One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough to blitz you for an evening – for about 40 pence. Most people wanted nothing more from alcohol than that it should anaesthetise them and help them forget, and vodka was ideal for this. Unlike whisky or brandy, you couldn’t crow over its ‘vanilla overtones’, its ‘hints of butterscotch’ or its ‘aged in the wood’ qualities. It simply got you drunk, no more, no less. And the bars served it that way: doled out, clinic style, in a measuring beaker.
Russia’s grannies, it seems, have a moonshine knack
The rules for drinking vodka were simple. You never did it without snacks – pickled cucumbers, little open sandwiches or the dried fish the locals loved but which I couldn’t stomach. If these weren’t to hand you at least had it with bites of black bread – if you couldn’t smell it, that told you your entire system, down to the nostrils, was now vodka-ized and you were getting dangerously drunk. Each slug of vodka should be followed with one of fruit juice or mineral water, to wash out the kidneys. You never drank straight from the bottle either. Journalist Vitali Vitaliev, an unsung poet of the liquid, said that a vodka-session without glasses was sheer barbarism, something no civilised human could contemplate, and more than one jamboree he knew of had got cancelled for this very reason.
Everyone in the former Soviet Union seemed to drink vodka in the 1990s – the twin Russian religions (and Estonian ones, and Polish ones, and dare I say it, Caucasian ones too) were literature and alcohol. If you could combine them, so much the better. I remember a long, poleaxed evening in Kazan where I sat with two female academics, both middle-aged and respectable, discussing Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Iris Murdoch and Joseph Heller over Moskovskaya vodka knocked straight back from shotglasses, till we were all slumped over and could barely get our words out. In Soviet times many vodka bottles had disposable caps – it was assumed no one could possibly open one without downing it at a sitting.
Vodka frequently featured in Russian literature too. The writer Tatiana Tolstaya advised that in the unthinkable situation there was no bread on hand to accompany the booze, you should smell your sleeve instead. For novices unsure of how to divide a bottle up (between three drinkers, say), it was, she said, simply a matter of listening to the sound as it came out: ‘In each half-litre bottle there are twenty-one ‘glugs’ and there are seven ‘glugs’ in a glass. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it will always be.’ Meanwhile, Vitaliev added intriguingly that though you might think a bottle was empty, there were still exactly 18 drops waiting to come out: ‘Not sixteen, not nineteen, but invariably eighteen. You can check it yourself. Some abstruse physical law is hiding inside those empty bottles.’
On my arrival in that part of the world, I fell deeply in love with vodka – before it became clear I and others were paying far too high a price for my new passion – and a bottle usually went with me on my travels. Back then producing one in company was a sign that, as a foreigner, you were OK, a good sort, and very few people would turn down a drink. I remember a fussy little businessman straight out of Gogol who joined our group of strangers on a train bound for St Petersburg. When I offered him some Smirnoff piertsovka (vodka flavoured with chillis) he squinted at me in disdain: ‘Certainly not!’ Within minutes he was consuming more than the rest of us put together, thrusting out his glass for more.
Even today, trains are the site of heavy drinking in Russia. The restaurant cars are, in my experience, frequently staffed by semi-alcoholics, whose standards of service nosedive as the journey continues. On a train from Tallinn to Warsaw in 1997, the waitress in the dining car became so paralytic, we had to put her to bed. Tucked up on the one of the train banquettes, she was soon snoring away peacefully, clutching in her pudgy hand, as I remember, a dried mackerel which had seen better days.
All reprehensible, of course, and couldn’t go on. Gorbachev, ten years before, had clearly felt the same way, trying to ban vodka or at least reduce drinking to harmless levels. But amid the closed vineyards and crippled vodka factories, there were endless stories of old ladies making and selling samogon, the Russian moonshine. Russia’s grannies, it seems, have a moonshine knack just as they have one for making chicken soup or knitting shawls. Brewing cheap alcohol was something useful they could do in retirement for the community, a way of continuing (in all senses) to serve.
It’s fatal of course to romanticise this kind of self-destruction, which ruins families, marriages, individuals and the economy. But it was fun while it lasted, a kind of flight, and while Russians have now replaced it with something different – gym memberships have soared, vodka sales plummeted – that old world, whose precarious fag-end I was fortunate to catch, had its own seedy glamour.
As for me, I’m old enough now to look at a bottle of Beluga, Three Birches or Green Label (all thriving vodka brands) and see nothing but madness and chaos in its depths. Vodka may look as innocuous as Evian, but don’t be deceived. It’s Crime, Punishment, the Devils and the Idiot all rolled into one.
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