Шарлотта Хобсон: Black Earth City: When Russia Ran Wild (and So Did We)

Another crowd of people arrived, including some Americans from a different hostel, and we drank several more toasts. Someone turned the lights off. The party was really heating up; I could see at least three couples in sweaty embrace and Tanya seemed to be taking her clothes off in the corner. “Is that your roommate over there?” said a man in my ear. He was a muscular, dark-eyed Russian in flip-flops, pointing at Emily. “Viktor and me, we think she’s incredibly attractive.”

“Oh, yes, she’s great, she—”

He’d already gone, squeezing through the room toward her. I found myself talking to a large American boy with red curly hair and freckles. “It’s always been hard for me to fit in,” he was saying. “I guess it’s because I’m black.”

“You’re black?”

“Albino. I have black features, you see, but Scottish coloring. My name’s Sasha McDuff.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Emily chatting with Viktor and her other admirer. Ira was giggling with one of the English boys, Joe, who was trying to feed her pieces of toasted cheese sandwich. Someone fell over, bringing down the wash line.

“I call myself Sasha now because I feel that Russia’s my spiritual home,” the American was telling me.

“I see-”

Suddenly Liza Minnelli turned the lights on. All the couples on the beds sat up, blinking, and Tanya hastily put her panties back on. “That’s enough,” said Liza Minnelli. “Everyone, you’ll have to listen to me for a moment. I’ve put up with this for too long. He”—she pointed one trembling finger at Yakov—“will have to choose.”

“Me?” Yakov looked startled.

“Oh for God’s sake, can’t you just sort this out among yourselves?” someone called out.

“No!” barked Liza Minnelli. “I want witnesses. Then he can’t go back on his word.”

“All right then,” said Tanya. “Yakov, who’s it going to be?”

“ Bozhe moi ,” Yakov gulped, “my god. I don’t know if I can—”

“Why not?” Nina said indignantly. “What about the things you said to me last night?”

There was a quiver of anticipation from the audience.

“Choose, you bastard,” said a few female voices.

“Say nothing! Don’t let the women bully you!” said the men.

“Does anyone want to bet on it?” hissed Joe. “I put a thousand rubles on the blond.”

“Yakov, look at me,” said Liza Minnelli. She spread her hands out before her, palms upward. “Everything I have, I give to you. My heart, my soul…”

The audience went crazy. Yakov hesitated, and turned. “Nina?” he inquired.

Nina giggled in the way that she had, squeaking with each breath. “Come on, milenky ,” she said, taking his arm. “Let’s go. Sorry, Liza.”

They left and Liza Minnelli turned on her heel and rushed down the corridor in the opposite direction. Someone switched the lights back off and the party resumed.

After that, Yakov and Nina became one more couple to be found sloping around the hostel looking for an empty room. Liza Minnelli got over the whole affair quite quickly. She had a generous disposition beneath the melodrama. The only time she got annoyed was when she arrived back from lectures to find the door of Room 99 locked, with Yakov and Nina inside; then she’d come upstairs to visit us and curse the pair of them.

The hostel’s reputation for low morals was well-deserved. All over Russia, however, a sexual revolution was taking place. The Communists were prudes. Of course men had affairs in the old days, that was normal, but women were expected to behave nicely—not smoke in public, for example, or wear short skirts. As for any hint of open licentiousness, despite what went on behind the scenes in Party dachas—it was considered antisocial and dealt with severely.

Now, suddenly, the controls disappeared and seventy years of pent-up desire burst onto the streets. At that moment Voronezh was far more liberal than London. Pornographic magazines and crotchless panties were for sale at every bus stop. The morning news might include a woman giving birth, and in the evening the airwaves were dominated by soft porn. Even the babushkas exchanged their string shopping bags for new, Polish-made plastic totes with naked lovelies on each side.

The Proletariat cinema on Revolution Prospect, meanwhile, reveling in its new freedom, dug out all the films it had not been allowed to show and billed them as “classics” and “great entertainment for all.” The selection was unpredictable. The Night Porter , in a fuzzy seventies print that made Dirk Bogarde’s face look orange, caused its final sensation in Voronezh, where it was advertised on a huge hand-painted board as “New! Shocking! Erotica!” One week there would be Fellini or Bunuel; the next you might find yourself watching Caligula , probably the only movie John Gielgud made in association with Penthouse Films. I was left with the distinct feeling that Sir John had not been shown this version of the film, in which chunks of soft porn had been spliced alongside the cinematic ancient Rome familiar to us all. Billed as “educational” and screened by the Proletariat at seven o’clock on a weekday, it played to the usual crowd of middle-aged couples on an evening out. Half an hour into the film, there were so many people walking out that you couldn’t see the screen. Not everybody approved of the new climate.

In the Voronezh papers there was an air of bewilderment. Where had all this filth sprung from? How was it that a poll of teenage girls, who five years previously had held only one ambition—to be “Lenin’s little helper”—now answered overwhelmingly that when they grew up, they wanted to be hard-currency prostitutes? For the time being, however, even the most choleric voices tailed off into resignation. After all, it was inevitable that Western decadence would arrive along with glasnost, said the pessimists in the butter line. They’re just young, rejoined others comfortably. Let them enjoy themselves while they can. Lord knows we did exactly the same, although it was all a secret back then.

As winter approached and the rising prices began to pinch, a few girls in the hostel made a policy decision. Lena was an energetic student who cleaned her room every afternoon in a baggy purple sweatsuit. In the evenings, she left the hostel in a wig, miniskirt, fishnets and stilettos for the Brno Hotel, where she entertained businessmen from the Baltics and Tashkent. She was the kindest, smiliest soul, always willing to oblige. She’d lend you a saucepan if your own had gone missing, and one afternoon in Room 99 when Emily and the girls were almost expiring from boredom and poverty, Lena stripped to cheer them up. She must have given a great deal of pleasure to her businessmen. The only person who was not happy was her English roommate. “I just don’t understand it,” she used to complain. “Lena’s got a terrible lot of menfriends.”

Supporting oneself on a student grant was hard, and most people relied on their parents for food. Lola, whose family lived in the Crimea, depended instead on what she referred to as aid from Africa. She had a Somalian boyfriend in the next-door hostel who used to cook her a lovely hot meal after they’d had sex. The point was that they usually ate meat, while the rest of the hostel was living on candy-pink sausage meat, rumored to be rat. “We had beef,” she’d say, smiling complacently when she returned. She was a compact little person, but she liked her dinner.

In Room 99, poor Tanya had broken her leg, which prompted the girls to write a blockade diary on the wall of their room. It read like the pitiful records kept by Leningraders under siege in 1941: