In Volga Bank, a rambling old house in the middle of Moscow, Richard Donald is mulling over a potentially life-changing idea involving his spare bedroom and the playrooms that are sometimes used by his grandchildren.
“We’re thinking of taking in a Ukrainian refugee family, though of course they might not want to live in Moscow,” he says.
Such a sentiment expressed in Red Square would result in Donald, a retired teacher, being huckled away by the police. This though is Moscow, Ayrshire, a former farming village 25 minutes south of Glasgow, where the popular feeling is firmly pro-Ukrainian. “I’d imagine it’s 100 per cent against the war here,” Donald says. “It’s not one of those villages where people get in your face, but the more people read about it, think about it, watch it on TV, what else can they think?”
Donald has hit the nail on the head. At the Arranview holiday park at the top of the hill towards Kilmarnock there is talk of flying the Ukrainian flag, and Alan Watson, 42, who runs the on-site bistro, expresses revulsion at the atrocities meted out by Russian forces.
Gabriel Ritchie, a marketing professional, recalls exchanging a bitter joke with a neighbour about the village name, formerly Muss Haw, according to tradition.
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“We were saying maybe we should change the name back,” Ritchie says. “What you see in the news really does focus your mind.”
Ritchie, 52, and his partner Karen Auld, 50, a midwife, have studied local history since moving to the village three years ago. The name is said to have been changed in the early 19th century after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, when his imperial ambitions began to founder. At 55 degrees north, the village is also on the same latitude as the Russian capital.
In a hallway the couple have a copy of a print of the French emperor entering the Russian city in September 1812, before disaster overtook him. “It reflects well on what’s happening today,” Ritchie says. “Napoleon was pushed back because of bad weather and supply chain issues, which seems like a reversal of role now, with Russia pushing against another country rather than being the victims.”
There’s also a more pragmatic reason to want the invasion to end. “We’re on oil heating here, not on the grid,” Ritchie says. “The cost has doubled in a month.”
Once you see one Russian reminder in this place, another appears. An old farm house was known as the Kremlin; a former coaching inn, now a private house, was called the Random Rouble, as it was made of random rubble.
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These wry local nicknames are familiar to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, whose mother was born and brought up in Burnhouses Farm at the south end of the village. Campbell spent his teenage summers working there, “milking cows, sweeping dung, painting gates, and always there for hay time”. He remembers a village with “the strongest sense of community” when he was growing up, but later in life he would wind up Labour Party comrades by telling them he spent every summer in Moscow “during the bad old days of the Cold War”.
Auld and Ritchie live by a stream called Volga Burn, and the name of their home, Poppy Cottage, is translated into Cyrillic script for the benefit of any Russian visitors.
There have been many down the years. At the height of the Cold War Alexei Kosygin, then the Russian premier, spent a day in Ayrshire, watching Kilmarnock play Rangers at football and visiting Moscow to take the 1967 version of a selfie by the village sign.
Kosygin was just part of a trend, says Matt Donald, 67, who has lived in Moscow for more than 40 years, and has CCCP etched in the glass of his front door. “We’ve made Russian national news,” he says. “The last time a production team came round to the house, they stayed about five hours and only left after they’d consumed three bottles of whisky. I wouldn’t imagine they’ll come back here soon — though I wouldn’t blame the average Russian for what Putin’s doing.”
Richard Donald and Ann, his wife, have had overseas visitors at Volga Bank too, often led by a Russian tour guide based in Edinburgh. She even filmed in front of their house to promote her business to Russians on YouTube. “After the shelling started, I got in touch with the lady who made the YouTube video,” Donald says. “She gave me a very neutral response.”