Vodka, Crises, and “Swan Lake” on a Loop
The Soviet Union crumbled to the four acts of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s most popular ballet. Swan Lake, composed in the 1870s, tells the story of Princess Odette, whom an evil curse turns into a swan. But to those with TV sets in the last Soviet years, the strictly choreographed harmony signaled that a political tumult was unfolding behind the curtains.
On August 19, 1991, troops and tanks rolled into Moscow. They started a coup that would end what was at the time the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state. When my family turned on their TVs that morning, they thought someone must have died. All scheduled programs were halted, and the Bolshoi Theater ballerinas danced on repeat. As hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Moscow, my family got tired of the looping orchestra music. They went about their day in their village on the outskirts of Perm, a mid-sized city near the Ural Mountains, 746 miles east of Moscow.
My parents grew up in that village. They raised me there, too. Gray khrushchevkas—low-cost, concrete-paneled five-story apartment blocks built in the 1960s—lined the streets. The place transformed each season: snow clothed it from early November to late March; sunshine and rainfall came in abundance between. A thick forest stood near the village. Crop fields stretched around it. The pond, a local point of attraction in summer, was crowded in the warmth but deadly quiet in the cold. At night, the dim-lit corners of the village were eerie.
From the kitchen window of our khrushchevka apartment, I could see the scattered lights of Perm’s industrial plants. The largest is PNOS, LUKOIL’s oil refinery and gas processing giant. PNOS is a city unto itself, a skeleton of pipes and mountainous barrels. During daylight hours, I spotted ash-colored clouds curling with the wind. The clouds grew as they traveled. Sometimes, I would smell the plant’s caustic proximity.
My father worked at the oil refinery plant all his life. My grandfather worked there, having quit his low-paying job at a middle school. My uncle began working for a neighboring petrochemical plant after dodging the army conscription. My mother and her sister-in-law also worked at that neighboring plant’s offices—a job my mother hated, and my aunt loved.
For many villagers who lived and worked in and around this plant, including my father, the world shrank down to the gurgling of vodka, to the clinking of ryumkas, shot glasses, to flushed cheeks and eyes full of expectancy, to downing a shot with salted cucumbers, bread, or often nothing to quell the burn.
In “Remarks from an Accomplice,” which begins Secondhand Time, an oral history bridging the end of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, Svetlana Alexievich writes, “Communism had an insane plan: to remake the ‘old breed man,’ Ancient Adam. And it really worked… Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement.” In the voices of the book’s characters, often unnamed, I hear my family.
“With Vladimir Putin in power, Russia will never be a democracy,” I used to confront my father when we still talked.
“What did that democracy bring us in the 1990s? You are not old enough to remember the ruin. It was Putin who delivered stability,” he used to respond.
In the wild 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the country ran on high fever. The economy was being rebuilt under shock therapy, but the Soviet people remained. Or, rather, the people remained Soviet. Putin’s first presidency coincided with never-before-seen prosperity: store shelves were full at last, salaries arrived on time, and a Russian could suddenly build a life much tastier and more stylish, with bigger homes, with new German and American cars. Moscow was polished and plentiful and dazzling. Foreigners flew to Russia, and Russians flew overseas.
But how do you cure a people after four generations of dictatorship? The Swan Lake ballerinas never stopped dancing. My father is wrong. I remember the 1990s. I think I do.
My parents were born in the mid-1970s during Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnation —the time of food stamps and long lines for milk and vodka. Their families lived just like every other Soviet family around them: in one-, two-, or three-room apartments with miniature hallways, thin walls, and forty-three square foot kitchens. Their living rooms had a stenka—a wall unit of peculiar construction, orange-brown wooden shelves that housed books, china tea sets, liquor glasses, framed photos, and souvenir figurines. Brick-and-crimson–colored carpets with floral patterns lay on the floor. A fat TV occupied the living room’s corner, and a plush couch stood in front of it.
My parents were both Little Octobrists, members of a Communist organization for children, and pinned ruby star badges with a portrait of four-year-old Vladimir Lenin to their school uniforms. They later became Pioneers, joining the communist organization for children older than nine. As Pioneers, they vowed to be “devoted to the Motherland, the party, and communism” and mastered red necktie knots. They read the Pionerskaya Pravda (Truth for Young Pioneers) newspaper and woke up to the 6AM exercises as dictated by the Pionerskaya Zorka (Pioneer Dawn) radio show. My mother, a straight-A student, almost joined the Komsomol, the Youth Communist League. My father, always a hooligan, cheated in his classes and smoked in the schoolyard.
When Secretary Brezhnev died in 1982, the union’s TV channels aired Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It was broadcast on a loop as the Soviet officials were choosing Brezhnev’s successor. After Secretary Yuri Andropov died in 1984, the swans returned to the country’s TV sets. When Secretary Konstantin Chernenko died in 1985, the Bolshoi Theater ballerinas were back.
On May 15, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, the freshly elected General Secretary, arrived in Leningrad. He set out on a trip that was a Soviet leader’s classic, attending the Victory Square and bowing at the monument to Vladimir Lenin. Yet something about that sprightly, youngish man at the head of the cumbersome, old party was different.
A TV news program documented the trip. With the Leningrad sky in bright blue, locals crowded around Gorbachev in the central street. He chatted with the people, sometimes speaking inches from their faces, and promised to introduce an anti-alcohol campaign soon. The people kept nodding in unison, “Правильно! Правильно!” (“Right! Right!”) But the state’s effort to reduce drinking nationwide was old news. Other Soviet leaders had already tried that before.
Gorbachev spoke boldly and in a thick accent, mispronouncing words.
“Stay close to the people,” said a woman in the crowd. “We will never let you down.”
“Ну куда ж ближе?” (“Even closer?”), he called back, and the crowd cackled.
Gorbachev addressed the Party veterans that day, “We live well. We have a lot. But we need to live better. There are problems.” In his evening speech for the active Party members and to the rounds of boisterous applause after every other sentence, he said, “Apparently, comrades, we all need to rebuild. All of us.”
Perestroika, or rebuilding, sought to reform a hulking system that resisted the smallest of changes with all the stamina of preceding decades. One of the new policies got the label of Glasnost, which meant “openness” and aimed to loosen the state’s censorship grip. The Head of the Department for Agitation and Propaganda explained Glasnost by quoting Lenin, “The state is strong only when the masses know everything, can evaluate everything, and do everything consciously.”
Opposing forces pulled the “Union” in different directions, and Gorbachev played into the favors of the hardline conservatives, too. Between 1988 and 1991, the Kremlin brutally suppressed unrest in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, and Latvia. In March 1991, in disregard of the “openness” policy, Gorbachev banned street protests in Moscow and put tanks in the city’s streets. Still, that did not deter the demonstrations led by politician Boris Yeltsin, a fervent supporter of a transition to representative democracy. Glasnost pressed on: the demonstrators called for Gorbachev to resign.
In a 10th-grade history class, my mother got an assignment to interview her grandmother Sophia. Sophia was born in Crimea in 1929. In 1944, when she turned 15, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars to the Soviet Union’s faraway regions. Grandmother Sophia had never spoken much about her deportation. When she began telling her story, my mother rushed to scribble her notes:
People in military uniforms came to our Tatar village. They gave us several hours to pack our bags. My father was Tatar. My mother was Russian. The Russians were allowed to stay, but my mother refused—her family had turned away from her when she married my father. We did not know where we were going. They transported us in freight wagons to the Urals. We starved and were thrown into barracks. Less than half of us survived.
“Was this the first time you learned of Stalin’s repressions?” I asked my mom recently.
“Yes. Grandma never, never complained,” she said.
At 6AM on August 19, 1991, a group of hardliners from the Communist Party, KGB, and military announced themselves as the State Emergency Committee. They seized control of the country from the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev. KGB forces detained him at a holiday estate in Crimea and cut off his means of communication. The hardliners’ goal was to prevent the signing of the USSR’s New Union Treaty and reverse Gorbachev’s democratic reforms.
In the center of Moscow, in front of thousands, Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank and denounced the takeover. Meanwhile, on TVs around the nation, the four innocent cygnets danced. The ballerinas of equal height held each other’s hands and sauntered across the stage to the right and left. Their technique was sharp, their line preserved, their unison undisturbed and effortless. They traveled the stage in a pas de chat. Having broken their chain, they froze in a momentous arabesque and dropped to the floor. Applause thundered. The coup d’état failed.
On December 25, 1991, the Russian tricolor flag mounted Moscow’s Red Square. It replaced the Soviet flag, a red banner with a golden hammer, sickle, and five-pointed star. Gorbachev, the USSR’s first President, was also its last. He resigned in a televised address that day: “A policy line aimed at dismembering the country and disuniting the state has prevailed, with which I cannot agree.” What Gorbachev left behind was, contrary to popular opinion, not a bloodless state dissolution. Trying to forestall the imminent end to the Soviet Union, the Kremlin killed scores of people in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, and Latvia. .
In December 1991, my mother was sixteen, and my father seventeen.
The post-Soviet rubble smelled of hard liquor. It had empty pockets and empty shelves. Even before communism’s fall, Gorbachev’s economic reforms—a puzzling mix of state planning and market economics—provoked acute shortages. People had not seen meat or butter for months. In 1992, the State Statistics Service recorded the number of those in lines at randomly chosen Moscow food shops: in the Pervomaisky district, 300 people lined up for bread; outside of the Novogireevsky store, 400 people stood in line for sugar, and 150 for milk. The store ran out of milk twenty minutes after it opened.
The economic changes were sweeping, and the law-and-order institutions could not keep up. The black market bloomed. Crime rates doubled: theft, burglary, and homicides flooded the nation. Organized crime groups mapped Russia’s cities and ruled the lawless streets. In a race for new wealth, gangs turned to bullets and car explosions.
“At this point, a very elementary thing has to be comprehended,” Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first popularly elected president, spoke on the one-year anniversary of the August coup in 1992. “We are taking just the very first steps toward a normal human life, and we are stumbling and falling… Difficult as it may be, the majority of people understand that we cannot go back to the old ways.”
The villagers on the outskirts of Perm grew their own food in ogorods, or gardens. My mother’s family kept chickens. Other families kept pigs. “Thanks to the ogorods, we did not go hungry,” my grandmother told me, “but it was tough. We lived one day at a time and never had enough money. Grandpa did not receive his school teacher salary and worked on the side as a truck loader.”
The inflation was catastrophic. In 1992 alone, prices grew 26 times what they were the previous year. Non-payment of wages became systemic. In 1996, 49.3% of workers in Central Russia did not get paid. In farther regions, that number rose to 69%.
My mother still remembers the day she discovered hidden candy at home. She was practicing for her piano classes and noticed the sound was off. She opened the piano’s lid to a bag of chocolate-glazed Kara Kum tucked inside. She called up her little brother, and they made a pact not to tell their parents who had hidden the sweet treat. One by one, they stole the candies and savored every crunch of praline and wafer crumbs. The family soon sold the piano for two pairs of winter boots.
In a 1992 presidential decree, Boris Yeltsin abolished the state monopoly on the production of alcohol. In 1993, the decree was revoked—too late to curb the currents of liquor produced and traded illegally. By 1995, 50% of vodka on the market was illegal. Taxes on imported alcohol were lifted, and that helped spread cheap drinks from abroad. Alcohol consumption peaked in 1994 with almost 3.9 gallons of pure ethyl alcohol per capita. By contrast, US drinking amounted to 2.2 gallons per capita that year.
In high school, during summers, my mother washed the floors and windows of a local kindergarten and my father cleaned up the local collective farm. They earned little but saved up to shop at the city rynok, or market. The newly allowed traders brought clothes, shoes, makeup, perfume, and electronics from Turkey, China, Italy, and Poland in spacious checkered bags. The further into the 1990s, the more abundant the rynok became: tents piled up with colorful sports suits, mink hats, high-heeled boots, golden belts, and fake designer bags.
By 1993, the new country still ran on the Soviet constitution, but Yeltsin’s ambitions for presidential power grew to the point of defying law: on September 21, 1993, he dissolved the parliament and announced a new election date. A violent two-week standoff between president and parliament followed. The military eventually sided with Yeltsin, and on October 4, tanks fired—each blow a dull, sickening thud—at the White House in Moscow, where the opposition to the president had barricaded themselves. The building burned. More than 140 people died. “I remember Swan Lake on TV… Was it 1991? Or 1993?” my mother hesitates while describing the crisis today. Like many Russians, she struggles to tell the two coups apart.
In those early days of the 1990s, my father roamed the violent roads in an oversized leather jacket and blue jeans; my mother made her own dresses, curled her hair, and dreamed of a daughter. They slow danced to Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red” at a village disco in 1994 and fell in love.
When I was a toddler, I played with Nevalyashka, a Soviet roly-poly toy. She was round, built like a snowman, dressed in enamel as red as the Kremlin. Her eyes, two big circles, took up half of her face. She looked sideways, her glance frozen, her lips pursed in a bow—a coquettish expression. No matter how earnestly I tried to lay her down, she would wobble but not fall. A bell rolled and rang as she rocked from side to side. The sound mesmerized me with its uneven melody.
I was no longer a kid of the Soviet Union, but I played with my Nevalyashka just like every other kid born in the decades before mine. I would never become a Pioneer, but I would go to former Pioneer summer camps. Soviet animated film characters were on the walls of my kindergarten: Gena the Crocodile played the accordion to Cheburashka, the Soviet Mickey Mouse. I met Tom and Jerry only after I had met the Wolf and the Hare of Nu Pogodi! (“Well, Just You Wait!”), a 1969 cartoon in which the Wolf was the epitome of a bad Soviet citizen: a criminal and a smoker. I stood at the yearly parades commemorating the Great Patriotic War heroes, and the Soviet flag waved above me. Every year, on May 9, people filled their glasses and toasted their “grandfathers, Motherland, and Victory.”
Many Russian feasts, zastoliya, started with the unfolding of the extendable transformer table. This piece of furniture, tucked away in a corner most of the time, opened its wings each holiday and occupied half of a living room. A white lace tablecloth landed on its surface. Liquor bottles occupied the table’s center. A carafe of homemade compot—a stewed-fruit-and-berry drink—was there for kids.
The guests who joined my parents’ zastolye were close and distant family. My paternal grandmother brought sausages she had obtained through her collective farm job. The city aunt and uncle were a funny-looking couple: she tall and round, and he short and bony. The aunt was loud, poetry verses falling from her lips as she kept drinking. The uncle was quiet in speech but raucous in singing as he kept drinking and his fingers dashed across the piano keys.
The feast always began with a round of shots. Holding their glasses at face level, my family toasted. Reaching across the table, they clinked glasses, husbands and wives avoiding each other—their clink was bad luck. The first round was down their throats, and the party attacked the food. Not much time passed before my father poured another round. Toasts, cheers, and glass clinks followed. It went on with breaks as short as ten or fifteen minutes. The talk got louder. Soon, it grew into shouts.
“The government are all thieves. What a shame! They plundered the country,” my grandfather yelled.
“To hell with President Yeltsin!” my father joined him.
“These days, you don’t know who to trust! Everyone is lying,” my grandmother lamented. “Under socialism, we did not have much, but everyone was kinder to each other.”
“Much kinder!” my grandfather agreed. “And we only had what the others had.”
“To hell with Yeltsin’s gang of scoundrels,” my father repeated. “Let’s do another one. Pour me some more.”
Sentences loosened up. Syllables mismatched. Eyes settled behind a veil.
Vodka has long yielded oblivion to Russians seeking refuge from life’s unbearable grey. Over the Soviet years, those refuge-seekers had always been many. But drinking in the 1990s turned uniquely sinister—trembling, reeking, hallucinatory. In our khrushchevka, an alcoholic lived on each floor. Late at night, I heard drunken shuffling up the stairs, banging on doors, and the occasional violence of delirium tremens.
What came between winter and summer brought mud to the roads of my village. When rain poured down, pedestrians waded through the narrow paths, and drivers turned their wheels forcefully, splashing sludge in all directions. I had to wear the shoes I hated, my knee-length rubber boots. Chunks of wet soil would stick to my soles. When the mud dried, brown crusts fell off.
Such dirt roads led to the local school, hospital, and church. And while all the buildings were unremarkable colors, the village church was blue, unusual for a Russian Orthodox house of prayer. Made of wood and painted azure, the church resembled the clear sky on a bright and cloudless day. White framed its windows and corners and matched the omnipresent snow in winter. The church survived the Soviet era and lived to see crowds as many Russians traded Marxism-Leninism for Orthodox Christianity.
My paternal grandmother was once a member of the Communist Party. When young, she worked as a milkmaid. In 1977, she won the 9th regional competition of machine milking masters. In 1998, by Presidential Decree Number 930, she was recognized as an honored zootechnician of the Russian Federation. Several years later, a court order declared the collective farm she had dedicated her life to insolvent. Relics of the Soviet past, collective farms were dying across the country. My grandmother gradually became a devout Christian and Sunday service regular.
I was baptized in the village church with the azure domes on January 4, 1998.
In my earliest memory, my parents’ bedroom was too bright for the late hour. The bulb’s light hurt my eyes. Covered in a bathrobe, my mother pressed me to her chest as a shield. Her cheeks were wet with tears. My drunk father had just battered her face. She refused to give him his car keys, holding them in her fist while her fragile figure dodged his towering, vodka-stinking body. Their shouts and curses seized the room. After punching my mother, he snatched the keys and stumbled out to rev the car engine.
The next day, my mother’s face was blue. The shadow of that night reached the larger family. My paternal grandmother showed up at our door. She turned away from my mother’s wild eyes and bruises, yet she spoke eventually, “You got married, so you must endure. You must endure, just like I did.” For that, my mother never forgave her. But she forgave my father, again and again.
That same year, my father’s best friend died in a car accident. He had been racing while drunk and drove into a lamppost. That man remains in our family albums. In those photos, he and my father are red-eyed with oblivious, boozy grins on their faces. The man’s daughter was my best friend in the local kindergarten. She was four when he died. At his funeral, my father and his friends were haunted—each knew the casket could have been theirs.
In 1998, the country lived through its worst financial crisis: the Russian government devalued the ruble and defaulted on domestic debt. My family did not have any savings to lose. The 1998 inflation rate reached 84%. In August 1999, the counter-terror operation in Chechnya was announced, and so the second Chechen war began. In the name of preserving territorial integrity, the Russian forces trampled the sovereignty movement in the North Caucasus. The conflict was bloody; the Russian army committed war crimes. By that time, my uncle, a military doctor, had already died in the region.
On December 31, 1999, Russians fell into their decades-old New Year’s Eve rhythm. They chopped carrots for the Olivier salad, dressed it in layers of mayonnaise, unfolded their transformer tables, borrowed chairs from neighbors, and unearthed jars of pickles and nastoyka, a fruit-infused vodka drink. At noon, the fuss came to an eleven-minute halt. All eyes were on the TV screens. In his address to the nation, Boris Yeltsin resigned. His face was bloated. A decade of heavy drinking and unsteady public appearances was behind him. He spoke with great effort, inhaling after every two words, “I apologize for not justifying some of the hopes of those people who believed that in one leap, in one fell swoop, we could jump from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilized future […]. As a goodbye, I want to say to each of you: Be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and peace of mind.”
The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! a Soviet movie and a New Year’s Eve staple since 1976, was on TV that evening. The main character, thirty-six-year-old Evgeniy Lukashin, goes once again to a Moscow banya, Russian sauna, with his friends on New Year’s Eve. They get drunk. Evgeniy ends up on a plane to Leningrad. While there, he mistakenly arrives at the apartment of Nadya Sheveleva, a Russian literature teacher. While my mother floated between our living room and the kitchen in preparation for a family feast, Evgeniy and Nadya fell in love.After the family table was finally set and the songs of the Little Blue Light variety show ended, I waited for candy under the decorated fir tree. My parents and grandparents listened to a young and sober Vladimir Putin as he addressed the nation five minutes before midnight. He encouraged Russian citizens to cheer for love and peace. My family raised their glasses. The Kremlin’s clock chimed twelve times. The country wobbled into the new millennium, but the ballerinas danced on.
You must be logged in to post a comment.