White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  Bep, the patriarch, who at sixty is the oldest living Russian hippy, has five children with his first wife and two with his second. Both women were hippies.

  ‘The first one’, he tells me, ‘was a great, seventeen-year love, which was destroyed by capitalism after the collapse of the USSR. Everyone thought it was the beginning of history and that a time of plenty was coming, prosperity and wealth. Like all Russian women, my wife fell into the trap of materialism and said I had to start a business, and that hippieness was nonsense and passé. She threw me out of the house.’

  ‘Because you weren’t earning?’

  ‘It was enough for food.’

  He married for the second time in 2001. He was fifty-three, and his new bride was his student at the University of Hippy Culture that the shaggies had founded.

  ‘What’s it like having a hippy for a father?’

  ‘Shameful. The Russians despise us. To them we are victims of fate who are incapable of earning a living. For the children a father like that is a source of shame.’

  (D) IS FOR . . .

  Durka – short for durdom, ‘house of fools’, a lunatic asylum or psychiatric hospital.

  In the USSR from 1967 to 1987 for political reasons more than two million people were regarded as mentally ill and were subjected to treatment.

  The career of most hippies began with the durka. Bep was there five times.

  ‘For us they were sanctuaries’, he says, ‘sacred places where along with the patients they locked up the dissidents, die-hard intellectuals, hippies and whole crowds of unusual people whom Soviet psychiatry regarded as lunatics. I was in there with the folk singer Volodya Vysotsky, with a guy who hijacked a steamroller and swanned around Moscow in it, and there was another guy who broke into a kiosk selling beer and spent all night carrying the beer home in buckets. He had filled the bath and the fish tank by the time they caught him next morning. In 1989 I met a completely normal artist in the durka who had made a banner saying ‘Communists Out of Afghanistan!’ and hung it from the balcony.’

  ‘Whose balcony?’

  ‘His own.’

  ‘Then he was a loony! Are you surprised they hauled him off to the funny farm?’

  ‘But he’d been there for ten years by then. When I left, they were still keeping him there. Thanks to people like that there was an unusual artistic spirit in there, more genuine than at liberty. There was no duplicity, hypocrisy or conformism, because inside the durka there was nothing to be afraid of. It was the only place where I could be myself – that’s where our movement was born.’

  (ZH) IS FOR . . .

  Zholty dom – the yellow house.

  ‘That’s another hippy name for the loony bin’, says Bep. ‘But lately the craziest place was Bulgakov’s house on the Sadovoye Koltso road.’

  At the end of the century a quasi-documentary film was made in Moscow about the hippy communes, for which the film-makers rented a large, burned-out flat in the writer’s house. The actors were real hippies, and their task was to live there in their usual style for a year. But once the filming was finished they showed absolutely no desire to move out. Every few days the militia evicted them by force, but they kept coming back and carrying on as before, drinking, getting stoned, listening to music, scrawling on the walls, dying, making love . . .

  ‘It’s scary to think what was going on in there’, says Bep. ‘It was vital to give them something to do, so Til, who had been living there with a hundred other shaggies for almost four years, decided to found the University of Hippy Culture. He found twelve tutors who gave classes on theatre, literature, history of art, religion . . . I lectured on the aesthetics of poverty and the philosophy of hippyism with elements of psychology.’

  They soon had an audience flocking in through the doors and windows: scholars, students, militiamen, tramps, film-makers and literary folk – the flower of the Moscow intelligentsia, and journalists from all over the world.

  Til gave lectures on the theory of madness and workshops on going out of your mind. He taught how to go mad on a given topic, and how to go crazy without being sick or feeling ill.

  I’m sure Til is exactly that sort of lunatic. He doesn’t suffer because of it – instead he cultivates his madness as a source of happiness.

  ‘At the lectures, I used to change my state of awareness in full view of everyone’, he tells me. ‘I used to tear my shirt, and people saw a real madman.’

  ‘You can swig booze or do drugs and you’ll change your state of awareness too’, I said cleverly.

  ‘I do not indulge in those practices’, he replied, looking disgusted. ‘That’s easy, primitive and uninteresting. Of course, like any hippy I’ve tried drugs, but I don’t need them.’

  The militia broke up the university after two years of activity.

  (Z) IS FOR . . .

  Zabivat’ – to roll a joint, make a spliff with marijuana.

  In the Soviet era the militia itself very often planted drugs on the hippies. Just a single gram of marijuana could get you two years in prison.

  (I) IS FOR . . .

  Ishnyaga – home-made heroin prepared from an extract of poppy straw to drink or inject.

  IS FOR . . .

  Klikukha – from the general slang word klichka, meaning a nickname or tag.

  ‘Til’, or properly ‘Till’, is the German folk figure Till Eulenspiegel, prankster, trickster and clown. The character was created in Germany in the early sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth his adventures were described by a Belgian writer called Charles De Coster. Til got this nickname from the old hippies twenty-four years ago, just after school, when he was eighteen and they accepted him into their circle. They could not have known that in another ten years or so the lad would become a skomorokh, or folk clown. Troupes of these professional clowns used to wander about Russian before the October Revolution.

  In the first few years after his marriage Til supported his family on appearances in the suburban railway. Day by day, in his clown’s costume he played the flute for the passengers, sang, performed tricks, improvised sketches and involved the public in his show. He is even Til for his own small children. Whenever he travels on the metro he plays his flute just for pleasure. He is never parted from it.

  The nickname Bep, or John the Baptist, came from his endless religious quest. Finally he chose paganism.

  Kaif – something wonderful. A mysterious Russian concept. A strange state of mind, a sense of happiness, fulfilment and equilibrium . . . The word comes from Turkish, into which it passed from Arabic. It was probably brought to Russia by the Crimean Tatars. For the Russians, kaif is often provided by a distant journey: the infinite yonder, a snowstorm, a mouth organ and vodka, which preserves and prolongs this state. For hippies kaif is quite simply drugs.

  Anyone who didn’t do kaif was not ‘one of us’. He was shady, suspect, maybe a secret police plant.

  In the USSR drugs began with ephedrine, a psychostimulant obtained from cough mixture on sale at the pharmacy for seven kopecks without a prescription. In the oral form the drug was called mulka and the intravenous version was dzhez (‘jazz’).

  To this day, every summer the hippies go south for marijuana and hashish. The best in the world is in the Chuy Valley on the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In that one valley alone 138,000 hectares of Indian hemp grows to the height of a man.

  Until 1978 morphine could be bought in Russia on ordinary prescriptions, which the hippies used to steal from doctors and write out for themselves. In 1980 the drug addicts discovered a way of concocting home-made heroin out of poppy seed.

  ‘Terrible, merciless, treacherous filth,’ says Dan, the ceramicist, who injected his second wife with it. ‘Because if I drink vodka when I have pain in my soul, it just makes me feel worse, the suffering’s even greater, but after heroin all problems really do disappear. One shot and it’s all right. That’s how I got hooked. For many years.’

  (L) IS FOR . . .

  Lomka – b
reaking, smashing, and for drug addicts it means going cold turkey, withdrawal syndrome.

  There are four million drug addicts in Russia. Like most of the heroin users, Dan has black, terribly damaged teeth.

  ‘But I gave it up when I married for the third time. She knew she was marrying an addict. I did it for her, and out of fear, because my friends were dying one after another.’

  ‘How did you come off it? In the loony bin?’

  ‘No, just with my wife. I shut myself up at a dacha out of town and spent a month on the spot in agonies. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I didn’t think, I just swayed, howled and shat myself like an animal. I hit the bottom. I know I won’t get caught again – for fear of coming off it. But there’s a problem with alcohol.’

  ‘Now you drink?’

  ‘Now if I go on a bender, I shoot up once and stop drinking. Then I shoot up again, and I’m off the drink.’

  ‘You’re mad!’ I clapped my hand to my forehead. ‘You’re using heroin to help you fight vodka! Whichever of them wins, you’ll be the loser.’

  ‘That’s what my wife said too. She took my daughters and left a month ago. We were together for eighteen years. I’ve lost everything.’

  IS FOR . . .

  Mient – a cop. General slang word for a militiaman.

  According to Til, the militia is worse nowadays than in the Soviet era. In those days they lived in fear of the top brass, so they preferred not to beat up even hippies without permission. Broken arms, legs, ribs, cracked skull and knocked-out teeth – most of these things happened to Til after the collapse of the USSR.

  ‘I kept getting beaten up all the time, so I learned how to avoid it. Very often a plain old joke, a bit of humour will work on a furious cop. I’m a past master at it.You have to tear the universal hatred from his heart and see the human being in him.’

  In the 1980s a book called Til and the Militiamen, about his unusual adventures with the police officers, started to be compiled. Each incident was described by a different author who witnessed it. It was never published or finished, because new stories were always being added, but you could read it on the Internet.

  ‘Lately the militiamen often mistake me for a Caucasian Mujahidin. It’s the long beard and hair, and when it’s cold I tie my long scarf around my waist . . .’

  ‘Why do you wrap your scarf around your stomach, Til?’ I asked, and I got what I deserved, because he talked about it for an hour and a half, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. Then he continued: ‘I can’t have a peaceful kip on a park bench because immediately someone prods me, and I see militia caps above me. They ask what I’ve got on my stomach. I reply that it’s a scarf, and they say: what’s under the scarf? So I slowly take it off, and they jump on me, slap handcuffs on me, summon the bomb squad and evacuate the citizens from the park.’

  In Til’s district all the militiamen know him, and the new ones are warned not to argue with the strange man who plays chess against himself on an invisible board, with invisible pieces.

  (N) IS FOR . . .

  Nakolka – in dictionary terms it’s a fastener, a clip or clasp, and in hippy language it’s a bed for the night, an address where you can stay in a foreign city.

  Once the weather warmed up, the hippies would set off on the road. The shaggies from Moscow went to Leningrad, and the Leningrad ones went to Moscow. From 1978 illegal hippy festivals were organized in Latvia or Estonia in the summer, so you had to show up there too. After that you had to go south. Best of all to Crimea, where you could sleep on the beach, and the wine was cheap as chips. And better yet to Central Asia, to stock up on hemp and poppy seed.

  They also travelled aimlessly. On a map of the vast Land of Soviets they would choose the remotest city they could find and set off towards it.

  Before leaving they would collect addresses from their friends of places where they could stay the night on the way. There was a great big hippy accommodation system. In any of the larger cities there was either a shaggy or a commune, and if you didn’t have an address, it was enough to accost the first hairy guy you ran into. In the cities the hippies never had to sleep out in the open.

  IS FOR . . .

  Oldovy – an old hippy, from the English word old.

  All the heroes of this chapter are oldovy, but not because of their age. An oldovy hippy may be twenty-two, but he is an authority, a leader in the very feebly hierarchical hippy community, which is based on freedom.

  The most oldovy of all was Yura ‘The Sun’ Burakov, whom the girls called ‘Sunshine’ and who was regarded as the first Soviet hippy. He is the author of the saying that ‘by killing yourself you’re destroying the Soviet Union’. He took drugs and drank a terrific amount, and all the hippies believed that really was the way to have a revolution.

  The Sun died in 1989 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was forty-six.

  (P) IS FOR . . .

  Perenta – parents, from the English word of the same meaning.

  Most hippies left home and ended up on the streets straight after coming of age, in other words after finishing the compulsory tenth year at school.

  ‘I left home without saying goodbye and only got in touch with them seven years later’, Dan tells me. ‘That is, I called. I didn’t even take anything with me. What would I take? Everything my parents ever bought me was embarrassing. What the hell did I need a suit for?’

  ‘Didn’t you love your parents?’

  ‘I did, but I had to get free. They spent a very long time looking for me, until they found out from the militia where I was and what I was doing. They were terribly upset. Most of all about my time in prison and the loony bin.’

  Masha Remizova, known as ‘Mata Hari’, and Sasha Dialtsev, known as ‘Pessimist’, are a hippy married couple who have been together for twenty-five years. In this respect they are unique, and uniquely, rather than using their nicknames people say ‘Masha and Sasha’ in a single breath, because they’re always together.

  Sasha moved out of home after the third year of studies at the Architecture Institute, when to his parents’ dismay he married Masha, who was also a hippy.

  ‘Sasha’s mum said she’d rather her son were an alcoholic’, Masha tells me. ‘For us a drunk is a normal thing, but she was terribly ashamed of a hairy hippy. What she found shameful was his appearance, the militia calling at the house and letters sent to her workplace, saying that her son took part in illegal, hooligan gatherings. They sent something like that when the Moscow shaggies got together after the murder of John Lennon to commemorate him, and the cops nicked us.’

  Prikid – clothes.

  ‘Did you have a pair of jeans?’ I ask Sasha.

  ‘Yes, I did. Mum brought me some in 1979 from a business trip to Poland. I can’t remember the brand name.’

  ‘Not many people could afford to buy jeans in this country because you could only get them from the profiteers and they cost a fortune. Two hundred roubles! That was a teacher’s whole monthly salary. But they were the height of elegance, especially when they were covered in patches after years of wear.’

  ‘I never wore jeans’, Masha puts in.

  ‘The hippies didn’t have enough money for Western trousers, so we used to make them ourselves out of tarpaulin’, says Sasha. ‘Flared, of course, bell-bottoms. I’ve still got a pair. Worn with a flowery shirt, a shoulder bag, sandals, and a headscarf or a hairatnik – that’s what we used to call an Indian headband, from the English word “hair”. But real hippieness relies on making everything by hand. Even more important is not to be a tramp, in spite of being poor. Never to be dirty or stinky.’

  They called this ‘the aesthetics of poverty’.

  To be a real, 100 per cent hippy you only had to meet three conditions – to travel, take drugs and wear fenechki, bracelets made of beads or bits of coloured string. This was the identification badge and ornament of all Soviet hippies. Even more important than a peace symbol, which they called a patsifik.

  None of the
characters in this chapter wears fenechki nowadays.

  (R) IS FOR . . .

  Rassekat’ – to cut precisely, break or chop, and in hippy language it means to roam, wander, or drift aimlessly, just to kill time.

  It was a wise man who named Sasha ‘Pessimist’. For a hippy, he’s bloody serious and principled. On principle he never took money from his parents, although he and Masha hadn’t enough to eat, on principle he never cheated money out of people in the street because he was ashamed to, and his pride wouldn’t let him, and on principle a year before finishing his studies he blatantly withdrew from the Komsomol – the Communist youth organization.

  ‘It was clear I’d be kicked out of college’, he says, ‘so to make sure they didn’t put me straight in the army I spent two weeks in the mental hospital and got my lunatic’s papers.’

  Also on principle he never wasted time on a bench under the statue of Pushkin. He says hippies like that are common, but he’s genuine and went to college, and when he was thrown out in 1983, he got a job.

  The only jobs the shaggies found acceptable were as janitors and night watchmen. Sasha preferred the latter, because there was nothing to do but sit and read books. And Sasha even wrote too.

  He earned seventy roubles a month. That was what a dealer charged for a single Pink Floyd record. He and Masha rented their flat for forty roubles a month. She was a student, so they only ate bread and margarine, pasta and buckwheat. So did their child. They made their own clothes.

  In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, Sasha went back to college and finished his degree. He was thirty years old. He was tired of idleness, poverty, killing time and the whole hippy lifestyle.