Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes

by Walton, Caroline

I come across The Wave, a pre-revolution coal ship, in dry dock in Solombala and on an impulse ask the skipper to take me on as ship’s boy. I’m not yet sixteen but I plead my love for hard work and the sea. In the end he agrees. A few days later we set sail down the Dvina, bound for Spitzbergen.

  “When will we see the sea?” I keep asking.

  “Your father will reach the gates of hell first, lad,” the sailors laugh, “don’t be in a hurry.”

  As we cross the Arctic Circle my shipmates baptise me in a tub of sea water. The cold takes my breath away but they revive me with tumblers of vodka.

  The Barents sea is always choppy. Water sprays onto the ship and freezes. From morning till night I break ice on the deck, spars and rigging. The worst task is cleaning up after coal has been loaded. The sailors like their ship to shine so I have to swill coal-dust off the decks and then wash it out of every nook and cranny with the point of a wet cloth. The incessant rain soaks my oilskins and weighs me down as I work.

  “If you don’t pull your weight, boy, you’ll be off at the next port,” the bosun growls. He turns to the other sailors: “Anyone who makes fun of this lad will get a punch in the face. Understood?”

  We sail to the Spitzbergen port of Barentsburg, where there is a Soviet mining concession. Convicts work the mines. Barentsburg is foreign territory and therefore off-limits to a son of an Enemy of the People. When the other sailors have gone ashore for the evening I stand on deck looking at the stars and the lights from the port. Only the distant bark of a dog or a drunken shout breaks the silence. It seems that somewhere below the horizon a fire is burning, shooting flares into the heavens. Bars of green light stripe the sky, bending into weird forms. I feel sorry for the prisoners: their camp floodlights will blot out these northern lights.

  Archangelsk is already cut off by the frozen White Sea so on our return voyage we unload our coal at Murmansk. The port is surrounded by logging camps. “Be vigilant,” warns the Wave’s political instructor before we disembark. “The camps are full of criminals and Enemies of the People.”

  “Convicts slip letters between the logs,” the bosun whispers to me. “Sometimes one of them cuts off a hand and nails it to a log. They hope that someone abroad will see it and make a fuss.”

  I’ve heard these camp stories before; they surprise me as little as night following day.

  Our next voyage is to Igarka in Siberia. We sail via Franz Josef Land, taking supplies to the meteorologists who work on Rudolf Island in the far north of the archipelago. The shore is surrounded by ice floes which crash against each other so violently we can’t land. We unload our cargo onto an ice sheet and the meteorologists come to fetch it on dog-sleds. They wave and shout greetings, happy to see their first visitors for months. I envy them. The Arctic seems exciting and romantic; people have only been living there for the short time I have been on this earth.

  At the mouth of the Yenisei we take a navigator on board to steer us around the river’s islands and shallows. We follow the river for hundreds of kilometres down to Igarka. Our political instructor again warns us to be vigilant as prisoners from the Norilsk camps work in the town. When I go ashore however, I find it hard to tell the difference between convicts and ordinary people. Some men come up and politely ask us to post letters for them so they can avoid the censor. We all agree. Later I drop four letters into a box in Archangelsk.

  We sail back up the foggy Yenisei, through the Kara sea, and past the tip of Novaya Zemlya to Nar’ian Mar, where we have to deliver a Victory car to the local Party chief. The car drives us all mad. It gets in my way when I sweep the deck and its tarpaulin cover keeps wrenching loose and flapping like a dirty flag. When I try to fasten it down it resists me as though it were alive. Everyone is happy to see the last of the vehicle at Nar’ian Mar. It’s a mystery where the Party boss will drive, for there are no roads in the region.

  The Wave leaves me behind at Archangelsk. It’s bound for the British Isles so they can’t take me. The night it sails I go to a bar and get as drunk as a piglet’s squeal. I wake up feeling sick but I have to get up and look for another post before the sea freezes over. As I drag myself out in the morning I see a sign in the hostel foyer: Radio-operator training college in Riga seeks applicants. Fare paid. I write and they accept me.

  ***

  The boys travelling with me to Riga come from villages deep in the countryside. They’ve never seen a train before and are nervous of the iron horse. I laugh at the quaint way they speak: “Yesterday we were to a bar going, vodka drinking, with a soldier fighting.”

  The Riga train amazes us with its clean toilets and polite conductresses. There aren’t even any cigarette butts on the floor. But beyond the window, war has left its traces in a desolate landscape of ruined buildings. We pass countless wrecks of German tanks. The people, in their grey padded jackets, look like the convicts of Igarka.

  We can’t afford restaurant car meals so we buy baked potatoes and cucumbers from old ladies on station platforms. Some potatoes are still raw in the centre. The country boys are shocked. It would never enter their heads to cheat in this way. People from the north are more honest than us, perhaps because they never had serfdom. In Central Russia people are still afflicted with the slave mentality and will try anything on if think they can get away with it, even when there’s no point.

  The outskirts of Riga are scarred with bombed factories; its centre is pitted with burned-out wooden buildings. We are surprised to find our college undamaged by war. It’s a six-storey former hotel with Anno 1905 embossed on its facade.

  I quickly settle into the institute and soon enjoy the liking and respect of my fellows. The college is a friendly place. When a master punishes a boy by withholding his dinner the rest of us tip our dishes of porridge over the tables. Then we pick up our bread and walk out of the dining room. Perhaps not everyone wants to go along with this protest but they keep quiet in the face of our collective decision.

  My best friend is a boy called Victor Rudenko. He comes from Kotlas, where his parents have been exiled as kulaks.5 Victor has picked up criminal jargon and likes to show off by calling out to the other boys: “You over there with rickets!” or “You ugly bastard!”

  Rudenko’s bravado backfires, and he becomes known as ‘Rickets.’

  There are one or two petty dictators amongst the second year boys. Those of us who don’t have the sense to keep out of their sight are constantly sent out for cigarettes or to take messages to girls at the bookbinders’ college. I notice that some lads – most of them insecure boys from collective farms – actually enjoy this treatment. “For them life without servitude would be like life without cake,” says Rickets.

  Rickets and I make friends with a Rigan, Valerka Polenov. Valerka is small and his shoulders are raised as though shrugging in bewilderment. He dresses carelessly with his cap pulled down over one ear. His hero is Lord Byron. Half the time Valerka is in a different world. He’s not even aware that people respect him. I never found out how he ended up in our college; he probably only comes because it’s next door to his house.

  Valerka’s father is an administrator at the circus. In his spare time he makes records from x-ray films, engraving them with the songs of Vertinsky and Vadim Kozin. If you hold a disc up to the light you see a broken bone or vertebra. I drop in on Valerka’s father to borrow some of these records. To reach the offices I have to walk through the circus dwarves’ quarters. Seeing them close-up, I can’t understand why we laugh at them. Without make-up, in the middle of their family quarrels, swearing, drinking and fighting, the dwarves are just like the people in our barracks at home. They are no different to anyone else; you might as well look in the mirror and laugh.

  I like college, but the place where I really feel I belong – for the first time in my life – is the town’s yacht club. When I see a notice in the papers appealing for new members I take a tram out to Lake Kish and present myself. They put me to work scraping paint and collecting rubbish. I throw myself
into my tasks, hoping that my dedication to the job will prove my love for the sea. Everyone is busy preparing for the summer, cleaning and painting their yachts, which look like fragile, pretty toys. The friendship of the club is different to that of the institute; you don’t have to use your fists to win respect.

  When he finds out about my visits to the yacht club our college director phones to tell them I am skipping lessons. He must know I’m jumping the tram to get there and so he wants to stop me going. The club tells me they’re sorry to lose me and that I should come back in a year’s time.

  I am furious, but there is nothing I can do without being expelled from the institute. After that I fill up my spare time by drinking with Rickets. The institute’s political instructor warns us that the town is full of bourgeois elements and the older boys say that the Latvian Forest Brotherhood has been known to catch lone Russians and strangle them. Despite these warnings, Rickets and I take every opportunity to slope off together through the dark streets. A stroke of luck secures us an evening job unloading potatoes from railway wagons, so we have cash to spend. We usually go to the Reindeer Antlers, a back-street joint popular with soldiers and sailors. Walking down the steps and throwing open the door of the little basement bar is like crossing into another world, one of warmth and comradeship.

  I mix my cocktail of vodka, beer, salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar. “Down the hatch!” I empty the glass in one. I learned to do this back in Chapaevsk by watching my friends’ parents. I practised with water until I mastered the technique.

  Regular fights break out in the Reindeer Antlers, but are usually stopped before serious injury occurs. Not to be outdone, Rickets and I fight each other at least once a month. It’s a ritual between us and means nothing. Other customers try to pull us apart but the harder they try the more tightly we grapple with each other. Finally we stagger back up the basement steps and roll home with our arms about each other, roaring pirate songs into the damp night air.

  The rich kids of Riga call themselves stilyagi. They listen to jazz and dance the boogie-woogie. They wear tight trousers and jackets with shoulder-pads as wide as the Pacific Ocean. I like western music too but these stilyagi are spoilt brats. You have to have a father in Party headquarters or a mother in a department store to dress as they do. The Komsomol paper denounces the stilyagi as ‘spittle on the mirror of our socialist reality’; we just beat them up whenever we get the chance. They’re pampered kids and useless at fighting.

  In summer we are sent out from the college to work on the Beria collective farm. I’ve never seen such dereliction and misery. The mud is even worse than at home. There’s no mechanical farm equipment; only worn-out horses. Our overseer spends his days drinking with the farm chairman. We sleep on straw in a shed and share the farmers’ meals of potatoes and rye bread which is half raw and full of chaff. We skive off to help old people and single women with their private plots in return for food and home-brew. Samogon is the only consolation of farm life. Everyone distils it so no one denounces their neighbour. Besides, the local policeman is a villager too.

  I can’t understand why people live on this hopeless farm, why they don’t run off wherever the wind blows. I am so relieved when our forced labour ends and we return to college that I don’t even miss the constant supply of alcohol.

  ***

  Did you cry when Stalin died? Does the world seem different now? writes Olga, one of my former classmates in Chapaevsk, in a letter to me that March. Stalin’s death in 1953 produces an odd feeling in us all. For some reason everyone starts to speak in whispers, as though his corpse were lying in the next room. I take my place in the guard of honour by his portrait. We assemble in the sports hall to listen to the funeral broadcast. Some boys cry. I feel sad too and strangely insecure. Then Rickets starts a game of push and shove in the back row and I cheer up.

  We are being prepared for work in remote Siberian stations where there won’t be any phone connections. We’ll have to know how to repair our equipment when it breaks down. The more they tell us about the difficulties that lie ahead the prouder we feel of our profession. We look down on boys from other colleges; aren’t there already millions of fitters and lathe operators in this world?

  For once in my life, everything seems to be going well. It’s my final spring at the college. Then, unannounced, they decide to hold a room search and find a banned book among my things. The book is nothing special, just a dry work on atavistic memory lent to me by Valerka’s mother who is a librarian at the Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, I am summoned to the director’s office.

  “Where did you get this book?” the director bangs his fist on the desk. “Who gave it to you? I demand you tell me! Do you want to be expelled?”

  My head spins. I don’t know what to do. I am honour-bound to return the book to Valerka. On an impulse I snatch it from the director’s hand and run out of the room. I give Valerka back his book. It would look bad for the college if I was expelled for reading banned literature so I escape with a reprimand.

  The following Saturday I’m chatting to some girls from the bookbinder’s college when our new teaching assistant comes up. “Got any more subversive literature?” he asks me. Turning to the girls he says: “Our Ivan here really caused a scandal last week.”

  “It’s none of your business!” I shout.

  He laughs.

  “Okay you bastard,” I swing a punch at him. I’ve already had a few beers and don’t stop to consider that the assistant is twice my size. He knocks me to the ground as easily as if I had been a flea.

  “Take him away, lads,” he says to some of my classmates who have gathered to watch the fight. They pick me up and carry me off to my room. I remember that Rickets and I have hidden a bottle of vodka in his locker. I start the bottle by myself. The more I drink the worse I feel. Rickets still doesn’t return, and before I know it I’ve finished the bottle. Some boys appear at the door and begin to tease me. I fling the empty bottle at them, then climb onto the window-ledge and jump.

  The ground slams into me. I can’t breathe. I lie with my face in the cobblestones. I’ll keep still for a couple of minutes. It will give the others a fright. The smell of vomit fills my nostrils. I twist my neck to see one of my classmates throwing up in the gutter. I wonder why he’s doing that. Perhaps he can’t hold his drink.

  “Don’t move, Vanya, we’ve called an ambulance,” says another boy in a shaky voice.

  As they heave me onto a stretcher I catch sight of the teaching assistant. His face is pale.

  “Excuse me for causing all this trouble,” I grind out the words with heavy sarcasm.

  The ambulance drive to the hospital seems endless. Thirst sears my mouth all night. I scream and curse until I pass out on the x-ray table.

  I come to in agony and confusion. Both my legs and my right arm are covered in plaster. I have a vague impression that my mother has been near me.

  “Well, young man,” says the doctor, “you have eighteen fractures and your right kidney is damaged. It seems you broke your fall on some telegraph wires and that saved your life. Your mother was here. She stayed until we knew you were out of danger.”

  I don’t want to live. Four shots of morphine a day barely help. I pleaded with a God I don’t believe in to grant me a break from the relentless pain for even five minutes. I can’t face the endless hours ahead, knowing there’ll be no respite until nightfall when the nurse brings my sleeping tablets. With a great effort of will I manage to save some of these tablets and store them until I have 14. Then I swallow them all at once. They resuscitate me and pump my stomach. After that a nurse watches as I take my medicine.

  I stop eating. They rouse my appetite with wine bought with money the college has sent in for my food. When the money runs out they give me diluted surgical spirit.

  My arm and left leg begin to heal and they remove the cast but the pain in my right leg intensifies until it pulsates in violent waves through my whole body. I plead with the doctors to take
the plaster off. They ignore me: “It’s just the cast squeezing.”

  When they finally remove it they discover that pus has eaten away the cartilage around my knee.

  My doctor, Professor Jaegermann, won’t listen to my pleas to amputate my leg. He keeps draining the knee. It has swollen to the size of a football, while I can circle my upper thigh with my fingers.

  I like morphine. It seems to wrap my pain in cotton wool and hold it at a distance, at least for a while. I ask for shots both before and after my dressings are changed but after a while they say I’m taking too much and refuse to give me any more. My pleas fall on deaf ears. An old French ward sister tells me that some of my shots were nothing more than saline solution. I send them all to hell and sulk, but I realise that if I’ve managed without morphine before I can do so in future.

  I begin to mix with the other patients and my spirits lift. “Let’s see the champion of jumping without a parachute,” the TB sufferers say as they cluster round my bed to breathe in the smoke from my cigarettes. The men crack jokes and share cakes and vodka that their wives have sent in.

  I sit up and do exercises. Professor Jaegermann tells me I’ll never be able to bend my leg again but I will eventually be able to walk without crutches.

  A few months later I get an order to go out to work in Primorskii Krai. That’s beyond Vladivostock I am relieved. I want to bury myself in the taiga far away from human eyes. My friends have already left for their Siberian posts. Valerka went to Yakutia. I hear that Rickets fell under a tram in Omsk. His injuries were worse then mine and he was sent back to his parents. That is the last I hear of him.

  ***

  The Moscow-Vladivostock express is packed with labour recruits6 desperate to make their pile of gold in the East. Some have spent years in prison camps; others are escaping collective farms. Old hands brag about the fortunes they’ve made in logging or mining and the adventures they had drinking up their pay.