasion to have run pink as warm blood mingled with hot water.

But I should not mock the banya, which has an honourable tradition that goes back many centuries and is revered in Russia both as a forum for social intercourse and for its health-enhancing properties. My brochure, written in a delightful Russian equivalent of franglais, promised me ‘maximum pleasure…the health and joy of full life, harmony and self-confidence’. This last I lacked entirely. I undressed until, puny and naked – but for an absurd grey felt hat shaped like an upturned flower pot that would supposedly protect my skull from the worst effects of the steam room. Then I advanced into another large chamber, which reminded me of the showers at my boarding school, though it lacked entirely the homo-erotic stimulation that they had nurtured in those long-ago pubescent days. I took a shower, among the other naked bodies, and then, armed only with a bunch of birch twigs, strode self-consciously into the steam room to join some of the giants of Russian commerce at rest. I lay on a hot slab, a minnow among walruses, until, after a lifetime of about ten minutes, I succumbed to the heat and, with globules of sweat pouring down my chest, I made to leave. At this, one of the walruses remonstrated, gesturing to show this foreigner that the ritual of the steam room was not yet complete. Picking up my bunch of soggy birch twigs, he started to flail my back and buttocks. I say ‘flail’; in fact it was more of a caress than a flail, and surprisingly soothing.

Next, I hurried out of the steam room and across the shower hall to a mock Roman bath, bracing myself for a plunge into what had been billed as ice-cold water. I made a rush for it and belly-flopped into the pool expecting the worst. In fact, mildly to my disappointment, the water was on the tepid side of cold. I swam around in a circle, wondering if, after all, I was less among walruses than among wimps. I was soon disabused. I had booked a massage and found my way to a row of cubicles, each occupied by a walrus on a slab, groaning with pain or pleasure as a white-towelled masseur pummelled the flab. I clambered on to my allotted slab and my masseur, whose hands, held thumb to thumb, were large enough to span my shoulders, set to his task with relentless expertise. Throwing a bucket of hot water over me and covering my body in soap, he worked his way up and down, back and forth, from head to toe, kneading flesh, muscles and bone until I too yelped and gasped and groaned at that combination of pain and pleasure that connoisseurs describe as sensuous.

Afterwards, more or less purged of impurities, I walked out past the two heavies, daring to essay a ‘goodbye’ in Russian – a gesture of goodwill that prompted them merely to glance at each other with raised eyebrows as if to say, ‘How did he get in?’ Had I had enough Russian at my disposal, I would perhaps have been brave enough to tell them that I was off to see Madonna, a prospect that, I suspect, would have transformed their glassy-eyed contempt into envy.

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