Free Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes by Caroline Walton, Ivan Petrov

flat has a toilet and running water. Olga’s parents give us a table and a bed. After a year my factory presents us with a place on the waiting list for a washing machine.
    My wife persuades me to take a course at a branch of Kuibyshev polytechnic in Stavropol. If I graduate I’ll be able to leave the shop-floor and work in the plant’s technical department. I prepare well for the entrance exams, going through a text-book of maths problems set by Moscow university. The evening before my exam we’re invited to a neighbours’ wedding and I drink more than I planned. My hands shake as I write the exam but I pass with a ‘4.’ Afterwards I have a few pick-me-ups, quarrel with Olga, and meet some friends who take me to stay with them in their hostel until the row blows over. It would have been churlish to abuse my friends’ hospitality by refusing a drink. I turn up for my next exam but can’t hide the fact that I am drunk. I say straight out to the examiners: “Yes, I’m drunk, but I came here to sit my exams instead of having a hair-of-the-dog. Ask away, and if I get the answers wrong, fail me.”
    The strangest thing of all is that I pass. However, I fail the essays. By the time I sit these I’m quite incapable of writing.
    Of course I drink a bit, especially on payday which my workmates and I celebrate wherever we can. We usually go to the barracks where there are several single women who are glad of some company. As the night wears on one or two of the lads might wander off home but few can bear to leave their battle stations. Although none of us is exactly an enthusiast for front-rank Soviet labour, our conversation centres around work - there is little else to talk about.
    Sometimes a wife turns up at the door, shouting and spoiling our party. Olga never humiliates herself this way, but she occasionally sends one of my more restrained friends to fetch me home.
    Lyokha follows me to Stavropol. He finds a job at my plant, and he and his wife move into a flat in our block. One Sunday I come home to find a crowd gathered in our courtyard. I push my way through. Lyokha is standing on his balcony, wearing only his vest and long-johns. A horse stands beside him. I recognise it as the sad old mare who pulls the beetroot-cart to the grocery store below. Wild-eyed and dishevelled, Lyokha is yelling to his wife: “Masha, Masha, come here sweetie! I want to introduce you to this fine stallion. Perhaps he can satisfy you, my dear? You might refuse me but not him, surely?”
    Lyokha’s wife emerges from the building and takes off down the road like a startled hare. The crowd swell, shouting their encouragement as Lyokha delivers a drunken speech on his wife’s coldness. The police arrive. The horse refuses to budge so the fire brigade have to be called to winch it down.
    Lyokha is sent to prison camp and his wife moves in with a local policeman.
    ***
    It takes a lot of vodka to make me drunk, so no one notices at work if I’m slightly the worse for wear. I start the day with a hair-of-the-dog, have a top-up at lunchtime and begin to drink in earnest in the evening. Vodka is my reward for a dangerous and boring job.
    When the government passes a decree against drinking in factory canteens we produce our own spirit on the shop-floor. This ‘syntec,’ as we call it, is made by pumping air through buckets of triethylphosphate. The acidity of carbon dioxide in the air separates ethyl alcohol from the phosphoric acid. Holding our noses and closing our eyes against the fumes we knock back our syntec in the showers and then leave the plant before the full effect hits us.
    In December a law is passed against public drunkenness. A boss, neighbour or relative can ring the police to report you. No further proof is needed. A whiff of alcohol on your breath is enough to get you locked up for 15 days. Alcoholics have become the new Enemies of the People. The thinking follows along these lines: a drunk ‘damages his human worth,’ so