Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (38 page)

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

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.

When we moved to our Arbat apartment, Sashka would often be dragged home unconscious by friendly co-bottlers or kind passersby. Or Mom and Dad would fetch him from the nearby drunk tank. He spent nights in our hallway reeking so badly, our dog Biddy ran away howling. Mornings after, I sat by his slumped body, wiping blood from his nose with a wet rag, waiting for him to come to and teach me a ditty in his rich and poetic alcoholic vernacular.

I particularly remember one song charting the boozer’s sequence, its pungency alas not fully translatable.

From Dad I knew that two-hundred-proof industrial
spirt
(ethyl alcohol) was best drunk on the exhale, nostrils squeezed shut lest you choke on the fumes.
Samogon
I knew also from Dad, who sometimes distilled it in our small kitchen using Mom’s pressure cooker and high-tech lab paraphernalia pilfered from Lenin’s Mausoleum Lab.
Politura
(wood varnish) was clearly far grimmer stuff, and
odekolon
(cheapo eau de cologne) wasn’t exactly fruit compote either.

Sashka and his ilk drank many other things besides, in those lushy pre-Gorbachev years. Down the hatch went
bormotukha
(cut-rate surrogate port poetically nicknamed “the mutterer”),
denaturat
(ethanol dyed a purplish blue), and
tormozok
(brake fluid). Also BF surgical glue (affectionately called “Boris Fedorovich”), ingeniously spun with a drill in a bucket of water and salt to separate out the good stuff. Like all Soviet
alkanauts
, Sashka massively envied MIG-25 pilots, whose airplanes—incidentally co-invented by Artem Mikoyan, brother of Stalin’s food commissar—carried forty liters of the purest, highest-grade spirits as a deicer and were nicknamed the
letayushchy gastronom
(flying food store). That the planes crashed after pilots quaffed the deicer they’d replaced with water didn’t deter consumption.

As a kid I found nothing deviant or unpleasant about Sashka’s behavior. The best and brightest of Soviet arts, science, and agriculture imbibed likewise. Far from being a pariah, my limping, muttering uncle had a Ph.D. in art history, three gorgeous daughters, and a devoted following among Moscow intellectuals.

Our Russian heart, big and generous, reserved a soft spot for the
alkanaut
.

Lying dead drunk on the street he was pitied by women, the envy of men. Under our red banner he replaced Slavic Orthodoxy’s
yurodivy
(holy fool) as a homeless, half-naked prophet who roamed the streets
and spoke bitter truths. (Bitter—
gorkaya
, from
gore
, meaning grief—was the folk synonym for vodka.) For abstainers, on the other hand, our big Russian heart had nothing but scorn. They were despised, teased, goaded to drink, regarded as anti-Russian, antisocial, antispiritual—
Jewish
, perhaps!—and altogether unpatriotic.

And theirs was the poisoned cloak Gorbachev chose to march forth in.

The last time I saw Sashka was in the early nineties, when he came to visit us post-Gorbach in Queens. He spent
his
fortnight inside our Jackson Heights apartment, afraid to go into Manhattan lest skyscrapers fall on his head. During his stay, Grandmother Liza died. When he heard, Sashka guzzled the entire bottle of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur Mom had hidden in a cupboard, except for the bit I managed to drink too. He and I sat sobbing until Mom came home from work and we told her the news.

He died prematurely a few years later, age fifty-seven, a true
alkash
.

“Are you NUTS?” demanded the Moscow morgue attendant, when his daughter Dasha brought in the body. “Who brings in such unsightly cadavers? Beautify him a bit, come back, and then we’ll talk.”

My grandma Alla was a happier drunk.

Alla drank beautifully. She drank with
smak
(savor),
iskra
(spark), and a full respect for the rituals and taboos surrounding the
pollitra
. She called her
pollitra trvorcheskaya
—the artistic one—a play on
palitra
, the painter’s palette. I was too young to be a proper co-bottler, but I was hers in spirit. I soaked up vodka rituals along with grandmotherly lullabies. We were a land in which booze had replaced Holy Water, and the rites of drinking were sacramental and strict.

Imbibing solo was sacrilege numero uno.

Lone boozers equaled antisocial scum or worse: sad, fucked-up, sick
alkogolik
s.

“Anyutik, never—never!—have I drunk a single gram without company!” Alla would boast.

“Alla Nikolaevna!” Mom would call from the stove with deep parental reproach in her voice. “Any reason you’re telling that to
a four-year-old?”

When Alla drank with her girlfriends, she’d pour
limonad
into my own twelve-sided glass before apportioning vodka among real co-bottlers in exact fifty-gram rations.
Glaz-almaz
(eye sharp as a diamond)—the co-bottlers congratulated her pour.

Following their cue, I’d stare lovingly at my glass and bark an anticipatory
nu
(so) before the toasting commenced. Toasting was mandatory. Anything from an existential
“Budem”
(We shall be) to flowery encomiums for every dead relative. People from the Caucasus particularly excelled at encomiums.

Like the adults I’d exhale sharply—then tilt back my head. Down it all in one gulp, aimed right at the tonsils. Yelp
“Khorosho poshla”
(it went down well) and purposefully swallow an appetizer before properly inhaling again.

Drinking without a
zakuska
(a food chaser) was another taboo. Cucumber pickles, herring, caviars, sharp crunchy sauerkraut, garlicky sausage. The limitless repertoire of little extra-savory Russian dishes seems to have been created expressly to accompany vodka. In the lean post-war years Alla and the teenage Sergei grated onion, soaked it in salt, and smothered it in mayo—the
zakuska
of poverty. Men tippling at work favored foil-wrapped rectangles of processed Friendship Cheese, or a Spam-like conserve with a bucolic name: Zavtrak Turista (Breakfast of Tourists). Foodless altogether? After the shot you made a show of inhaling your sleeve. Hence the expression
zakusit’ manufakturoy
(to chase with fabric). Just one of the countless untranslatables comprehensible only to those who drank in the USSR.

Silence, finally, was also a despised drinker no-no. The Deep Truth found in a glass demanded to be shared with co-bottlers. In one of Alla’s favorite jokes, an
intelligent
(intellectual) is harangued by two
allkogoliks
to chip in to make three. (Rounding up strangers to split a
pollitra
was customary; co-bottling always required a quorum of three.) To get rid of the drunks, the reluctant
intelligent
hands them a ruble, but they insist that he drink his share. He does. He runs off. His co-bottlers chase after him halfway around Moscow.

“What … 
what
do you want from me now?” he cries out. “
A popizdet’
?” Obscene slang roughly translatable as “How about shooting the shit, dude?”