Вил Мирзаянов - State Secrets - An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

It was no accident that some of my fellow villagers, who didn’t know their roots, behaved in this way. To some extent, it reflected the class warfare of the “lower classes” with the “upper classes”, which had taken root, thanks to the Bolsheviks.

When I was in graduate school, at the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, I always went to my village to visit my parents during my vacations. During one of my trips home, I ran into Uncle Salikh, a close relative on my mother’s side, who was sitting on the porch of a country store, keeping company with several tipsy men. He was rather drunk himself. He called to me, “Mirzayanov, I need to talk to you!” He looked resolute and aggressive, as if he were going to take revenge for an insult that had just been hurled at him. Salikh was a disabled veteran, with no right hand, and only three maimed fingers remained on his left hand. Like many people, he lived in poverty and “celebrated” the day in the village store, when he received his small disability allowance. He usually bought a quarter liter of vodka, and kept it in the inner breast pocket of his shabby gray jacket, which he never took off, no matter what the weather was like. From time to time he tenderly took the bottle out of this pocket and took a little sip with great pleasure. At that moment, he impersonated a connoisseur of delicate French wines. After this, the bottle was returned to its place.

Salikh quickly got tipsy, and after that he imagined he was a generous rich man who was ready to treat anybody who was fortunate enough to be honored with his attention at that happy moment. “Hi there, Gadelzhan, come here!” he would forcefully but politely address somebody who was passing by. “I decided to serve you, don’t be freaking squeamish. Don’t you see who you are talking to? So, you should be proud that I personally paid attention to you, bastard, and have invited you. I didn’t have to do it, you son of a bitch, you know that damn well…” Having delivered his standard monologue, Salikh would take the bottle out of his pocket with his crooked fingers, and bring it almost vertically to the mouth of his guest, so that the person whom he was treating couldn’t possibly take a single sip.

All men in the village were used to Salikh’s manner of serving his guests, and everyone understood that it was a game created by the imaginary hospitality of this disabled man. It had never occurred to anyone to be offended. The store was opposite our house, near the school, and like the other boys, I liked to watch grow-ups and listen in on their conversations. However, I remember that one time a rather indecent guy decided to play a joke on Salikh. He distracted the attention of the veteran Salikh, took a few sips from the bottle that was offered to him, and practically emptied it.

You can’t imagine what happened next! Poor Salikh was outraged and couldn’t stop yelling at him. He wouldn’t agree to the compensation that the youth who had insulted him was offering. Tears were running down the old man’s cheeks. He was really unhappy. At that time, vodka was brought into the village only once every three months, and it lasted a week or two. Mostly poor old men and women bought it to sell at a higher price later. They also had to use it to pay for firewood, hay or for having something repaired in the house or in the barn. Without vodka, it was almost impossible to accomplish these things in the village. At that time, vodka performed the same function as foreign currency, as the American dollar or the Euro does now.

That is why when Salikh declared that he wished to talk to me, it wasn’t unexpected because he often addressed people in this way when he wanted to “serve” somebody. And this is exactly what happened.

“Muscovite, do you want to drink a little with me or are you freaking squeamish?” he asked as usual.

It was a hot July day and, frankly speaking, with so many people around, I didn’t want to demonstrate a positive attitude to his offers. I refused and this provoked the usual angry tirade of Russian and Tatar curse-words from Salikh. However, contrary to his usual habit, he quickly calmed down and said sternly:

“Will you be honest? I need to talk with you.” I promised him to be honest.

“People say you study in Moscow. Right?” asked Salikh. I confirmed this.

“And what will you be after you finish your studies?” he continued his interrogation with irony. I explained that if I succeeded in accomplishing my goal, I would have a Ph.D. in chemistry. This didn’t make a favorable impression on Salikh. I guessed that he simply hadn’t understood my answer. He followed with an acid remark, and asked me not to pull the wool over his eyes because, when necessary, he also could speak vaguely and scientifically, no worse than any rogue-commissioner from the regional center, who is sent to the village every spring to put into service some task on the labor front.

The crippled Salikh was one of the first men to come back to the village in 1942 from the front, or rather from the hospital. Then there were almost no men left in the village except for the chairman of the collective farm, the lame Gerey, and the eternal guard of the property of the collective farm, the lame Shaikhutdin. The rest were very old indeed. The women and children lived who in the village ploughed, sowed, mowed, and harvested the crop. Hay and grain were carried in carts to which cows were harnessed, because all the horses had been mobilized into the Red Army.

The ferocious and lame Gerey with his bulging eyes, which were always red from constantly drinking, appeared one morning in the office yard of the collective farm, which was situated near our house. He had a wet white kerchief tied up on his forehead, and he took a deep breath, and as always, started shouting at the women who had gathered there. I remember one of the phrases that he often repeated, which made the poor women tremble, “Do you think I am from Japan?” At that time, very few people in our village had heard about this remote foreign country across the sea. Even if someone had heard about Japan, they only knew that it was an enemy and that the Red commanders gave the Japanese hell near Lake Hasan, in 1939. That is why these words frightened the poor women almost to death. Some old woman always tried to humbly soothe the raging village boss, “Dear Akhmetgereyzhan. Forgive us. We are ignorant and stupid!”

Once, Gerey badly frightened me too. One wintry day, when I was eight years old, I was gathering straw in the street, which was to be strewn in the farmyard. I didn’t notice when Gerey’s koshevka (a light cart) passed me, but I almost fell down from fear when I heard his thunderous bass, “You! Ishan’s mongrel! Do you think that your father left this straw for you?”

It was 1943 then, and my father was out on the front. There was no one to stand up for me. I was paralyzed with fear, and I could neither move, nor say anything to excuse myself. However, when I saw that his short whip, which was made from twisted leather strips, was returned to the cart, I realized that the storm had passed. Probably that time Gerey decided that scolding was enough. Absolutely exhausted, I managed to drag myself home.

As there were no other deserving candidates, the disabled Salikh was immediately appointed as deputy chairman of the collective farm. He quickly adopted Gerey’s style and method of roaring at the helpless women and children. More than 200 beehives of the collective farm’s bee-garden produced enough honey for malt drink to always to grace the tables of the farm’s managers. Finally the stores were depleted, and babaj (beekeeper) had to use up the surplus honey, that was supposed to feed the bees over the winter. This meant the end of the bee-garden, but that didn’t make the chairman and his deputy stop drinking. They switched to a home-brew that was prepared for them in the neighboring Russian villages, in return for grain. The end of the war put an end to Salikh’s career, because younger men came home from the front, and they, in turn, wanted the same privileges that Gerey and Salikh had enjoyed.