‘We didn’t want to be on the margins of society any more. We had grown up and were feeling the need for self-fulfilment. We wanted to do something.’
‘A career!’ came a revealing shout from Vanya, Sasha and Masha’s younger son.
‘Some career!’ replied his father irritably. ‘Go to your room and shut the door. We wanted to fulfil ourselves professionally. We felt there was a lot we could do. We have strength, energy, taste, talent, and at last there was the long-desired freedom.’
They had their own bookshop and got work at Niezavisimaya Gazeta (‘The Independent Newspaper’). Sasha is a sought-after architect, literary critic and writer. He has published five excellent novels.
New friends appeared – literary people, journalists and artists – and the old ones no longer sufficed. They had abandoned the hippy world.
‘We left the system.’
(S) IS FOR . . .
Sistema – the system. That’s what they call themselves as a whole. The hippy community, the shaggy nation.
‘A few years ago they showed a documentary on television about a detox centre for drug addicts’, Masha tells me. ‘There was a long scene showing group therapy, and I recognized several of my friends among the patients. I hadn’t seen them for ten years. They were sitting in a circle in a large room. Shaggy, sad and motionless. And I had left them. I felt like the Indian girl who abandoned her tribe and went to join the white man’s society. She has a normal, comfortable life, she has a home, a car and a job, and suddenly she notices that her tribe is dying out. I cried like anything. The tribe has truly died out now.’
IS FOR . . .
Telega – the hippies’ main, legendary form of creativity. Literally it means a cart, a wagon, but for the shaggies it is a wonderful, sophisticated creative act. They talk of ‘driving the cart’ (gnat’ telegu), in other words being crazy, pretending to be mad.
The psychiatric hospital saved you from military service. You only had to be in there once to avoid ending up in army boots, so the hippies were eager to go there voluntarily. Just that once. An even safer method was to pull a minor but bizarre hooligan stunt, so you were arrested and then taken to the mental hospital.
‘There you took the state loony’s exam’, says sixty-year-old Bep, who was in the durka five times. ‘You had to pretend to be mad. You only had to say straight out what you thought about the Soviet regime, or demonstrate your religious belief. And if you were shaggy and ragged, like the antithesis of Soviet man, after just two weeks in hospital they wrote the desired phrase in your army registration booklet: “Unfit for military service even in time of war.” And if you made a really good loony, you got a pension. I managed to do it. They paid eighty-five roubles a month, which was enough to be free of poverty, be creative, do some reading and travelling. It was important not to be too good at it, or they might slap an indefinite sentence on you and lock you up in the hospital for years.’
Tusovka – a place where hippies gather, and also the group ascribed to it.
The first and biggest was in the centre of Moscow, on Pushkin Square, under the poet’s statue. The second was in the Moscow University park, but the most famous, magnetic place was the one just off Arbat Street, near the ‘Aromat’ cafe. This legendary, no longer extant tusovka was called ‘Babylon’. Altogether there may have been only about a thousand hippies living in the city, but even so they represented the largest group to be independent of Communist authority.
(U) IS FOR . . .
Urlak or urka – a word from criminal slang meaning a hooligan or street thug. Short for ugolovny element, meaning ‘criminal element’. This is the hippy’s eternal enemy.
They would come down to the city centre from the peripheral estates and neighbouring towns to ‘fuck up the shaggies’. They were tolerated, even encouraged by the militia and Communist youth organizations, who for twenty years had been incapable of eliminating the hippy plague.
‘That’s why the second generation of hippies was no longer as laid-back and peace-loving’, says Dan. ‘It’s hard to be a pacifist when you see them dragging off your girlfriend by the hair, kicking her and getting ready to rape her. We had to learn to fight.’
‘There were the druzhinnitsy too’, I say, meaning the volunteer militia helpers organized by the Komsomol.
‘They at least didn’t beat to kill. At the tusovka on Pushkin Square the “Beryozka” squad was in operation. There was no hippy who didn’t fall into their clutches. They had a huge card index with photos. Their headquarters was on a neighbouring street. Once they caught my friend, Jimmy. They booked him, and used some manual hair clippers to give him a buzz cut. So he picked up the hair, stuck it onto a hat and paraded about in that head gear for the rest of his life. One morning we begged a lot of money, so we bought several bottles of plonk each and drank it in the courtyard next to their headquarters.’
‘You must have gone mad!’
‘You may be right. And we decided to break into their place. We borrowed a saw from their neighbours to cut off the padlock. We made a terrible mess of the place, but we couldn’t get into the archive, because it was in a safe, so we made a big pile of all the papers and furniture, poured floor polish onto it and set it alight. There was an awful big fire. They were moved to another district.’
‘Did they catch you?’
‘No. But not long after that Jimmy jumped off a tower block’, says the old hippy, his voice faltering. ‘He drank a terrible lot. The freedom we were so eager to have can kill. A man who doesn’t do anything, but lives at the cost of others, debases himself. You have to give, not just take. I buried dozens of friends before I really understood that. I am one of the last survivors.’
Φ (F) IS FOR . . .
Fakatsya – to do something unpleasant. Put simply, to work. From the English word ‘fuck’.
So in order not to live at the cost of others, Dan models and fires vases, and Bep founded and has for some years been running a museum of Old Slavonic culture. He earns 12,000 roubles a month (£240) and has his lunatic’s monthly pension of 3500 roubles (£70).
Til handed me a small card that passes as his business card. Under his name it says: ‘Manager of the Ladybird Arts Theatre, poet, teacher, director, actor, artiste, playwright and musician.’
The Ladybird is a children’s theatre based at a cultural centre run by Til and his wife Irina.
Sasha and Masha have so many occupations they don’t know what to turn their hand to next.
Flet – a flat or apartment, from the English. Viktor Fedotov from Saint Petersburg, known in his youth as Molodozheniets (‘Young Husband’), because at the age of eighteen he had a wife and child, is a building contractor and is the only person featured in this chapter who doesn’t have long hair. He is a friend of Father Sergei, a hippy turned priest, whose new church he is building. Years ago, when Father Sergei used to go to Leningrad, like many of the Moscow hippies he used to stay at Viktor’s flat, because it was a famous, highly populated commune.
‘I had two anarchist friends’, Viktor begins his story. ‘In 1980 they were arrested for posting bills. The KGB also interrogated a girlfriend of theirs, who warned me that the boys had been caught. So I told everyone at our commune that we’d have to clean out the flat. They could put you inside just for having Solzhenitsyn, and we also had anarchist newsletters, foreign newspapers, banned Black Sabbath records and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. We finished cleaning up, and an hour later the secret police came thundering up to our flat.’
‘Did they find anything?’ I ask.
‘No. But my friends started asking me how I knew they’d arrested the lads and that there was going to be a search.’
‘That girl had told you.’
‘But I had sworn I wouldn’t tell anyone about her’, says Viktor, nervously looking for a cigarette. ‘She was making an academic career for herself at the university, and if it came out that she had warned me about the raid, the KGB would have destroyed her. She took a risk just
to save us. Everyone believed I must have been a traitor and that those two were in prison because of me. It was all a very clever psychological operation by the secret police. By undermining my honesty, they smashed up the whole group, they smashed up our commune. All the hippies moved out to get away from me, and the ones from other cities stopped coming to stay. So I was left all on my own in a flat where a crowd of seventeen hippies had been living. Not even my wife believed me. She took our four-year-old son and left. She refused to live with a traitor.’
After three years in prison both anarchists came out and explained that Viktor couldn’t have betrayed them because he hadn’t known anything about their activities. At this point his wife wanted to come back to him, but Viktor couldn’t get over the fact that she hadn’t believed him.
‘Do you know who was in charge of that operation?’ he asks me.
‘Well?’
‘Vladimir Putin.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘He was a young lieutenant, and in the Leningrad KGB he was responsible for informal youth groups’, says Viktor. ‘He called us in, and he conducted the interrogations in person.’
‘Did he ever hit you?’
‘Not once. There were others who beat us like devils – they broke my fingers, injured me and punched out my teeth, but he never even used swear words or threats. He has nothing to be ashamed of . . .’
‘You don’t say!’ I interrupt. ‘He ruined your life!’
‘My wife never got hers back in shape either. She’s alone, and our son grew up without a normal family. He’s thirty-one and he’s a drug addict. My one and only child. That man wrecked all our lives.’
(H) IS FOR . . .
Haik – hitchhiking, and a haiker is a hitchhiker, from the English.
This was the only way the hippies ever travelled. Sometimes they used the electric railway, the suburban trains that ran on short routes. In small jumps like that you could get right to the far end of the country, all the way to Vladivostok. It took about a month, because the hippies never had any money and didn’t buy tickets, so the conductor would throw them out at the next station, where they’d wait for the next train.
(CH) IS FOR . . .
Chornaya – black, because it is as black as death. This is another name for the home-made heroin concocted from boiled poppy straw. The hippies used to hitchhike to Kyrgyzstan for the best poppy seed, but the collective-farm fields were protected by armed guards, and a lot of young people died at their hands.
(SH) IS FOR . . .
Shiz – schizophrenia or a schizophrenic.
Viktor, Dan, Bep, Til and almost all the hippies who ended up in psychiatric hospitals were given the dissident’s diagnosis, which was ‘asymptomatic schizophrenia’. Only a psychiatrist could tell the person was sick.
After the collapse of the USSR the authorities admitted that the Soviet lunatic asylums were the site of political repression.
‘They said I was a victim of the regime, and they wanted to invalidate all the diagnoses’, says the indignant Bep, patriarch of the Russian hippies. ‘I went to hospital twice to make sure they wouldn’t change anything. That pension of mine may be small, but it is something. I have never worked in my life, because they wouldn’t give jobs to lunatics in those days, so who would employ me now? I told the doctors I don’t want to be rehabilitated, so I’m the last person to be suffering from an illness that doesn’t exist.’
‘Maybe you’d get some compensation’, I reply.
‘What do you mean? The authorities didn’t do it for the people’s sake – they only did it to pay out less pension money. The state is the worst evil of all. Both the old Soviet one and the one we have now.’
Sasha, Masha’s husband, was one of the few hippies in whom the Soviet psychiatrists identified a case of manic depressive psychosis, because he said that if they cut off his hair he would hang himself.
‘So just in case they never even took the cross off my neck’, says Sasha. ‘And they took them away from everyone else.’
‘Why did they take away their crosses?’ his son Vanya calls out from his room.
‘So the hippies wouldn’t hang themselves on the leather thongs.’
Sasha and Masha abandoned the world of the shaggies and began a new, free and affluent life in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
‘We left the hippy system’, says Sasha, ‘but ten years later we felt it was the best, most beautiful part of our lives. And those were the best friends we had. I wrote a book about it. On 1 June we went to a place outside Moscow where the hippies get together, because we have our special holiday then, on Children’s Day. We rediscovered Dan and some other old friends. We publish a cheap hippy journal, and every year we go to our festival in Ukraine.’
‘Do you hitchhike?’
‘We take the car’, says Sasha, embarrassed.
‘I’ll show you our oldovy car, so you won’t get the wrong impression!’ cries Masha, and drags me onto the balcony.
Down below, covered in snow, there’s a purple 1989 Zhiguli (the Russian name for a Lada), on which Masha has painted huge flowers.
‘And I’ve bought a Lazhik – the day after tomorrow I’m off to Vladivostok’, I boast, and my hosts’ eyes light up.
‘Oh, how I’d love to come with you!’ says the delighted Sasha. ‘I never got further than the Altai Mountains, and this is such an opportunity . . .What a haik . . .’
‘So then go. I’ll take care of everything at home’, says Masha, and for an hour she badgers him until he breaks.
‘I promised to get this project finished . . .’
‘Sod that’, says Masha, not giving up. ‘You can be on the road again.’
‘Do you want me to get thrown out of my job?’ Sasha shouts, causing Vanya to come running from his room.
For a long time no-one says a word.
Finally Masha breaks the silence.
‘Another hippy’s dead.’
Of course in the first stage supplies for people who settle on the Moon will be brought from the Earth. But it will be a very expensive pleasure. The value of a loaf of bread supplied to the Moon from the Earth will be as much as the same loaf would cost on Earth if it were made of gold. And so one of the first tasks will be to adapt the Moon to self-sufficiency. I think that by the twenty-first century this task will have been successfully realized.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
Mani drinking outside his block in the Marino area.
Rabid dogs
I was still in Moscow, waiting for my Lazhik jeep to be kitted out for my trip. The frost had made the vodka so thick it could barely trickle out of the bottle. In fact by now, according to the Report, an artificial sun with the power of a million kilowatts was supposed to be casting light and warmth over Moscow. There should have been only five million citizens, and no-one was meant to be hungry, no-one suffering from tuberculosis or cancer, no-one even tired, so there should have been hardly any need to sleep. There weren’t supposed to be any cars, snow on the streets or stinking rubbish chutes in the flats.
Only the final dream on this list has actually come true, and that only partially, because now it stinks in the stairwells.
DIRTY RAP – THE PERFUME FACTORY
Right now the first solid frost of the autumn is making me shiver.
We’re drinking in the bushes under a block that stretches 700 metres in a sleepy district of Moscow called Marino. We’re sitting on old tyres, and for a table we have a large wooden spool that once held electrical cable. This is a morning booze-up round the bonfire to celebrate Russian Militiaman’s Day. It’s Saturday, 10 November 2007, and one of us is a cop.
He’s a mate of Misha Naumov, otherwise known as Mani, a thirty-two-year-old rapper from the hip-hop band DOB, whom I have arranged to meet here. DOB is at the very bottom of the Moscow musical underground, so-called dirty rap (close to ‘gangsta rap’), which in this city is affectionately known as griazny riapchik.
&
nbsp; Although he plays the scumbag and the slob, Mani is extremely likeable. He’s the only person I know whose fingernails are black and bitten all at once. On top of that, his stubbly, battered face is blue from the vodka and the cold weather, he has some teeth missing and a skull and crossbones on his hat. Like any self-respecting rapper, he writes his own songs.
‘About the lads from the block, about my job replacing windows with plastic ones, about my wife and my little girl’, he says, and spits through the hole where a tooth has gone. ‘And I also sing about how Brindik from our band drugged himself to death, and about drinking with my mates on Militiaman’s Day.’
And along came this guy – he looked like a wuss,
But he had a bottle – so he was one of us.
He’s the first Polak – I ever seen
The guy is a writer – I slip him some skin.
As the rapper improvises, his friends tap out the rhythm on their bottles. Mani records his whole life on disk. He caused the biggest furore in the district with a rap story about some guests he had. One day Mani’s wife brought these two men home from work with her. One of them was English, the other a Czech.
‘That one spoke a bit of Russian’, says the rapper, ‘but the English guy didn’t know a single word. They ended up with us by accident, because my wife was chosen by lottery to host them. They lived with us for a week.’
‘And so?’ I enquire.
‘I treated them royally. To vodka and beer. They loooved it! They were planning to open a perfume factory in Moscow, and they wanted to see how the average Russian family lives and how their workers would relax.’
White Fever Page 5
