Back Out, the USSR - an Extract from 'Rock & Hard Places' by Andrew Mueller

That the Baltic nations are very different countries is obvious as soon as I get off the bus in Riga. In 1993, every transport terminus in the Baltics was dirty, chaotic, crowded, noisy, crime-ridden and staffed by indolent halfwits: the Soviet system boiled down to a waiting room and a timetable. In Estonia now, the bus and train stations approach positively Scandinavian standards of efficiency and order, and the taxis that take you away from them are, as I've learnt, driven by humblingly honest men. Latvia, in this regard, hasn't changed a bit.

Riga's bus station, now as then, is a filthy, mildewed bedlam, a seething den of pickpockets, beggars and drunks, from which the only escape is a rusty, backfiring, Russian-built jalopy piloted by a malodorous, chain-smoking ogre who charges me five quid for a ride round the corner. It's high time some civic-minded arsonist put Riga's bus station out of everyone's misery. It doesn't do the city any favours. Given the grand, stately beauty of Riga itself, it's like arriving in a palace through the laundry basket.

Riga's old city is magnificent like a battleship is magnificent. It's impressive without being in any way endearing. You could call Tallinn cute. You could not say the same of Riga, unless you're also of the opinion that there's something cuddly and adorable about, say, mahogany furniture, or Victorian royalty, or the 1994 Bulgarian World Cup squad. Riga's architecture is extraordinarily overbearing. The principal landmark is the Freedom Monument, or Brîvîbas Piemineklis, a tall concrete pillar flanked by expressionless statues and guarded by equally rigid sentries. The Monument, although it looks a definitive Stalinist grotesquery, was built during Latvia's brief independence in the 1930s - for decades, to lay flowers at its base was to book oneself a one-way ticket to Siberia.

The other buildings of Riga's old city are of the art-nouveau Teutonic wedding-cake variety - the experts call it Jugendstil. They form stern, forbidding pickets around a bunch of still more imposing churches. The vast brick Dom is the biggest place of worship in the Baltics and, at nearly 200 metres by 50 metres, one of the biggest in the world. Its organ has 7,000 pipes, all of which are mercifully silent while I'm there - at full throttle, it must be enough to deafen Motorhead.

The best thing about Riga is outside the old city - miles outside, amid the crumbling ghettoes of tower blocks to the north, which remind me inescapably of Croydon. The Latvian Motor Museum was always going to find favour with me because it is, after all, full of old cars and I am, after all, male, but its superb collection has been curated with an attitude that anyone should warm to. The star attractions are relics of Latvia's previous governors. These include black Zil limousines that belonged to Stalin and Khruschev, each accompanied by a wax model of their erstwhile owners, several Cadillacs from the extensive collection of dedicated anti-American revolutionary Leonid Brezhnev, and Erich Honecker's customised Mercedes-Benz jeep.

The unlamented East German dictator bought the vehicle to take him on his expeditions into the forests to shoot deer, which must have been a great way to unwind after another stressful week ordering the shooting of people. Lest his egalitarian credentials be compromised, Honecker specified that the car be stripped of all its Mercedes-Benz logos and any indication of its capitalist West German origins. A sign next to the car tartly recalls that "Honecker settled himself comfortably in the soft seat and hunted the wild animals, dazzled by the searchlights, for the last time in September 1989, shortly before the joining of both Germanies". Structurally dicey, but nicely put: all it lacks is a "So nyah nyah nyah".

Next to Honecker's khaki death machine is what remains of the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that Brezhnev steered out of an official parade and into an oncoming truck in Moscow in 1980 - the great man was apparently as dedicated a teetotaller as he was an anti-American revolutionary. Behind the wheel of the mangled Roller is a wax model of the startled First Secretary. At least as far as the sculptor was concerned, you wouldn't want to live on the difference between a frightened Leonid Brezhnev and Denis Healey in the throes of un-anaesthetised dental treatment. I buy a die-cast toy of Stalin's car. "Made In USSR," declares a sign on the box, which may explain why the doors won't close properly.

Waiting for a bus out of Riga, and deciding that anywhere is preferable to the bus station, I try the market opposite. It's housed in a complex of half a dozen World War I Zeppelin hangars, each one containing stalls selling a particular kind of produce - meat in one, fruit in another, bread in the next - and is a rigorous olfactory obstacle course. The fish and cheese pavilions, in particular, should by filed by the fainthearted alongside bungee-jumping and bear-baiting. Every till is manned - or, rather, womanned - by a plump, toothless, red-faced matron wearing a frilly lace hat over their woollen beanie and a frilly lace apron over their overalls. It can only be a matter of time before Peter Greenaway sets a film in here.