DEPENDING on your taste, the smell of Mother Russia is either a disgusting or addictive bouquet of petrol fumes, smoke from papirosi cigarettes and boiled cabbage. It hits you like a wave as soon as you arrive at Moscow Airport. Junkies like myself come back for it time and again.
If you were in Russia in October, you would have noticed that there was a marked increase in the proportion of cabbage in the cocktail. For this is the time of the cabbage harvest, the nearest thing this dour northern country has to a carnival.
The cabbage harvest coincides with Pokrov, an important feast of the Russian Orthodox Church which is connected with the veil of the Virgin Mary. The scarves with which Russian women modestly cover their heads in church are a reminder of this protecting veil.
At Pokrov, when the chrysanthemums are dying and the first snowflakes are floating in the air, Russians stock up on cabbage for winter. For religious believers the vegetable is especially important, as it is one of the few foods they will be allowed to eat during the long fasts in the run up to Christmas and Easter.
In Soviet times the cabbage season was dreaded by all students, because they were obliged to spend the start of the autumn term helping the collective farmers to bring in the crop. "We were bussed out to the fields and housed in freezing barracks," remembers Irina Glushenkova, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. "Pianists have to look after their hands; but we grubbed in the soil. The start of our proper studies was delayed until November."
Now students are exempt from the labour - but army conscripts are still exploited. The Moscow Times last week ran a series of shocking photographs showing young soldiers, hungry because of inadequate rations, eating raw cabbage as they worked in the fields. These are the men who are on the brink of mutiny, if the warnings of the Defence Ministry, seeking a bigger budget, are to be believed.
Former students may have bad memories of cabbage and soldiers would certainly prefer something more substantial. But the townspeople of Russia eagerly await the arrival of the vegetable. A minority of these consumers may be able to afford exotic foods such as paragus and kumquats, on sale in the new supermarkets. But cabbage remains the friend of the poor.
Last week, I watched it being unloaded from lorries in the town of Kolomna, just south of Moscow. Queues built up early in the morning because, at 1,000 roubles (20 US cents) per kilo, the cabbage was cheap.
Young men were buying it by the sackful. Why so much?
They explained that since the local machine building factory was idle, the unemployed were making ends meet by taking sacks of cabbage on the suburban railway up to the capital, where they could sell it for five times the price.
"We have to be very quick," said one cabbage merchant. "At Novaya Station (on the edge of Moscow) we have just one minute to unload the sacks before the train pulls out again."
Women in the queue were buying for their own families. Natalia Zaitseva had borrowed a neighbour's battered Lada car and so she was able to carry three sacks of cabbage. She took me home with her. What to my western nose was a school dinner smell filled the corridors of the apartment building, where other housewives were already busily boiling up cabbage.
Natalia soon joined them. For lunch she made a big pan of shi, the traditional cabbage soup, about which Russians talk with the same reverence as Americans speak of their mother's apple pie or the Irish their bacon and cabbage.
"Every Russian housewife has her own recipes for this," she said. "For a Russian, shi is almost sacred".
Before it rotted, the rest of the cabbage was destined to become Kvashenaya Kapusta, similar to sauerkraut and capable of being kept all winter.
"You should really have a wooden barrel, but I will use an enamel bucket," said Natalia. "You slice up the cabbage, add a little shredded carrot for colour and salt the mixture. The salt brings out the juices."
For strict religious believers, who must abstain not only from meat but also from milk products, alcohol and sex during the orthodox fasts, Kvashenaya Kapusta, is one of the few pleasures of life left to them. Natalia is not especially religious, although a little icon hangs in her kitchen. Like millions of other Russians, she is just poor.
"The cabbage will be an essential part of the family diet this winter," she said. "We can't afford fruit juice; but we'll still get our vitamin C.
A Socialist delegation of three members of the European Parliament, including the Irish MEP Ms Bernie Malone, yesterday conveyed a request from the Dalai Lama for talks with the Chinese government.
A Chinese Communist Party official, Mr Li Beihai, told the delegation the door was open all the time to dialogue with the Dalai Lama, if he genuinely gave up his "splittist" policies, said Ms Malone, who is accompanied by the Italian MEP, Mr Lmgi Colajanni, and the Spanish MEP, Mr Joan Colom i Naval.
Ms Malone chaired a European Parliament Committee in Strasbourg last week which was addressed by the Dalai Lama, who fled from Tibet in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule. She said "the Dalai Lama told us he would be interested in starting an unconditional dialogue with the Chinese Government He asked us to mediate." The delegation will visit Tibet later this week.
The EU ambassador to China, Mr Endymion Wilkinson, was called in by the Foreign Ministry last Friday and told of China's anger at the meeting between EU officials and the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama told a news conference in Strasbourg he was not seeking independence from China but constructive engagement. Yesterday in Budapest he said persuasion rather than pressure was the way to achieve Tibet's quest for autonomy from China.
China should deal with foreign affairs and defence, leaving Tibetans to manage all other fields.