Read Online Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes by Caroline Walton, Ivan Petrov - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Caroline Walton, Ivan Petrov
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through gauze into my skin. They make mosquitoes seem as harmless as butterflies. The only way to live in the taiga is to be like Shurka the Grouse-Catcher and take no notice of midge bites.
Winter comes as a relief, but by now my tobacco has run out.I nearly go insane. Thoughts of cigarettes fill my days and my dreams at night. I pull out all the butts that have fallen between floorboards. I remember a place near the river where I tossed a half-smoked cigarette three weeks ago. When daylight comes I go out and fill a bucket with snow from that spot. I melt the snow on the stove and strike lucky, fishing out the soggy butt, drying and smoking it. I’ve never enjoyed a smoke so much in my life, but within ten minutes I’m prising up floor-boards again
I grow bored with life in the deep taiga. Work takes up no more than two or three hours a day and there is nothing to do for the rest of the time. There are no books. I even miss the society of Akza.
I start to think more and more about my pen friend Olga Vorobyova in Chapaevsk. We’ve been corresponding since my college days. Olga is a pretty, down-to-earth girl. Most importantly, when I write to her about my leg she doesn’t seem to be bothered. Her letters are full of questions about my plans for the future. I begin to think about returning to a normal life. Perhaps I’ll ask Olga to marry me. With the money I’ve saved here I’ll be able to rent a room so we won’t have to live with our parents.
My three-year posting comes to an end, much to my relief. I leave for Vladivostock, saying say goodbye to my acquaintances in Akza – those that are left. Yablonsky has been rehabilitated and returned to Leningrad. I never manage to apologise to Kryuchkov. With the first signs of spring he died, as TB sufferers often do.
I reach Samarga and collect 120,000 roubles in pay. This is a fabulous sum. Back home it would take a factory worker several years to earn that amount. I stay in Samarga for two weekswaiting for the sea-route to open. The shop has run out of vodka but there’s a good supply of champagne. When he goes home for dinner the shopkeeper locks the medical assistant Ivan Ivanich and me in the shop and we continue to work through the bottles. In the evening we count the empties and I pay. There’s no other way to pass the time. The local women don’t appeal to me: after years of fish-gutting their buttocks sag so low they have to lift them up with their hands when they want to sit down.
In the morning before the shop opens I chat to the shopkeeper’s paralysed son. He listens open-mouthed to my tales of Riga and Moscow.
“But why do they build the houses so tall?” he keeps repeating. “Why do people want to live on top of each other?”
My hair hasn’t been cut for three years and local kids follow me around, jeering as though I’m some sort of hermaphrodite. My first stop in Vladivostock is a barber’s. After I’ve cleaned up I go to a restaurant and soon I’m sending bottles to every table. I’m overjoyed to be back in civilisation again and spend a riotous month celebrating the event. At least I have the foresight to buy my ticket home before I blow all my wages. I arrive back in Chapaevsk with a blinding hangover and 68 roubles in my pocket.
5 Kulaks were wealthy peasants who were shot or exiled to Siberia during the collectivisation period of the early 1930s.
6 Labour recruits were offered bonuses to work in Siberia for a minimum of one year.
7 The Udege are a Siberian people who live on the eastern seaboard of the Primorye region. In the 2002 census they numbered I,657. They were nomadic hunters until forcibly settled in the 1930s.
8 Dalstroi was the collective name of the northern Siberian camps.
9 This purge began after the murder of Kirov in 1934.
3
Decembrists
The 1960s
“Goosie, goosie, goosie!”
“Hee, hee, hee!”
“Ten by three?”
“Me, me, me!”
My workmates and I emerge from the shower-room in troikas. 10 One man
Winter comes as a relief, but by now my tobacco has run out.I nearly go insane. Thoughts of cigarettes fill my days and my dreams at night. I pull out all the butts that have fallen between floorboards. I remember a place near the river where I tossed a half-smoked cigarette three weeks ago. When daylight comes I go out and fill a bucket with snow from that spot. I melt the snow on the stove and strike lucky, fishing out the soggy butt, drying and smoking it. I’ve never enjoyed a smoke so much in my life, but within ten minutes I’m prising up floor-boards again
I grow bored with life in the deep taiga. Work takes up no more than two or three hours a day and there is nothing to do for the rest of the time. There are no books. I even miss the society of Akza.
I start to think more and more about my pen friend Olga Vorobyova in Chapaevsk. We’ve been corresponding since my college days. Olga is a pretty, down-to-earth girl. Most importantly, when I write to her about my leg she doesn’t seem to be bothered. Her letters are full of questions about my plans for the future. I begin to think about returning to a normal life. Perhaps I’ll ask Olga to marry me. With the money I’ve saved here I’ll be able to rent a room so we won’t have to live with our parents.
My three-year posting comes to an end, much to my relief. I leave for Vladivostock, saying say goodbye to my acquaintances in Akza – those that are left. Yablonsky has been rehabilitated and returned to Leningrad. I never manage to apologise to Kryuchkov. With the first signs of spring he died, as TB sufferers often do.
I reach Samarga and collect 120,000 roubles in pay. This is a fabulous sum. Back home it would take a factory worker several years to earn that amount. I stay in Samarga for two weekswaiting for the sea-route to open. The shop has run out of vodka but there’s a good supply of champagne. When he goes home for dinner the shopkeeper locks the medical assistant Ivan Ivanich and me in the shop and we continue to work through the bottles. In the evening we count the empties and I pay. There’s no other way to pass the time. The local women don’t appeal to me: after years of fish-gutting their buttocks sag so low they have to lift them up with their hands when they want to sit down.
In the morning before the shop opens I chat to the shopkeeper’s paralysed son. He listens open-mouthed to my tales of Riga and Moscow.
“But why do they build the houses so tall?” he keeps repeating. “Why do people want to live on top of each other?”
My hair hasn’t been cut for three years and local kids follow me around, jeering as though I’m some sort of hermaphrodite. My first stop in Vladivostock is a barber’s. After I’ve cleaned up I go to a restaurant and soon I’m sending bottles to every table. I’m overjoyed to be back in civilisation again and spend a riotous month celebrating the event. At least I have the foresight to buy my ticket home before I blow all my wages. I arrive back in Chapaevsk with a blinding hangover and 68 roubles in my pocket.
5 Kulaks were wealthy peasants who were shot or exiled to Siberia during the collectivisation period of the early 1930s.
6 Labour recruits were offered bonuses to work in Siberia for a minimum of one year.
7 The Udege are a Siberian people who live on the eastern seaboard of the Primorye region. In the 2002 census they numbered I,657. They were nomadic hunters until forcibly settled in the 1930s.
8 Dalstroi was the collective name of the northern Siberian camps.
9 This purge began after the murder of Kirov in 1934.
3
Decembrists
The 1960s
“Goosie, goosie, goosie!”
“Hee, hee, hee!”
“Ten by three?”
“Me, me, me!”
My workmates and I emerge from the shower-room in troikas. 10 One man
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