I was walking down the street yesterday, about to meet some colleagues for an evening of card games and roast chicken. At the time I was on the phone to Jon, when without warning a massive guy came up behind me and but both his hands heavily on my shoulders. This was rather surprising, but then he called out to a car, that swooped out of the nearest turning and pulled up in front of us. Before I could really react, he had pushed down on me, hard, forcing me into the car, and had closed the door behind me.

Jon tells me that I sounded surprisingly calm while this was going on, but the guy driving the car started shouting almost immediately. “POLITZIA, POLITZIA,” he shouted, while I looked back in wide-eyed terror. They drove me to a nearby alley and continued shouting. “PASSPORT. PASSPORT!” Stupidly, I had left all of my documentation at home, but had no really effective way of communicating this other than shrugging and looking bewildered. They carried on shouting for a while and I carried on looking confused, but I quickly realised that we were at an impasse.

They were apparently unwilling to do anything to me other than shout, thankfully, so I called the manager of the school and asked him to translate for me, in order to help move things along. He had a word with the cops and explained to them that I didn’t have my passport with me, but almost as soon as he’d hung up they started shouting again – “POLITZIA! PASSPORT!” This didn’t seem like a promising sign.

After a while, the record changed. The larger of the two turned, looked me in the eye, grinned, and – pointing to himself – started repeating, “Mafia. Dollars! Mafia!” At this point I actually relaxed a little. Up until this point I hadn’t been sure what was going on, but a shakedown is much more of a known quantity – it was surreally hilarious, but in general, you know what to do when a massive crooked cop is asking you for money. He clearly wasn’t actually Mafia; I’d been walking around with a laptop, a camera, an iPod and my credit cards, and if this guy had really been mafia he wouldn’t have bothered with a shakedown for twenty bucks. So I continued to act dumb (I’m a natural) until he got bored, which happened surprisingly quickly. After about 5 minutes, he visibly deflated, said “Bye bye”, and stared morosely out of the window. “Spasiba!” I said before climbing out of the car and hauling ass.

My boss was livid about the incident. Apparently, despite being a bit of a Russian cliché, crooked police shakedowns are rare in Nizhnevartovsk, and he promised to give the local PD hell (I’m sure that he pays enough in protection money to be able to expect that his teachers are unmolested). Me, I was… one-fifth terrified, two fifths confused and two fifths entertained. As soon as I realised that I wasn’t in any real danger, the whole thing became a bit of a pantomime. There is an extent to which I brought it on myself – by walking around without a coat I stuck out as a foreigner like a sore thumb (I also attracted a fair bit of gopnik attention – ‘gopnik’ being the local variety of chav, redneck, bogun, whatever). But it makes for a good anecdote and we had a few laughs about it over the roasted chicken, so it could have gone down much worse.