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

he should be locked up for the night in a special holding station, without medical help. After this he will take heart and emerge in the morning sober and ready to build our shining future. The cost of this service is knocked off his wages. That is the theory. In reality the police have to meet their targets of catching a certain number of drunks. They pick up anyone who has the slightest sniff of booze about them. They don’t bother the hardened drunks in town; there’s no point. They don’t work, so there’s nowhere to send the bill.
    I am sentenced as a Decembrist 14 when a neighbour reports me for banging on my door. I’ve lost my key and forgotten that Olga is at work. My trial lasts no more than a minute and the verdict is not subject to appeal. I do my time in a filthy police cell, deprived of tobacco and sleeping on the bare floor.

    On my release I’m summoned to a workplace meeting and branded as a stain on the honour of the collective. Party demagogues and careerists have free rein. My mates sit solemnly through my denunciation, knowing that any one of them could be standing in my shoes. Afterwards they take me out for a consolation drink.
    In an attempt to humiliate us Decembrists the plant erects a bottle-shaped booth and a metal cup by its gates. We are paid our wages through a little window in the side of the bottle. We have to stand in the cup while the entire workforce of the plant files past to the bus stop. Soon the bottle becomes a place where troikas assemble before running to the nearest vodka shop.
    ‘To hell with them all,’ I think as I sink even lower. I see no reason to stop drinking. Life will be no better without the bottle. Shops won’t suddenly fill with goods and the people around me won’t blossom into interesting companions. I find a thousand convincing reasons to get drunk. If the house is clean and tidy, that has to be toasted; if Olga nags me, I have to register my protest. If someone makes a rude or untrue remark about me, I drink to console my hurt feelings. Most often it’s my wife who is guilty of wounding my soul.
    Each time I overstep the mark I renounce the bottle for two or three months until my resolve crumbles. My periods of abstention convince me that I can leave the drink alone. Yet whether I am drinking or not I always have alcohol on my mind; I believe everyone has.
    I miss so much work that my plant threatens the sack. Olga wants me to have treatment.
    “I drink no more than anyone else,” I protest
    “Then why don’t you spend less time with your drinking-partners and take a correspondence course? With a few qualifications you might get a more interesting position where you wouldn’t want to waste all your time drinking.”
    “You must be mad if you think I’m going to spend my free time studying dialectical materialism. Just so I can swap my hammer and screwdriver for a phone and pen – and for what? To win the right to bark at my friends? Anyway, you’re a ‘professional’ but you earn less than me no matter how many abortions you perform.”
    “I sometimes wonder why I married you.”
    “Because if you hadn’t, you would have had to repay your debt to the state by going to practise your medical skills on some godforsaken collective farm. Not even your Party Papa could have saved you from that fate.”
    In the end I agree to seek treatment just to keep everyone quiet. Through her contacts Olga gets me into a psychiatric clinic. They give me three grams of a drug called Antabuse, followed by 30-40 grams of vodka. This cocktail takes my breath away. They revive me with oxygen and apomorphine, though not enough of the latter for my taste.
    With Antabuse in my system I keep off the booze for eight months. Our daughter Natasha is born and I stay at home caring for her while my wife works night shifts.
    ***
    In summer my family and I go to stay at the dacha at Studioni Avrag. The old folks are long dead but my Aunt Ira still livesthere with her husband