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

Dmitri Maslovski and their daughter. In the 1920s Uncle Dima inherited a large house in the centre of Kuibyshev. The upkeep proved too expensive so he sold it for the fabulous sum of half a million roubles. Thus the Maslovski family escaped poverty despite Uncle Dima’s alcoholism.
    One evening we discuss literature over dinner.
    “Dostoevsky,” I opine, “is old-fashioned. He uses too many words. In short, he’s boring.”
    Uncle Dima goes to the bookshelves and pulls out a set of ten volumes. “These are for you, Vanya. Dostoevsky’s collected works.”
    I read the books out of respect for my uncle, who was once rector of a college in Ukraine. They open my eyes: people in the last century lived their daily lives just as we do! If only Mitya Karamazov and Nastasya Filipovna were my brother and sister – how well we’d understand each other! What wild times we would have! The drunkard Marmeladov could be me! Remembering my childhood admiration for Robinson Crusoe, I wonder why people in books are so much more interesting than those in real life.
    ***
    I slip four boxes of codeine into my socks and a hot-water bottle full of vodka into my waistband. Then I cross into the prisoners’ zone where my old friend Lyokha is waiting at a pre-arranged spot. With a wink, he slips me some packets of sugar in return for my drugs. In town we don’t see sugar for months on end, but the prisoners can buy it in their camp shop. On the other hand we can get as much codeine as we want from our chemists without a prescription.
    I think Lyokha is unfortunate to have ended up behind barbedwire, but I feel no pity for the rest of the prisoners. They must have done something to earn their sentences, although I don’t blame them when they skive off work. No one likes working under the lash. There’s nothing to distinguish the prisoners from the rest of us except their shaven heads. We are warned to be vigilant but that is unnecessary for they keep to themselves.
    About half the inhabitants of Toliatti are former zeks 15 who were freed when Khrushchev revised the Criminal Code in 1961. Ex-cons differ little from the rest of us. We all hate Party activists. Anyone who hob-nobs with the bosses is a traitor. Perhaps in Moscow shop-floor workers drink with engineers and administrators but in the provinces, the bosses are our enemies. Arse-lickers are shunned by their workmates, leaving them with nothing else to do but build their careers.
    Lyokha is released after serving a year for hooliganism. Strangely enough, his wife leaves her policeman and returns to him. I ask Lyokha why.
    “Simple, Vanya. My exceptional virility is instantly apparent to women, and not only to my wife, but doctors, singers, any woman at all. I only have to talk to a tractor for five minutes and it starts to run after me.”
    “Vanya,” Lyokha calls one evening, “I’m on night-shift. Bring a bottle over to the office and get out of your wife’s hair.”
    I’m only too happy to comply with his request. The local shop is already closed so I stop off at a flat where Gypsies trade around the clock.
    Lyokha has taken a job as a phone engineer. I arrive at his office and we down the bottle between us. The vodka sets me free. I forget about my work, my wife and my leg. Just then itseems that no one understands me better than Lyokha.
    “You know, Lyokha, I can’t talk to Olga like I can to you. She is close to me, but after all, she is my wife. We know each other too well. I can guess what she’s going to say even as she opens her mouth.”
    “I know. I stopped reading poems to Masha after I married her. But never mind, Vanya, listen to this,” replies Lyokha, and hands me a set of headphones. He dials a number.
    “It’s the director of Plant No. 2,” he explains.
    When a man’s voice answers Lyokha says politely: “This is the telephone maintenance collective. How long is your telephone cord?”
    We hear the idiot waking his wife and sending her to fetch a