The Last Man in Russia
OLIVER BULLOUGH
THE LAST MAN
IN RUSSIA
The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
BASIC BOOKS
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NEW YORK
Copyright © 2013 by Oliver Bullough
Published by Basic Books,
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Published in 2013 in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane,
an imprint of Penguin Books
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E-book ISBN: 978-0-465-07497-6
Contents
Introduction: We will bury you
SUMMER
1They took our grandfather’s land
2A double-dyed anti-Soviet
3Father Dmitry was K-956
4The generation of change
5Reds admit ban of rebel priest
6They behaved like free men
7Ideological sabotage
WINTER
8It’s like a plague
9The unworthy priest
10The K G B did their business
11I look at the future with pessimism
12They don’t care any more
SPRING?
13Making a new generation
Postscript
Sources and Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction: We will bury you
Misha, a journalist friend, rang me around noon on 1 January 2004. I assumed he was calling to wish me a happy new year. For Russians, New Year is a more important holiday than it is in the West. Presents are exchanged and toasts drunk for success in the year ahead. It is normal to call or text friends if only to laugh with them.
Misha, however, had something different in mind. He had, I later discovered from his girlfriend, been drinking – with breaks only to pass out – solidly for two days already, and he went on to drink for two more.
‘Oliver, listen, I need your help. What is the meaning of the word zombie hedgehog?’
He was speaking Russian, heavily slurred, but still intelligible. He said the last two words in English, however, and clearly wanted me to translate them. I was baffled, and asked what he meant. There was a pause at the other end, then he swore at something or someone in the room with him and hung up. I waited for him to call back, but he never did. When I next saw him, a week or two later, he had no recollection of the call and I never did find out why he had asked.
Misha had an alcohol problem. On a trip to Chechnya a few months later, we got up at around five-thirty in the morning to be sure to arrive in Grozny with plenty of time to work. I had arranged that the hotel would make breakfast for us early. I was drinking tea and waiting for my eggs when Misha walked into the dining room. The waitress asked him what he would like to drink, and he looked around at me.
‘Do you want to drink?’
I shook my head. I needed it clear to work.
‘Give me a bottle of brandy,’ he told the waitress. She brought it, with a single glass, on the same tray as his breakfast. He drank it, shot by shot, while he ate his fried eggs, sausage and bread. He bought another bottle as we were leaving. By the time we reached the Chechen border, he had drunk that too – a litre of brandy before nine in the morning – and insisted we stop for vodka.
This is not one of those stories of journalistic excess that end with the drunkard doing his job despite being barely coherent. (There is an apocryphal Fleet Street photographer who is said to have fallen off his stepladder and still to have shot three perfect frames before hitting the ground.) No, Misha was by turns abusive and sentimental as I tried to get some kind of work out of the day. By evening, he was comatose and a few of us cobbled together some material to send to Moscow under his name.
Although this was an extreme episode, it was not in itself unusual. Many of my colleagues would drink spirits when out of the office, and managers across Russia have learned to incorporate into their plans time lost through drinking. The culture of drinking is so entrenched that the language has a multitude of words to describe the different stages of alcohol abuse. Zapoi means the kind of multi-day bender Misha had survived over the New Year. Opokhmelitsya is a verb meaning to have a drink in the morning to remove a hangover (it is a crucial element of a zapoi, but exists in other contexts too). Peregar is the smell of alcohol from a mouth in the morning.
This is a habit not only of the destitute. Misha was a successful, talented and well-paid journalist. He and his colleagues drank in ways I had never seen before. And, although Russian men do drink more than women, this is not by any means a uniquely male problem. Anyone travelling to work on the Moscow metro in the morning will see well-dressed, made-up young women drinking beer out of cans. In Russia, buying alcohol is easier than buying bread. Kiosks have whole walls of vodka, which they sell for as little as £3 for a half-litre.
While hiking in the wilds near Siberia’s Lake Baikal, my brother and I met a small group of fellow outdoor enthusiasts and we decided to camp together for the night. They were the first people we had seen for a couple of days, and we brought out a bottle of vodka we had been saving for just such an occasion. Our offer was met not with alacrity, however, but with scorn. One of the group, a professor from a university in Novosibirsk, explained, as if talking to a child, how real hikers behave. Real hikers watch every gram they carry, he said. They have no space in their rucksacks for such indulgences as vodka. I was wondering whether perhaps Tom and I should find somewhere else to camp, when he reached behind him.
‘This is what you need,’ he said, drawing a brown bottle out of his rucksack. It was what the Russians call spirt, pure alcohol. I saw his point. If you want to get drunk, why waste space carrying vodka – with its 62.5 per cent of water – when you can carry the same volume of alcohol and get the water from a stream?
The evening of the day when Misha overdid it in Chechnya, we were cooped up on a military base. It was then illegal for foreign journalists to travel in Chechnya without an escort (this was both for our protection and to stop us getting any work done), and we had to be in the barracks long before the sun set and the violence started. Misha was asleep but I was not, so another journalist and I passed the hours before bed chatting to Ilya Shabalkin, a colonel who acted as spokesman for the federal forces, and a couple of other officers. Shabalkin brought out a two-litre bottle of Dzhelka, a cheap but not undrinkable brand. I had contributed a small bottle of Green Stamp, a brand then fashionable in Moscow.
I quickly fell behind. How much you can drink is a sign of your masculinity, and Russians have a multitude of sayings to ridicule anyone who tries to stop early or to skip a round (‘If you won’t drink with us today, you’ll betray your homeland tomorrow’ is one example). Fortunately, foreigners tend to be exempt, it being understood that we are already inferior. I could only watch as these four men – three of them holding high rank in the Russian armed forces, and the other a successful reporter – drained the bottles like an ebbing tide. By the
time I crept away to bed, there were three empty bottles on the table, and they had started on a fourth. That is more than six litres of vodka among five people, one of whom was barely drinking, on a weekday. And they had not yet finished.
When Russians drink vodka, they do not sip it, or mix it with juice. They drink shot after shot, each one followed by a quick bite of gherkin or bread. Russian vodka normally tastes chemical, like an unsuccessful science experiment. Unlike with whisky, wine or beer, there is no effort to make the drink itself enjoyable. It is a means to an end, a vehicle to get you drunk. I will drink vodka if I have to, but rarely out of choice. When I can, I drink beer instead, which means I can usually remember the night’s events the next morning.
Russians have always had a reputation for drinking. One of the first mentions of them in the historical record features their king rejecting Islam because of its prohibition on alcohol. The average Russian drinks three times the volume of spirits drunk by a German, and four times that of a Portuguese, and that’s only the official figures. No one has any idea how much self-distilled moonshine is drunk, but it must be a lot, for every traveller in Russia has a story about it.
I was once on an overnight train from St Petersburg to Moscow. I had bought the cheapest ticket, and was one of eight passengers sitting bolt upright in a dingy compartment as the train crawled through a dark forest. We had all brought beer to drink, but the bottles were finished now, and lay littered around our feet. We were semi-drunk and morose, staring ahead at the gloomy outline of the person opposite.
An old woman sitting by the window stood up, rummaged around in her bag on the luggage rack and brought forth a two-litre plastic bottle and a light-blue cup. Holding up the cup, she offered us all a drink. It was too dark to read, and I was too uncomfortable to sleep, so I agreed. So did everyone else. The cup went up her row of four passengers, crossed over to me and came back down our side. We each downed our share in a gulp, then breathed through our sleeves to take away the burn. The last man before the window passed the cup over the table and back to her, so she could pour out some more.
It tasted like white spirit, but the effect was spectacular, a rush of well-being to the back of the head. Conversation was kindled, and we became rowdier as the light-blue cup’s journey continued. Stopping once I had started was apparently not an option, and I got drunk very fast. It was a relief when I saw the old woman drink the last glassful. I had not disgraced myself. No one could say the foreigner had failed to keep pace. That was when she stood up again and reached to the luggage rack, whence she pulled down a jerry can.
She could barely manage it, and I could hear the liquid sloshing around inside. She rested it on the table and carefully filled the bottle up again before lifting the can back on to the shelf. There would be no escape. The drinking went on until I passed out.
Something like that happens every night on trains all over Russia. Done once, it is an amusing anecdote. Done daily and it is a disease, and it is killing the nation. Between 1940 and 1980, Russian consumption of all alcoholic drinks increased eightfold. The nation decided, apparently as one, to go on a huge zapoi, and the consequences have been disastrous.
All across what is the Russian heartland, old Muscovy, the land where the Russians held out against the Mongols, Napoleon and Hitler, the picture is of destitution. Thousands of villages are empty. Thousands more are home to a handful of pensioners, and will be empty too within a couple of decades. Some towns have halved in population in twenty years. In 1950 – when Stalin was at his most erratic, when the country was still half destroyed by World War Two, when terrible sacrifices were being demanded from the population – births outnumbered deaths by 1.7 million.
In 2010, deaths outnumbered births by 240,000, and that was the best year for a couple of decades. In 1991, the country was home to 148.3 million people. In 2010, that number had fallen to 141.9 million. The Russian nation is shrivelling away from within.
And it is not just that Russians are not being born. Russians are dying. The average Russian male born in 2010 was calculated to live less than sixty-three years. Russians of both sexes taken together are almost four times more likely to die of heart disease than a Western European, and more than five times more likely to be killed by an ‘external cause’ – murder, suicide, drowning, poisoning, car crashes. The comparable countries for violent death are Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Russia is not the only country afflicted with a falling population. In Italy and Germany, for example, the average couple has fewer than two children, which will inevitably lead to population decline. Western European women are reluctant to have as many children as their mothers.
Western Europe’s situation causes problems of its own, not least when it comes to affording the state pension system, since people are living longer thanks to improving healthcare and healthy living campaigns. The Russian situation is far more serious, however. It is driven by the death rate, and overwhelmingly by the death rate among working-age men. The average Russian man will not live to get his pension.
It is widely assumed that the drinking and the population crisis are a post-Soviet problem. It is true that the problem accelerated with the collapse of communism and the extreme economic dislocation that followed. Inflation wiped out pensions and savings, while factories closed and threw millions of people out of work. Russians drank to blot out the times they were living through. In truth, however, they were drinking before.
The years of the late 1950s and early 1960s when Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union are little remembered today, but they were the high point of the state’s achievements and self-confidence. It was not only people in Moscow who believed the Soviet Union would surpass the West in production and living standards. People in the West worried it would too. This was the era when sputnik, Laika the dog and Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Urals and it seemed even the most advanced American weapons were at the Russians’ mercy.
Armies of state employees controlled the production of ever greater volumes of steel and armaments, all checked by legions of statisticians. Soviet tanks stood poised on the borders of West Germany. Hungary’s attempt to throw off Moscow’s dominance in 1956 was ruthlessly crushed. The government could be forgiven for congratulating itself on its achievements. The future was red. Khrushchev, addressing Western ambassadors in 1956, showed his confidence and contempt with the phrase ‘we will bury you’. Soviet citizens would outlive their Western rivals, and would dig their graves for them.
It was an ironic boast because, if Khrushchev had been alert and well informed, he would have noticed a worrying trend. At or around the same time that Gagarin became the first man in space – a triumph Russians boast of to this day – the Russian nation began to die out.
For a start, Russian women stopped having enough babies to maintain the population. For a nation to sustain itself, the average woman must have around 2.1 children. From 1965, Russian women gave birth to fewer than that. And that was when Russians started to die younger too. In the early 1960s, the average Russian and the average Austrian both lived for about sixty-nine years. By 2005, the Austrian was living for an extra decade and a half, the Russian for four years fewer.
I could speculate about why Russians were drinking so much. I wondered if it was a simple function of availability. The Soviet Union produced vodka, so Russians drank it. But that is not a real answer. No one drinks themselves to death just because they can. When a whole population takes to the bottle, something far more serious must have happened. Perhaps Russians felt their destinies were out of their control. The country was stagnant and would remain that way for as long as anyone could predict. If tomorrow will be no better than today, why not enliven today by getting drunk?
But speculation was all I had. Academics have largely overlooked Russia’s 1960s and 1970s. There is no decent biography of Leonid Brezhnev, though he led the world’s biggest country for close to two decad
es. Nor is there a good book about Yuri Andropov, though he headed the K G B for almost as long and took the top job too for a little while. Ambitious young historians look elsewhere to make their name. These are years of stagnation and decay, and far less sexy than the times of Joseph Stalin, when the Soviet Union was growing, or of Mikhail Gorbachev, when it was falling apart.
And there is another reason why that period is little written about. Although there are now detailed studies of the life chances of Russians, there was no equivalent work in the Brezhnev years. The Soviet Union produced millions of bound copies of its leaders’ speeches and thousands of novels proclaiming how bright the future would be. But it published no books asking why the workers of the workers’ state were anaesthetizing themselves to an ever greater degree. The government controlled publishing, and allowed Russians to read only books that told them how well off they were.
Even a book as plodding as Dr Zhivago proved electrifyingly controversial for the Soviet state. Its author, Boris Pasternak, was hounded to an early grave in 1960 for not conforming to the standards expected of a Soviet novelist, and for daring to have it published abroad. Despite the treatment of Pasternak, however, a small group of writers insisted on writing their own way. Smuggling their manuscripts abroad was their protest against the state’s insistence on obedience in all things. At that time, creative endeavours needed state approval, which meant these upstarts had to be crushed. In a defining moment, in February 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers who had published books in the West, were put on trial to show their peers that such independence could not be allowed.
They were not pro-Western as such, but they hated being stultified by what was going on around them, and their trial is symbolic of what a whole generation was going through. ‘The cost of obedience was a tension, an anxiety that only increased as the years went by. He was a born writer, not a soldier,’ one friend wrote of Sinyavsky. Soldiers obey, but writers question, and the system would not tolerate questions.
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