A moment that changed me: I was so desperate to leave home I agreed to smuggle 80,000 Bibles into the USSR | communism

I grew up in a modest, family hotel on the Dutch coast. The scenes of my boyhood were of German seaside tourists, drunken men and women at the bar, wedding receptions, and bingo nights in the function room. We slaved all year round – my father at the kitchen stove, my mother serving, cleaning the hotel rooms, and caring for three children. Books passed me by so it was an anomaly that, at the age of 12, I found myself attending a grammar school in Haarlem that churned out politicians, artists and writers.

I was embarrassed about my non-intellectual origins. Each morning, when my classmates’ fathers drove their expensive cars to solicitors’ offices, banks or ministries, my father would don his cook’s uniform from him. One day, when I was 14, I went to our village library. After I’d filled out the membership card, a woman said: “And now you can choose three books!” I snatched three off the shelf. The thinnest was First Love, by Ivan Turgenev. From the start, the words struck me like a hammer-blow. I was drawn in by the language and the 19th-century Russian world that the writer evoked. I’d become a reader.

In 1980, when I started my Russian studies at the University of Amsterdam, I had only one wish: to be able to read Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy in the original. I graduated five years later, but my wish was now less modest: I wanted to become a writer. But how?

I decided to take Maxim Gorky’s advice to Isaac Babel: “First go and live!” After a year and a half as a recreation leader on Tenerife – close to where Isherwood wrote his Berlin stories – I returned to the Netherlands. I still hadn’t written a thing. I’d reconciled myself to the idea that I’d spend the rest of my life in an office, with a broken dream of being a writer.

Then I was saved by a man dispatched like an angel from heaven. Siderius appeared at my family’s door one day, dressed in a tan mac, with a comb-over. He asked me about my background in Russian and I invited him in. To this day, I have no idea how he found me, but there were only a few people in the Netherlands in the 1980s who spoke Russian.

“So you’re fluent?” I have asked. “Do you think you could smuggle Bibles into the USSR for us? The faithful are aching for the word of God, and smuggling the Bibles in piecemeal isn’t getting the job done.”

The illegal transportation of Bibles to the Eastern Bloc had been going on for years. It was pretty risky. There was always the chance of arrest and imprisonment. Small-scale activities had been carried out along the Finnish border, tying Bibles to balloons for the wind to carry them into the USSR. But large-scale operations were done by road, with luxury cars, mini-buses and campers packed with Bibles driven through Hungary, Romania and East Germany. The last of these, the DDR, was the most challenging, with the Grenztruppen border guards, snarling Alsatians at their sides, tapping at the chassis of the vehicles, and peering under them with mirrors. But Siderius’s plan was to take a large consignment by ship, which would be a gamechanger. And I was so desperate to get out of the Netherlands that I agreed.

He paid for my flight, visa and hotels, and a week and a half later, I found myself in Leningrad harbour, surrounded by mountains of scrap metal, listening to the cries of filthy gulls, and waiting for my local contact to sign off on a shipment of 80,000 Bibles concealed under charge of Dutch potatoes. That man would end up taking the lion’s share to sell on the black market. He claimed that he could turn a dollar profit on each Bible. These were the last days of Gorbachev. Communist banners hung in the streets, and there were long queues of people in front of the nearly empty shops. The black market fraudsters had already discovered the attractions of capitalism, prostitution and illegal casinos, but theirs was a secret world of decadence and abundance. I had managed to save a few of the Bibles to distribute among the Russian people myself. I tried a care home, but I could barely give most of them away because they had more need of incontinence pads.

That import-export business would progress from Bibles to ladies’ lingerie in the new Russia, with its openness and permanent chaos, its currency depreciations, collapsing banks, mafia murders, its revolving door of new ministers and cabinets, and absence of all taboos. Sex, lotteries and fortune-telling swept the new nation. You could pick up a bronze bust of Lenin on the street for six packs of chewing gum.

Meanwhile, I teamed up with a partner to organize exclusive tours to the USSR for wealthy businessmen and bankers. We would impress them with tickets for the Bolshoi, which were impossible for foreigners to get, but which I could pick up dirt cheap in roubles. I’d take the box office employees to dinner and, in exchange for western lipstick, nail polish, shoes and medicines, they would supply us with as many tickets as we needed. Not that things were always easy. Before the 1980s we were over we found ourselves holed up with a group in a sanatorium in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, as violence spewed to the surface in the Caucasus. Outside, Soviet troops killed Georgian protesters on the Rustaveli Boulevard.

I met the love of my life, my wife, Julia. But then my business partner went on to embezzle all our money, which left me with no option but to write. I became the Moscow correspondent of the leading Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf, and started to publish my first novels about the country where I still live, which has become a writer’s goldmine. Though sometimes a nightmare too. In 2016, after I finished my novel Poubelle, on the war in Ukraine, I thought that history would leave us in peace for a while. But Julia and I have just taken the last flight out of Russia, leaving everything behind us. History is knocking on our door again, louder than ever.

Translated by Paul Evans. The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street by Pieter Waterdrinkertranslated by Paul Evansis published by write.