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The odd Russia site
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I arise from a Napoleonic hangover, a symptom of this complete ruin. Wandering the streets in a coughing trance last night, I came to a night shop selling nothing but "French" brandy for half-a-month's salary.
A few weeks ago Moscow was on its knees. Now that I am back it is simply lying horizontal, squirming, shivering and starving, waiting to be kicked in the teeth and finished off by the harsh winter.
"Victory will be ours!" Pavlov thumps the table and with a simultaneous flick of both hands takes out a cigarette and pours two tiny glasses with precision. He is persuasive at five o'clock in the morning, a serious pisshead with serious ideas -- he tells me to write so I must write. This is a discovery for me. My almost vain attempts to find this place, my wanderings through raw November were mental as well as physical, a real down time in my life.
Then a cup of chicken broth and two glasses of vodka begin the revival.
November 1991.
[On September 21st 1993 President Boris Yeltsin announced the dissolution of the old Russian parliament. A leftover from the old Russian republic within the Soviet Union, the parliament had become a thorn in Yeltsin's side in the two years since his resistance to a hard-line coup had in effect destroyed the USSR. In what became one of the more poignant episodes of Russian history, Yeltsin's 1993 opponents rallied round the parliament, and weeks later the standoff produced the biggest bloodbath Moscow had seen since the revolution, with 300 people killed. Though ostensibly this was Yeltsin's final victory over the old guard who had resisted reform, it seems more appropriate to describe the events as a kind of modern Russian Thermidor, when the hopes for real change which appeared during the previous few years gave way to apathy and cynicism. Because to destroy the old order, Yeltsin had created something which was soon to be similarly despised.]
Thankfully I was hundreds of miles away. I heard the news of the dissolution by radio in a hostel room in the north Russian village of Palekh.
It was a bright day; crisp and sad as the remnant of summer faded, its warmth already blasted away by the August rains. It was life as usual. The vegetable season created an illusion of abundance at the market. Nearby, men sat gulping beakers of vodka in threes, the magical number for drinking sessions in Russia (which is supposed to preclude squabbling or worse). They pretended nobody could see them, lurking amongst bushes or behind birch trees. Elsewhere, hidden from view, the more diligent spoilt their eyes and lungs crafting the village's lacquer boxes. Palekh ware was now one of the cliches of Russian folk art, a craft which replaced a local icon-painting tradition when communism and atheism demanded.
It wasn't all yokels and arts and crafts here, though. Juggernauts occasionally thundered down the trunk road through the middle of the village, shaking the church and gradually cracking centuries of biblical paintings by its local masters. The Soviet-chic pseudo-folk style restaurant, built in the vain hope of tourists, cowered beside the road in anticipation.
I went to Palekh to research the local craft for a guidebook. But events during my journey made it more than just a stop in provincial Russia -- I needed to cool off in rural peace. In fact I was making an escape, but not from anything as banal as Moscow's political schemings -- there was a much more immediate problem.
That morning I had left the nearby city of Ivanovo on the first bus, having satisfied myself that Palekh was one of the last places my adversaries would have thought to look had they chosen to come after me. And even the fact that the heating wasn't on to counteract the low September temperatures, that there was no shower or television and that the toilet was just a bucket didn't bother me. I still had a jar of milk from the market, and a babushka to wrap me in blankets and make me mushroom soup.
* * *
"If you were my fucking guest (?!), I'd give you the best fucking treatment -- vodka, parties, girls, fucking bathhouse. You shouldn't be fucking coming here on your own, it's not right, you're an intruder, you're not fucking welcome."
The speaker of this brief diatribe against me and independent travellers in general was the cause of my flight. It began innocently enough, on an evening in a seedy Ivanovo restaurant. Ushered in by a bad-tempered waitress, I sat down to an imported beer and a spindly Georgian-style chicken leg, about the closest Ivanovo could manage to a vegetarian meal. I was tired and in need of sleep after 24 hours travelling.
Ivanovo is the "city of brides", a town famous for its textile industry and gender imbalance, so much so that the authorities felt the need to put a military garrison right in the centre of town. But this still wasn't enough to stop solitary males turning swiftly into soft targets. Add to that the fact that Russians have a collective spirit, and often don't respect privacy, especially in restaurants.
"Hey, you there, why are you sitting on your own, come and keep us company," came a raucous female voice somewhere away to my right.
I looked up to see a mini-hen party, a foursome partly obscured by an array of shot glasses and decanters.
These four were a parody of glamour. All were on the chubby side, though clearly none were over 30, and one was so small as to actively resemble a ball with arms and legs. All displayed the most unpleasant physical traits of Russian womanhood (which I have to say is mostly a fragrant section of the human race) - large numbers of gold teeth, lipstick lathered on like shaving foam, and the smell of raw sewage.
Their attention was flattering for a newcomer, but keeping them company was a painful experience -- speech which meant little to me, a coarse vernacular, full of quips and empty expressions, like "mukha-blyakha" (untranslatable, a corruption of the Russian for "slut") and other semi-obscenities.
On top of that my origins were called into question:
"So where are you from?"
"England."
"You're lying."
(I don't mind people being unsure of my nationality -- sometimes it's a good idea in Russia not to be too revealing about yourself -- , but I do have a problem with being told in such bare-faced terms I'm a liar.)
"No, I'm not. Look, surely you must notice the accent?"
"Pull the other one."
At this, I finally threw my passport in front of her in exasperation.
"What's that?"
"It's a British passport."
"Must be a forgery."
All the time there was an undercurrent of sexuality, devoid of tenderness. They drank, I didn't. I danced, with each of them in turn. I tried vainly to be diplomatic and not offend. Somewhere during the course of the evening, as I was in the process of upsetting each one in turn for not devoting myself exclusively to her, they invited me to a nightclub outside town. One had a male friend who would do anything for her, and even put his life and car at risk.
It's not a good idea to leave yourself in the hands of strangers who, at best, are completely pissed, but my judgement was impaired by lack of sleep and a siren-like pull from these women. As we raced out of the city, the object of the driver's affections decided she wanted to do a bit of joyriding. We found a quiet forest road with no traffic, and off she went at full speed. After seconds of manic Formula-1 in the darkness, I started wondering how my remains would be identified, if at all, and how the local press would handle the story of my destruction. And not for the last time that evening.
Finally, when my companions had had enough fun, we headed through a gate manned by sleepy conscripts into some kind of military base. After more endless forest driving we arrived at some dive, hidden in the basement of a lump of administrative concrete. It was an archetypal provincial Russian nightclub circa 1993 -- a Brezhnev-era sports hall filled with plastic garden tables and chairs, a bar selling an impressive array of spirits, a single brand of imported beer and weak coffee. A dancefloor pumped Ace of Base, Boney M, and local rap. Skinhead Neanderthals wandered around swilling vodka and groping their girlfriends aggressively and blatantly.
The night had a subdued start, given the atmosphere -- we sat round, met some of the Armenians who ran the place. Then my companions decided to tell everyone I was English (they'd decided to believe me by now), not in a way to inspire interest or enthusiasm but more as you would point out an exotic animal in a zoo. Vodka flowed, and the Caucasians proved not for the first time that they could hold their drink better than the Russians present. I fought to keep my head intact.
Things started to get out of hand -- one of the Russians working in the bar ripped our driver's jacket with a knife. It all happened quietly and ominously, as I was ordering a drink at the bar. I returned to find scowling faces, breaking nervously into trembling hysterics.
And then one of our drunken harpies decided to call one of the Armenians a shit, just for the hell of it. Armen had had no part in the knifing incident -- this was just a case of the harpy feeling bored and self-destructive.
"You watch what you're saying, you filthy bitch," the gross, brylcreamed specimen replied, erupting icily.
"I'll say it again. And anyway, I have a defender (yours truly) so you can't touch me."
"Oh well in that case let's he and I go outside and sort it out man to man," he said, fingering what was probably some vicious piece of Caucasian cold steel inside his jacket pocket.
"Okay, sorry. I didn't mean it." (Phew.)
Then, as we prepared to leave, the jacket-slasher started pulling at my sleeve. "So you're English are you?" he blurted over and over in a slurred version of the zoo-visitor voice. I wondered what tortures he had planned. The tugging at my sleeve became more insistent, my attempts to escape from his grasp more futile. I looked for support to the Armenians, most of whom had until then seemed friendly. Stony-faced and unaware of the irony of his words, one of them muttered to me: "Sober up, will you, the guy just wants to talk to you".
I soon realized I'd been watching too many thrillers and my tormentor was just a petty thief. I was led into a backroom and kindly relieved of my money. He even very courteously asked me how much I needed to get back to Moscow, and subtracted it from the total. And his concern for my welfare didn't end there. Quoting Aleksandr Griboyedov, a 19th century Russian thinker (even thugs in Russia can be well educated), he proceeded to his little diatribe.
"If you were my fucking guest, I'd give you the best fucking treatment -- vodka, parties, girls, fucking bathhouse. You shouldn't be fucking coming here on your own, it's not right, you're an intruder, you're not fucking welcome."
Having experienced the down side of Russian hospitality, I returned to the hotel. Surprisingly, I managed to get a lift back with my original harpies. There was an odd atmosphere in the car -- everyone was behaving as if nothing had happened. It really seemed as if no one had noticed a thing, or perhaps they were so immune already that it just seemed normal.
One of the Armenians travelled back with us and saw where I was staying, and, although no-one tried to follow me when I was dropped off, I was shaken enough by now to want to get out completely. Ivanovo had had more than its fair share of my time. I lay in bed unable to sleep, waiting desperately for the morning and dreading a knock at the door. To my own amazement, I survived the night and checked out at dawn, clattered across town on a tram, and made a dash into the countryside.
Awakenings
Ivanovo was one of the most depressing places anyone could ever have the fortune to visit, which in itself made it attractive in my twisted, Russophile mind. I was left with an impression of a grey, rainy city where Stalinist monumentalism met crumbling wooden cottages, where Ladas and Moskvichs struggled over some of the worst potholes even Russia has ever seen.
The best symbol I could find for Ivanovo was a statue on the station square, a sleek 1970s mutation of some revolutionary hero. In Soviet times Ivanovo portrayed itself as the cradle of the revolution -- the first people's councils, or soviets, were set up here in 1905, when Russia's urban working class began the first tremors which led to the earthquake of 1917. But this was hardly much of a distinction. It merely underlined its reputation as a depressed factory town.
I had a foretaste in 1981, studying Russian at school, when a group of Soviets arrived from Ivanovo heavily guarded by a KGB stooge. They seemed totally devoid of interest in anything, let alone us and the school. Clearly, anyone who might have shown any enthusiasm for anything British, capitalist, Western etc., would have been barred from leaving the country in those days. Not so these sullen middle-aged men and women in pvc jackets stinking of cheap cigarettes.
After an embarrassingly brief "cultural" meeting with us clueless O-Level students, they gave us tacky metal badges praising the socialist achievements of their city. My Ivanovo badge for many years served as a symbol of Soviet Russia.
This after all was a time when Brezhnev's gerontocracy was at its most doddery, Russian troops were bogged down in Afghanistan, and the world was lurching from Olympic boycott to nuclear scare and back again. Russia remained so tantalisingly closed, and the socialist realist kitsch of its stamps and red banners was often the only glimpse that could be had.
My elitist public school proved a good place for this glimpsing, and the nature of the school ensured the language a subversive charm: while the school was good on resources, the conservatism of its occupants ensured that anyone showing an interest in the "Evil Empire" would be given a wide berth. Here was a chance to play the Russian "superfluous man"-- the highly intelligent, thoughtful, sometimes twisted and always misfit hero of 19th century Russian literature. Since I hadn't developed a taste for cigarettes or booze or drugs, and as far as sex was concerned I may as well have been a newborn baby, it was a way of making a point. But not only that -- I was already hooked on Russia.
* * *
Russian at school was almost as musty as Latin or Greek -- the Brezhnev leadership of the day had obviously spread its dead hand well beyond the confines of the Warsaw Pact. It wasn't so much the school, but attitudes to Russia had so ossified that it was rare to get an idea of the living language beyond the cliches of Misha and Natasha's Moscow romance on 'Russian for beginners'. Those learning German and Spanish could go off on holiday or on exchange programmes to an assortment of countries, while Russianists were lucky to get a week tramping around Moscow with a wooden-faced guide. Perhaps because of that, the class was painfully scholarly, its members revelling in Russian's tendency to sport complicated grammatical constructions. All the time, though, there was a sneaking feeling that it was all one jolly adventure...
Our two Russian teachers were total opposites. One was an avuncular ex-seaman and drunkard, slavic to the core, though it was never quite clear where he got it from. His size made him a rugby enthusiast, and flickers of the upper-class gentleman occasionally showed behind his bravado. The other was a beanPole with a passion for the newly formed SDP. His finely chiselled features and bristling moustache were about as East European as you could get, but they sat uncomfortably with his deadpan estuary English and stock phrases. The liberal use of cliches like "the fact of the matter is" and "there's no two ways about it" concealed, however, a hell of a sharp mind.
Between them they took us through the very varied and incongruous strands of Russian culture which were available -- from Chekhovian restraint and suggestion to the officialese of the contemporary Soviet journalist. And they did it with an affection which teachers of more popular mainstream subjects lacked. Yet however alive the 19th century classics, however much the Pravda articles reflected the reality of Soviet hypocrisy and lies, it was all too distant. We needed some kind of real contact with contemporary Russia. I thirsted for this grotesque parody of a country.
* * *
My first, school trip to Russia in spring 1982 is still a very specific memory. We were a group of male adolescents, covering the whole range from nerd to aristo tearaway. All but the spoddiest drank, smoked and feigned sexual conquest as much as possible, as our leader, the wider of our two slavic polarities, turned a blind and vodka-clouded eye.
The most poignant recollections were of being shunted around Moscow and St. Petersburg for a week in a coach in the spring slush, trying clumsily to smoke "papirosy" (cheap Russian filterless cigarettes) in the back and being dragged out to photograph whatever monument by our fact-spouting raisin of a guide. Our real contact with ordinary Russians was minimal -- we never really got beyond fending off youngsters on Red Square trying to buy our jeans.
All that remained was to contemplate Stalinist architecture and generic shop signs -- decrepit letters making up the words "Fruit and Veg" or "Fish" every few blocks. There were red banners with party slogans, of course, and occasionally a vigorous-looking Brezhnev portrait would pop up by the roadside. But the biggest impression of all was the all-pervading petrol and exhaust smells, the first nasal surprise to hit any newcomer to Russia, whatever regime happens to be in power at the time.
As always in Russia, food was a source of curiosity: I remember coming down to breakfast on the first morning to a glass of a thick white liquid (ie sour cream) and almost choking on its sourness; also the abundance of stale red cabbage at whichever faceless restaurant we happened to be dining at. Our only solace was the chocolate, in those days cheaper (surprisingly) in the mainly laughable -- Marlboro-and-Lenin-bust-dominated -- foreign currency shops than it was for the poor Soviet shopper.
As cloistered teenagers, some of us saw Russia as the first chance to have a good time in our lives. So we drank gin and vodka embittered by the varnish of our makeshift souvenir cups, pretending to enjoy our own rather jaded company in the fashion of world-ignorant schoolboys given a chance to fly freely for a while.
Then, miraculously, on our last evening we were coaxed into some folk dancing by a group of passionate Hungarians basking in the thrill of a rare opportunity to travel abroad. They drew us into adolescent kissing games. At this particular stage of life, this proved sexually explosive -- a group of us had retired to one of our rooms for greater cosiness and intimacy, and thanks to some tactical seat-swapping I was able to home in on the beautiful Matu. At this point someone playfully cut the lights and I kissed passionately, deeply and unprecedentedly.
It was significant that this awakening happened in Russia. Not that the country yet had me completely within its grasp, but curiosity had gained a foothold. And the fact that I'd enjoyed the experience of simply being there and said as much seemed to confirm my weirdo status at school -- only badmouthing the country in a condescending fashion could be considered normal. At the time it was natural for me to think -- well how is this arrogant land any better? -- and withdraw behind a magnificent wall of isolation.
Spend any length of time in Russia and you will inevitably come across the Russian drink problem or problems. As a Russian friend once perceptively observed -- foreigners there either turn to drink or write a book. So it's probably up to those of us who did the latter, who stand a higher than average chance of being relatively sober for reasonable lengths of time, to explain a few things about Russian drinking habits.
* * *
"I've lived long, drunk deep, and thought hard, and I know whereof I speak."
Venedikt Yerofeyev. 'Moscow Stations'
Drinking vodka from souvenir cups in 1982 was my earliest tentative foray into the land of spirits and minor drunkenness. And though there were no Russians around at the time to put the debauchery on a proper level, the link was established in my mind: Russia equals alcohol. For an impressionable teenager anxious to do grown up things and have a good time, this was a momentous discovery.
A year later, at a crash language course where students brushed up on their written and imbibed Russian, I overdosed on wine and for the first time ever regurgitated the contents of my stomach in the name of Bacchus. Fittingly, the evening's deep red vomit turned to bright green in the morning, symbolising the changing of the lights, the beginning of my drunken lurch through the vodka-soaked pastures of post-Brezhnev Russia.
A student year in Moscow really opened the sluices. The undergraduate studies included an extra-curricular course in drinking neat vodka and samogon (home-brewed spirit), interspersed occasionally with the industrial spirits and cheap wines of the perestroika era.
"Oh that most blessed time in the life of my people, the hours between opening and closing!"
'Moscow Stations'
This was at the height of the anti-alcohol campaign of the mid 1980s, when production was cut drastically and sale heavily restricted, and the idea of illicit drinking became devastatingly attractive. Slap an ill-conceived ban on something in Russia, as frequently happens, and people will flout it with a glee which is almost grotesque in its furtiveness.
* * *
Whether it's a case of supply meeting demand or the other way round, vodka has almost always been chronically available in Russia. Reliance in the Brezhnev era on cheap state vodka, which was at least regulated if not always nice to drink, was, however, broken by the dry laws. People's reaction was to start making their own in large quantities, often opting for alternatives such as shoe-polish or fermented toothpaste.
But such vile concoctions have had a much longer history in Russia. In the classic novel 'Moscow Stations', about a drunk's train journey from the city to the suburbs, Venedikt Yerofeyev comes up with a whole recipe book of vicious cocktails, like "Dogs giblets, the music of the spheres":
"Zhiguli beer 100g
Sadko the Wealthy Guest shampoo 30g
Anti-dandruff solution 70g
Superglue 12g
Brake fluid 35g
Insecticide 20g
Marinade for a week with cigar tobacco, then serve."
When the dry laws petered out, along with Gorbachev and perestroika, chaos ensued, with the new criminal elements setting up illegal stills and bottling plants, and poisoning thousands per year. These cheap surrogates were often visually indistinguishable from the real thing. And as they were widely available at all hours of the day, risk-loving Russians gladly put gallons of this potentially lethal filth into their bodies every year.
* * *
This must have seemed such a relief from that other misery, shortages. In 1987, drink shops usually only stayed open for a couple of hours if and when they had something in stock. Queues were almost always huge, unwieldy and very slow. Not least at our local shop Balaton, specializing in Hungarian wine. The lake of the same name, a popular Hungarian holiday resort portrayed on the shop's wall, was a reminder to the poor shoppers that there were things even more inaccessible than inebriation from its vineyards. The queue snaked beneath our hotel-room windows, often in the freezing cold, a constant reminder of the plight of the less fortunate.
* * *
But wine is not a Russian drink. In fact the Russian word for wine, "vino" used to refer to drinks like vodka (Smirnov brands, both the American and newly-resurrected Russian branches of the great vodka family, are called Table Wine No. 1 etc.). One group grape wine has been popular with, oddly enough, is the out-and-out winos. There is no shortage of notorious Dagestani rotguts like "777", not for nothing one digit off the number of the beast. And they're cheap enough to beat even vodka for price.
It's only in the last few years that good wine has made a modest impact -- on that section of the middle class with good Western connections which despises New Russian excess. But wine from anywhere except Eastern Europe is expensive, and people don't trust what comes from closer to home.
Shampanskoye meanwhile -- sparkling wine -- has always been a popular drink among women. This is the Russian woman's short cut to glamour, communism's cheap concession to extravagance and hedonism, and the main catalyst in any half-way competent seduction. And with the enormous range in prices between bog-standard Moscow-made bubbly and the top champagne brands, it remains to this day accessible to just about everyone.
* * *
"We're all of us drunk, each in his own way, only some have imbibed more than others. And that's how if affects people: some laugh right in the world's face, others cry on its shoulder."
'Moscow Stations'
On one occasion the sense of oppression and restriction at Balaton made the queue's components sitting targets for certain members of our student group, who have since become respected journalists in the UK. As we were doomed by the Soviet term dates to spend Christmas in Moscow, our exchange scheme lovingly supplied us with a turkey, which we ate cold in our hotel. The wags in question decided that there was plenty of mileage to be gained from the situation. They held the turkey up to the window, banging furiously on the pane, gesticulating wildly and laughing raucously, until the would-be drinkers down below had had their would-be red noses metaphorically rubbed firmly in the ice beneath their feet. So much for serious Daily Telegraph correspondents.
"What could be more noble than experimenting on oneself? On a Thursday evening I'd drink three and a half litres of beer and vodka mixed, in one go. I'd drink it down and go to bed fully clothed, with just one thought in my mind: would I wake up on Friday morning or wouldn't I?"
'Moscow Stations'.
One way or another, we got the drink we needed, from taxi ranks, dollar shops and generous friends. Sometimes we braved the Balaton queue for the sake of that uplifting sense of achievement and hardship. Over those few months I became depressingly familiar with technicolour yawns and thumping migraines. The worst parties always seemed to be our own, as our Russian friends always gleefully slipped through hotel security with as much booze as possible. They must have felt they had to compensate for our feeble Western appetites for alcohol. Once I sipped something from a pharmaceutical bottle labled "ammonia", which obliterated the next 24 hours. I always woke up afterwards, but always wished I hadn't.
* * *
(Genuine) vodka's warming abilities give it a comforting role in the long winters, whether to increase the sense of wellbeing of those safely inside or to defend the extremities of those condemned for one reason or another to spend time in the open. It has other advantages, though. It is scientifically proven to help the digestion, so the real experts say. Valentin Timofeyevich - a prisons service official from Ivanovo and therefore a very great authority from years of practical research (more about him later) -- told me that swallowing neat spirits hard is much better for your stomach than sipping diluted drinks, as long as you chase them with juice or something. And after all, it does clean out the system too.
But I think it's safe to say Russians don't take vodka for their digestion. If a Russian celebrates, there's no limit, and even if he's not celebrating, there's no limit. What's more, Russians are almost greedy in their desire for self-destruction. Alcoholism is the main reason for the life expectancy of males falling to 57 years. And this doesn't take into account the thousands of young men with knackered livers who stop drinking in their thirties because the death wish isn't strong enough.
* * *
The thing is, Russia seems such a crazy, wonderful place when you're drinking -- anything is possible -- and strange as it might seem beer is a particularly good means for creating illusions. You wouldn't normally think of it as a Russian drink, but in fact beer or something similar has been around there longer than vodka. And when you think about it, images of ruddy-faced peasants experimenting with fermented cereals in the dying years of the first millennium AD are not so difficult to conjure up.
In Soviet times beer was as hard to come by as vodka, and any trip to the shop meant braving endless queues. People had to fill bags and crates with the stuff to make it worth the effort. But then there was an upheaval in the industry, as quality improved and prices stayed down to compete with aggressive competition from foreign brands. Now every kiosk or shop or bar has a whole host of brightly-coloured labels, both Russian and foreign, to tantalize the consumer.
So, in the heady days of the 1990s free market, I and a few fellow beer-lovers took advantage of the boom. In summer, in the days when I could live relatively easily on relatively little, I frequently drank away my afternoons with them. This meant taking our bladders in our hands as we sought Moscow's dwindling collection of aging and inconvenient public toilets. And when travelling, I'd always try out the local concoctions with their now colourful and diverse labels depicting local legends of tsars, hussars and medieval knights. A bit of sunshine and a feisty brew, and even the drabbest little town could suddenly seem alive and exciting.
* * *
Beer is not considered an alcoholic drink there, simply a means of recreation, a time-filler, a hangover cure, a chaser. You'll rarely find it on the table at parties, but it's always an option for the casual street meeting. Add "vobla", the word to describe fish dried to a texture similar to tree bark and salted enough to give an elephant a stroke, and preferably a bathhouse, and you have another great Russian tradition.
The local stuff is a cheap thirst-quencher, often still unpasteurized and spiked with acetate and other nasties. It's rumoured that producers even used to put detergent in it to give it a head. It's also not uncommon to find heavy sediments and murky membranes, and one early perestroika TV programme found a bottle with a dead snake in it. But the old formula of identical factories all over the Soviet Union has long since gone, replaced by diversity of product and fancy labels. Some beers are very tasty, and most are better than the "fortified" (i.e. mixed with cheap spirit) Scandinavian imports which modern Russian men seem to so warm to.
The beer bars in Russia used to be down-to-earth affairs to put it mildly -- dimly-lit spit and sawdust dives with vending machines and reusable glasses. They were strictly men only, of course. But these were taken over and virtually wiped out in the mid-90s. Nowadays most cities have a handful of quite expensive beer bars serving mostly draft foreign beer, but these are beyond most people's pockets. Now the "muzhik" hangs out at some "tolkuchka" (spontaneous street market) or railway station, where he'll come across dozens of blonde buxom beauties from Saransk or Tula doing a brisk trade from their crate fortresses.
* * *
But for the Westerner the big question when drinking in Russia was always: when do I stop? For the Russian it's easy -- just go for it and never mind the consequences. They only stop when there's no alcohol left in the house, and the neighbours' is also finished, and there's nowhere to buy more. The trouble starts if somebody DOES mind, and that involves concepts alien to Russians, like being careful, refusing to drink more, lying about why we don't drink more to avoid offending people etc. If you're not careful you'll cause serious offence -- you might just as well tell a small child you don't love them any more. And if you hear the words "znachit ty menya ne uvazhayesh" (so you don't respect me), expect trouble.
Let's face it, if you look at the situation from a fly-on-the-wall point of view, the Russians do have a point. Imagine a group of Russians from a remote village with a Westerner who they've only just met and are eager to get to know better. They'e eating and drinking away and generally having a good time, when suddenly the Westerner says: "Oh, I'e had enough, I need to get up for work tomorrow," thus ruining the whole evening, and probably these people' chances of ever having a decent conversation with a Westerner are completely dashed. Just think for a moment what a boring, spoilsport party-pooper this guy must look.
So it was often difficult to strike a compromise between your own needs (to go to bed and avoid a hangover) and the needs of the collective (to have a good time and indulge in lively conversation, drinking, dancing, singing etc.). There were always going to be occasions when some driven, hardnut "muzhik" would hold my liver to ransom over beakers of neat spirit as I squirmed and made excuses. I tried to keep such occasions to a minimum, but a few wriggled their way into my life experience.
Like the train journey from hell -- what could be worse than drinking in a confined, stuffy space, constantly rattling, with persuasive fellow travellers sporting an evil concoction of spirits?
I was on a bizarre trip indeed, returning to Moscow on the single daily train from an obscure town in northern Ukraine. Novhorod Siversky was the ultimate backwater: famous as the setting for Russian medieval epic 'he Lay of Igor's Host' it was now just one of dozens of terminally sleepy towns, picturesque from the right angle and dotted with a few overstated museums and churches. So quite frankly I was looking for a bit of spicy adventure, and after several hours killing time (in the station -- it was that bad) I finally took the train out.
We snailed west through remote rural communities on the Russian-Ukrainian border before turning a sharp right through Russia' Chernobyl-contaminated southwest corner. This convoluted trip took 18 hours to go about 300 miles, and provided plenty of opportunity for idle talk and, more importantly, drink. I spent the time telling the lads in my carriage all the usual rubbish about "England" -- London fog, Sherlock Holmes, lords and ladies, Margaret Thatcher, foaming jugs of ale, the Loch Ness monster etc. I gave the most likeable a dollar as a souvenir, with which he bounded off smiling broadly at the next station.
Those that remained, who were rather more worldly wise -- or perhaps spiritually wise was a more accurate term -- offered me a choice of industrial spirit and some pepperminty stuff. Peppermint seemed harmless enough, but there were no checks to the boredom or the pressure to drink. At this point the evening began to melt away into a hazy speeded-up alcoholic fug. My only cast-iron recollection after that was searching the canteen for more, and finding vodka. It was Azerbaijani -- the alcoholic equivalent of severe concussion.
If you'e expecting another robbery here, forget it. My companions were hard men, but honest, and I can say with pride that I'e never been robbed while drunk. Which is perhaps just as well (not that that's any compensation for the many foul hangovers I've experienced). The worst these guys were guilty of was the usual bullshit about their sexual exploits, and an offer to take me to a hypothetical prostitute in the next carriage, for which, had she proved material (I didn't test this one out), they would no doubt have received a commission.
So let's skip the evening's oblivion, of which my recollection is practically non-existent, and go straight to the morning after. The bad news about this train was that it arrived around 1130 am and gave you time to sleep in -- a rare pleasure under normal circumstances. However, a pounding headache and nausea are not helped by rattling nor restricted loo access -- the toilets get locked more than half an hour before the train arrives. So I got out at Moscow gasping for peace, quiet, toilets, aspirin, paracetamol and settlers.
If trains are bad for hangovers, imagine a jeep on a dirt road. This was the culmination of another Ivanovo nightmare. A photographer colleague had been invited to a unique shoot (in the days when such things were relatively new -- this was the glum rainy autumn of 1992) at a couple of local prisons, and I tagged along as token intrepid reporter. After doing our bit in a male prison colony at the wrong end of a 30-km dirt track, the photographer and I spent an evening of leisure with a select band of screws in the local canteen, and the vodka began to flow too...
Valentin Timofeyevich, the career prison officer who was showing us round, had throughout our stay been exclusively glum and serious. Now, he suddenly blossomed after a shot or two. Anyone with any drinking experience at all with Russians can be sure that the most morose creature imaginable will shine with little prompting in such situations -- after all, being Russian and drinking are highly compatible pastimes. Our officer proved himself a connoisseur of heavy vodka drinking, therefore a real "muzhik". He knew all the tricks -- how to drink to best effect, how to hold that drink and how to beat hangovers. I don't think I've ever seen anyone let go in such a controlled way -- he never, evening or morning, lost the plot. In an odd reversal of roles, perhaps, we westerners were meanwhile busy enjoying ourselves damagingly and to the full. I jumped with abandon into the cool clear waters of the local lake, and back in the hotel room my companion surprised everyone with a totally spontaneous, totally nonchalant stream of thin, caustic vomit which spattered the carpet half way through the evening.
As usual, my woes began the next morning. I refused breakfast, only to be ultimately coaxed into my first and last hair-of-the-dog, again on the advice of the ever-vigilant, ever-knowing Valentin Timofeyevich. Before setting off in the jeep, I gulped down 100 grammes of some unpretentious Lithuanian eau de vie. And thank God I did -- I could not have made it over the bumps without expelling most of my innards otherwise.
Somehow my hangovers seemed to get worse and worse and physical sickness more commonplace. Returning to Russia one autumn as a visitor was the last straw.
One night, I found myself in the company of a dubious double act, messrs Pavlov and Pavlenko. They had never met before, but both were hard drinkers and hard "muzhiks", and took an instant boozy shine to each other. Pavlov is one of the heroes of a later chapter. Pavlenko was a toothless barrel-shaped photographer, a "friend of the Islamic world" who claimed Yasser Arafat and several Afghan warlords among his acquaintances. He was completely Russian, so it wasn't quite clear how he got involved with the world's various Muslim strongmen, but it gave him some bloody good chat-up lines. In a country where men openly compete to tell the tallest stories and behave as outrageously as possible, his donning of mojaheddin headgear and proposing toasts to Chechen separatist leaders (in between wars, thankfully) were excellent party pieces.
First I went with the steady stream of vodka and diatribes on Russia's woes, then gradually faded out as the conversation turned to the Russia version of viagra -- slap your dick hard twice on the windowsill (it always works!).
I went to sleep and awoke with a growing ache in my side to go to the toilet. I almost fainted and struggled back. "Your liver's fucked," said Pavlov, "I had that too."
He was wrong -- it was just an old appendectomy wound playing up --but at the time I decided never to drink again, as one always does in these situations. This pledge lasted exactly two days -- a couple of birthday parties and many more pleasant evenings put paid to it -- but something had changed. I was weary of alcohol, and of the Russian way of drinking. My love-hate relationship with booze, just as it started with Russia, so did it finish. Living in Britain again, I didn't feel I needed to escape any more, I wanted to be healthy and be useful in my life in that annoying Protestant Anglo-Saxon way people have here.
But if I'd been Slav and Orthodox? Well that would have been very different. Rigid fasting, especially during Lent, accompanied by abstention? Probably. But what of the rest of the time? Give people an opportunity to let themselves go, and they will.
* * *
"Drink more, eat less. That's the best remedy for self-conceit and facile atheism. I mean, just look at a hiccuping atheist: grim-faced, unable to concentrate, ugly and tormented. Spurn him, the hell with him, and watch me when I hiccup, trusting in Divine Providence, without an antagonistic thought in my head; for I believe that He is good, and I too am good and blessed."
'Moscow Stations'
When Prince Vladimir of Kiev chose Orthodox Christianity as Russia's religion in the 9th century, he had a clear reason for doing so. The best alternative, Islam, forbad alcohol, and no Russian monarch could have physically survived such a ban. No surprise then that even the most severe and dogmatic Russian priest can often be seen knocking back his 100 g of vodka without so much as a "gospodi pomiluy" (God have mercy).
But then in rural Russia, where devout and often mystical belief goes hand in hand with vodka culture, what choice could there possibly be?
It doesn't always just stop at the odd tipple, though, however much the Church rails against alcoholism. In fact, drunkenness is as much a part of the church community as the community as a whole. It's not surprising when you think about the severe conditions, both physical and psychological, that many clergy and monks live and work in. With many of Russia's churches and monasteries in ruins and not providing warmth in winter, drinking can be sometimes the only way to get warm. Add to that the mental state of people in a community that is more concerned about physical and numerical strength than spiritual wellbeing, and you have another recipe for leglessness only slightly less potent than Yerofeyev's concoctions.
* * *
For all its power and influence, which transcends politics and religion as well as personal experience, alcohol is still only a facilitator. It is a key which opens the way to the Russian soul, to true love, friendship, hatred, violence and even war. Time to move on. Let's now use that alcoholic key in pursuit of friendship.
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