Taming the Great Bear

A journey across Russia for BBC2 brought Jonathan Dimbleby face to face with shamans, Cossacks – and an amorous female welder. Andrew Pettie meets him...

Jonathan Dimbleby and Russia go way back. The writer and broadcaster, 63, visited Moscow in the early 1980s to film a series for ITV about the Cold War. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. “I found the experience extremely depressing,” he says. “You were constantly hemmed in by security. You couldn’t talk freely and the people would look at you scowlingly, if at all. The crew and I would carefully search our hotel for secret service bugs – it was all very cloak and dagger stuff.”

A quarter of a century on, Dimbleby is back. He has returned to Russia to make a five-part travelogue about the country and its people for BBC2. The change in attitude to Westerners was one of his journey’s many surprises. “On this trip I was completely free to talk to anyone,” he says. “People were very forthcoming, and that was a transformation. The fact that Russia is now a pretty crude market economy was another. Wherever you go you see Western restaurants, Western shops, Western and Japanese cars. Although many Russian cities remain drab and ugly, the material life there is clearly much greater.”

That said, Dimbleby, who proves a knowledgeable and at times shrewdly critical guide, believes that the modern Russian state still has much in common with its Communist predecessor. “Russians are only free to say what they like if their voice isn’t heard, if they don’t matter,” he says. “The state is still repressive: the judiciary is effectively controlled by the Kremlin; the parliament is a rubber stamp; the media is muzzled. Russia is run by oligarchs, the secret service, the military and the political class, who are allied to those groupings. It’s a harsh thing to say, but for me Russia is a crypto-fascist society.”

Dimbleby’s views on Russian politics make for grim reading. But his experiences of meeting ordinary Russians – in all their diverting diversity – were almost uniformly positive. “I felt a great contrast between the structure of the state and the way that it’s going – and I think it’s getting worse, not better – and, on the other hand, the extraordinary hospitality and warmth of the people I met along the route. The series is essentially about that Russia – an attempt to get to the heart of the Russian people.”

One thing no one can accuse Dimbleby of is taking shortcuts. During the course of filming, he and the crew travelled 10,000 miles. They journeyed by car, train, boat, bus and on horseback (with Cossacks) from Murmansk in the north to Vladivostock in the distant east, dropping in on dozens of unlikely people and places on the way. At one moment Dimbleby is taking tea with a group of glamorous St Petersburg opinion-formers. The next he’s meeting a Buryat shaman on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. His most bizarre encounter, though, involved being chatted up by a female welder in a sulphur spring once frequented by Tolstoy.

“We were in Pyatigorsk, a spa town in the Caucases,” he says. “I leapt out of the van, stripped to my underpants and went down to this slippery rock and into the water. I found myself sitting half-naked alongside five of the most curious characters imaginable. One looked like a walrus with a great moustache and water pouring over his head. Next to him was a woman twice my size who’d been a welder up in the north. They treated me like someone from outer space who had just nestled amongst them. The welder seemed to like me, which was very flattering of course.”

To Dimbleby’s credit, the series is more than a wide-eyed, Palin-esque adventure. He includes refreshingly schoolmasterly segments on Russian history and some of the country’s crippling social ills. (The life expectancy of the average Russian male, we’re told, is 59. The principal cause of young male death is alcoholism and alcohol poisoning.) This approach is intentional; Dimbleby says it’s vital that travelogues inform as well as entertain. “You’ve got to offer the viewer some meat, rather than just candy floss.”

The undisputed star, however, is Russia itself. The country, as Dimbleby’s epic travels illustrate, is almost unthinkably big. “When you realise that Siberia alone is larger than the United States including Alaska and Western Europe put together, you get a picture of just how huge Russia is,” he says. “It was nothing, by the end of filming, to go on 15 or 20-hour train journeys.” At times Dimbleby sounds almost overwhelmed by the scale of his undertaking. “There were moments when I thought: ‘Oh God, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.’ Because Russia is so complex, so big. But I’m glad I had a go at chewing.”

Dimbleby’s affection for Russia and the Russians is evident and, as the series progresses, infectious. But his love of his subject hasn’t blinded him to its many problems. “I found the experience both daunting and exhilarating,” he says. “I’m not exhilarated by the politics of Russia, by the state. I’m depressed by those. But I was exhilarated by the challenge of the journey and the people I met. Would I do it again? No. Am I glad I did it? Absolutely, yes.”

Russia: a Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby starts on BBC2 on Sunday, 11 May at 10.05pm