The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
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Authors: Oliver Bullough
The Last Man in Russia
OLIVER BULLOUGH
THE LAST MAN
IN RUSSIA
The Struggle to Save a Dying
Nation
BASIC BOOKS
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NEW YORK
Copyright © 2013 by Oliver
Bullough
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books
Group
Published in 2013 in the United
Kingdom by Allen Lane,
an imprint of Penguin Books
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E-book ISBN: 978-0-465-07497-6
Contents
Introduction: We will bury you
1 They took our grandfather’s land
5 Reds admit ban of rebel priest
10 The K G B did their business
Introduction: We will bury you
Misha, a journalist friend, rang me
around noon on 1 January 2004. I
assumed he was calling to wish me a
happy new year. For Russians, New
Year is a more important holiday
than it is in the West. Presents are
exchanged and toasts drunk for
success in the year ahead. It is
normal to call or text friends if only
to laugh with them.
Misha, however, had something
different in mind. He had, I later
discovered from his girlfriend, been
drinking – with breaks only to pass
out – solidly for two days already,
and he went on to drink for two
more.
‘Oliver, listen, I need your help.
What is the meaning of the word
zombie hedgehog?’
He
was
speaking
Russian,
heavily slurred, but still intelligible.
He said the last two words in
English,
however,
and
clearly
wanted me to translate them. I was
baffled, and asked what he meant.
There was a pause at the other end,
then he swore at something or
someone in the room with him and
hung up. I waited for him to call
back, but he never did. When I next
saw him, a week or two later, he had
no recollection of the call and I
never did find out why he had
asked.
Misha had an alcohol problem.
On a trip to Chechnya a few months
later, we got up at around five-thirty
in the morning to be sure to arrive in
Grozny with plenty of time to work.
I had arranged that the hotel would
make breakfast for us early. I was
drinking tea and waiting for my eggs
when Misha walked into the dining
room. The waitress asked him what
he would like to drink, and he
looked around at me.
‘Do you want to drink?’
I shook my head. I needed it
clear to work.
‘Give me a bottle of brandy,’ he
told the waitress. She brought it,
with a single glass, on the same tray
as his breakfast. He drank it, shot by
shot, while he ate his fried eggs,
sausage and bread. He bought
another bottle as we were leaving.
By the time we reached the Chechen
border, he had drunk that too – a
litre of brandy before nine in the
morning – and insisted we stop for
vodka.
This is not one of those stories of
journalistic excess that end with the
drunkard doing his job despite being
barely coherent. (There is an
apocryphal Fleet Street photographer
who is said to have fallen off his
stepladder and still to have shot three
perfect frames before hitting the
ground.) No, Misha was by turns
abusive and sentimental as I tried to
get some kind of work out of the
day. By evening, he was comatose
and a few of us cobbled together
some material to send to Moscow
under his name.
Although this was an extreme
episode, it was not in itself unusual.
Many of my colleagues would drink
spirits when out of the office, and
managers across Russia have learned
to incorporate into their plans time
lost through drinking. The culture of
drinking is so entrenched that the
language has a multitude of words to
describe the different stages of
alcohol abuse. Z
apoi
means the kind
of multi-day bender Misha had
survived over the New Year.
Opokhmelitsya
is a verb meaning to
have a drink in the morning to
remove a hangover (it is a crucial
element of a
zapoi
, but exists in
other contexts too).
Peregar
is the
smell of alcohol from a mouth in the
morning.
This is a habit not only of the
destitute. Misha was a successful,
talented and well-paid journalist. He
and his colleagues drank in ways I
had
never
seen
before. And,
although Russian men do drink more
than women, this is not by any
means a uniquely male problem.
Anyone travelling to work on the
Moscow metro in the morning will
see well-dressed, made-up young
women drinking beer out of cans. In
Russia, buying alcohol is easier than
buying bread. Kiosks have whole
walls of vodka, which they sell for
as little as £3 for a half-litre.
While hiking in the wilds near
Siberia’s Lake Baikal, my brother
and I met a small group of fellow
outdoor enthusiasts and we decided
to camp together for the night. They
were the first people we had seen for
a couple of days, and we brought
out a bottle of vodka we had been
saving for just such an occasion. Our
offer was met not with alacrity,
however, but with scorn. One of the
group, a professor from a university
in Novosibirsk, explained, as if
talking to a child, how real hikers
behave. Real hikers watch every
gram they carry, he said. They have
no space in their rucksacks for such
indulgences
as
vodka.
I
was
wondering whether perhaps Tom
and I should find somewhere else to
camp, when he reached behind him.
‘This is what you need,’ he said,
drawing a brown bottle out of his
rucksack. It was what the Russians
c a ll
spirt
, pure alcohol. I saw his
point. If you want to get drunk, why
waste space carrying vodka – with
its 62.5 per cent of water – when
you can carry the same volume of
alcohol and get the water from a
stream?
The evening of the day when
Misha overdid it in Chechnya, we
were cooped up on a military base. It
was
then
illegal
for
foreign
journalists to travel in Chechnya
without an escort (this was both for
our protection and to stop us getting
any work done), and we had to be in
the barracks long before the sun set
and the violence started. Misha was
asleep but I was not, so another
journalist and I passed the hours
before
bed
chatting
to
Ilya
Shabalkin, a colonel who acted as
spokesman for the federal forces,
and a couple of other officers.
Shabalkin brought out a two-litre
bottle of Dzhelka, a cheap but not
undrinkable brand. I had contributed
a small bottle of Green Stamp, a
brand then fashionable in Moscow.
I quickly fell behind. How much
you can drink is a sign of your
masculinity, and Russians have a
multitude of sayings to ridicule
anyone who tries to stop early or to
skip a round (‘If you won’t drink
with us today, you’ll betray your
homeland
tomorrow’
is
one
example). Fortunately, foreigners
tend to be exempt, it being
understood that we are already
inferior. I could only watch as these
four men – three of them holding
high rank in the Russian armed
forces, and the other a successful
reporter – drained the bottles like an
ebbing tide. By the time I crept away
to bed, there were three empty
bottles on the table, and they had
started on a fourth. That is more than
six litres of vodka among five
people, one of whom was barely
drinking, on a weekday. And they
had not yet finished.
When Russians drink vodka,
they do not sip it, or mix it with
juice. They drink shot after shot,
each one followed by a quick bite of
gherkin or bread. Russian vodka
normally tastes chemical, like an
unsuccessful science experiment.
Unlike with whisky, wine or beer,
there is no effort to make the drink
itself enjoyable. It is a means to an
end, a vehicle to get you drunk. I
will drink vodka if I have to, but
rarely out of choice. When I can, I
drink beer instead, which means I
can usually remember the night’s
events the next morning.
Russians have always had a
reputation for drinking. One of the
first mentions of them in the
historical record features their king
rejecting Islam because of its
prohibition on alcohol. The average
Russian drinks three times the
volume of spirits drunk by a
German, and four times that of a
Portuguese, and that’s only the
official figures. No one has any idea
how much self-distilled moonshine
is drunk, but it must be a lot, for
every traveller in Russia has a story
about it.
I was once on an overnight train
from St Petersburg to Moscow. I had
bought the cheapest ticket, and was
one of eight passengers sitting bolt
upright in a dingy compartment as
the train crawled through a dark
forest. We had all brought beer to
drink, but the bottles were finished
now, and lay littered around our feet.
We were semi-drunk and morose,
staring ahead at the gloomy outline
of the person opposite.