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Talking Location With author Sarah Armstrong – Soviet Moscow

27th May 2021

#TalkinglocationWith… Sarah Armstrong, author of The Starlings of Bucharest

Recreating Soviet Moscow

If there was ever a time to develop a strategy for researching novels which didn’t involve leaving the house, during a pandemic seems like the perfect moment. Yet, it wasn’t the confines of lockdown which led me to research my novels remotely, but a decision made years ago.

Sarah Armstrong

Woods – Minsk

For my third novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I wanted to write something different in terms of genre, time and place, and I fixed on Moscow. I’ve never been anywhere in Russia, but there was something about that city which felt familiar after reading lots of spy novels, and watching so many films based there. It wasn’t the modern city that I was interested in, but the more shadowy Moscow of the Soviet Union.

I chose the 1970s as the decade that I most associated with my version of Moscow. I needed to give myself permission to write about a place and time I hadn’t experienced, and that came from research. I started by writing down everything I already knew or assumed about the USSR, and all the clichés came out: concrete, grey, cold, space race, red, psychic phenomena, vodka, KGB, sports medals and drugs, chess, design, snow, furs, wolves and bears. These were all tropes I’d learned and, to make my Moscow feel authentic, I had to establish what was real and which were stereotypes I needed to avoid. There wouldn’t be any macho 1980s Russian baddies or sadistic spies in my novel.

Sarah Armstrong

Dawn view Planeta Hotel, Minsk

I hadn’t realised how real the research would make Moscow feel, especially when my assumptions were challenged by what I learned. In the summer Moscow was hot and light, not cold. Instead of concrete, I was struck by the city’s forests. I read memoirs written by people who’d visited or lived in Moscow, listened to 1970s music, watched 1970s films, and read articles on history, Soviets and spies. It all built a sense of a place I could imagine inhabiting, a place I would know my way around – as long as it was 1973. The fact that I hadn’t visited modern Moscow felt like a bonus, as it meant I didn’t have to filter out the huge changes to the cityscape which have since taken place.

InThe Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I discovered Moscow through the eyes of Martha, the wife of a diplomat at the British Embassy. Martha wants to fit into her married role, but she wants to be part of Moscow more. I didnt know anything about foreign embassies, or how British workers lived in Moscow, and that was another element of the research which drew me into the city.

Minsk

When it came to writing the sequel, The Starlings of Bucharest, I decided to revisit Moscow and see the same places and some of the same people, but from a different perspective. Ted, my protagonist, has stumbled into his role as a film critic for a magazine specialising in films from behind the Iron Curtain. He seems to be getting the hang of the job when he is asked to travel to Bucharest to interview a film director. Unfortunately for Ted, someone appears to have different plans for him when he arrives in Moscow for the 1975 International Film Festival.

Ted is a visitor to Moscow, and this gave me the opportunity to look at the way Inturist organised hotel stays and controlled the way visitors engaged with Soviet cities, and with Soviet people. Unlike Martha, Ted doesn’t have any connections in Moscow. Unlike Martha, Ted isn’t sure that there are people who are really invested in making sure nothing bad happens to him.

Sports Palace

While I have been approached at book readings by people insisting that I must have been to Moscow in the 1970s because I’d got the details just right, there was still a nagging doubt in my mind that I may have missed something because I haven’t physically visited the place. The Moscow I have written about no longer exists, so even if I did visit I would not be able to confirm most of my research. But then someone told me about Minsk, the Belarusian Hero City, built in the 1950s, which remains largely unchanged from its Soviet incarnation. It was my 1970s Moscow, and I could still visit.

I received a grant from the Society of Authors to visit Minsk in December 2019, and booked my retro hotel with timing which now seems uncanny. Minsk was the test of whether I’d really grasped what it would have been like to be in Moscow in the 1970s…

I felt right at home.

Sarah Armstrong

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