Caroline Walton - Smashed in the USSR

I don’t protest as I’m beginning to tire of life in the hostel. Olga takes me home, gives me something to help me sleep, and in the morning we take a train to the Urals.

At the clinic we join 25 other men, each accompanied by his wife or mother. We introduce ourselves. I’m surprised to see the alcoholics aren’t all ordinary working men like me. There’s a surgeon who confesses he was once so drunk that he fell on top of a patient on the operating table. Next to me sits a Hero of the Soviet Union, with medals on his jacket but no shirt under it. He sold his clothes for a drink. Professor Burenkov says to him: “Well, you defeated the fascists but you allowed vodka to defeat you.”

The Hero hangs his head.

Burenkov gives us each a bitter herb drink, then a massive dose of Antabuse. Next we have to down a glass of vodka. The Antabuse reacts badly with the vodka and soon we are vomiting and writhing in pain. It’s hard to see two dozen men retch and groan all around you without feeling dreadful yourself. I think I’m going to die. Professor Burenkov strides around the group roaring: “Anyone want another drink?”

The relatives outside are watching the drama through a window. They beat on the glass and cheer: “Give them more vodka!”

Burenkov injects us with camphor and makes us lie on mattresses with our left arms above our heads in order not to strain our hearts. Then he takes us all outside. We sit under trees, feeling life return. The doctor shows us slides of swollen livers and the abnormal brains of the children of alcoholics. That night we take our trains home, clutching our supplies of Antabuse.

As Burenkov’s popularity grows throughout the country he stops practising. An unknown number of people die after anxious wives and mothers slip unregulated quantities of Antabuse into food. It has no smell or taste so alcoholics consume it unknowingly and then choke to death after they’ve had a few drinks. Women usually administer the Antabuse in good faith. They are simply desperate to keep their men folk out of prison.

Before I went to Burenkov it looked as though my days at the factory were numbered. After my cure the administration are so impressed that they put me in charge of the factory’s credit fund. This fund is designed to help us buy expensive items such as fridges. It’s usually controlled by a group of women supervisors who borrow all they want while telling shop-floor workers that the funds have run out. They say we only want the money to buy vodka. The director dismisses the women and places me in charge. After that every alcoholic in the plant comes to me for three roubles for his troika session.

Now I am sober my thoughts torment me and prevent me from sleeping. To calm me my wife prescribes the popular Hungarian barbiturate Noxiron. At first two or three of these tablets are enough to knock me out but my need soon grows. I drop in on Olga at work and discreetly tear off some blank prescription forms from her pad. I fill them out without trouble as I know the Latin alphabet. As indecipherable as any other doctor’s, her signature is easy to forge. Having written several prescriptions I visit different chemists in our area, acquiring enough Noxiron to last a month.

Olga notices that I’m taking a lot of barbiturate and tries to explain that my new addiction is as harmful as the old one. To appease her I stop taking the tablets during the day but at night I swallow them until I pass out.

I share my discovery with my former drinking partners who, like me, have had to choose between alcohol and their wives and jobs. One day when Olga is on night shift my friends come over for a Noxiron session. My wife returns to find me sprawled on the floor, black and blue. When I try to stand up I topple over like a felled tree. I can’t even extend my hands to break my fall. The rubbish bin is full of Noxiron packaging. Olga puts me to bed.

That evening a colleague of my wife’s and her husband come to supper. I drag myself out of bed to join them. With relief I remember I have some pills left. Excusing myself, I go into the hall and rummage in the pockets of my coat.

“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” Olga stands in the doorway, pointing to the toilet. My hopes of avoiding a horrific withdrawal are dashed.

“Bitch! You had no right to go through my pockets!”

Olga walks away. I follow her into the room, still raging. With one blow I sweep a dish off the table. Jam splatters over our lady guest’s new cardigan and the dish smashes the glass of our book-cabinet.

The lady’s husband leads me into the kitchen. We smoke and I calm down a little. When we go back into the living-room I find my wife putting Natasha’s things into an overnight bag. Everyone leaves.

At the back of a cupboard I discover a bottle of vodka that has been put aside for some family celebration. Although I’ve been taking Antabuse for several months I open the bottle and begin to drink. I soon pass out.

The doorbell wakes me up. Expecting my wife, I open the door and a policeman enters. “You’re under arrest,” he saunters through into the living-room, sits down at the table and begins to fill in a form. I go into the kitchen and swallow the remaining vodka in one gulp. After that it is all the same to me whether the policeman takes me off to a health spa or to a leper colony.

“A year! You could sit that out on the shit-bucket!”

My cell-mates in Syzran jail think I’ve got off lightly for menacing society with malicious hooliganism of a particularly vicious form.

Olga visits me after the trial. “Vanya,” she pleads, “I never expected them to send you to prison. I tried to withdraw my statement but they threatened to give me two years for laying false charges. And you heard the judge…”

At the trial she wept and asked them not to punish me, but the judge told her to be quiet.

“Perhaps he was right,” I admonish her. “If every wife was allowed to change her mind trials all over the country would collapse and there would be chaos.”

We have nothing left to say to each other. If I tell Olga what I think of her she’ll walk away believing I deserve to be in prison. “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “It makes a change to be living here. The company is delightful.”

I babble on about prison life until it is time for her to go. She throws me a look of despair as she leaves.

Waiting for the trial was the worst part; now I know how long my sentence will be I settle down to await my transfer to a labour camp. I can’t say I am depressed; in fact I’m curious about my fellow inmates and interested to find out what camp life will be like.

In the jail we are housed in long barrack huts that we call cowsheds. As new prisoners come in they talk about what they have done. One or two swear they will never again pick up a knife or a glass of vodka, but most see their arrival in prison as pure bad luck. They don’t see any justice in their sentence and are sure it will be their last.

The boy in the bunk next to mine is an exception. Vovik is a country lad of 18 who has been sentenced for robbing village stores. “A thief’s life is the best of all,” he claims, “I want no other. Robbing those stores is like shooting fish in a barrel: they don’t have alarms. We find out beforehand where they keep the money. The assistants leave the takings in the shop overnight because they don’t trust their husbands. We helped ourselves a few times and then we went to the Black Sea for a holiday.”

“What did you do there?”

“We ate ice cream until we burst and went to the cinema as often as we liked. The trouble was, as we changed the notes we’d stolen our pockets became so weighted down with coins that our trousers hung off our arses. One night in the park we poured all our loose change into a flowerbed. Unfortunately a policeman noticed. He got suspicious and pulled us in. They kicked us round a bit and one of my mates squealed. We each got three years.”