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

by Walton, Caroline

  My three-year posting comes to an end, much to my relief. I leave for Vladivostock, saying say goodbye to my acquaintances in Akza – those that are left. Yablonsky has been rehabilitated and returned to Leningrad. I never manage to apologise to Kryuchkov. With the first signs of spring he died, as TB sufferers often do.

  I reach Samarga and collect 120,000 roubles in pay. This is a fabulous sum. Back home it would take a factory worker several years to earn that amount. I stay in Samarga for two weeks waiting for the sea-route to open. The shop has run out of vodka but there’s a good supply of champagne. When he goes home for dinner the shopkeeper locks the medical assistant Ivan Ivanich and me in the shop and we continue to work through the bottles. In the evening we count the empties and I pay. There’s no other way to pass the time. The local women don’t appeal to me: after years of fish-gutting their buttocks sag so low they have to lift them up with their hands when they want to sit down.

  In the morning before the shop opens I chat to the shopkeeper’s paralysed son. He listens open-mouthed to my tales of Riga and Moscow.

  “But why do they build the houses so tall?” he keeps repeating. “Why do people want to live on top of each other?”

  My hair hasn’t been cut for three years and local kids follow me around, jeering as though I’m some sort of hermaphrodite. My first stop in Vladivostock is a barber’s. After I’ve cleaned up I go to a restaurant and soon I’m sending bottles to every table. I’m overjoyed to be back in civilisation again and spend a riotous month celebrating the event. At least I have the foresight to buy my ticket home before I blow all my wages. I arrive back in Chapaevsk with a blinding hangover and 68 roubles in my pocket.

  5 Kulaks were wealthy peasants who were shot or exiled to Siberia during the collectivisation period of the early 1930s.

  6 Labour recruits were offered bonuses to work in Siberia for a minimum of one year.

  7 The Udege are a Siberian people who live on the eastern seaboard of the Primorye region. In the 2002 census they numbered I,657. They were nomadic hunters until forcibly settled in the 1930s.

  8 Dalstroi was the collective name of the northern Siberian camps.

  9 This purge began after the murder of Kirov in 1934.

  3

  Decembrists

  The 1960s

  “Goosie, goosie, goosie!”

  “Hee, hee, hee!”

  “Ten by three?”

  “Me, me, me!”

  My workmates and I emerge from the shower-room in troikas.10 One man in each group runs off for a bottle while the other two go to order some snacks.

  In the canteen we’re held up by a woman from the shop floor who is already drunk and arguing with the server: “I asked for soup – what are these slops?”

  “Push off, Zhenya, we want to get finished tonight,” says the serving woman.

  “What do you know about work? We’re up to our knees in DDT all day.”

  “If you don’t like the job go somewhere else.”

  “Someone has to do it.”

  “Get a move on ladies,” shouts my drinking-partner, Lyokha-Tuba.

  Zhenya rounds on him: “And what do you men know about hard work? You technicians sit around on your arses all day while we’re getting ourselves in a sweat.”

  “With Igor Fyodorovich in your case,” remarks the serving woman.

  Everyone starts screaming, so Lyokha and I give up on bread and pickles and sit down to wait for our mate. He comes running in with the bottle, takes his seat and pours out three glassfuls. I raise mine: “To women.”

  “The trouble with this place,” Lyokha remarks, “is that however long you spend in the shower you still come out smelling of DDT.”

  “Yeah, it makes me feel as though I’m crawling with lice,”11 I say. “Never mind. We’re the envy of the town for breathing in this crap all day long.”

  “But what’s the use of getting higher pensions if we don’t live long enough to enjoy them?”

  “It could be worse. How many of those poor sods who made mustard gas before this place was converted are still alive?”12

  “My mother does okay,” I observe. “For a dose of Lewisite she trots off to a sanatorium in the Crimea each year.”

  “Funny how Party lungs are more sensitive than anyone else’s,” says Lyokha.

  Lyokha’s face and hands are coloured bright tomato-red, making him appear an even heavier drinker than he actually is. A couple of weeks ago a woman worker sprinkled potassium manganese on his head while he slept. When he stood in the shower after work the powder dyed him a deep red. It’s taking a long time to wash out and everyone laughs at him, especially the women.

  That woman was getting her revenge on Lyokha for a trick he played on her. Night-shift workers like to take forty winks behind their gas masks. Last month Lyokha crept up as the woman slept and painted black ink over the goggles of her mask. Then he shook her awake, shouting: “Fire!” She awoke in terror and blindly leaped into the water tank. Unfortunately it was empty and she broke her arm. She couldn’t complain because she shouldn’t have been sleeping and besides, no one grasses on their fellow workers.

  After we’ve drunk the bottle I put on my beret, sling my gas-mask container over my shoulder and say goodbye to my friends. I have a date with my former classmate and pen friend Olga Vorobyova.

  Now that I’m back in Chapaevsk, Olga and I are talking of getting married. The problem is finding somewhere to live. The waiting list for a flat is twenty years. In the meantime I cannot live with my parents and I will not live with hers.

  Olga works as a gynaecologist in a local clinic. That night she takes me out on her ambulance rounds, disguising me in a white coat. I’m interested to see the inside of other people’s flats, although they all look alike. At midnight I strike lucky, for while Olga is attending an emergency I manage to pinch some morphine from her supply and inject myself. I haven’t lost my taste for the drug.

  ***

  The first months of our marriage are happy ones. We move into a flat of our own in Stavropol-on-the-Volga where communism has almost been built.13 The Kuibyshev hydroelectric power project has flooded old Stavropol and convict labour is building a new town on the banks of the reservoir. I go over and find a job in a synthetic rubber factory. After three months the plant allocates us a flat and Olga comes to join me.

  We live like everyone else, going with the flow like shit down the Yenisei. Our one-room flat has a toilet and running water. Olga’s parents give us a table and a bed. After a year my factory presents us with a place on the waiting list for a washing machine.

  My wife persuades me to take a course at a branch of Kuibyshev polytechnic in Stavropol. If I graduate I’ll be able to leave the shop-floor and work in the plant’s technical department. I prepare well for the entrance exams, going through a text-book of maths problems set by Moscow university. The evening before my exam we’re invited to a neighbours’ wedding and I drink more than I planned. My hands shake as I write the exam but I pass with a ‘4.’ Afterwards I have a few pick-me-ups, quarrel with Olga, and meet some friends who take me to stay with them in their hostel until the row blows over. It would have been churlish to abuse my friends’ hospitality by refusing a drink. I turn up for my next exam but can’t hide the fact that I am drunk. I say straight out to the examiners: “Yes, I’m drunk, but I came here to sit my exams instead of having a hair-of-the-dog. Ask away, and if I get the answers wrong, fail me.”

  The strangest thing of all is that I pass. However, I fail the essays. By the time I sit these I’m quite incapable of writing.

  Of course I drink a bit, especially on payday which my workmates and I celebrate wherever we can. We usually go to the barracks where there are several single women who are glad of some company. As the night wears on one or two of the lads might wander off home but few can bear to leave their battle stations. Although none of us is exactly an enthusiast for front-rank Soviet labour, our conversation centres around work - there is l
ittle else to talk about.

  Sometimes a wife turns up at the door, shouting and spoiling our party. Olga never humiliates herself this way, but she occasionally sends one of my more restrained friends to fetch me home.

  Lyokha follows me to Stavropol. He finds a job at my plant, and he and his wife move into a flat in our block. One Sunday I come home to find a crowd gathered in our courtyard. I push my way through. Lyokha is standing on his balcony, wearing only his vest and long-johns. A horse stands beside him. I recognise it as the sad old mare who pulls the beetroot-cart to the grocery store below. Wild-eyed and dishevelled, Lyokha is yelling to his wife: “Masha, Masha, come here sweetie! I want to introduce you to this fine stallion. Perhaps he can satisfy you, my dear? You might refuse me but not him, surely?”

  Lyokha’s wife emerges from the building and takes off down the road like a startled hare. The crowd swell, shouting their encouragement as Lyokha delivers a drunken speech on his wife’s coldness. The police arrive. The horse refuses to budge so the fire brigade have to be called to winch it down.

  Lyokha is sent to prison camp and his wife moves in with a local policeman.

  ***

  It takes a lot of vodka to make me drunk, so no one notices at work if I’m slightly the worse for wear. I start the day with a hair-of-the-dog, have a top-up at lunchtime and begin to drink in earnest in the evening. Vodka is my reward for a dangerous and boring job.

  When the government passes a decree against drinking in factory canteens we produce our own spirit on the shop-floor. This ‘syntec,’ as we call it, is made by pumping air through buckets of triethylphosphate. The acidity of carbon dioxide in the air separates ethyl alcohol from the phosphoric acid. Holding our noses and closing our eyes against the fumes we knock back our syntec in the showers and then leave the plant before the full effect hits us.

  In December a law is passed against public drunkenness. A boss, neighbour or relative can ring the police to report you. No further proof is needed. A whiff of alcohol on your breath is enough to get you locked up for 15 days. Alcoholics have become the new Enemies of the People. The thinking follows along these lines: a drunk ‘damages his human worth,’ so he should be locked up for the night in a special holding station, without medical help. After this he will take heart and emerge in the morning sober and ready to build our shining future. The cost of this service is knocked off his wages. That is the theory. In reality the police have to meet their targets of catching a certain number of drunks. They pick up anyone who has the slightest sniff of booze about them. They don’t bother the hardened drunks in town; there’s no point. They don’t work, so there’s nowhere to send the bill.

  I am sentenced as a Decembrist14 when a neighbour reports me for banging on my door. I’ve lost my key and forgotten that Olga is at work. My trial lasts no more than a minute and the verdict is not subject to appeal. I do my time in a filthy police cell, deprived of tobacco and sleeping on the bare floor.

  On my release I’m summoned to a workplace meeting and branded as a stain on the honour of the collective. Party demagogues and careerists have free rein. My mates sit solemnly through my denunciation, knowing that any one of them could be standing in my shoes. Afterwards they take me out for a consolation drink.

  In an attempt to humiliate us Decembrists the plant erects a bottle-shaped booth and a metal cup by its gates. We are paid our wages through a little window in the side of the bottle. We have to stand in the cup while the entire workforce of the plant files past to the bus stop. Soon the bottle becomes a place where troikas assemble before running to the nearest vodka shop.

  ‘To hell with them all,’ I think as I sink even lower. I see no reason to stop drinking. Life will be no better without the bottle. Shops won’t suddenly fill with goods and the people around me won’t blossom into interesting companions. I find a thousand convincing reasons to get drunk. If the house is clean and tidy, that has to be toasted; if Olga nags me, I have to register my protest. If someone makes a rude or untrue remark about me, I drink to console my hurt feelings. Most often it’s my wife who is guilty of wounding my soul.

  Each time I overstep the mark I renounce the bottle for two or three months until my resolve crumbles. My periods of abstention convince me that I can leave the drink alone. Yet whether I am drinking or not I always have alcohol on my mind; I believe everyone has.

  I miss so much work that my plant threatens the sack. Olga wants me to have treatment.

  “I drink no more than anyone else,” I protest

  “Then why don’t you spend less time with your drinking-partners and take a correspondence course? With a few qualifications you might get a more interesting position where you wouldn’t want to waste all your time drinking.”

  “You must be mad if you think I’m going to spend my free time studying dialectical materialism. Just so I can swap my hammer and screwdriver for a phone and pen – and for what? To win the right to bark at my friends? Anyway, you’re a ‘professional’ but you earn less than me no matter how many abortions you perform.”

  “I sometimes wonder why I married you.”

  “Because if you hadn’t, you would have had to repay your debt to the state by going to practise your medical skills on some godforsaken collective farm. Not even your Party Papa could have saved you from that fate.”

  In the end I agree to seek treatment just to keep everyone quiet. Through her contacts Olga gets me into a psychiatric clinic. They give me three grams of a drug called Antabuse, followed by 30-40 grams of vodka. This cocktail takes my breath away. They revive me with oxygen and apomorphine, though not enough of the latter for my taste.

  With Antabuse in my system I keep off the booze for eight months. Our daughter Natasha is born and I stay at home caring for her while my wife works night shifts.

  ***

  In summer my family and I go to stay at the dacha at Studioni Avrag. The old folks are long dead but my Aunt Ira still lives there with her husband Dmitri Maslovski and their daughter. In the 1920s Uncle Dima inherited a large house in the centre of Kuibyshev. The upkeep proved too expensive so he sold it for the fabulous sum of half a million roubles. Thus the Maslovski family escaped poverty despite Uncle Dima’s alcoholism.

  One evening we discuss literature over dinner.

  “Dostoevsky,” I opine, “is old-fashioned. He uses too many words. In short, he’s boring.”

  Uncle Dima goes to the bookshelves and pulls out a set of ten volumes. “These are for you, Vanya. Dostoevsky’s collected works.”

  I read the books out of respect for my uncle, who was once rector of a college in Ukraine. They open my eyes: people in the last century lived their daily lives just as we do! If only Mitya Karamazov and Nastasya Filipovna were my brother and sister – how well we’d understand each other! What wild times we would have! The drunkard Marmeladov could be me! Remembering my childhood admiration for Robinson Crusoe, I wonder why people in books are so much more interesting than those in real life.

  ***

  I slip four boxes of codeine into my socks and a hot-water bottle full of vodka into my waistband. Then I cross into the prisoners’ zone where my old friend Lyokha is waiting at a pre-arranged spot. With a wink, he slips me some packets of sugar in return for my drugs. In town we don’t see sugar for months on end, but the prisoners can buy it in their camp shop. On the other hand we can get as much codeine as we want from our chemists without a prescription.

  I think Lyokha is unfortunate to have ended up behind barbed wire, but I feel no pity for the rest of the prisoners. They must have done something to earn their sentences, although I don’t blame them when they skive off work. No one likes working under the lash. There’s nothing to distinguish the prisoners from the rest of us except their shaven heads. We are warned to be vigilant but that is unnecessary for they keep to themselves.

  About half the inhabitants of Toliatti are former zeks15 who were freed when Khrushchev revised the Criminal Code in 1961. Ex-cons differ little f
rom the rest of us. We all hate Party activists. Anyone who hob-nobs with the bosses is a traitor. Perhaps in Moscow shop-floor workers drink with engineers and administrators but in the provinces, the bosses are our enemies. Arse-lickers are shunned by their workmates, leaving them with nothing else to do but build their careers.

  Lyokha is released after serving a year for hooliganism. Strangely enough, his wife leaves her policeman and returns to him. I ask Lyokha why.

  “Simple, Vanya. My exceptional virility is instantly apparent to women, and not only to my wife, but doctors, singers, any woman at all. I only have to talk to a tractor for five minutes and it starts to run after me.”

  “Vanya,” Lyokha calls one evening, “I’m on night-shift. Bring a bottle over to the office and get out of your wife’s hair.”

  I’m only too happy to comply with his request. The local shop is already closed so I stop off at a flat where Gypsies trade around the clock.

  Lyokha has taken a job as a phone engineer. I arrive at his office and we down the bottle between us. The vodka sets me free. I forget about my work, my wife and my leg. Just then it seems that no one understands me better than Lyokha.

  “You know, Lyokha, I can’t talk to Olga like I can to you. She is close to me, but after all, she is my wife. We know each other too well. I can guess what she’s going to say even as she opens her mouth.”

  “I know. I stopped reading poems to Masha after I married her. But never mind, Vanya, listen to this,” replies Lyokha, and hands me a set of headphones. He dials a number.