Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (13 page)

Life would be fine apart from problems on the domestic front. Oleg and his wife Lily fight day and night. Their punches, slaps and screams end in no less violent reconciliations. The police have long since stopped responding to neighbours’ complaints. They know that by the time they arrive the combatants will be locked in such a tight embrace it will be impossible to prize them apart. If they manage to arrest Oleg then Lily will turn on them like a tigress. Once when they try to arrest her, Oleg dangles their daughter out of the window until the police let her go.

It is impossible to live in this atmosphere so after a month I decide to return to Chapaevsk. Before I leave, Oleg takes me to a village near the sea where we buy 1,000 dried bream for a fantastically low price. In Kuibyshev these fish are in great demand as an accompaniment to beer. I can sell them for enough money to support me for several months.

As luck would have it the
Sergei Uritskii
is waiting in dock. I manage to buy a ticket for a place on deck and board just at the last minute. As I am arranging my bags I hear a familiar voice.

“Vanya! Going back already? Didn’t you find your friend?”

It’s one of the waitresses, Asya, who I got to know on the journey down.“I did,” I reply, “but a husband and wife make one devil. I felt uncomfortable in the middle of their quarrels. I’m going home now to sell my fish.”

“But you have so many bags and no berth.”

I smile: “I’m alright. I’ll sleep under the stars again.”

Shyly Asya asks me to share her berth.

As the ship approaches Kuibyshev I ask for her address. She shakes her head. “It’s better not to raise hopes. They are too easily crushed.”

Asya is one of those rare women who are untouched by the
filth of this world. I could have arrived home not only without the bream but without trousers, money or documents. Robbing me would have been as easy for Asya as spitting.

Back in Chapaevsk I decide not to sell my fish to the thieves and swindlers who run the market. Instead I give them to my uncle Volodya in return for an advance. By the end of the week I’m back on the bottle again and have forgotten all about the bream. As luck would have it I bump into Yura the conductor and am able to thank him properly for the ride.

I move into another hostel. It is built like pre-war barrack housing except it’s made of brick and has an indoor toilet. All day long snotty children play in the corridor under lines of grey underwear. Everyone knows which pair of underpants belongs to whom. If a brassiere falls on the floor you can pick it up, examine it and identify its owner by the way it is patched. Then you knock on her door: “Auntie Dusya, here’s your bra. The kids were using it as a football.”

Domestic rows blow up with boring regularity. Every family drinks. The noise only abates in the early morning when the bottles are empty and the shops still shut.

Each morning my hangover gets me out of bed, just as if I was going to work. I gather together bottles from the night before and go next door to shop No. 28 to exchange the empties for a glass of cheap fortified wine. This disgusting brew helps me control myself until ten o’clock when the spirits section opens.

In the morning my hands shake so much that I can’t hold a glass without spilling it over myself. If I have a companion with me he pours the wine down my throat; if not I use a belt. I wrap one end round the hand that holds the glass and pass the other around my neck, pulling on it until the glass reaches my lips.

On the days when the shop is out of wine we have to look for eau de Cologne or aftershave lotion. These are hard to drink on an empty stomach. Furniture polish is the worst – that is real poison and always makes me puke. However, once I’ve lined my stomach with a hair-of-the-dog I can drink whatever comes my way.

Alkies from the whole district congregate in my room. It’s warmer than the street. I open the day’s session by banging my fist on the table:

“What’s the fucking use of thinking?

Fill your glasses and start drinking!”

Each person takes a bite from a stale hunk of bread on the table as they pass the bottle around. If a new face appears at the door I shout: “Come in! Welcome to the communist state. Don’t worry about a thing. Put on what you like and sleep with who you like. In the morning we sort out clothes and girls.”

I try to avoid my former workmates. They are all drinkers too, but unlike me, they don’t comb the shops for lacquer and varnish. Occasionally I see my mother in the streets and then I have to duck out of her sight. Unfortunately ours is a small town, and local gossips inform her of my descent into street drinking. When she comes down to shop No. 28 and bundles me into a taxi I resign myself to the inevitable. My mother has a bag already packed. We drive out to a hospital at Rubezhnoye, a former country estate where Catherine the Great’s lover, Count Orlov, kept thoroughbred horses. After the revolution the house was converted into a hospital, but 50 years of Soviet power have brought it to a state of collapse.

The director turns a blind eye if patients get drunk on occasion; the most important thing is to repair the place. A condition of treatment is that each patient has to work four hours a day
without pay. They paint and plaster walls and build the director’s dacha in the grounds. My job is to watch the hospital’s water tank, making sure it never overflows or runs dry.

“Go on, drink your damned vodka! Drink the filthy stuff!” the doctor stands in the middle of our circle, conducting us like a circus ringmaster. We each have a bucket between our knees. The doctor has injected us with apomorphine before making us swallow a warm solution of bicarbonate of soda. Then we drink vodka from the three bottles we have each been told to bring with us to the hospital.

The doctor examines everyone’s bucket. I can’t manage to throw up, so he makes me drink a mixture of vitriol, castor oil and grease. The next morning I stick two fingers down my throat while the doctor’s back is turned. Anything is better than drinking that dreaded cocktail again. After a dozen sessions I start to vomit blood and they take me off the treatment – a blood vessel has burst in my stomach.

Next we’re treated with Antabuse, with a cruelty and intensity I have never yet experienced. After my dose the doctor makes me drink 20 grams of vodka. I suffocate. My chest feels as though it’s being crushed by rocks. As I struggle for breath the doctor holds up a hand mirror. My face turns purple and then deathly white. My hands and feet are freezing. The doctor gives me oxygen, wraps me in blankets and monitors my blood pressure.

With each treatment they increase the dosage of vodka. When I return to consciousness, only half alive, the doctor leans over me and says: “There, you see, in hospital, in the presence of a doctor, you almost died. What will happen to you if you have a drink outside? You will die! You’ll die gasping like a dog!”

Despite this torture I still do not believe in the efficacy of
Antabuse; however I stay off the bottle for a few weeks after my release. I hope to keep sober for long enough to find a more interesting circle of friends. I am sick of hanging around the vodka shop with completely degraded people. After my two unsuccessful attempts to escape Chapaevsk I begin to suspect that I will only find the company I desire in Moscow. In the capital there must be people who live life in the fullest sense of the word, who write novels and read poems to each other. But how could I live among those parasites? They think they are above us provincials, all the while bleeding us dry, living off our backs. They think themselves so superior, yet to boast that you are a Muscovite born and bred is as absurd as boasting that you were born on Saturday.

Even if I decide to go to the capital I’ll have to live rough as I know no one there. And all those plate glass windows reflecting the ugly curve of my leg will be a constant reminder of my disability.

Instead of Moscow I go out to the steppe. My sister’s husband Yura keeps bees and he needs someone to watch the hives during the summer.

The last remnants of the ancient forest that once covered most of Kuibyshev province were cut down during the Great Patriotic War.
23
Now the steppe-land crops are protected from dry winds by strips of plantation. These trees have grown from the saplings which my classmates and I helped to plant twenty five years ago.

Along the edge of the plantation are some 80 beehives belonging to different owners. They take it in turns to bring me food, water, tea and cigarettes. Yura lends me a tent, a camp-bed and a pair of Wellington boots. He offers me a dog but I don’t want one. She’ll bark at every wild animal that passes.

I quickly become attuned to the life of the forest. After a few days I put my watch away; I’ve learned to tell the time by the sun and the stars. I notice that the magpie chatters in quick alarm at the approach of a human, while his chatter has a different timbre when an animal approaches. When the ants begin to scurry, trying to cover the entrance to their nests, I know it’s time to take some dry wood into my tent. Sure enough, leaves rustle, the mosquitoes bite more viciously, and I hear the first patter of raindrops on my tent roof.

The birds will not let me sleep through the forest dawn, but that is a blessing. I rise to the nightingale’s song, edging out of my tent and sitting absolutely still, not even smoking. The bird takes no notice of me and sings on, beautifully and forcefully. It is not just singing for love, for the female is already sitting on her eggs. I wonder where that power comes from.

When the nightingale falls silent I set off to look for mushrooms. In my childhood Grandfather Dobrinin taught me how to search for them; he even knew by the smell of the wood what type of mushrooms grew there. The best time to look for them is after rain. I gather two basketsful of saffron milk-caps, orange-cap boletus, russula and agarics. By some oaks I strike it lucky and find the prized honey agaric. I give most of my mushrooms away to the beekeepers when they arrive with my provisions.

The next day I go to the steppe to pick bunches of St John’s wort, greater celandine and milfoil for my sister who uses them for folk remedies.

Rainy days get me down. It’s boring and uncomfortable to sit in the tent for hours on end. I ask Yura and the others not to bring vodka but all the same I feel restless. To distract myself from my thoughts I carve pieces of wood into statuettes
and decorate bottles with plastic telephone wires. I learned the technique in prison. With a hook made from a bicycle spoke I twist the plastic into pictures and designs. When I’ve finished I give the bottles to the beekeepers who are happy to take them home to their wives.

The mosquitoes annoy me, but I know from my experience in the taiga that the only way to defeat them is to take no notice. I have no net; I don’t want to shut myself off from the world around me. Just before rain, when the midges and mosquitoes become a real torment, I drive them away with the help of a beekeeper’s smoker. It is a simple can with holes punched in it and attached to a string. Inside I put some rotten wood and a piece of amadou fungus pulled from an old tree stump. When struck with a flint the amadou smoulders and lights the wood. Smoke billows from the can as I swing it like a church censer.

Just as I used never to tire of looking at the sea, so I sit for hours gazing across the blue undulations of the steppe. Sometimes a rare bustard hovers overhead, or a distant herd of boars runs through one of the gullies that scar the landscape. Seven centuries ago Mongol horsemen, not knowing how to live in the forest, camped on these grasslands. A lorry raises dust on a far-off road. I half close my eyes and imagine I see horsemen of the Golden Horde galloping along the crest of a ridge.

Summer ends. I pack up my tent with sadness. Yura drives me back into town. Each beekeeper gives me a kilo of honey and a small sum of money. I have nowhere to go except the hostel. My former plant will not take me back because of my poor work record. I curse them all to hell and exchange my honey for samogon.

There is nothing but Benedictine on the shelf of shop No. 28.

“Let’s buy a bottle,” I suggest.

My mate Tarzan explodes: “Are you crazy? That’s a women’s drink. Let’s get some cucumber face lotion from Auntie Dusya.”

“But Benedictine’s stronger than vodka. I used to drink it in Riga.”

“Okay, you win.”

Tarzan and I wander off to the park with our Benedictine. We are on our third bottle when Pashka Plaksin joins us. Pashka is famous in Chapaevsk as an alcoholic and a master-sewer of felt boots. As there is no chance of buying good boots in the shops, many people make them on the quiet. Pashka’s boots are the best in town. To own a pair is like having a Pierre Cardin suit in your wardrobe. Those who want to jump the queue will slip him a bottle of something. This is how Pashka became a drunkard. In the mornings he shakes so much he can’t even pull up a glass with his scarf. Someone has to slip a stick between his lips and pour the wine straight down his throat.

Pashka produces two bottles of pure surgical spirit donated by a grateful customer. The next thing I know is an agonising pain in my head and back. I open my eyes to see someone giving me an injection.

“What did you drink?” a voice asks.

“Surgical spirit,” I rasp.

“You can’t get that in the chemists. Where did it come from?”

“A friend gave it to me.”

“That was no friend. If the police hadn’t found you and brought you here you would have died. That was industrial spirit and it has burned up your kidneys.”

It seems that after leaving Tarzan and Pashka I fell into a snowdrift. Some passing police pulled me out and hauled me in to the sobering-up station. A nurse declared me to be on the point of death so they called an ambulance. It would have spoiled their records if yet another drunk died in their charge.

The hospital washes out my kidneys and discharges me. Sober again, I am taken on by a plastics factory. Now I remember how much I hate the working life. When I was drinking the only problem I faced was how to get over my hangovers; now I’m working like a donkey for nothing in return. I hardly earn enough to buy bread. Most of my pay goes to the sobering-up station which I have visited 14 times since returning from the forest. Soon I stop going to work; it seems futile.

The local police are sick of the sight of me. The next time they pick me up they give me a beating and put me on a charge of drunken hooliganism. They wait five days for my black eyes to fade, but even then the judge at my trial asks: “What happened to your face?”

“A bag of fists fell on my head.”

The judge decides I am capable of responding to treatment and sentences me to two years in an LTP.
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It lies about thirty miles
away, beside the village of Spiridonovka. Life in the LTP is easier than in other camps for we are classed as sick men rather than criminals. Our guards are unarmed and letters are not censored.

The village of Spiridonovka is a miserable collection of hovels surrounded by a strict-regime camp and the LTP. While the village children play ‘prisoners and warders,’ driving each other in convoys through the mud, their parents work in the camps. The villagers dedicate themselves to taking care of the prisoners, smuggling in vodka, cigarettes and an astronomical amount of tea.

Treatment is compulsory but I categorically refuse to take Antabuse, despite a promise of time off my sentence if I do so. In the past I’ve swallowed it voluntarily; I won’t have it forced down my throat. They send me to the isolator a few times then give up on me.

The doctor in charge of our treatment is a sadist called Bityutskaya. “You will not receive parcels here. You’ve already caused enough suffering to your families,” she announces. This doesn’t make much difference to me as I have no one to visit me or send in food. Later many of us paint ‘
In Vino Veritas
’ on the back of our jackets. When the doctor walks past we turn our backs so she can fully appreciate the effects of her treatment.

As I walk into the barracks with the other newcomers an older man comes up and introduces himself: “I’m Vassya-the-thief-alias-Honeycake. I’ve been through Rome and the Crimea, fire and water, brass trumpets and devil’s teeth. I’m the orderly around here, so any of you who fancies a cushy job has to clear it with me first, okay?”

Vassya gives us the once over. Spotting a defeated-looking country lad, he asks: “You there, what’s your name?”

“Trofim Ivanich.”

“You look like an intelligent chap, Trofim. Give me a goose and you can guard the stationery store.”

Trofim persuades his wife to smuggle in a goose. She probably feels guilty for having committed him to the LTP. Trofim is delighted to be given such an easy job and goes off to perform it conscientiously.

At evening roll-call there’s one person missing. Ten recounts establish that the absent man is Trofim.

“Where the hell is he?” asks the guard.

“Working,” someone remembers.

“Where?”

“Guarding the shop,” replies an innocent newcomer.

“Who told him to do that?”

“One of the orderlies,” replies another innocent.

No one can prove anything against Vassya; the goose has already been eaten. Trofim has received his first lesson in camp life.

Unlike many inmates, Vassya is fond of talking about his past: “I grew up on a farm in the Kuban. When the Nazis arrived in ’42 I went to work for them as a groom.” He pauses. “Don’t turn up your noses, brothers. I had to eat. They needed me to look after their horses so they took me with them when they retreated. We ended up in Hungary. By then it was obvious to any idiot that the Germans were losing the war. I slipped away and joined up with our boys in Poland.

“After the war I went home to the Kuban and everything would’ve been fine if my mother hadn’t had to show off to the women at the well. Her neighbours were boasting of their sons’ exploits so she produced a picture of me with my chest covered
in medals. Someone noticed these were fascist decorations. I had borrowed a regimental dress for the photograph; I could hardly pose with a broom and bucket of horse shit. So I was denounced and given ten years for collaboration.

“Since then I’ve been in more camps than I can count. The truth is I don’t care much for life on the outside, what with residence permits, housing queues and trade union meetings. After a month I’m ready to see the inside of barbed wire again.”

Early one morning a huge turd appears in the snow near the accounts office where officers’ wives work. It is about twelve centimetres in diameter. Beside it lies crumpled newspaper and a pile of dog-ends. A group gathers around the monstrosity. It could only have been produced by a giant – yet normal-sized footsteps lead to the spot.

Vassya appears to be more affronted than anyone else. “Citizen lieutenant,” he says to the officer who has come to inspect the offending object. “This is disgraceful hooliganism, especially in the presence of women. I propose that everyone’s orifice be measured in order to find out who is capable of such an outrage.”

I have my own suspicions, for that week I noticed Vassya collecting something in a plastic bag which he kept carefully hidden away. After the fuss dies down he confesses his deed to a group of confidants. He says he learned the trick in a camp at Komi.

In the work zone we make shell-timers for a Kuibyshev arms plant. Many zeks throw themselves into the job as a distraction from deadly boredom, but none of them gets remission. The only guarantee of early release is membership of the SVP. Some zeks think: ‘Okay I’ll put on the armband but I won’t inform on anyone.’ But it doesn’t work like that: a zek betrays his fellow
inmates as soon as he dons that armband. In a day or two he is racing the other SVPs to the guardhouse to sing for a two-rouble bonus. Weakness of character turns people into informers, and once they have crossed that line there’s no turning back.

We are a friendly brigade. When someone nears his release date we give him a hand so that he can save some extra money. Although the work isn’t too heavy we depend on chefir
25
to meet our targets. Tea is smuggled in by civilian workers and by the prisoner who goes to the village post office for our mail. Zlodian Kitten is the only prisoner allowed out without a guard. He is an artist who paints pictures of kittens on glass to sell in the village. His kittens are all different, with bows and balls and so on. As the local shop only sells portraits of Lenin, there’s a huge demand for his work. Zlodian never returns without loose tea slipped in between the pages of newspapers.

After I’ve been in Spiridonovka for a year the authorities finally realise that the fight against chefirists is not only useless but counterproductive. A prisoner high on chefir works like a robot. No tea means no target, so the rule is relaxed and production plans are filled.

My co-chefirist is a drug addict known as VV. More of a dabbler than a hardened addict, VV takes any tablet he can lay his hands on. He is particularly fond of teophedrin, a mixture of codeine and ephedrine.

“I was a good Komsomolist before I did my military service, but the army changed that. It wasn’t so much the bullying that got me down, though that was bad enough. No, it was being surrounded by so many idiots who felt important for the first time in their lives. Now I spit on everything.

“It was my mother who sent me here. She didn’t like the company I fell into after I left the army. It wasn’t what she had in mind for her only son.”

VV and I share our tobacco and vodka, most of which comes into the camp in hot-water bottles thrown over the fence. Almost everyone who is freed from the LTP remembers his mates this way.

I grow tired of dormitory conversations about who drank how much and who slept with whom. To relieve the boredom I devise a joke. I write a letter purporting to be from ‘Sima,’ the wife of ‘Fedya.’ When letters are given out all the Fyodors in the barrack come forward but none recognises the handwriting. There is no return address on the envelope. Then by collective decision the letter is opened and read aloud. It could have been written to any one of us:
Divisional Inspector Paramon often drops by…
this was interrupted by a roar of knowing laughter…
At last I have dried out the mattress…
the reader continues as 300 voices jeer at the unknown Fedya for wetting his bed…
I salted the cucumbers and yesterday in the herring queue Paramon’s wife Agafya slapped my face…

In the morning all the Fedyas in the camp come forward to prove their wives are not called Sima. One of them, who happens to be married to a Serafima, brings a collection of letters to show that her handwriting is not that of ‘Sima.’ A week later another letter arrives from Sima. The contents reveal that she has had a reply from her Fedya. The whole zone sets out to uncover the mysterious man. Only after a third or fourth letter do people start to guess that I am the author. They clamour for more: “We want something to cheer us up after work.”

A wave of prison riots breaks out all over the country.
Discontent also grows in our camp. A new Godfather arrives and begins a campaign of intimidation. Our letters are torn open before they reach us and visitors are roughly searched, especially women. When a prisoner from the neighbouring criminal zone goes on the run they start to torment us with endless counts and recounts. A guard marches through our barrack with a slavering Alsatian on a slackened chain. It lunges at us; a couple of men who protest are taken out to the punishment cells.

They say you can divide people into cat lovers and dog lovers, but I’d add a third category: Alsatian lovers.

That night we gather to discuss what to do. Someone suggests writing a letter to Brezhnev, another says we should kill a dog. Suddenly, unexpectedly even to myself, I leap onto a bunk and shout at them: “Tossers! Cowards! All this talk is useless!”

The protestors turn to me, some try to knock me off the bunk. Others ask: “Well, what do you suggest then?”

“A strike! We stay in bed tomorrow and refuse to go to work until our demands are read by higher authorities. We’ll write a list of complaints and smuggle a copy out to the newspapers. If the authorities refuse to give way we’ll go on hunger strike.”

“Idealist!” mutters an older prisoner, but most of the men agree to my proposal. We choose a committee of four volunteers and I write out a list of complaints.

The next morning no one leaves their bunks except the cook and the man who stokes the boiler. Not everyone is happy to strike, especially those nearing the end of their sentences, but they don’t want to oppose the collective will. The Godfather arrives, stomping through the barrack, at first abusing us and then trying persuasion. Four men hand him our list of demands and he goes off to phone his superiors.

A week passes and then an MVD commission arrives. To our amazement, half our demands are met. Weapons are removed from the zone, we are allowed to wear sweaters and warm underwear, the food improves, visitors’ rooms are enlarged, they promise to put a TV in the rec. room. and to supply any books we request. I immediately compile a list and they bring in all the books I have ordered, even ones that are forbidden on the outside such as Schiller-Mikhailov’s
History of the Anabaptists
. I expect they can afford to be generous because their libraries are overflowing with confiscated books.