The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (2 page)

An old woman sitting by the

window stood up, rummaged around

in her bag on the luggage rack and

brought forth a two-litre plastic

bottle and a light-blue cup. Holding

up the cup, she offered us all a

drink. It was too dark to read, and I

was too uncomfortable to sleep, so I

agreed. So did everyone else. The

cup went up her row of four

passengers, crossed over to me and

came back down our side. We each

downed our share in a gulp, then

breathed through our sleeves to take

away the burn. The last man before

the window passed the cup over the

table and back to her, so she could

pour out some more.

It tasted like white spirit, but the

effect was spectacular, a rush of

well-being to the back of the head.

Conversation was kindled, and we

became rowdier as the light-blue

cup’s journey continued. Stopping

once I had started was apparently not

an option, and I got drunk very fast.

It was a relief when I saw the old

woman drink the last glassful. I had

not disgraced myself. No one could

say the foreigner had failed to keep

pace. That was when she stood up

again and reached to the luggage

rack, whence she pulled down a

jerry can.

She could barely manage it, and I

could hear the liquid sloshing

around inside. She rested it on the

table and carefully filled the bottle

up again before lifting the can back

on to the shelf. There would be no

escape. The drinking went on until I

passed out.

Something like that happens

every night on trains all over Russia.

Done once, it is an amusing

anecdote. Done daily and it is a

disease, and it is killing the nation.

Between 1940 and 1980, Russian

consumption of all alcoholic drinks

increased eightfold. The nation

decided, apparently as one, to go on

a huge
zapoi
, and the consequences

have been disastrous.

All across what is the Russian

heartland, old Muscovy, the land

where the Russians held out against

the Mongols, Napoleon and Hitler,

the

picture

is

of

destitution.

Thousands of villages are empty.

Thousands more are home to a

handful of pensioners, and will be

empty too within a couple of

decades. Some towns have halved in

population in twenty years. In 1950

– when Stalin was at his most erratic,

when the country was still half

destroyed by World War Two, when

terrible

sacrifices

were

being

demanded from the population –

births outnumbered deaths by 1.7

million.

In 2010, deaths outnumbered

births by 240,000, and that was the

best year for a couple of decades. In

1991, the country was home to

148.3 million people. In 2010, that

number had fallen to 141.9 million.

The Russian nation is shrivelling

away from within.

And it is not just that Russians

are not being born. Russians are

dying. The average Russian male

born in 2010 was calculated to live

less than sixty-three years. Russians

of both sexes taken together are

almost four times more likely to die

of heart disease than a Western

European, and more than five times

more likely to be killed by an

‘external cause’ – murder, suicide,

drowning, poisoning, car crashes.

The comparable countries for violent

death are Angola, Burundi, Congo,

Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Russia is not the only country

afflicted with a falling population. In

Italy and Germany, for example, the

average couple has fewer than two

children, which will inevitably lead

to

population

decline. Western

European women are reluctant to

have as many children as their

mothers.

Western

Europe’s

situation

causes problems of its own, not least

when it comes to affording the state

pension system, since people are

liv in g longer thanks to improving

healthcare

and

healthy

living

campaigns. The Russian situation is

far more serious, however. It is

driven by the death rate, and

overwhelmingly by the death rate

among

working-age

men. The

average Russian man will not live to

get his pension.

It is widely assumed that the

drinking and the population crisis

are a post-Soviet problem. It is true

that the problem accelerated with the

collapse of communism and the

extreme economic dislocation that

followed.

Inflation

wiped

out

pensions and savings, while factories

closed and threw millions of people

out of work. Russians drank to blot

out the times they were living

through. In truth, however, they

were drinking before.

The years of the late 1950s and

early

1960s

when

Nikita

Khrushchev led the Soviet Union are

little remembered today, but they

were the high point of the state’s

achievements and self-confidence. It

was not only people in Moscow who

believed the Soviet Union would

surpass the West in production and

living standards. People in the West

worried it would too. This was the

era when sputnik, Laika the dog and

Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Gary

Powers in his U-2 spy plane was

shot down over the Urals and it

seemed even the most advanced

American weapons were at the

Russians’ mercy.

Armies

of

state

employees

controlled the production of ever

greater

volumes

of

steel

and

armaments, all checked by legions of

statisticians. Soviet tanks stood

poised on the borders of West

Germany. Hungary’s attempt to

throw off Moscow’s dominance in

1956 was ruthlessly crushed. The

government could be forgiven for

congratulating

itself

on

its

achievements. The future was red.

Khrushchev, addressing Western

ambassadors in 1956, showed his

confidence and contempt with the

phrase ‘we will bury you’. Soviet

citizens would outlive their Western

rivals, and would dig their graves for

them.

It was an ironic boast because, if

Khrushchev had been alert and well

informed, he would have noticed a

worrying trend. At or around the

same time that Gagarin became the

first man in space – a triumph

Russians boast of to this day – the

Russian nation began to die out.

For a start, Russian women

stopped having enough babies to

maintain the population. For a nation

to sustain itself, the average woman

must have around 2.1 children.

From 1965, Russian women gave

birth to fewer than that. And that

was when Russians started to die

younger too. In the early 1960s, the

average Russian and the average

Austrian both lived for about sixty-

nine years. By 2005, the Austrian

was living for an extra decade and a

half, the Russian for four years

fewer.

I could speculate about why

Russians were drinking so much. I

wondered if it was a simple function

of availability. The Soviet Union

produced vodka, so Russians drank

it. But that is not a real answer. No

one drinks themselves to death just

because they can. When a whole

population takes to the bottle,

something far more serious must

have happened. Perhaps Russians

felt their destinies were out of their

control. The country was stagnant

and would remain that way for as

long as anyone could predict. If

tomorrow will be no better than

today, why not enliven today by

getting drunk?

But speculation was all I had.

Academics have largely overlooked

Russia’s 1960s and 1970s. There is

no decent biography of Leonid

Brezhnev, though he led the world’s

biggest country for close to two

decades. Nor is there a good book

about Yuri Andropov, though he

headed the K G B for almost as long

and took the top job too for a little

while. Ambitious young historians

look elsewhere to make their name.

These are years of stagnation and

decay, and far less sexy than the

times of Joseph Stalin, when the

Soviet Union was growing, or of

Mikhail Gorbachev, when it was

falling apart.

And there is another reason why

that period is little written about.

Although there are now detailed

studies of the life chances of

Russians, there was no equivalent

work in the Brezhnev years. The

Soviet Union produced millions of

bound copies of its leaders’ speeches

and thousands of novels proclaiming

how bright the future would be. But

it published no books asking why

the workers of the workers’ state

were anaesthetizing themselves to an

ever greater degree. The government

controlled publishing, and allowed

Russians to read only books that told

them how well off they were.

Even a book as plodding as
Dr

Zhivago

proved

electrifyingly

controversial for the Soviet state. Its

author,

Boris

Pasternak,

was

hounded to an early grave in 1960

for not conforming to the standards

expected of a Soviet novelist, and

for daring to have it published

abroad. Despite the treatment of

Pasternak, however, a small group

of writers insisted on writing their

own

way.

Smuggling

their

manuscripts abroad was their protest

against the state’s insistence on

obedience in all things. At that time,

creative endeavours needed state

approval, which meant these upstarts

had to be crushed. In a defining

moment, in February 1966, Andrei

Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two

writers who had published books in

the West, were put on trial to show

their peers that such independence

could not be allowed.

They were not pro-Western as

such, but they hated being stultified

by what was going on around them,

and their trial is symbolic of what a

whole

generation

was

going

through. ‘The cost of obedience was

a tension, an anxiety that only

increased as the years went by. He

was a born writer, not a soldier,’ one

friend wrote of Sinyavsky. Soldiers

obey, but writers question, and the

system would not tolerate questions.

The body of self-printed and

distributed literature –
samizdat
–

produced by these men and those

that followed is a crucial source for

what was going on beneath the

veneer of success that the Soviet

Union presented to the world. It was

here, for the lack of anything else,

that I began to look for the reasons

why Russians began to drink in such

quantities.

My research got me nowhere,

however. The dissidents’ concerns

were lofty and admirable – freedom

of speech, freedom to emigrate, the

right to a fair trial – but did not seem

the kind of thing to drive a mass

epidemic of alcoholism. Then I

found

a

book

by

Ludmilla

Alexeyeva, a veteran of the human

rights struggle who was forced into

exile in 1978. Perhaps because she

was living in the United States, she

took a broad view of the country,

and looked outside the capital.

She

wrote

how

Russians

everywhere had become depressed