“It’s the director of Plant No. 2,” he explains.
When a man’s voice answers Lyokha says politely: “This is the telephone maintenance collective. How long is your telephone cord?”
We hear the idiot waking his wife and sending her to fetch a tape measure.
“Two and a half metres.”
“Very good. Now pull out the cord and stick it up your arse.”
Lyokha and I double over with laughter and hang up. At three in the morning. Lyokha calls the director again and shouts down the line: “It’s me! You can take it out now!”
Lyokha is soon dismissed from the phone collective. After that he returns to Chapaevsk, where he can only find work as a ‘golden man,’ as we call those who scoop shit out of the barrack latrines.
***
I meet Ivan Shirmanov at a works party. He surprises me by drinking nothing at all. I’ve met teetotallers before but there’s nothing priggish about Ivan. He plays the accordion well and his anecdotes are unusually witty. I talk to him about my life in the Far East. He nods: “I know the taiga; I was in Kolyma.”16
Ivan stops coming to work and our trade union sends me to find out what has happened to him. He lodges in a pre-revolution wooden house. His sister Elizaveta is reluctant to let me in but I persuade her I’m here to help. She ushers me into a gloomy, evil-smelling room. Empty bottles roll around the floor. Ivan lies on an iron bedstead; its mattress soaked through where he has wet himself.
“He needs a doctor, he can’t stop drinking by himself,” says his sister.
Ivan lies on his back, giggling like a mischievous schoolboy.
“Elizaveta, you poor woman. You don’t know how amusing it is to see everything floating before your eyes. My thoughts are butterflies. So pretty, so fascinating… I’ll catch that one. No wait, it’s gone! Oh, the devils!”
Ivan has a fit of laughter.
“Ivan, what should I do? D’you want to keep your job?” I ask, “If you leave it any longer they’ll dismiss you for ‘dishonourable reasons’ and then you’ll be portering for the rest of your life.”
In silence he hands me a notice of resignation that he has already written out.
“You don’t have to resign. We can come up with an excuse.”
Ivan remains unmoved: “I want to leave without a fuss. This is my problem. I must sort it out myself.”
Next day I tell my workmates what has happened. They are a good bunch, none of them careerists or back-stabbers, and we decide to pack the next trade union meeting to plead Ivan’s case. It is forbidden to dismiss someone without the approval of their union and unions have to have the agreement of their members. Ivan’s dismissal is presented for approval. I speak up: “Comrades! Is it not our duty to help Comrade Shirmanov? As the advanced class the proletariat triumphed over the bourgeoisie, can we not also triumph over alcoholism, not that there is really any such thing in the USSR? Let us return Comrade Shirmanov to the right path!”
Strangely enough, the meeting is swayed by my argument and the union even proposes to pay my fare to escort Ivan to the mental hospital. A Party man, Sashka Akulshin, accompanies us. Sashka has left his family behind in Chapaevsk while he arranges accommodation in Stavropol. His absence from his wife and his no-less-beloved Party organisation leads him into strong temptation. When Ivan suggests going by bus instead of taxi Sashka readily agrees. After all, we’re economising the money that the work collective has contributed to the return of the prodigal son. By the time we reach the clinic the doctors can’t tell who is bringing in whom for treatment. I only recognise the hospital by the slogan on its outside wall: Let us Wage War on Drunkenness!
Despite our efforts Ivan never returns to work in our plant. He takes portering jobs and his sister continues to look after him. He is the only one of my friends my wife will lend money to, although she knows quite well what he wants it for.
“If I don’t lend it to him poor Elizaveta will,” she says.
One day Ivan and I go out in search of good beer. The only bar that sells it is on the steamer that plies between Moscow and Astrakhan. We board the boat, go to the restaurant and buy up all the beer they have. Then we sit back and enjoy the swaying of the craft on the wide expanses of the Volga. Our plan is to sail as far as Sengilei and take the bus home. The journey should take us three hours. We wake up in Kazan, with our pockets empty and Ivan’s shoes gone. Three days later we return home, sailing downriver on rafts, like Huckleberry Finn. The raft people, who ferry logs down from the northern forests to Volga cities, laugh when they hear our story and let us ride for nothing. Ivan entertains them on the way with his jokes and I learn that it is possible to live without a house and to travel without money.
***
My mouth tastes as though a reindeer herd spent the night in it, my head spins and my thoughts crawl away from my grasp. With shaking hands I gather my clothes and tiptoe into the kitchen to dress. I try to smoke the first cigarette of the day without vomiting. I can’t go to work without a hair-of-the-dog. A little pile of coins is stacked on the windowsill. I take it and creep out of the house while the others sleep. That night I come home in a happy mood to find Olga waiting for me in a rage.
“That was the last of our money. I put it aside to buy milk for Natasha.”
I won’t let her see how bad I feel.
“What the hell do you want, Olga? Okay, I drink, but no more than anyone else. You can’t say I am a bad husband – I even help you with the washing for Christ’s sake – and I don’t chase women.”
“Just as well. Who’d want a drunk like you?”
“And you don’t see me out in the courtyard all day with the domino players. I don’t go on fishing trips.”
“If it weren’t for your leg you’d be off like a shot with your rod and bottles.”
I can’t bear to be reminded of my leg. I leave for the hostel that night.
There I unburden myself to my friends. “The trouble with Olga is that she thinks she knows better than me because she has a degree. It’s a mistake to marry a woman better-educated than yourself.”
I get the sympathy I crave from men who are in a similar position to me. I move into the hostel and life becomes a long drinks party, with a little work thrown in for good measure.
***
Olga finds me outside the vodka shop waiting for my hair-of-the-dog. “Vanya, come with me. I’ve got an invitation to Professor Burenkov’s clinic in Chelyabinsk. He’s developed a new treatment. It’s banned by Moscow so it probably works.”
I don’t protest as I’m beginning to tire of life in the hostel. Olga takes me home, gives me something to help me sleep, and in the morning we take a train to the Urals.
At the clinic we join 25 other men, each accompanied by his wife or mother. We introduce ourselves. I’m surprised to see the alcoholics aren’t all ordinary working men like me. There’s a surgeon who confesses he was once so drunk that he fell on top of a patient on the operating table. Next to me sits a Hero of the Soviet Union, with medals on his jacket but no shirt under it. He sold his clothes for a drink. Professor Burenkov says to him: “Well, you defeated the fascists but you allowed vodka to defeat you.”
The Hero hangs his head.
Burenkov gives us each a bitter herb drink, then a massive dose of Antabuse. Next we have to down a glass of vodka. The Antabuse reacts badly with the vodka and soon we are vomiting and writhing in pain. It’s hard to see two dozen men retch and groan all around you without feeling dreadful yourself. I think I’m going to die. Professor Burenkov strides around the group roaring: “Anyone want another drink?”
The relatives outside are watching the drama through a window. They beat on the glass and cheer: “Give them more vodka!”
Burenkov injects us with camphor and makes us lie on mattresses with our left arms above our heads in order not to strain our hearts. Then he takes us all outside. We sit under trees, feeling life return. The doctor shows us slides of swollen livers and the abnormal brain
s of the children of alcoholics. That night we take our trains home, clutching our supplies of Antabuse.
As Burenkov’s popularity grows throughout the country he stops practising. An unknown number of people die after anxious wives and mothers slip unregulated quantities of Antabuse into food. It has no smell or taste so alcoholics consume it unknowingly and then choke to death after they’ve had a few drinks. Women usually administer the Antabuse in good faith. They are simply desperate to keep their men folk out of prison.
Before I went to Burenkov it looked as though my days at the factory were numbered. After my cure the administration are so impressed that they put me in charge of the factory’s credit fund. This fund is designed to help us buy expensive items such as fridges. It’s usually controlled by a group of women supervisors who borrow all they want while telling shop-floor workers that the funds have run out. They say we only want the money to buy vodka. The director dismisses the women and places me in charge. After that every alcoholic in the plant comes to me for three roubles for his troika session.
Now I am sober my thoughts torment me and prevent me from sleeping. To calm me my wife prescribes the popular Hungarian barbiturate Noxiron. At first two or three of these tablets are enough to knock me out but my need soon grows. I drop in on Olga at work and discreetly tear off some blank prescription forms from her pad. I fill them out without trouble as I know the Latin alphabet. As indecipherable as any other doctor’s, her signature is easy to forge. Having written several prescriptions I visit different chemists in our area, acquiring enough Noxiron to last a month.
Olga notices that I’m taking a lot of barbiturate and tries to explain that my new addiction is as harmful as the old one. To appease her I stop taking the tablets during the day but at night I swallow them until I pass out.
I share my discovery with my former drinking partners who, like me, have had to choose between alcohol and their wives and jobs. One day when Olga is on night shift my friends come over for a Noxiron session. My wife returns to find me sprawled on the floor, black and blue. When I try to stand up I topple over like a felled tree. I can’t even extend my hands to break my fall. The rubbish bin is full of Noxiron packaging. Olga puts me to bed.
That evening a colleague of my wife’s and her husband come to supper. I drag myself out of bed to join them. With relief I remember I have some pills left. Excusing myself, I go into the hall and rummage in the pockets of my coat.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” Olga stands in the doorway, pointing to the toilet. My hopes of avoiding a horrific withdrawal are dashed.
“Bitch! You had no right to go through my pockets!”
Olga walks away. I follow her into the room, still raging. With one blow I sweep a dish off the table. Jam splatters over our lady guest’s new cardigan and the dish smashes the glass of our book-cabinet.
The lady’s husband leads me into the kitchen. We smoke and I calm down a little. When we go back into the living-room I find my wife putting Natasha’s things into an overnight bag. Everyone leaves.
At the back of a cupboard I discover a bottle of vodka that has been put aside for some family celebration. Although I’ve been taking Antabuse for several months I open the bottle and begin to drink. I soon pass out.
The doorbell wakes me up. Expecting my wife, I open the door and a policeman enters. “You’re under arrest,” he saunters through into the living-room, sits down at the table and begins to fill in a form. I go into the kitchen and swallow the remaining vodka in one gulp. After that it is all the same to me whether the policeman takes me off to a health spa or to a leper colony.
10 It was customary for a troika of three men to pool ten roubles to buy a bottle of vodka.
11 DDT was used to get rid of lice.
12 After the war, plants that had made chemical weapons were converted to pesticide production.
13 The Kuibyshev dam and hydro-electric power plant, built by prison labour, were completed in the early 1960s and hailed by the government as ‘the building of communism.’ Stavropol-on-the-Volga was later renamed Toliatti after the Italian communist.
14 Decembrists were revolutionaries sentenced in 1825 for plotting against Tsar Nicholas the First. In this context they were drunks sentenced according to the December laws.
15 Zaklyuchonniye: prisoners.
16 Kolyma was an area of camps in the Soviet Far East.
4
Prison
“A year! You could sit that out on the shit-bucket!”
My cell-mates in Syzran jail think I’ve got off lightly for menacing society with malicious hooliganism of a particularly vicious form.
Olga visits me after the trial. “Vanya,” she pleads, “I never expected them to send you to prison. I tried to withdraw my statement but they threatened to give me two years for laying false charges. And you heard the judge…”
At the trial she wept and asked them not to punish me, but the judge told her to be quiet.
“Perhaps he was right,” I admonish her. “If every wife was allowed to change her mind trials all over the country would collapse and there would be chaos.”
We have nothing left to say to each other. If I tell Olga what I think of her she’ll walk away believing I deserve to be in prison. “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “It makes a change to be living here. The company is delightful.”
I babble on about prison life until it is time for her to go. She throws me a look of despair as she leaves.
Waiting for the trial was the worst part; now I know how long my sentence will be I settle down to await my transfer to a labour camp. I can’t say I am depressed; in fact I’m curious about my fellow inmates and interested to find out what camp life will be like.
In the jail we are housed in long barrack huts that we call cowsheds. As new prisoners come in they talk about what they have done. One or two swear they will never again pick up a knife or a glass of vodka, but most see their arrival in prison as pure bad luck. They don’t see any justice in their sentence and are sure it will be their last.
The boy in the bunk next to mine is an exception. Vovik is a country lad of 18 who has been sentenced for robbing village stores. “A thief’s life is the best of all,” he claims, “I want no other. Robbing those stores is like shooting fish in a barrel: they don’t have alarms. We find out beforehand where they keep the money. The assistants leave the takings in the shop overnight because they don’t trust their husbands. We helped ourselves a few times and then we went to the Black Sea for a holiday.”
“What did you do there?”
“We ate ice cream until we burst and went to the cinema as often as we liked. The trouble was, as we changed the notes we’d stolen our pockets became so weighted down with coins that our trousers hung off our arses. One night in the park we poured all our loose change into a flowerbed. Unfortunately a policeman noticed. He got suspicious and pulled us in. They kicked us round a bit and one of my mates squealed. We each got three years.”
“What’s the point of stealing a few roubles just to get caught and end up inside like this?” I want to know.
“I never saw ice cream on the collective farm. In Sochi I ate it day and night! Stealing is easy – I’m going to take it up again as soon as they let me out.”
Vovik spends his time drawing elaborate ballpoint churches on handkerchiefs. Prisoners soak these and press them to their backs, leaving delicate tracings which are then tattooed into the skin. Vovik’s churches are very popular and he has orders from other cells besides ours. He is a good-natured boy, willing to share out country foodstuffs sent in by grateful village shop-assistants, along with knitted gloves, socks and scarves.
“I’m carrying the can for them,” he explains. “They all have their hands in the till too.”
I am glad of the odd scrap from Vovik’s parcels. I refuse the food my wife sends in but it’s hard to exist on prison rations. In the morning we are issued half a loaf of clay-like bread which has to last the whol
e day. Taking a tip from the old lags, I try not to gobble up my bread at once but keep some to chew in the evening. This is important. Those who eat theirs all at once spend the whole day looking at the others’ bread with hungry eyes. Some men develop an insatiable desire for food, begging it from the other zeks. This is the road to losing your human dignity.
I have hardly got used to prison routine in Syzran when the shout comes to pack up our things and assemble outside. We are marched through town to the station. I follow on behind in a cart with four women prisoners. My leg prevents me from keeping up with the men.
At the station we’re penned in by snarling Alsatians straining at their chains. With kicks and cuffs the guards make us sit on the floor. Townspeople and travellers mill about but no one stands and gawps. Men casually reach into their pockets as they pass and throw us cigarettes. An old lady pushes past the guards and silently places a bundle of pies on a prisoner’s lap.
From the outside, our ‘Stolypin’ carriages look no different to a normal passenger car except that there are no windows on one side. Each compartment holds about twenty men, and is sectioned off from the corridor by steel bars. Experienced prisoners make straight for the top bunk and kick away anyone who tries to follow them. We have no idea where we’re going. Finally, when the train starts to move we learn our destination is to be a camp near Tashkent.
Our bread and herring rations make us crazy with thirst. The guards give out scarcely any water since they can’t be bothered to escort us to the toilet. “Have patience lads,” says an elderly zek, “salt absorbs water, so if you eat the herring you won’t sweat so much. You’ll hold water in your bodies and the craving will pass.”
As the train pulls into Saratov news comes through that an earthquake has destroyed most of Tashkent. We are diverted to Astrakhan. When we reach that city I am squeezed into a Black Maria with 32 others. A prisoner loses consciousness in the stifling van. No one takes any notice of our cries for help.
Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes Page 7