“The rich, they have their own ways …” snorted the pimply traffic cop who stopped us to extract the usual bribe.
The forty-meter khrushcheba apartment where Liza and the entire family tearfully awaited wasn’t designed for our epic duffel bags either. Especially since my grandparents had invited two elephantine Odessa relatives to stay with them while we visited.
And then we were there, thirteen years after our farewell dinner, back around Liza’s laden table.
Nobody missed our eight stolen batons of New York salami. We didn’t realize this at the time, but 1987 was virtually the farewell year for the zakaz, the elite take-home food package Granddad still enjoyed, thanks to his naval achievements. Very soon the zakaz would vanish forever, along with most any sort of edible and, eventually, the USSR itself. I could still kick myself for not making a photo documentation of Babushka Liza’s table. It was straight out of the 1952 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. There were the vile, prestige cod liver conserves under gratings of hard-boiled eggs, the buttery smoked sturgeon balik, the Party-favored tongue, the inescapable tinned saira fish in tomato sauce—all arrayed on Stalinist baroque cut-crystalware my grandparents had scored as fiftieth wedding anniversary gifts.
“Black bread!” Mother kept squealing. “How I missed our black bread.” She squealed too about the sushki (dried mini-bagels), the zefir (pink rococo marshmallows), and the prianiki (gingerbread). That night, through my fitful sleep as we all bivouacked on cots in my grandparent’s boxy living room, I heard the fizz of Mom’s Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving in water, drowned out by the droning legal soap operas of her deaf aunt Judge Tamara, up from Odessa.
“Chudo, chudo, chudo—miracle miracle.” Relatives tugged on our sleeves, as though we might be a mirage. Grandpa Naum was the happiest customer of all. His smile was wide, his tense intelligence worker’s frown smoothed—as if thirteen years of shame and fear and moral dilemmas had magically slid away. His dogged loyalty to whatever regime was in power had paid off. All was ending well. The omniwise Gorbachevian State had magnanimously forgiven us prodigal traitors to Rodina. It was now fine even to openly condemn Stalinist crimes, a sentiment Granddad had bottled up for over three decades.
“If only Gorbachev would restore the navy to its former glory” was his one lament.
“Let’s thank the Party,” he thunderingly toasted, “for bringing our girls back to our Rodina!”
“Fuck the Party!” shrieked the young glasnost generation.
“Fuck Rodina!” the entire family chimed in unison.
Our Moscow fortnight passed in a blur. Never in our lives have we felt so desired and loved, been kissed so hard, listened to with such wild curiosity.
A demonic hospitality possessed Mom to invite people she barely knew to visit us in America. Because now they could.
“I’ll send you a visa, stay with us a month, we’ll show you our New York!”
I kept pinching her under the table. Our New York was a small one-bedroom in Queens that Mom and I shared with my antique Steinway grand and my six-foot-three boyfriend, a haughty British poststructuralist.
“That first visit,” Aunt Yulia confided recently, “we found you so adorable, so American in your fancy fur coats. And more than a little demented!” She giggled. “How you loved everything about our shabby, shithole Rodina! Perhaps because of the snow?”
True. A fairy-tale white had camouflaged all the sores and socialist decay. To our now-foreign eyes Moscow appeared as a magical Orientalist cityscape, untainted by garish capitalist neon and billboards. Even my mother the Rodina-basher found herself smitten. With everything.
The store signs: RYBA. MYASO. MOLOKO. (Fish. Meat. Milk.) These captions formerly signifying nothing but empty Soviet shelves and unbearable lines were now to Mom masterpieces of neo-Constructivist graphic design. The metro stops—those teeming mosaic and marble terrors of her childhood, now stood revealed as shining monuments of twenty-four-karat totalitarian kitsch. Even the scowling pirozhki sales dames berating their customers were enacting a uniquely Soviet linguistic performance.
Mom for her part very politely inquired what coins one might use for the pay phones.
Grazhdanka, she was snarled at. “Citizen, you just fell from Mars?” Me in my vintage raccoon coat? I was branded as chuchelo, a scarecrow, a raggedy bum.
In retrospect 1987 was an excellent year to visit. Everything had changed. And yet it hadn’t. A phone call still cost two kopeks, and a three-kopek brass coin bought you soda with thick yellow syrup from the clunky gazirovka (soda) machine outside the maroon-hued, star-shaped Arbat metro station. Triangular milk cartons still jumbled and jabbed in avoska bags; Lenin’s bronze outstretched arm still pointed forward—often to Dumpsters and hospitals—with the slogan YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT PATH, COMRADE!
At the same time, perestroika announced itself at every turn. I marveled at the new fashion accessory: a chain with an Orthodox cross! Mom couldn’t get over the books. Andrei Platonov (Russia’s Joyce, unpublished since the twenties), Mikhail Bulgakov’s previously suppressed works, collections of fiery contemporary essays exposing past Soviet crimes—all now in handsome official hardcovers, openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments.
Along newly pedestrianized Arbat Street, we stared at disgruntled Afghan war vets handing out leaflets. Then gaped at the new private “entrepreneurs” selling hammer-and-sickle memorabilia as ironic souvenirs. Nestling matryoshka dolls held a tiny Gorbachev with a blotch on his head inside bushy-browed Brezhnev inside bald Khrushchev inside (yelp) mustachioed Stalin—all inside a big squinty-eyed, goateed Lenin. We bought lots.
Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Granddad’s Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1) Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.
And there was another phenomenon, one that reverberated deep in our imagination: Petlya Gorbacheva (Gorbachev’s Noose). The popular moniker for the vodka lines.
They were astonishing. Enormous. And they were blamed entirely on the Party’s general (generalny) secretary, now dubbed the mineral (mineralny) secretary for his crusade to replace booze with mineral water. Even the abstemious leader himself would later amusedly cite a widespread gag from that very dry period.
“I’m gonna go kill that Gorbachev motherfucker!” yells a guy in the vodka line. Hours later he comes slumping back. “The line at the Kremlin to kill him was even longer.”
The joke barely conveys the popular wrath over Gorbachev’s antialcohol drive.
At a mobbed, shoddy liquor shop near our former Arbat apartment, Mom and I watched a bedraggled old woman with the bluish complexion of a furniture-polish imbiber. Theatrically she flashed open her filthy coat of fake fur. Underneath she was naked.
“Pila, pyu i budu pit’!” she howled. (I drank, I drink, I will drink!)
On the faces of fellow vodka queuers I noted that existential, sodden Russian compassion.
The trouble in the alcoholic empire had started in May 1985. Just two months in office, Gorbach (the hunchback) issued a decree entitled On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. It was his first major policy innovation—and so calamitous that his reputation inside the Soviet Union never recovered.
The mineral secretary was of course right about Soviet drinking being a social catastrophe. Pre-perestroika statistics were secret and scant, but it’s been estimated that alcohol abuse caused more than 90 percent of the empire’s petty hooliganism, nearly 70 percent of its murders and rapes, and almost half of its divorces—not to mention the extremely disturbing mortality rates. Perhaps a full-scale prohibition would have had some effect. Instead, Gorbachev promulgated the typical half measures that ult
imately made him so reviled by Russians. In a nutshell: after 1985 drinking simply became more expensive, complicated, and time-consuming.
Vodka factories and liquor stores were shut, vineyards bulldozed, excessive boozing harshly punished. The sclerotic state sorely needed cash—among other things, to clean up the Chernobyl disaster—but it gave up roughly nine billion rubles a year from alcohol sales. Such sales, under the mineral secretary, took place only after two p.m. on workdays. Meaning the hungover workforce had to maneuver more skillfully than ever between the workplace and the liquor line.
Not the most efficient way to combat alcohol-related loss of productivity.
We had arrived in Moscow in late December. Getting booze for the holidays ranked at the top of everyone’s concerns. New Year’s festivities were about to commence, but store shelves were barren of that Soviet good-times icon: Sovetskoye champagne. Baking, too, was a wash: yeast and sugar had completely vanished, hoarded for samogon (moonshine). Fruit juices, cheapo pudushechki candies, and tomato paste had evaporated as well. Resourceful Soviet drinkers could distill hooch from anything. Kap-kap-kap. Drip-drip-drip.
Trudging around snowy, parched perestroika Moscow, Mom and I kept dropping into liquor lines to soak up alcoholic political humor. The venom poured out where vodka didn’t.
At the draconian penalties for consuming on the job: The boss is screwing his secretary. Masha, he whispers, go open the door—wide—so people don’t suspect we’re in here drinking.
At the price hikes: Kid to dad: On TV, they’re saying vodka will become more expensive, Papa. Does it mean you’ll drink less? No, son, says Papa, it means you’ll eat less.
At the effect of the antialcohol drive: Gorbach visits a factory. See, comrades, could you work like this after a bottle? Sure. After two? Yup. All right, five? Well, you see we’re working!
To properly grasp the social and political disaster of Gorbachev’s Noose, you have to appreciate Russia’s long-soaked, -steeped, and -saturated history with vodka. So allow me to put our blissful family reunion into a state of suspended animation—befitting our fairy-tale visit—while I try to explain why our Rodina can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).
Booze, as every Russian child, man, and dog knows, was the reason pagan Slavs became Christian. With the first millennium approaching, Grand Prince Vladimir of Rus decided to adopt a monotheistic religion. He began receiving envoys promoting their faiths. Geopolitically, Islam made good sense. But it banned alcohol! Whereupon Vladimir uttered his immortal line, “Drinking is the joy of the Rus, we can’t go without it.” So in 988 A.D. he adopted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.
The story might be apocryphal, but it puts a launch date on our Rodina’s path to the drunk tank.
Originally Russians tippled mead, beer, and kvass (a lightly alcoholic fermented refreshment). Serious issues with zeleny zmey (the green serpent) surfaced sometime in the late-fourteenth century when distilled grain spirits arrived on the scene. Called variously “bread wine” or “green wine” or “burnt wine,” these drinkables later became known as vodka, a diminutive of voda (water).
Diminutive in name, a permanent spring flood in impact.
Vodka’s revenue potential caught the czars’ eyes early. By the mid-seventeenth century the state held a virtual monopoly on distilling and selling, and for most of the nineteenth century, one third of public monies derived from liquor sales. Then came the First World War. The hapless czar Nicholas II put his empire on the wagon, fearful of the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier, a humiliation blamed on the sodden state of the military. Bad move. Nikolai’s booze ban starved Russia’s wartime coffers; the resulting epidemic of illicit moonshining destabilized the crucial grain market. Grain shortages led to hunger; hunger led to revolution. (Perhaps the mineral secretary in the twilight of his own crumbling empire might have paid closer attention to history?)
Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on samogon supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The samogon flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.
The monopoly’s most ardent advocate? One Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Socialism can’t be built with white gloves,” he hectored diffident comrades at a 1925 Party congress. With no other source of capital, liquor sales could and should provide a temporary cash cow. The “temporary” ran on and on, financing the lion’s share of Stalin’s roaring industrialization, and later, military defense.
World War II descended; Russia boozed on. A classic fixture of wartime lore was the “commissar’s 100 grams”—the vodka ration for combatants (about a large glass) prescribed by Grandpa Naum’s Leningrad protector, the bumbling commissar of defense, Klim Voroshilov. On the home front, too, vodka kept flowing. Despite massive price hikes, it provided one sixth of state income in 1944 and 1945—the beleaguered empire’s biggest single revenue source.
By Brezhnev’s day our Rodina was in the collective grip of “white fever” (the DTs). Or, to use our rich home-brewed slang, Russia was
kak sapozhnik—“drunk as a cobbler”
v stelku—“smashed into a shoe sole”
v dugu—“bent as a plough”
kosaya—“cross-eyed”
na broviakh—“on its eyebrows”
na rogakh—“on its horns”
pod bankoy—“under a jar”
vdrebezgi—“in shatters”
By this time national drinking rituals had long been set, codified, mythologized endlessly. The seventies were the heyday of the pollitra (half-liter bottle), priced at 3.62 rubles, a number with a talismanic effect on the national psyche. There was the sacramental granenniy stakan (the beveled twelve-sided glass); the ritual of chipping in na troikh (splitting a pollitra three ways); the obligatory “sprinkling” to celebrate anything from a new tractor to a Ph.D.; and the “standing of a bottle” (a bribe) in exchange for every possible favor, be it plumbing or heart surgery.
Vodka shimmered in its glass as Russia’s poetry, its mythos, its metaphysical joy. Its cult, religion, and signifier. Vodka was a liquid cultural yardstick, an eighty-proof vehicle of escape from the socialist daily grind. And well, yes, a massive national tragedy. Just as significantly, before—and especially during—Gorbachev’s antialcohol push, the pollitra served as a unit of barter and currency far more stable than the ruble, which was guzzled away anyhow. Vodka as cure? From the common cold (heated with honey) to hypertension (infused with walnut membranes) to whatever existential malaise afflicted you. In the bottom of the vodka glass, Russians found Truth.
And this Truth Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was taking away.
To his credit, statisticians later established that male life expectancy rose during the mineral secretary’s temperance drive. Then it plummeted. Between 1989 and 1994, well into Yeltsin’s vodka-logged rule, death rates among males ages thirty-five to forty-four rose by 74 percent. But as Mayakovsky said: “Better to die of vodka than of boredom.”
Boredom meaning … the clutches of sobriety. At a research institute where Dad worked-slash-imbibed before he joined the Mausoleum Research Lab, he had a sobutilnik (“co-bottler,” the term for that crucial drinking buddy), a craggy old carpenter named Dmitry Fedorovich. After the first shot, Dmitry the Carpenter always talked of his brother. How this brother was near death from a kidney ailment, and how Dmitry Fedorovich had lovingly sneaked into the hospital with “medicine”: a chetvertinka (quarter liter) and a big soggy pickle.
The kidney sufferer partook and instantly died.
“And to think that if I hadn’t gotten there on time he’d have died sober,” the carpenter sobbed, shedding tears into his beveled vodka glass. His co-bottlers cried with him.
To die sober. Could a Russian male meet a more terrible end?
Like all Russian families, mine has its own entanglements with the green serpent, though by the Russian definition of alcoholism—trembling hands, missed workdays, full-blown delirium, untimely death—only my uncle Sashka truly qualified. As an alkogolik—a.k.a. alkash, alkanaut, alkimist—he was a figure of awe even among the most sloshed members of Moscow’s intelligentsia. His status derived chiefly from the Accident, which happened when Mom was four months pregnant with me.
One day, Dad, who’d been mysteriously disappearing, telephoned Mom from the Sklif, Moscow’s notorious trauma hospital.
“We wanted to spare you in your state,” he mumbled.
At the Sklif, Mom found her then twenty-two-year-old baby brother unconscious, every bone broken, a tube sticking out of his throat. The walls and ceiling were splattered with blood. She almost miscarried.
Several days before, Sashka had lurched up to the door of Naum and Liza’s fifth-floor Arbat apartment, blind-drunk. But he couldn’t find his keys. So he attempted the heroic route of alky bohemian admirers of Yulia, my femme fatale aunt. To win her heart they’d climb from the landing window to her balcony—a circus act even for the sober.
Not knowing that the busy balcony railing was loose, Sashka climbed out from the window.
My uncle and the railing fell all five floors to the asphalt below.
He landed right at the feet of his mother, who was walking my little cousin Masha. When the hospital gave Grandma Liza his bloodied clothes, the key was in his pocket.
After six horrific months at the Sklif, Uncle Sashka emerged a half-invalid—one leg shortened, an arm semiparalyzed, speech impaired—but with his will to drink undiminished.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 24