Novel set in ITALY and ANGLESEY
Talking Location With author Paul Vidich – a lost MOSCOW
3rd April 2021
#TalkingLocationWith…. author Paul Vidich, Journey Back in Time to a Lost Moscow
How do you travel back to Moscow in 1985? That was my challenge. I had planned a trip to the Russian capital as a starting point to acquaint myself with the city as it existed in the final days of the Soviet Union. I was certain that the streets would be the same, the skyline similar, and the people, their humor, and language would not have changed much in the intervening thirty-five years. Unfortunately, the pandemic struck and my travels plans were cancelled.
Why would anyone want to visit a city from the past? In fact, Charles Dickens did just that when he explored Paris of 1789 during his research for A Tale of Two Cities, which he published in 1859. Like Dickens, I am a novelist and I had decided to set my next novel in Moscow in the last years of the Soviet Union.
I usually start with a novel’s setting. Setting isn’t just scenery or an illustrator’s eye for detail, but it’s all the things that draw a character to a place, establish atmosphere, and evoke the story’s imaginary world. I happened to read about Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet military specialist and spy, who the CIA tried to exfiltrate from Moscow. The Soviet Union in the twilight of power struck me as a good place to set a Cold War novel. It was the moment when the country’s illusion of dominance met the grim reality of a crumbling system.
I researched the 1980s Soviet Union for six months. I read several autobiographies of high-ranking KGB officers who successfully defected to the West. I was able to understand the hopes and fears of these men and women, and once I understood their world, I was able to let my imagination fill out a plot that emerged from the characters’ lives. It’s a messy process, and it required my willingness to be patient with the material. I created the characters by accessing my own emotions and psyche, combining them with real-life accounts of KGB officers, and scraping the material together into a mental space where they came to life. The premise of an exfiltration became the foundation for a larger story.
In the past, I have visited the cities in which I set a novel. These visits are akin to location scouting. I want to see where the action happens, the routes my characters take from their hotel, where my characters live, and what they see when they walk down the street. But, as I said, the pandemic prevented that with The Mercenary. In the process of dealing with my set back, I discovered that I could do ‘location scouting lite’ with Google maps. The street view feature allowed me to visit the city virtually. Street names, traffic patterns, pedestrian’s clothing can all be viewed. I was able to walk the streets that my central character, Alek Garin, walks and establish the city’s authenticity, as if I was there.
Google Maps allowed me to travel to the city’s iconic locations that figure in the novel and which play a part in Garin’s game of cat and mouse with the ever present, and always dangerous, KGB surveillance teams. They include:
Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence at No. 10 Spasopeskovskaya Square, a graceful stucco building built in the final years of Tsarist Russia.
Metropol Hotel, which sits near Red Square and across from the Bolshoi Theater.
Vvedenskoye Cemetery, where singer, Maria Yudina, famous for being awakened in the middle of the night to sing for Stalin, is buried.
Belorussky Station, a busy hub, where northbound trains go to Leningrad and the Finnish border and southbound trains make their long overnight journey to Uzhgorod and the Czechoslovakian border.
Red Square, where the enormous clock on Spasskayo Tower inside the Kremlin’s walls, announcing the time.
Sensibility is the thing that a traveler remembers about a place. The sensibility of Moscow in 1985 was a city of 
surveillance and grimness. Echoes of a Native Land, the memoir of Serge Schmemann, a New York Times correspondent in Moscow during the late 1980’s, helped me capture the feeling of ominous claustrophobia felt by Westerners living in Moscow at the end of the Soviet era.
Moscow in 1985 doesn’t exist anymore, nor does the Paris of 1789, but you can visit both cities by opening the pages of a novel and allowing yourself to journey back in time.
Paul Vidich – catch Paul on Twitter
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