The Vitali spark in search of a storm He has lived two lives, rejected the KGB, and travelled the world. Lorna Martin talks to The Herald's new writer at large

material for carrying out the occasional character assassination.

Vitaliev, a multi award-winning satirical and investigative journalist and novelist, who has written perceptive books and articles about his travels through Eastern Europe and America, joins The Herald on Monday as a writer at large, providing a fresh, funny, and unique look at nationalism, cultural identity, and what it takes to create a country.

The virtue of all of his writing, which has appeared in The (Australian) Age, Punch, Guardian, Spectator, and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, is that it comes from a mind well stored with knowledge. It is also searingly honest, humane, and quick to seize the unexpected but appropriate image of the truth.

Born in 1954 in the Ukraine, the only son of a nuclear physicist and his wife, a chemical engineer, he was told at the age of seven never to say what he thought if he wanted to survive. Reaching adolescence, he found the advice impossible to adhere to and, after graduating from Kharkov University and initially working as an interpreter and translator, he became a journalist with the Moscow-based Krokodil magazine and a thorn in the side of

the KGB.

After writing several investigative accounts about the connections between the Soviet mafia and the secret police of the former USSR, he was approached by the KGB to be recruited and, after many refusals, was subjected to months of harassment. He defected with his then wife and young son in January 1990, moving first to London, then taking up residence and citizenship in Australia. After a few years, he moved back to the UK before coming to Edinburgh a few months ago.

When we meet at the flat in Morningside that he shares with his third wife, Jacinta, an Australian Italian, and his three children, Andrei, five, Anya, who's almost three, and Alina, one, he talks somewhat solemnly about his life during the decade after his defection.

He describes himself as being like a tightly suppressed spring that was suddenly released. ''I couldn't stop travelling,'' he says. ''It became like an illness. For 35 years I had dreamed of being able to travel. But I sort of resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to leave the Soviet Union. I was an encaged dreamer who had spent so much time in the gigantic cage of the former Soviet Union. When the spring popped, it couldn't stop. I couldn't stay in one place and visited more than 60 countries in 10 years.''

He says the biggest mistake he made after spending 35 years in a totalitarian state was to treat his newfound freedom in the same manner as an Old Bolshevik would have treated communism - a flexible dream that could be adjusted to a gloomy, down-to-earth reality.

He understandably took for

granted what he describes as some western liberties, such as unrestricted travelling and buying books.

''I couldn't get enough of them and, unknowingly, I was suffering from freedom bulimia. During the first two years in Australia I subscribed to dozens of British and Australian newspapers and magazines which represented to me the coveted and repressed freedom of information. I also got hold of every credit card I could and went on shopping sprees buying ridiculous and unnecessary things.''

After three years in Australia and a life of consumerism and freedom, his marriage collapsed and he realised he was missing Europe. Not any European country in particular but just Europe, with its smells and sounds, its history and architecture, its wars, troubles, theatres, newspapers, and its never-ending excitement. He moved to London but was still running at an unsustainable speed and unsurprisingly, after a couple of years, he burned out and ended up broke, desperate,

and unhappy.

He believes he was predestined for some sort of fractured life, possibly because the day of his birth - in January 1954 - was stuck between two epochs - 37 years after the Bolshevik revolution and 37 years before the collapse of the

Soviet Union.

He says his second, western life was in many ways no easier than his first, though it is certainly proving to be much more eventful.

Today, as he prepares to visit the Shetland Islands, there are still signs of his insatiable need to be on the go. He moves around constantly, making endless cups of coffee, smoking rolled-up cigarettes, answering phone calls from his children at nursery. He is much thinner than the chubby correspondent who appeared on Saturday Night Clive - something he puts down to giving up his beloved vodka and taking up martial arts (he has a red belt in tae kwon-do).

He says he feels incredibly lucky to have lived two different lives on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and appreciates the unique outlook it gives him on the countries he visits.

He ended up in Scotland almost by accident when his wife was transferred in her job with the Royal Bank of Scotland but is already fascinated, sometimes bemused, and occasionally saddened by his brief experience so far of Scottish life.

''It is a fascinating country, going through an exciting process, and being an outsider sometimes you can see things better from the outside,'' he says.

He was disheartened when he read about Don Cruickshank, Scottish head of the London Stock Exchange, urging Scots to leave the country if they wanted to be successful. ''It struck me as being absolutely typically Australian,'' he says. ''In Australia, there is this feeling that you have to go to Britain if you want to make it. What rubbish. It comes from within. Of course, you're background and family, they play a part. But it's in the power of everyone to 'make it'.''

He says the main manifestation of the Scottish chip on the shoulder is what he describes as a sort of ''superficial megalomanic''. His first experience of it was from the taxi driver in Edinburgh. Another example, he recalls, which left him speechless, was when he read the headline in a Scottish tabloid following the death of David McRae from Angus after he contracted rabies. ''Scot is first Brit to contract rabies for 100 years,'' he says,

wearily. ''That was the headline. I think perhaps it helps to feed a national ego.'' He rather worryingly compares the Scotland of today with Gorbachev's glasnost of the late 1980s, of which he was a victim.

''We were told we were getting freedom of speech. But if it had been freedom of speech it would've been called that. Instead it was called glasnost. In a way, it was very clever, because it was a euphemism for lack of freedom of speech. Devolution reminds me a little of that. Devolution isn't independence. It isn't even semi-independence. It's a euphemism. You can either be free or you are a slave. I really believe that. I think the Scottish Executive is pretty impotent but pretends to be powerful. It can debate things like having too much junk food in your diet or the colour of the saltire. But that's not enough.''

On the question of Scottish nationalism, he says he thinks Scots want to be independent but ''when it comes to serious matters, there's this real uncertainty about yourself. People are not sure''.

However, he is convinced Scotland has what it takes to go it alone. ''If Liechtenstein can do it Scotland certainly can. I don't really see much point in devolution. It's like prolonging an agony of something that's dying. Making it more painful. Sometimes it hurts less just to cut the cord and get on with it.''

It was Robert Burns who said that it is a great gift to see ourselves as others see us. Unfortunately, most of us haven't been blessed with that talent. But luckily we have people like Vitaliev, who belongs to a rare group of people who can write with brilliance, humour, and style in a second language, to point out our foibles and idiosyncrasies and even enable us to laugh at ourselves in the process.

Vitali Vitaliev's first report appears in The Herald on Monday.