I could hardly believe it when my parents told me one nice, sunny day that we were travelling to the most powerful country in the world. Just me and my younger sister by two years, who had just turned 15! My father had studied in Moscow and we would stay with his best study friends. Mother Russia was waiting for us.
When we arrived at Sofia airport, we felt like we were in an exciting film. Our parents were not allowed to escort us any further than the departure hall. We wanted to take a picture, but an armed police officer rushed to us and snapped: ‘No photo’s’.
All airports were deemed military objects, where there was no place for family sentiments. It was also forbidden to take pictures of bridges and railways, as well as stations, transmission towers, harbours and factories. This was the same in Russia, so we had asked ourselves if there was anything we could take pictures of.
My sister and I passed the metal detectors and walked through to passport control.
‘Look at me,’ a grumpy man said and carefully compared the photograph to my face. He returned my passport without saying anything. Perhaps it was naïve, but I secretly hoped he would wish me a pleasant journey. I found it to be so terribly exciting to be travelling by airplane without my parents for the first time and to such an exciting destination. The era of ‘glasnost’ (openness) had already begun in Russia. You could only dream about that in Bulgaria, but in Russia people wore t-shirts with ‘perestroika’ (rebuilding) and ‘sex’ without being arrested.
The Red Square looked familiar to me, even though I had never seen it before. After all it had been the background for most of the news on Bulgarian television as well as the endless reruns of Russian films. We were amazed: we thought everything in Moscow was gigantic. The metro, the central department store, the hotels, the university buildings.…we even found the traffic to be an attraction. The cars were crisscrossing each other. The drivers would change lanes every few minutes, loudly tooting their horns to avoid collisions and to vent their frustrations. We have never seen such chaos in Bulgaria. Perhaps we hadn’t yet imported enough Russian cars.
Our hosts asked if we wanted to visit the mausoleum to see Lenin’s embalmed body. I didn’t want to leave this vibrant life to look at a dead person. Besides, we also had a mausoleum in Bulgaria where comrade Dimitrov, the first of the legion of heroic party leaders, had been put on display for eternity.
No, I didn’t want to look at Lenin. I had already seen so many photos of him and learned so many stories about him at school, that I felt like I knew him well enough. I wanted to see things that were truly new. Like the mass drunkenness of the Russians. On nearly every street corner you could see people unsteady on their feet. Gorbachev had not started an anti-alcohol campaign for nothing. The new leader knew how to tackle things, but this time he had misjudged, because vodka was the only comfort for the poor. I noticed straight away how much it meant to most people. We also knew how to drink in Bulgaria, but the way the Russians drunk vodka, was extreme. Young and old, low-skilled to career maker, they drunk more than was good for them. People who didn’t know each other would scrounge change at the front of the liquor stores to buy a bottle of vodka which they would share together on the street.
Many Bulgarians had unique ways of obtaining alcohol. A friend of my parents was the manager in a liquor store and always opened the bottles by breaking the bottle necks. He would then pour the alcohol through a sieve. The first time we saw him do this we looked at him curiously until he explained: ‘with every delivery I note how much percent so-called transport loss there is and then I send the broken bottle necks as evidence.’
Despite such inspiring examples, the Bulgarians were greatly behind the Russians when it came to drinking alcohol. Our Slavic brothers not only drank during the day, in the middle of the street, but even went to work drunk. Was this the country of communist ideals, of the impressive military parades, of the 3.7 million soldiers and 25.000 nuclear weapons? De people looked more depressed than proud. What also surprised me was that there was hardly any Western music for sale, while in Bulgaria you could buy a wide variety of records and music tapes.
Compared to the good life in Bulgaria, the economic situation in Russia was distressing. Perhaps that was why they drunk so much. I gasped at how they put all their food on the table and tried to share it as fairly as possible. My parents never needed to count the potatoes and we could always afford enough meat. That wasn’t even at the expense of alcohol, because there was always a bottle of red wine on the dinner table.
Only the caviar was extremely cheap in Russia. The Kremlin had a state monopoly on the sturgeon fisheries and the Soviet Union accounted for ninety percent of the world production of caviar. The government boasted this was the only country where the labourers could also enjoy the ‘black gold’. During the break at the Bolshoi theatre I ordered some crackers with caviar, licked the shiny grains off and threw the crackers away. I also did the same after the show and the memory of the melting caviar in my mouth stayed with me longer than the art of the prima ballerina’s.
No one could have predicted that the caviar production would be in the hands of poachers years later and that there would even be an international embargo on the import of Russian caviar.
During my stay in Russia there was caviar in abundance, but something simple like sugar was scarce.
‘It’s all Gorbachev’s fault,’ our hosts complained. ‘He reduced the number of liquor stores and cut back on the opening times. No one can be bothered standing in long queues, not even for vodka. So people start to brew their own and all the sugar vanishes out of the stores.’
The people who did queue for vodka tried to keep their spirits up by telling anti-Gorbachev jokes. For example, the salesperson who has been ordered by Gorbachev to close his store. He walks outside and tell the long queue of people waiting: ‘I’m going to kill that idiot in the Kremlin.’ He comes back sad a few hours later. ‘What did you do?’ the people asked. ‘Nothing,’ he sighs. ‘If only you knew how long the queue for the Kremlin was.’
Gorbachev’s new rules reached very far, so I completely understood my hosts’ complaints. If you were caught brewing illegal liquor twice in the same year, then you could get two years’ hard labour. I doubted such strict measures helped by something so deeply enrooted in the Russian people. Even teenagers drank litres of vodka. I discovered this when I arrived by train in bustling Leningrad. The boys I met first had bought me a glass of vodka the very same day. I already had some experience with whisky and cognac, but the Russian vodka hit me with the first sip. The boys couldn’t bear me nipping.
‘That’s a waste of vodka,’ Mischa said, the prettiest of them all. ‘You’re supposed to drink vodka in one go. Look.’
Mischa drunk a second glass in one go after he had toasted with his friends. I wasn’t sure I could do the same. I still felt the first sip burning in my stomach, never mind a whole glad. Mischa saw me hesitate.
‘Come on, little girl, have some respect for Russian traditions. You’re our guest and you should respect your hosts. Cheers, here’s to good health.’
To good health. I hoped it would be okay. I raised my glass and drank it in one go. I felt my stomach burn and spontaneously got tears in my eyes.
‘How much alcohol is in this?’ I asked with a voice I didn’t recognize.
‘A lot. That way you know it’s good vodka.’
‘It feels more like methylated spirits. I feel everything burning inside.’
‘Ach, you get used to that. That happened to me the first time also,’ Mischa reassured me.
‘How long will it last? Give me a match and you’ll see me spit fire.’