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It's a surprisingly effective formula and for his latest series (following visits to China, India, and Latvia (his mother, Rita, was of Latvian heritage) he's off, like Reeve and Levison Wood before him, to Russia and he's keen to discover the Russia behind the (true) cliches regarding corruption, crushing of political dissent, and poisoning.
A military parade in Moscow may not be the best place to start doing this but Guy's zeal for discovery soon overcomes such obstacles. As Sting taught us "the Russians love their children too" so after a quick tour through Russian and Soviet history that takes us from 1917 to the present day via Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Stalin, the Cold War, Gorbachev, the break up of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin getting pissed up, the rise of the oligarchs, and former KGB man Vladimir Putin doing judo, sending people to prison, and fishing with his shirt off it's time for Guy to join his own little parade around Red Square and St Basil's.
Except he's not in a tank (you get the impression he'd like to be) but a very expensive ZiL car, and is restricted to travelling at no more than 20mph. Not that it's that easy to in Moscow anyway (unless you're a friend/crony of Putin and can use special lanes) as it's the second most congested city on Earth after Los Angeles.
I think if I lived in Moscow I'd much prefer to use the metro - and not just to avoid the traffic jams. The stations are famously ornate, full of stained glass windows, chandeliers, marble statues, socialist realist art and murals, and bronzed columns that are rubbed for luck. Above ground the architecture of Moscow impresses, or offends, in an even more ostentatious way. Moscow currently has seven of the ten tallest buildings in Europe, in fact London's Shard is the only non-Russian building in the top five.
This has led to the popularity of the extreme sport 'rooftopping', something that gave me vertigo just watching it on television, and Guy, sure enough, meets up with a couple of 'rooftoppers'. The FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, tend to turn a blind eye to rooftopping as long as it doesn't have a political dimension so you can climb to the top of the Federation Tower if you want, even become an Instagram celebrity by posing in ludicrously dangerous looking spots wearing high heels and evening dresses like Angela Nikolau, as long as you don't erect a Ukrainian flag while you're up there. Russian authorities aren't interested in enforcing health and safety rules, they're there to stop 'political' actions.
Going to prison isn't all bad though. I mean, it is almost definitely mostly very very bad indeed but it does have one bonus. Being an ex-con makes you ineligible for national service.
Should Russia descend into a lawless, Mad Max style, dystopia the rooftoppers and ex-cons won't be the only ones already at an advantage. The Night Wolves biker group, known as Putin's own Hell's Angels, have built a workshop/nightclub that houses steampunk contraptions they've made that look like crosses between David Smith sculptures and something from a Hollywood reboot of Robot Wars.
The fact they still blame, not totally incorrectly, the West for the crash under Yeltsin and that the Night Wolves, and many others in Russia, also hate Europe's 'tolerance' of homosexuality, incorrectly (obvs), makes it pretty clear who these 'Hell's Angels' think are the real enemy.
There seem to be quite a few people in Russia who miss the days of being a super power and that, perhaps, explains the current expansionist policies, the meddling in foreign elections, and the bullish behaviour of Putin and his gang.
For a look back at a time when there was absolutely no doubting the Soviet Union's place at the top table of global politics Guy is shown round Moscow's Space Museum and regaled with stories of the space race between the USSR and the US, the first sputnik (1957), Laika, Elka, and Strelka the space dogs, Yuri Gagarin the space man, and even shown a sample of moon soil given by Neil Armstrong to the museum. Tests showed it to be exactly the same as the moon soil collected by Russian cosmonauts proving, comprehensively, that the moon landings were not faked. For that to happen Russia and the US would've had to have colluded. As if that would ever happen?
Russian dogs weren't just sent into space but used as kamikaze pilots in wars too! A practice that was later taken up, less successfully, by the Japanese army and Iraqi insurgents. The dogs obviously died but plenty of other Russian military 'hardware' is still knocking around and being used for 'leisure' activities now.
Guy visits a privatised former air base and pilots an L-39 Albatros (it's the one Pierce Brosnan's James Bond uses in Tomorrow Never Dies). After, what appears to be, a very brief training session, he's permitted to take the jet up for a few barrel rolls, a couple of loops, and even to execute an extremely low daisy cutter over other people's heads. The plane is just eight metres from the ground. UK law states a minimum of 150 metres.
If Russians don't seem too bothered about health and safety (or political correctness gone mad as morons like to call it) they seem equally unconcerned with temperatures that would see the UK grind to a halt and the army called out. -25 is mild enough for most Russians to go for a nice day out.
Or, in Archangel, work. Archangel is the only place in Europe to have diamond mines and here we see giant trucks carrying ninety tonne loads up hills to be sifted through by 'sorters' who, at the end of each shift, have their hair, nostrils, ears, and even their arseholes checked in case they're nicking them. Nobody has been found attempting to steal one yet and Guy, game as ever, whips his pants off for an inspection after a short shift on the sorting desk. I'd never really thought about the actual business of diamond mining before so this, as with much of this fine series, was an education to me. I even learnt that every diamond that exists is at least one billion years old!
The Kamez truck factory in Naberezhnye Chelny may deal with more modern, and less expensive, goods but it's still a huge place. Twenty-three square miles in total, the city around it was built to support the factory not vica versa. Needless to say Guy has a drive in one of these monsters that nowadays dominate the Dakar rally just as surely as they pollute the planet.
Another Russian invention that's almost certainly done way more harm than good is the Kalashnikov. Izhevsk in the Udmurt Republic used to be most famous for Tchaikovsky but it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that Mikhail Kalashnikov, now, is a more recognisable name to many. The AK-47s he developed were owned by the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and are estimated to kill 250,000 people every year.
Mikhail himself was said to feel bad about how his weapon had been appropriated (though it seems unclear what the fuck people were gonna use it for) but the Russian Orthodox church, which (like most churches) loves nothing more than a bit of indiscriminate murder, told him he was a 'patriot' for doing this and the Russian Minister of Culture claimed the gun is "the true cultural brand of Russia.
Six thousand people work in Izhevsk's Kalashnikov factory. A number, thankfully, dwarfed by the nearly half a million who work on the Russian railways. The Trans-Siberian is, famously, the largest railway in the world and Irkutsk in Siberia (cue some footage of Stalin and the gulags) hosts one of its biggest depots as well as an immense paper mill, twelve miles long, making pulp for anything from bank notes to pizza boxes.
The timber comes from the taiga (the Siberian boreal forest) which is so vast it absorbs a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide. The lumberjacks who work it look to have a hard life but at least they get to knock off if the temperature drops below -40. Two things that never seek to amaze about Russia, and travel programmes never tire of telling us, is that it's bloody big and it's bloody cold. Russians, apparently, joke "the colder it gets the more ice cream we sell".
Although it seems booze is a more popular method of getting you through the night or, indeed, day. While Simon Reeve travelled to Tuva to witness some truly tragic cases, Guy Martin, has, of course, kept it a bit perkier. He's at Buguldeika on the shores of Lake Baikal to witness a shamanic dance before retiring to a yurt for some hospitality which seems to consist mainly of getting pissed on the triple measures of the local loopy juice they serve up. The milky concoction causes him to wince but is fairly effective in getting him 'trolleyed'. It's a good way (or is it?) to prepare for a trip across the border to Ukraine and Chernobyl.
You could see a trip to Ukraine in a documentary nominally about Russia as 'mission creep' or even as politically insensitive but you just know Guy Martin desperately wants to have a nose around Chernobyl. It's his kind of place. I visited Ukraine back in 2009 and wanted to go myself but you need to book in advance. It's surprisingly popular with tourists and the money generated helps to fund Ukrainian resistance to pro-Russian forces illegally annexing parts of the east of the country.
On the 26th of April 1986 Chernobyl became the biggest nuclear disaster ever (so big that the programme makers can only get across its enormity with the use of some Faux Cyrillic lettering, it seems) and now Chernobyl is surrounded by a 1000 square mile exclusion zone. When visiting Guy has to go through checkpoints at eighteen and six miles from the plant itself.
The death toll is highly disputed ranging from 2 (or zero in one slightly blinkered case) to 29 to 90,000! Part of the reason for these discrepancies is that the Soviet government (who'd scrimped on safety measures insisting the reactor was safe enough to install in Red Square) tried to cover up the disaster. It wasn't until warning signs started going off in Stockholm that the Swedes twigged what the Soviets already knew but weren't saying. The fallout covered most of Europe. As far away as Cumbria they only stopped testing sheep for Chernobyl radiation as recently as 2012.
The 'shield' itself that covers the reactor is the size of Wembley Stadium but the 'sarcophagus', the molten core, the 'elephant's foot' as it's been nicknamed has 'suicidal' levels of radiation and very very few people have risked going inside. One man who has, and survived, is Sergei who went in there to take photos. Guy meets him and Sergei puts it down to being a tough Russian and believing in God. Make your mind up, Sergei, although fair play, comrade.
The town (now a ghost town) of Pripyat was founded in February 1970 to serve Chernobyl and life there was said to be good, far better than most other towns in the Soviet Union at the time, before the reactor exploded a day before a new amusement park was due to open. Fifty thousand citizens of Pripyat were evacuated and told they'd be back within three days. They're still not back. Images of burnt out dodgems and a rusty ferris wheel tell some part of that story but they don't tell it all.
It doesn't tell the story of the rescue workers, the 'liquidators', whose eyes changed from brown to blue due to the strength of the radiation and when they died, as many quickly did, had to be buried in lead coffins to stop the spread of gamma rays, but it also doesn't tell the story of the animals who, popular legend has it, thrive in the exclusion zone.
That's not strictly true. Some do and some don't. There are wild dogs, cats, moose (!), foxes, and firebugs thriving but some flora and fauna has mutated and twisted out of shape and/or died. If you only survey the animals left alive, and not the dead ones, you're in danger of coming to false conclusions. There's clearly a certain amount of radiation that is good for living things but would you be the one who wanted to find out how much?
Estimates say the site will not be safe for human habitation for another 20,000 years but it's not only dogs, foxes, and moose that can disprove these estimates but people too. Some hardy souls, a couple of hundred of them, have defied orders and chosen to continue living within the exclusion zone and they're not, as you might expect a bunch of crusties, environmental activists, or some extra macho chapter of the Night Wolves.
In fact, Guy meets a baba, a feisty Ukrainian grandmother, who pretty much orders Guy and his crew to fix her 'sticky' gate (not a euphemism). Those who stayed on in and around Chernobyl live, on average, a decade longer than those who left. The trauma of relocation is posited as a theory but surely the trauma of living through, and still living in the site of, the world's worst nuclear catastrophe was traumatic enough. It sounds like we still don't know enough about what happened in Chernobyl but, at least, we now know, thanks to the likes of Guy Martin, a little more about what life is like there as well as in neighbouring Russia (if not, from this series, elsewhere in Ukraine).
For once, in one of Guy Martin's travelogues, he neither entered a race or did some sort of sporting challenge but, in common with all of the other programmes I've seen him present, he proved an affable, inquisitive, and energetic host who presided over a fun, slightly lightweight, but, nonetheless, very informative and enjoyable show. I'd go on holiday with him as long as he doesn't make me barrel roll an L-39 Albatros, go rooftopping, or spend more than two minutes in anywhere that's -40. In fact Our Guy in Havana has a nice ring to it, for some reason!
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