At first glance this city is much like any other great capital,
but Moscow is even more about money and glitz than I'd imagined.
Arkady Novikov is at all the posh parties.
He was once turned down for a job in the kitchens at McDonald's.
Now he owns more than 100 chic restaurants, and knows everyone that matters.
He is, as they say, "The Man".
This bash is for Madonna, who's in town for a megaconcert.
In the scrum of minders and paparazzi, just a glimpse of the lady herself.
This city worships the rich and famous.
This is my first visit to Moscow since the collapse of communism.
No prizes for recognising this as Red Square.
St Basil's down there and here, the Kremlin, which for me
still is always associated with the Soviet Union, what President Reagan used to call "the evil empire".
This was the enemy, the threat in the nuclear age, and I still
have that sort of odd sensation when I'm standing here looking at it now.
On the outside, there's little change,
but behind the historic facade, it's a very different world.
The famous department store, Gum, used to be exceptionally gloomy, now look at it.
But my purpose on this trip is not to binge on bling, but to find out
how much has changed away from the capital of conspicuous consumption,
though I can't resist one last taste of it.
Arkady Novikov has invited me and my fluent-in-Russian producer, Teresa, to visit one of his restaurants.
Lots of beautiful girls he says, as you'll see. Lots of beautiful girls.
What sort of prices do you pay in this restaurant for a meal?
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
Mm-hm. Roughly 50 for a... 50. ..for a lunch, you know, for a good lunch.
The restaurants favoured by the "in crowd" are also said to be watering holes for the rich and wicked,
where they and the politicians scheme and scam, over some of the best food you can get anywhere.
Arkady will have none of it.
"Look around you", he insists, "they're really nice people,
"ordinary people, maybe it happens but it could happen anywhere.
"Every family has its black sheep", he says.
"For that matter you could find the same thing in western restaurants."
You've now got 100 restaurants, how long before you're at 200?
TERESA TRANSLATES
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
It's all up to God.
What's the secret?
You have to be professional and work a lot.
Arkady is a very rich man because he's touched a new Russian nerve.
Muscovites spend as if there's no tomorrow,
and the city is now the most expensive in the world.
An absurd sight!
The nation's capital has a real buzz.
However, I'm in search of another Russia beyond Moscow,
that Russia where the great majority live.
Moscow going south, I feel a bit like a schoolboy, I've got my money,
just go and try and get a ticket and hope that I get the right train.
I think it's platform nine or train nine. We'll see.
Is that right?
Great.
Spasiba.
I'm getting better. At least I can do "spasiba".
Some of these trains are more than a kilometre in length, and of course
my carriage has to be right at the end.
I've got a couple of minutes.
Phew, made it.
A tremendously good smell of food.
A little smell of food and a little bit of bodies as well.
I had a three-hour journey ahead of me.
Time for a good read...
..or so I thought.
Book...?
Yeah, well I'm reading this book.
It's a very famous Russian book called...
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.
Ahh. You know Tolstoy? Great man.
Tolstoy. Yeah, he's a great man.
It's one of the intriguing things about travelling by train
is that you do have these totally incomprehensible conversations.
Sometimes - I don't want to cast any aspersions -
with individuals who've had a drop or more of liquor.
'They're migrant workers.
'Moscow sucks them in and spits them out in their thousands of thousands.
'No wonder they drink.'
Very good.
'I needed help. Teresa to the rescue.'
That's his brother up here.
He's already drunk. Yes.
Let him sleep, he says. Yeah.
'My new companion is a labourer.
'He comes from Ukraine, but his home town can't provide anything like the wages in Moscow.
'It may be tough in the capital, but there ARE compensations.'
There's lots of everything, lots of... Lots of everything. Sights, lots of attractions...
Mm-hm. He likes all those games, you know, you can have,
like firing rangers
and all those sort of like, amusement parks. Karaoke.
Karaoke. Do you do Karaoke?
Yeah, he does, yeah, easy-peasy.
He loves that kind of thing.
Very good to meet you. Very nice to talk to you, thank you.
I'll have one more.
One little bit more.
'Back to my book again.'
I'm re-reading my favourite of all novels.
I first read it over 40 years ago and I loved it then, and it's just as good today.
It has those famous opening words.
"Happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
It is, of course, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
It is a sensational work of genius
and I'm going to soon be where he wrote this book,
at his home, on his estate, a place called Yasnaya Polyana.
Yasnaya Polyana is a shrine to Russia's greatest writer.
Tolstoy is revered not only for his literary genius,
but because he saw into the very soul of the Russian people.
The Bolsheviks preserved his estate for the nation,
although he actually believed in anarchism, not communism.
You must be Alana, yes?
Alana. Alana, I'm Jonathan.
Hi. Hi.
These on first, yes? Yes.
That's very important that you have them. Of course.
Well, presumably you have a lot of people treading through the house.
Yeah, we have around 150,000 visitors a year.
150,000? Wow.
You can go round so many houses and it's sort of
nearly the same or there's other work, but this is exactly the same.
The shelving there, the desk and him sitting...
In this little... Right there, and that sofa's still there and even the photographs, still the same.
That's completely brilliant.
And by the way, the black couch on which he was born.
That was a family tradition, that all the children were to be born on this couch.
On the couch, he insisted, didn't he? All his children were born on the couch.
Yes, and some of his grandchildren even.
This is his bedroom? His bedroom, yes. How extraordinary.
And here is Tolstoy's famous blouse called Tolstovka.
Oh, yes. Can I touch it?
Well, actually people are not supposed to, but you can, I think.
So I'm breaking... So, that's the smock that we see him in so many times in those portraits.
Late in life, Tolstoy became even more renowned as a radical thinker than for his novels.
He was feared by the Czarist authorities, but he was held in awe and impossible to silence.
He was also an iconoclast.
Though his Christian faith was profound, he rejected the doctrines
of the Orthodox Church, for which mortal sin he was excommunicated.
Tolstoy believed the peasants to have a God-given nobility
and his descendant is recreating Yasnaya Polyana
according to principles he thinks the great man would have endorsed.
This is the kind of thing I absolutely love -
I think I've just had Tolstoyan fantasies ever since I was a child,
which is why Anna Karenina meant so much.
The key figure in Anna Karenina, based on Tolstoy's autobiographical Levin,
was actually someone who loved farming, he loved travelling, he loved thinking,
he loved communicating, he was a complex, difficult person and my sort of Tolstoyan fantasy
is that you can be a landed gentleman,
you can pretend you can work hard as a peasant at the same time,
but it really sort of gets me here, and coming here is exactly what I thought it would be like.
Tolstoy was buried in the heart of his estate.
His quiet grave a memorial to a national hero,
whose dreams for Russia would soon turn to dust.
Tolstoy's romantic view of the peasants was widely shared.
When he wrote "the peasants are closer to God than we are",
intellectuals, writers and artists would nod their head in agreement,
but it was a rather rose-tinted view.
Chekhov wrote, perhaps rather more clinically, as behoves a doctor as well as a playwright,
"the peasants are coarse, dirty, drunk, quarrelsome
"and they live in mutual fear and suspicion all the time".
Whatever the truth, the story of the peasants is a thread that is
woven through the story of Russia, right up to the present day.
So, I'm on my way south now into the agricultural heartland of Mother Russia.
Our journey had started far to the north of Moscow.
Now pushing on from Yasnaya Polyana, we enter the vast Russian steppe...
the arable flatlands that surround the city of Voronezh.
The best way to sense the scale of this land is to see it from the air.
It's like this for as far as I can see, right away into the distant horizon.
Huge fields, I can't judge the exact size, but I would say they're 60/70/100 acre fields with trees
acting as a windbrake to stop this valuable soil blowing away.
It just goes on and on and on. It makes East Anglia seem like a little pocket handkerchief,
and where I live in Devon like a little dot.
The soil below us here is some of the very best in the world.
"Black earth" they call it.
A 19th century famous Russian agronomist said,
"It's the Czar of soils, more valuable than oil, more precious than gold".
As soon as I was safely back on the ground,
I wanted more than anything else to find somewhere I could dig my fingers into this soil
and feel it for myself.
We came across a group of women picking potatoes.
What's fascinating about this is, this is a family plot,
the family plots like this, the small plots,
produce 95% of Russia's total demand for these basic crop potatoes,
and that's gone on throughout the centuries, and THIS...
this...this is the black earth in which it's done
and this is a metre depth of soil, this is fantastically rich.
It's what we saw from the sky but seeing it here...
..it's great stuff.
You can understand why farmers love it.
How important for your family income are these potatoes?
TERESA TRANSLATES
WOMAN REPLIES IN RUSSIAN
Of course, of course it is.
Because...the more potatoes you can sell, then you can buy things for your children...
People live on it.
Soft life or hard life, is it?
What do you think? Do you think it's an easy life? It's hard!
I thought you might say that. I feel guilty. I think I ought to help.
Send us a combine harvester, that'll do it.
THEY LAUGH
She says not having your bottom up in the air like that.
It's true. All you see is bottom. Try it all day, try it for a whole day.
In many ways, Russia's peasants live much as they did a century ago.
Once more, theirs is a hand-to-mouth existence on the margins of the money economy.
Stalin set out to destroy peasant agriculture and replace it with massive farms known as collectives.
Food production on an industrial scale to nourish the workers
who laboured in the factories to build the Soviet Union.
The plan produced a nightmare.
The peasants were forced to surrender their farms to the state -
there was no choice and no compensation.
Those who dared refuse, often the most go-getting, were branded as kulaks.
They were shot or sent to hard-labour camps in Siberia,
and all the food, almost every grain of it, was requisitioned for the factories.
As a result, with the full knowledge of the Kremlin,
millions of peasants died in the man-made famine that followed.
Eventually, the collectives staggered into full production.
They were extremely inefficient and heavily subsidised
but they yielded just enough food to feed the urban masses
as well as the rural workers who harvested the crops on their behalf.
But when communism collapsed, so did the collectives.
In some areas today,
Moscow's nouveaux riche are buying up the land.
In others, the collectives have been turned into co-operatives,
but without any state support many of them are virtually bankrupt.
Russia's peasants are poor but they're as stoical today
as they were in the time of Tolstoy, their tenacity quite remarkable.
As an old man, Tolstoy adored the fields and forests,
but as a young man he conceived a passion for the mountains and I wanted to follow him there.
Moscow was now a long way behind us as we headed south from Voronezh,
across the steppe towards the mountains of the Caucasus.
For generations, Russians in search of excitement and romance
have taken a similar route towards Pyatigorsk.
We've been travelling now for just about ten hours.
It's been an entirely uneventful journey through mile after mile
of endless farmlands like this and then suddenly
you see in the distance, looming out, the mountains.
Pyatigorsk is a spa town surrounded by mountains.
In the 19th century, it was a fashionable resort
where you could breathe the mountain air and refresh your jaded spirits.
Beyond the city, the Imperial army were struggling to subdue
the mountain tribes along what was then Russia's southern border.
As a young army officer, Tolstoy fought in that war,
exhilarated by the fighting but haunted by its brutality.
The more Tolstoy saw, the more he admired the enemy,
their bravery and their passion for independence,
the very qualities the Russians were trying to stamp out.
At that time, Pyatigorsk was filled with army officers on leave from the front,
a place of romantic intrigue and exotic danger.
The great poet Lermontov wrote, "It is crowded with dancers, gamblers and brawlers.
"We are inflamed by women by day
"and by bedbugs by night."
It has somewhat altered.
We should have been on our way by now,
but how could I refuse an invitation to a wedding in the Caucasus?
FOLK MUSIC PLAYS
The preparations start early in the morning.
A sheep is a wedding gift which will be slaughtered for the feast.
Everyone brings something.
By tradition, there's a court jester as well, fiercesome but funny.
The women have grace, but it's the men who take the starring role.
Swordsmen strutting their stuff.
The same steps that their forefathers used in mortal combat only a few generations ago.
They made me try as well... thoroughly embarrassing.
The wedding is not only a celebration but a reminder that
these people have their roots in a warrior culture.
GUNSHOT
Not so long ago, my driver, on the left here,
crossed the mountains into Abkasia to fight alongside his brothers
in their struggle for independence, not from Russia, but Georgia.
Everyone in the village has known the bride since she was a baby,
but there's still a moment of suspense - her unveiling.
Tradition requires the bride to be kidnapped by the bridegroom
two weeks before their wedding.
After that there's a tit for tat and then a ransom, or at least I think that's what's happening.
The bridegroom's mother is being held captive by the bride's family
and the bridegroom's mother's son, who's not getting married but is the son, has to buy back his mother.
Got it?
As the sun begins to set, someone is still missing.
MAN SHOUTS OUT AND OTHERS REPLY
The man himself.
His first task is to apologise to the bride's family
for kidnapping their daughter, but he still gets his comeuppance.
HE SHOUTS AT THE GROOM
Only now can the happy couple tie the knot.
An appropriate moment to leave them to it.
From the wedding in Kabardino-Balkaria,
we headed east through the Caucasus towards Daghestan and the Caspian Sea,
but on our way we paused to visit a bitter reminder of the Chechen war - Beslan.
To reach Beslan, we had to cross into North Ossetia,
the only Christian republic in the Russian Caucasus.
The same route that was taken one morning in 2004
by terrorists fighting for Chechen independence.
It was September 1st, the start of the new school year.
Three days later, Beslan became a slaughterhouse.
The gunmen had seized more than 1,100 children, parents and teachers.
If the idea was to draw attention to the Chechen cause,
it was a hideous error of judgement.
The gunmen had herded most of their hostages into the gymnasium.
On the third day, Russian troops stormed the building.
In a chaos of gun fire and bombs, 334 hostages died.
186 of them were children.
Even when you've seen the pictures and read about it,
to come in here and actually see the place is...
It's completely heartbreaking.
All these ruined lives.
Writing over 150 years ago about these struggles in the Caucasus,
Tolstoy said, "Is it possible that there is not room for all men on this beautiful Earth?
"Can it be that amidst this enchanting nature,
"feelings of hatred, vengeance and a desire to exterminate their fellow beings
"can endure in the souls of men?"
That was 150 years ago.
We drove on across the apparently endless steppe north of Beslan
en route to the Caspian Sea.
We've just crossed the border into Daghestan
and we're unloading from one vehicle into another all our gear because,
um, it's generally thought deemed wiser for us to rely on drivers in Daghestan
who know the territory and can make sure we don't get into any unnecessary trouble.
We're filming this in a surreptitious way because
we are concerned that the police authorities here,
if they know we're filming, would stop us doing it.
Although the republics of the Russian Caucasus belong to the Federation,
they all have their own borders and their own police
who can be a touch unpredictable.
Our contact in Daghestan is more than a baggage handler.
Khan is a clan leader who carries real clout in this sometimes lawless land.
Our first stop is a curious anomaly,
a village that's populated entirely by Chechens but just inside the Republic of Daghestan.
Khan is an elder, a "starshii".
So long, so long.
He enjoys automatic respect.
As I discovered the history of this village,
I began to realise why atrocities like Beslan can still happen.
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
'I found some old men who told me what happened to them here in the Second World War.
'The episode is indelibly etched in their memory.
'In the freezing winter of 1944, Russian soldiers entered the village
'and rounded up every man, woman and child.
'They were herded into cattle trucks and shipped off to Soviet Central Asia.'
There were, there were...the guns.
At gunpoint. Yeah.
'Every Chechen, the whole nation, was deported.
'They had no food, no water, no heating.
'One in every five of them died on the way.'
When someone died there was no equipment, nothing, to dig the grave
and they found anywhere, if they found wall,
then they'd take out some stones, put the dead body there and then cover it by stones.
'Stalin apparently thought the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazis.
'For this alleged betrayal, these old men, who were then children, were raised in exile.
'They dreamed of home.
'Three years after Stalin's death, they were reprieved
'and they returned, but they've never forgotten or forgiven,
'we can be sure, nor will their children or grandchildren.'
Not far from the Chechen village, we entered the flood plains that border the river Terek.
In the 19th century, the Terek formed a natural frontier
against the expanding Russian Empire
whose armies were driving south, determined to conquer the Caucasus once and for all.
At that time, the Russian front was spearheaded by a phalanx of shock troops
who were as famed as they were feared - the Cossacks.
THEY SING
Today, I'm going fishing with some of their descendants.
In some parts of the country, the Cossacks are a resurgent force,
xenophobic thugs who like giving Russia's minorities a rough time.
But here in Daghestan, the Terek Cossacks are themselves a minority, and they behave accordingly.
Placido Domingo of our time.
What they're just saying that when...when he's singing
then Placido Domingo can't compete with him.
It was on this front that Tolstoy fought alongside the Cossacks and he came to admire them,
not because they hated their enemies in the mountains beyond the river
but for their courage in battle against them.
You've got your gun, Petr.
'But when he really liked was another side of the Cossack character.
'Their simple life, their love of the outdoors and their glorious independence of spirit.'
What have you got there?
It's huge, can we take it out and look?
Can we take it out and look?
'Sorry to say, even Cossacks can be poachers.
'The principle ingredients for ukha,
Russia's famous fish soup, had being caught illegally with nets.'
Very alive.
'I soon discovered that our chef for the day
'is not given to hiding his feelings, nor is political correctness his strong suit.'
Nikolai. Nikolai.
You enjoy doing this, yes?
And you're a proud Cossack, yes?
What is it to be a Cossack, what makes a Cossack different?
It means to be able to, like, run your cars. Your...
'My Cossack translator is getting lost for words.'
Do you have a big faith in Russia, in Mother Russia?
< Yeah, absolutely.
He says when beer... The bear?
.bear, the bear, wakes up, then everything will be OK.
Because the bear resembles the Russia, the true Russia.
Tell me what you think is the true Russia.
In a single phrase, like, Russia is the Russian people.
Spasiba.
Very, very much.
THEY LAUGH
'While Nikolai gets on with his cooking, his leader Petr goes shooting.
'Then we eat.
'We drink.
'And, inevitably, we sing.'
THEY SING
'It's many generations since their forebears fought against the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus,
'but I suspect even now they're nostalgic for that Holy War against the infidels.'
That war was fought in the mountains and the centre of resistance was here in Daghestan.
For once, the disparate tribes of the Caucasus were united.
Their leader was Sheikh Shamil, whose spirit still hovers over the mountains.
For more than two decades, he outwitted the might of the Russian Empire.
But Shamil was outnumbered and outgunned.
His last stand was just outside this village, Gunib.
It is an extraordinary, romantic story.
Shamil on his white horse.
25 years he leads the Caucasian people in an epic struggle
against the Russian invaders, the Imperial Army,
and gradually the Imperial Army encircles him
until he finds himself - we're now some 6,000 feet up in the mountains -
he finds himself encircled, the noose around his neck, down to his last 400 men.
And his family, his son in particular, said, "You've got to surrender."
So he rode out down here with his retinue on his white horse.
All around him were Russian soldiers and they started to jeer him
and shout at him and shout "hoorah, hoorah"
and he went to turn back and said, "If that's how it's going to be, I won't surrender."
The order came up then from the Russian general to his troops,
"Silence", and there was absolute silence.
Shamil's extraordinary feat of resistance had made him famous all across Europe.
So great was his renown that even the Czar felt obliged to treat his prisoner with honour.
And today he remains a symbol of defiance in these mountain passes and beyond.
On our way down to the Caspian Sea, Khan stopped off to show me Daghestan's finest weekly market.
It's quite a scene here, Khan.
Yeah, this is the biggest market in Daghestan. Amazing.
'Walking through this open air shopping mall, I began to appreciate
'Shamil's astonishing achievement in uniting the tribes of the Caucasus.
'They must speak at least a dozen languages in this market alone.
'There are 34 clans in Daghestan and even now blood feuds and vendettas between them,
'not to mention kidnappings, tend to scare visitors away.'
When we were planning on coming here,
there's a thing called a Foreign Office Advisory,
and we were told it's not safe to go to Daghestan because of robbery, kidnapping and even worse.
Well, right now you are in the most dangerous place in Daghestan!
You can be kidnapped by the traders,
by these ladies. Well... And they business what they are doing is the most dangerous business.
'But Khan has no illusions.
'He knows very well there are Islamist insurgents hiding in the mountains
'and he also knows that in this Muslim society, they will always find some support.
'He knows they're here and he wants them out.'
What is your attitude towards these people, cos they still exist underground, don't they?
Yes, they still exist but the tragic thing is that, um,
they do not represent not only any Daghestani village,
they do not represent any Daghestani hamlet.
These people are out of Daghestan society.
You're a father, you've got a family. Do you fear them?
I'm afraid of them.
My perception is that we should treat them as ordinary criminals not as a part of Daghestan society.
In the distance, below the mountains to the east, is the Caspian Sea.
On its shores, the most southerly and the oldest city in Russia, Derbent.
Derbent was first settled at least 5,000 years ago.
The great fortress which overlooks the harbour was built by the Persians a mere 15 centuries ago
to protect the city from invasion from the north
but its strategic location made it a magnet for the czars.
Here we are in the oldest city in Russia... That's right.
..and somehow it hasn't been ruined. How's that?
In 561, they built all these fortifications
and these walls up to the mountains goes approximately 70 miles.
It is compared with the great Chinese Wall, with Hadrian Wall,
and there are three fortifications and this is one of them.
'But Derbent was above all a city of traders and it survived because the merchants
'were ready to cut a deal with almost anyone to keep the peace.'
What they did was they ceremonially gave the key of city
and the historical manuscript called the "History of Derbent"
and they said that, "You are winners,
"this city belongs to you," and when Peter I came to Derbent...
They gave him the keys. "Peter, we welcome you, you can have the keys.
"And you rule us". Yes.
What does this tell us about the people of Derbent?
It tells that in some way they came to philosophy that there is no reason to fight against anyone.
The reason is to keep peaceful life and if someone want to rule us,
let him do it but why war?
And this is a very, you know,
it is very different story with this city comparing with the story of Daghestan. Absolutely.
MUEZZIN CALLS OUT
'Today, after long years in which the orthodox church and then the communist state held sway,
'Derbent is now free to celebrate its origins as one of Islam's most holy cities.'
This is the famous mosque, yes? Yeah.
'Dzhuma mosque is the fourth most important site in all Islam.'
This mosque is...
how old?
It was built in the early-8th century.
It's in Persian on right side, and on left side it is in Arabic.
HE READS OUT ..Means just enter this mosque with the belief.
With belief. Can we go in? Yes, please.
Wow.
It's very beautiful. Very simple.
'In the Soviet period, the mosque was turned into a prison and later a museum.
'Today, it thrives as a place of worship for Sufi, Sunni and Shia Muslims alike.'
This is something very unusual.
Praying together. Praying together.
In prospect, this journey across the largest country
in the world was quite daunting
but I feel now I understand a little bit more about Russia,
its diversity and its richness and I've met some incredible people.
Warm, friendly and welcoming.
And that, plus more vodka than I ever thought I'd consume,
fuels my enthusiasm for the next stage.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk