MANITA

Manita is our Russian guide. She is waiting for us at the Crimea's airport in Simferopol as our party of five comes through the exit gate. Our arrival in the country has been remarkably free of palaver - passports sternly but briskly inspected; planes on time; luggage intact. It is late but we are in high spirits. She is tiny and barely comes up to our driver Sasha's mid-riff. She is neatly but modestly dressed, her red scarf the only sign of colour. I guess she is about fifty and could be lifted by a small child with ease. The top of her head is quite flat and she has a full thatch of dark hair which has been dyed a purple shade of auburn at its front. It is all gathered together in a neat bow at the back. What was I expecting? A short and chubby baboushka? A tall Slav? A Russian doll? She is none of these things. She has calm and appraising eyes that are emphasised rather than hidden by their heavy lids. The folding skin below hints of sadness and endurance. She smiles without showing her teeth and offers her small hand. It is perfectly manicured and unadorned but has a slight roughness of toil long ago. "Welcome to the Crimea" she says in a voice with that purring sound that is pure cat-nip to certain men. "Hello, I'm Jonathan" I say. "That's Yadomir...in Russian", I add redundantly. She holds my gaze. Her expression is not unkind. Do you want a gold star it seems to say? I wonder what is the Russian word for "buffoon".

We are on a tight schedule with a lot to see. Sash has been given his instructions but we barely seem to be making progress through the early morning traffic. Sevastopol is massive - over half-a-million live around its enormous and glistening harbour. It is the home base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Naval Officers' Academy. There is the "Moscow", just returned from firing cruise missiles off the coast of Syria. Sash has pulled up to a junction. The exaggerated bobbing of his head as he looks left and right suggests great caution laid on for our benefit. He pulls out with a  scrunching of gears. A car swerves past behind us, its horn giving out a long angry blare. Manita remarks shortly and Sash nods. He is on the naughty step. The next day our driver is Igor. He is thick set and has cunning little eyes set in a chunky face. He gives us a sceptical smirk of greeting. Who are these jokers, his expression seems to ask? O well, it's all in a day's work. Like Sash, he too is a gear cruncher and frustrated rally car driver. Manita has to draw attention again to what passes for the highway code in these parts. Igor makes some remark which brooks no contradiction out of the corner of his mouth. Look lady, I'm in charge of the wagon OK? Manita considers this for a while. When Igor is next addressed her tone is different and he is soon eating out of her hand. The driving improves too. 

We are standing outside a large circular building on a hill-side. Below us in a great arc are the hills and valleys about Balaklava. The autumn sun beats down pleasantly. Manita knows the museum guide and she chats cordially. The building is empty of visitors but its guardian is enjoying her little moment of official power to delay things. Manita continues to gossip but she has the instincts of a shepherdess and her eyes dart about for any sign that we, her little flock, might be wandering off. Ah. We can go in. The museum contains a panorama of the German siege of Sevastopol. The art of "socialist realism", once so kitsch, is now a big deal she says. The picture is indeed impressive. It depicts a Russian assault on a heavily defended enemy position. There is the chaos of hand-to-hand fighting: stern looking Russians are laying about them with bayonet and grenade; a German cowers in his trench, his face a rictus of fear and hate. We already know the siege was one of the bloodiest of the Second World War and need no further prompting to stand in a moment of respectful silence.

Manita has an instinct for what we know, what we think we know and what perhaps we ought to know. She has the impressive grasp of the autodidact but wisely intuits that our limited attention span would be better directed towards greater understanding rather than incremental information. Like her neat and economical movements, her remarks are short and to the point. She is married to an ex-Soviet naval officer who spent most of his career in the Far Eastern Fleet in Vladivostock. He was a nuclear engineer, she says. They married in 1982, four years after he graduated from the academy; she is six years younger and was a teenager really, when she accepted her man and was wedded to the Soviet navy. They came back to the Crimea in 1991 when the USSR was falling apart. You'll have to join the Ukrainian navy said his bosses. Sod that: I'll retire, was his reply. Gorbachev was a traitor, she says evenly.

The Maxim Gorky battery to the south of the City is a famous landmark of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945. It is a shrine really. Here the defenders held out for weeks against the surrounding Germans. When the water ran out, the survivors of the garrison of 300 lived off Crimean champagne that had been hidden in vast underground bunkers. Wounds were soused and weapons cleaned in vintage bubbly. The Germans winkled most of them out with gas and flamethrowers and shot them on the spot. A few escaped through the sewers. A young lieutenant got back to the Soviet lines and was executed. He was already deemed to have "surrendered" and was thus likely a spy. We are visibly appalled. Manita gives a small shrug. Her tale has been told in a flat tone without drama. It was an existential fight to the death. 

The Soviets system was far more inventive than we give it credit. Do you know, asks Manita, that "they" invented the diaper? Yes, it's true she says, anticipating my dubious teasing. This nugget is so left-of-field, that it just has to be right. They were designed for Gagarin, the first man in space. He did not want pipes attached to his parts so they invented a nappy in which he could pee to his heart's content. Later, we see the great man himself  included in a group photograph at the formerly secret submarine base at Balaklava. He is in the company of Khrushchev, the General Secretary and is surrounded by cheerful workers and sailors. The photographer knows his stuff - Gagarin might be the hero of the hour, but the state pays the photographer's wages. The leader of the USSR is the focus of the frame. Did not the cosmonaut die of alcohol poisoning I cheekily ask? For once, Manita is genuinely shocked. Do you know that he always carried a double-bottomed vodka glass? Everyone wanted to be his friend and ply him with drink. But for this little bit of kit he would have been permanently plastered.

We are a happy group with a good dynamic. We laugh a lot when the setting does not require respectful or thoughtful silence. Manita is becoming accustomed to our antics and often conceals a smile behind her hand. She is not, I am beginning to see, naturally reserved but has been brought up in the useful life skill of self - editing, albeit for the wrong reason. She is also surprisingly tactile. Bruce is visibly ailing and says little but he gamely keeps up and always has a cheerful smile: she helps him into our mini-bus and strokes his hand solicitously and gently at appropriate moments. She deals with my tom-foolery with a small shove. Later in the trip, I ask her whom are her heroes. She is far too smart to toe a party line in this company and answers by identifying one who is not. Zhukov, the great WW2 Soviet marshal of western text books is given short shrift. He was a dangerous peasant who was utterly careless with his men's lives. General Rokossovsky was caught up in Stalin's purges before the war. He was arrested, his teeth were smashed out and all his fingers broken. But when the Germans attacked, he was badly needed and recalled. "Where the hell have you been?" joshed Stalin, The Soldiers' Friend, as he gave him a playful punch on his remaining uninjured limb. But for him and those few like him who had survived the era of the show trials, it would have been curtains in 1942 she says.

Manita has taken us to the public cemetery on the heights above Sevastopol. For once the sky is grey and sad. Everywhere there are enormous floral tributes, even on the most ancient graves. Fake and real flora seem to burst out in a new spring although it is already mid-autumn. We are led past the imposing statue of Totleben, the engineering genius whose fortifications around the harbour frustrated the allies for over a year during the Crimean War. Manita shows us a dark granite gravestone. There are weird grotesque shapes and contorted figures. It looks like a work of the school of Dada. But amidst the chaos is the unmistakeable outline of a submarine and sixteen names are engraved on the tomb. It is dedicated to the sailors from the city who died aboard the nuclear submarine Kursk when she sank in the Barents Sea in the summer of 2000. It was a terrible accident, distinguished by the futile attempts at rescue and all aboard her perished horribly. Manita seems quietly moved and lays a hand on the cold stone - perhaps she and her sub-mariner husband knew some of those who died. Such accidents were common then she says simply.

It is early evening and we are on the last item of our agenda, the Armoured Train. Do you know quizzes Manita, why the words "train station" are "baksal" in Russian? I confess I do not. The Tsar sent a delegation to London to find out about the new-fangled horseless carriage. He'll want one of those, they all agreed. Where did they view this amazing thing before the age of industrial espionage and a reluctance to share?  Um. Vauxhall? She gives a little clap. The monstrosity in front of us now is in a small siding. It is a public monument  but  has seen better days. An old man prods at some litter near its engine and a small weed is beginning to break free from the gun turret. I read out the Cyrillic motto on its side. "Death to fascists" it proclaims. Manita winces: you pronounced it like a Pole, she says. Railways do not seem to be associated with much happiness in Russian literature. I say the train reminds me of the scene in Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" where the Bolshevik Strelnikov is laying waste about his reinforced steel carriages in the bleak and frozen Urals. I get another wince: she is thinking of David Lean's production values in the eponymous  film. Can you imagine? An Egyptian as Zhivago and an English woman as Lara Antipova: the gorgeous but ill-fated Russian lovers. She gives a mirthless laugh. 

The five days have passed. I have grown to feel a strong sense of respect and affinity for our quietly purposeful and enigmatic guide.  At another time and place my awe would have likely turned into love. Would a Russian of the pre-revolutionary world have recognised her as one of the intelligentsia? In fact she seems far bigger than that: she has a deep intelligence and sensibility rooted in quiet patriotism. The fads of cultural and political fashion would interest but not ensnare her: she would surely confuse the ersatz intellectuals who dominate our own discourse in the West today. Our society has been thoroughly overpowered in its public spaces by a mood of cultural elitism that is growing in inverse proportion to moral uncertainty and decline. In our foolish sophistication we have allowed ourselves to be directed by  judges who declare we live in a non-judgemental world. There are no absolute truths anymore, just the self, utility and greed. Who are we to continue casting stones at the Russians? Throw away they say. We are the Crimea. We are Mother Russia. You can no longer hurt us.