The Other Railway Children, Chapter 10 (extract) "In which I eat Rostropovich's steak"

While visiting Russia earlier with Alex Cooke, I’d met the Railway Police Chief covering six of the most important Moscow train termini (including Kurski, Kazanski, Yaroslavl and Leningradski) and been appalled at the run down state of the police accommodation where children found on the station were taken and interrogated. We had made some modest funding available to improve the environment for both children and police and had tried - not very successfully - to influence the railway police to be more sensitive to the plight of runaway children. Apparently some 500 children were passing through police hands at these six stations every month - we suspected many were duplications as often the child would merely be returned home on the next train without any solution to their problems.

The police engaged in this activity were severely underfunded - we were told that phone calls outside the Moscow area were barred from the police office and children were only brought to emergency accommodation in Moscow if they were from the immediate local authority area. A lot of the children were said to be arriving at the Kurski station from the South East - the areas neighbouring the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, and from some of the Islamic republics and Kursk itself - and Mary Murphy, an experienced development consultant I’d met through the CSC, knew of a reputed Russian NGO that might have the political strength to make an impression on the issue.

Mary accompanied and introduced me to, and had meetings with, Oleg Zykov, the President of the NGO, NAN (No to Alcohol and Narcotics in English) who had been a member of President Putin’s Human Rights Commission covering youth issues, and also a journalist and a member of the Russian Duma (parliament) who were both concerned about the growth of the street children and gang problems in Moscow.

The upshot was that we developed a proposal to carry out an18 month action research project in 2005/6 in partnership with NAN at the six Moscow stations we had contacted before plus three or four of the busiest metro stations. The project was linked with the Belgian Medecins Sans Frontières staff who would carry out some of the social welfare work with the children and refer them to the NAN shelter, the only shelter in Moscow authorised to be run by a voluntary organisation outside the State system. Children would be intercepted at the stations and interviewed by the researchers rather than the police who would endeavour to establish the reasons for their running and offer help at the shelter or home reconciliation and repatriation.

I visited Moscow again towards the end of the research to gain an insight into the emerging conclusions and as Mary was unavailable to act as my guide and interpreter she commended to me an excellent interpreter who was a young Russian Orthodox priest and a postgraduate in mathematics at Hull University and knew the Methodist chaplain at the university who had been our local minister in Nantwich - such is the small world! A further highlight of this visit was an audience with the Vice President of Russian Railways in her palatial Baroque board room which had been fixed for me by the Russian cellist and conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich.

Thereby hangs another set of coincidences. Gordon Pettitt, Deputy Chairman of Railway Children, had been chatting to a woman sitting opposite in the train during a journey from Lancaster where he’d been visiting family. When during the conversation she heard about the Railway Children and its work, she revealed that she was a friend of Rostropovich, living next door to a flat he used when giving concerts in London. She said that Gordon and I must meet him and frankly we thought we’d hear no more of it.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Gordon received an invitation to a short meeting at her flat in Warwick Avenue and I accompanied him. We’d expected perhaps twenty minutes at most with the great man, but found we were to be guests at a small dinner party. Unfortunately Gordon had to leave as he had another engagement but I stayed on and when Rostropovich eventually arrived, somewhat late, I was introduced and prevailed upon to eat his steak as he had given up meat for Lent, a fact unknown to our hostess. Having demolished two steaks therefore and a glass of wine, I was privileged to listen to nearly an hour’s advice on voluntary work in Russia from the man who was highly esteemed in that country because of his heroic stand with Yeltsin at the Russian parliament building when the Communists threatened to take control again.

He had been exiled in America during the later Communist years returning at Gorbachev’s liberalisation and had been friendly with four American presidents - Carter, Reagan, George Bush senior and Clinton, all of whom had been guests at his 75th birthday. I say this revelling in the saying that everyone has only six degrees of separation from every other human being - I can now claim only one intermediary link between me and four American presidents, not to mention Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin et al! Rostropovich and his wife Galina, a great Diva, had several charities in Russia covering both music and health and he explained that he could therefore offer me no financial support but I could use his contacts, one of whom was this Russian Railways Vice-President.

Perhaps we used the opportunity too soon for she swept into the room and got down to business straight away requiring to know what assistance we wanted. We explained the purpose of the research we were engaged with and she left us contacts to take up when the research was finished. I subsequently met Rostropovich once more at the Barbican when he conducted Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, a favourite of mine, but he was already a sick man and died of cancer shortly afterwards.

We could have done with his influence later for the research report recommended the intervention of social workers at Moscow’s stations, funded by the State but trained by NAN - but although agreed in principle as part of a national child protection system developed under Putin, it got bogged down in the bureaucracy between the Transport and Interior Ministries and stalled. Railway Children still has some funds earmarked to follow this through should the situation ease but later developments in Russia concerning NGOs and the suspicion of foreign organisations has meant that this is an infertile ground for development at the present time.