Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Despite the widespread public drunkenness, it was all but impossible to buy vodka in Moscow shops when I first visited in 1991, more than three years after Gorbachev’s antialcoholism campaign had ended. The scarcity reflected the economy’s mortally crippled condition. Except for the little Beriozki stores that sold selected products to foreigners and privileged Soviets for foreign currency, which was illegal for most to possess, many shelves remained almost completely empty of everything that summer. (Outdoor markets, called rynki, were different. Part of a loosely regulated gray market run with the help of criminal groups, they sold fresh produce for higher prices.) The few shops that did stock at least some products were so foul-smelling from (I presumed) mold and rot that I barely managed the arduous task of actually buying something when I tried. It required jostling through weary crowds crammed around display cases to glimpse what happened to be on sale. Next you determined how much you wanted and multiplied the number or weight by the price shown. God forbid you would have to ask an invariably dour salesperson, who would shake her head before reluctantly scribbling the figure on a scrap of paper. Then you stood in line elsewhere in the store for a cashier using an ancient register to ring up a receipt that you would bring back to the original display. After more pushing and more waiting, a salesperson would eventually reluctantly cut the very inferior cheese or sausage you’d chosen.

  Gorbachev’s relaxation of the administrative coercion that had kept the Soviet economic system running, however wastefully, for seven decades was based on hope that freedom from the quotas and orders imposed by the state planning agency Gosplan—which left not even the production of toothpicks up to supply and demand—would encourage factory managers and other lower-ranking officials who oversaw production lines to run their own industries more efficiently. After all, the logic went, they knew what needed to be done better than their superiors. But reducing central control actually helped bring the system down. The government set artificially low prices; when available, products were very cheap. The result was that enterprises had little incentive to produce goods and stores had little more to sell them. However, there was huge incentive to steal—that is, to steal from the state.

  Much of Muscovites’ time went into trying to guess where to get what they wanted or needed. For vodka, it was often restaurants because they still received supplies. I did best at the Rossiya Hotel, a huge, ghastly 1970s cube neighboring the Kremlin. Approaching the kitchen’s back entrance, which faced the Moscow River and where one or more waiters were invariably loitering, dragging on cigarettes, you’d ask how much they would be willing to sell, then haggle over the price. A bottle cost roughly the equivalent of a dollar in rubles, several times more expensive than the official price. Pshenichnaia, or wheat vodka, was among the smoothest to be had, and you could often get several bottles. If a restaurant failed, you’d try another or a store’s back entrance.

  Foreigners had the option of frequenting one of a handful of seedy hard-currency bars, most of which were in hotels from which ordinary Soviets were barred. Burly KGB bouncers stood at the doors, stopping any locals bold enough to attempt to enter. Russians told me they could differentiate by looking at people’s eyes: those of foreigners weren’t dulled by weariness and resignation. Among the most popular haunts was the smoky bar in the basement of the 1970s Intourist Hotel near the Kremlin, now the site of the Ritz-Carlton. There, Western would-be entrepreneurs seeking business deals mingled with shady criminal types, prostitutes and foreign students. It wasn’t a place where you’d want to spend much time, but you could buy as many big cans of Löwenbräu beer as you wanted if you could pay for them in dollars. And some foreign embassies gave weekly parties. One of the most popular was held at the German embassy, where most foreign passports got you in and beers cost two dollars.

  Arriving in Moscow had transformed me from an impoverished college student into royalty. In addition to the relative wealth my few dollars conferred on me, stories of my life in the land of freedom and plenty made me interesting to Russians no matter how boring I actually was. Utterly cynical about their government and society and no longer afraid of punishment by the authorities, the young people I met were keen to snap up any bit of knowledge I could offer about the West. The collapse of the Soviet system’s mores and strictures, which took place far more quickly than most people realized at the time, gave them a great sense of personal liberty. Free time was spent foraging for food and drink to serve at parties, which were usually held in the apartments of parents summering at their dachas. Their crumbling world made life a great adventure.

  Outside Moscow, alcohol was even harder to come by. Visiting nearby Zagorsk, the site of one of Russia’s four most important monasteries, I spent a day exploring the beautiful town before spotting a state restaurant that was miraculously open. I was with my friend Kolya—the young television correspondent with whom I’d soon travel to Vilnius—who persuaded a dark-haired waitress to seat us, which she did grudgingly, although we were the only patrons. Then she disappeared, leaving us to pore over a menu filled with a long list of the usual dishes: beef entrecôte, pilmeni (dumplings), bliny, borsch. Having made our choices, we waited ravenously for the waitress—in vain. After some time, it emerged that she and the rest of the staff were busy carting crates of beer from the kitchen to a van outside. Finally persuaded to approach our table, she patiently listened to our orders before sternly informing us that all the menu’s dishes were unavailable. What about starters? we asked hopefully. Those too. Okay, what about two beers? Now irritation blazed from her eyes. There was no beer.

  Pointing to a waiter who was wheeling another load of crates out the door, Kolya adopted his sweetest tone, free of his usual irony in such cases. “Darling, can’t we just have a couple of bottles? We’ve traveled here all the way from Moscow; surely you wouldn’t want us to leave with a bad impression of your town.” His charm produced a compromise: two bowls of thin borsch grudgingly brought to our table.

  The following year, 1992, when price controls were lifted and inflation skyrocketed, a dollar went from being worth twenty-seven rubles to two hundred, and the value would continue rising into the thousands. But now you could buy bottles of Pshenichnaia vodka from any number of Muscovites, many of them elderly, who desperately crowded around the entrances to train stations, metro stations and pedestrian underpasses by the hundreds, hawking food, drink, used clothes, toothbrushes, anything they could sell to make a few kopeks.

  If alcoholism was a Soviet nightmare, it approaches the level of Armageddon today. Like computer-chip capacities, Russians’ alcohol intake has almost doubled every decade since the 1970s. After years of talk about imposing a new state monopoly on spirits (which private manufacturers would be obliged to use for producing their liquor), the government announced plans in 2010 to quadruple the tax on vodka over the following three years, a hike that would double the minimum vodka price to about six dollars per half liter, roughly a pint. This time the aim appears to be less to fill the treasury’s coffers—for which oil and gas are now far more important—than to finally do something about the drinking that’s helping drive the average male life expectancy down to a level lower than North Korea’s at at time when recent tax increases on cigarettes have helped push the number of smokers to historic lows in the United States.

  However, few believe the authorities can withstand the centuries-old temptation to earn as much as possible from the new vodka taxes. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, long considered the government’s leading liberal, recently encouraged his fellow countrymen to smoke and drink more, saying they were the best things they could do to help the economy emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis. “Those who drink,” he said, “are giving more to help solve social problems [by] boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates.”

  There may well be another major explanation for the government’s failure to take effective measures to stop the rampage of alcohol: its unwillingness to face
the crippling problem with anything like serious resolve or action. Or the authorities may believe, as Catherine the Great is said to have remarked, that it’s easier to rule a drunken public.

  In any case, higher prices prompted by the new taxes—along with restrictions on nighttime sales and advertising—are already driving more Russians to follow the old pattern of drinking dangerous and unregulated samogon and other poisonous liquor surrogates. Historian Alexander Nikishin is among those who maintain that establishing a monopoly is the only real way to fight the country’s crippling alcoholism. But Nikishin also believes the lack of “enough honest people in government” would make it impossible to exert real control over alcohol production and consumption. “The more control there is in our country,” he says, “the more corruption there is. Vodka can be your friend or enemy, depending on the authorities’ attitudes. You can make a killing from it and lose your people.”

  But the government would have to do far more than simply control alcohol production and sales to seriously change the role drinking plays in Russia. Leaving aside the cold weather, that old justification for drinking to excess, alcohol abuse has partly been an “easy” escape from the individual’s pawn-like role in society. More than just the physical difficulties of climate and geography, it’s the state’s crushing oppression, the corruption, the virtual lack of hope for change that are still contributing to Russia’s traditional fatalism and resignation. The drinking done by the scientists I met in Novoi Urengoi surprised me at the time, but it was nothing unusual.

  The morning I left, Victor, who’d drunk to the point of collapse, was in one of his rare sober moments. He apologized profusely. “Don’t think badly of me,” he appealed. My assurance that I wouldn’t was genuine: I sympathized with him as a victim of his circumstances. Some of the drunks I met in Russia, including several of my friends, were sensitive, intelligent people who’d lost control of their lives or never really had it.

  As I was leaving for the airport, Victor repeated his invitation for me to visit his home in Khanty-Mansiisk. “We’ll drink vodka together!” he promised as enticement.

  Internat No. 8.

  A Nashi camp counselor passes propaganda images depicting opposition leaders Mikhail Kasyanov (left) and Garry Kasparov as prostitutes.

  5

  Intimates

  Visiting friends is good, but home is better.

  —Russian saying

  The crushing uniformity of Moscow’s dingy Soviet-era residential districts seems to lessen after sunset. The glow from countless windows, although generated mostly by ceiling lamps that cast an unflattering light inside the blocks of cramped apartments, can convey an almost cozy feeling. However illusory, they signify the haven of private life away from the gritty trials of the daily grind, especially because many of the apartments seemed lavish when they were first assigned to families that had been previously crammed into single rooms of dreaded communal apartments. Each abode became a testament to its occupants’ resourcefulness. Every decoration—garish wallpaper, cheap lamps and gaudy velour furniture—represented a victory.

  Of course there’s far more variation today. Many of the apartments boast the latest foreign appliances to go with their Evroremont makeovers, as European-style refurbishments are commonly called (Evro for Europe and remont meaning “repair”). The new luxury heightens the sense of refuge, especially in winter, when streets layered with snow and ice are often barely passable, not to mention filthy. The patina of domestic tranquillity also belies the unimaginable suffering of recent memory.

  Very many Russians have a dramatic, often appalling story of survival. Despite a current vogue for Stalin, the lawlessness of Moscow’s streets is reminder enough of the violent, vindictive forces of human nature that continue to corrode society. Ubiquitous shopping malls and sushi chains give a gloss of Western-style normalcy to many districts, but step outside those oases of cathartic consumerism and there’s no mistaking why Russians tend to believe that the individual is frail and security feeble. All the more reason the family was and remains a warm sanctuary that serves to widen the great cleavage Russians feel between themselves and the hostile outer world, despite many men’s wretched treatment of their women at home.

  Relatives of mine inhabit a little Soviet-era flat in a particularly smoggy Moscow district named Chertanovskaya. It belongs to my mother’s second cousin Gera Kiva, whom I’ve mentioned, a mild-mannered, silver-haired man who lives with his wife, a gentle woman named Lucia, and his very elderly mother, Olga Sergeevna (my great-grandmother Polina’s niece, whom everyone calls by her name and patronymic as a mark of respect). Now in her late eighties, Olga Sergeevna is canny, hardy and very frank. When she talks about her past, it’s without rancor or regret. Her mentions of difficulties that would be intolerable to most Americans are no doubt offhand because they’re nothing out of the ordinary for many Russians.

  As I’ve noted, Olga Sergeevna’s grandfather was a grain merchant in Kazan. Drafted in 1932, her husband was sent to southwestern Siberia as a food buyer for the Red Army and settled in the industrial city of Novosibirsk. Those years were among the worst of the Soviet famines, which were caused mainly by the collectivization of agriculture, and they were especially brutal in Kazan and other Volga River cities hit hard by Stalin’s ruthless tactics and punishments. Since living was cheaper in Novosibirsk, where the chances of survival were also significantly greater, Olga Sergeevna soon joined her husband there.

  In the late 1930s, they moved to Moscow, at first staying in the two-room apartment of my grandmother Serafima and her husband, Zhora, their lone family connection in Moscow. After World War II, when Serafima returned to Moscow with her new daughter, they, in turn, stayed in the Kivas’ single room. Serafima and my mother may not have survived those years without such family ties, usually the most critical lifeline in a state that supposedly provided everything for everyone.

  Of course, having the wrong connections could get you killed under Stalin, whose regime disrupted communication even between family members crammed together in single rooms. “No one ever discussed where you came from,” Gera, a young boy at the time, recently remembered. One of his grandfathers had been a priest and other relatives were merchants. Worst of all, in the eyes of the authorities, part of the family had descended from gentry. “I knew almost nothing about any of that,” he told me. “God forbid anyone had found out.”

  Travel abroad, work for international organizations and many other aspects of globalization have lessened the Bolsheviks’ terrible legacy. Still, in some ways, family remains more important in Russia than it does elsewhere, even today. Although the Kiva family is not as tightly knit as it once was, Gera and Lucia’s two grown sons spend much of the summer together at another Russian institution, the dacha, where Gera and Lucia help care for four grandchildren. Family ties remain central for them and most others in a country where institutions function poorly, the rule of law is weak and merit counts for far less in getting ahead than in other industrialized countries—all of which means it’s often unwise to trust strangers. As in the past, practical considerations are more likely to dictate Russian behavior than differences in emotional makeup or beliefs.

  It goes without saying that the Stalinist era wasn’t the first time Russians or their ancestors faced an unrelenting threat to their existence. A need to overcome tremendous odds against survival has helped shape the Russian character since the first millennium CE, when the East Slavs, who gave rise to today’s Russians, first migrated from Central Europe into the inhospitable northern forests around Moscow. The soil is poor in that region, swamps are numerous and winters bitterly cold. It is rarely mentioned that after settling in those forests, it took the Slavs many centuries to move south into the famed fertile Black Earth region. Crucially, that expansion came only after the foundation of their culture had been laid.

  Scratching out a living from subsistence agriculture for many centuries provided the “womb” of Russian culture, shaping a
lmost all aspects of life, as the Harvard historian Edward Keenan observed.1The Slavs—who quickly subsumed the indigenous, largely hunter-gatherer Balts and Finns—relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, chopping down trees, burning them and using the ash for fertilizer. That inefficient, wasteful method, which nourished crops for no more than a few years, required regular migration to new parts of the forest. One theory has it that slash-and-burn left an indelible mark on a people who have swallowed more territory than any other in the world.

  No one family, let alone a single individual, could have survived very long under the brutal conditions in which the Slavs found themselves, according to Keenan, whose patient, rigorous dismissal of conventional wisdom about Russian history was a revelation for me and the many others who attended his lectures. A flooded field or the death of a cow could easily mean the difference between destruction and survival, he explained. Viable life required a larger basic social unit: the village, where relatively successful peasants could be forced to assume more responsibilities—such as taking care of a widow—while the less successful were saved from falling into complete ruin.

  The central role of the communal village has made Russians hold “less confidence in human nature and its individual articulations than we do,” Keenan has written about the effects of a millennium of subsistence farming. “They have learned that the individual is vulnerable and fragile.”2 Generally more pessimistic than their Western counterparts, Russians tend to be especially skeptical about “taking gambles on humans’ moral virtue.”3 They’re happier when group sanctions curb individuals’ “harmful impulses.”