Sashka and his ilk drank many other things besides, in those lushy pre-Gorbachev years. Down the hatch went bormotukha (cut-rate surrogate port poetically nicknamed “the mutterer”), denaturat (ethanol dyed a purplish blue), and tormozok (brake fluid). Also BF surgical glue (affectionately called “Boris Fedorovich”), ingeniously spun with a drill in a bucket of water and salt to separate out the good stuff. Like all Soviet alkanauts, Sashka massively envied MIG-25 pilots, whose airplanes—incidentally co-invented by Artem Mikoyan, brother of Stalin’s food commissar—carried forty liters of the purest, highest-grade spirits as a deicer and were nicknamed the letayushchy gastronom (flying food store). That the planes crashed after pilots quaffed the deicer they’d replaced with water didn’t deter consumption.
As a kid I found nothing deviant or unpleasant about Sashka’s behavior. The best and brightest of Soviet arts, science, and agriculture imbibed likewise. Far from being a pariah, my limping, muttering uncle had a Ph.D. in art history, three gorgeous daughters, and a devoted following among Moscow intellectuals.
Our Russian heart, big and generous, reserved a soft spot for the alkanaut.
Lying dead drunk on the street he was pitied by women, the envy of men. Under our red banner he replaced Slavic Orthodoxy’s yurodivy (holy fool) as a homeless, half-naked prophet who roamed the streets and spoke bitter truths. (Bitter—gorkaya, from gore, meaning grief—was the folk synonym for vodka.) For abstainers, on the other hand, our big Russian heart had nothing but scorn. They were despised, teased, goaded to drink, regarded as anti-Russian, antisocial, antispiritual—Jewish, perhaps!—and altogether unpatriotic.
And theirs was the poisoned cloak Gorbachev chose to march forth in.
The last time I saw Sashka was in the early nineties, when he came to visit us post-Gorbach in Queens. He spent his fortnight inside our Jackson Heights apartment, afraid to go into Manhattan lest skyscrapers fall on his head. During his stay, Grandmother Liza died. When he heard, Sashka guzzled the entire bottle of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur Mom had hidden in a cupboard, except for the bit I managed to drink too. He and I sat sobbing until Mom came home from work and we told her the news.
He died prematurely a few years later, age fifty-seven, a true alkash.
“Are you NUTS?” demanded the Moscow morgue attendant, when his daughter Dasha brought in the body. “Who brings in such unsightly cadavers? Beautify him a bit, come back, and then we’ll talk.”
My grandma Alla was a happier drunk.
Alla drank beautifully. She drank with smak (savor), iskra (spark), and a full respect for the rituals and taboos surrounding the pollitra. She called her pollitra trvorcheskaya—the artistic one—a play on palitra, the painter’s palette. I was too young to be a proper co-bottler, but I was hers in spirit. I soaked up vodka rituals along with grandmotherly lullabies. We were a land in which booze had replaced Holy Water, and the rites of drinking were sacramental and strict.
Imbibing solo was sacrilege numero uno.
Lone boozers equaled antisocial scum or worse: sad, fucked-up, sick alkogoliks.
“Anyutik, never—never!—have I drunk a single gram without company!” Alla would boast.
“Alla Nikolaevna!” Mom would call from the stove with deep parental reproach in her voice. “Any reason you’re telling that to a four-year-old?”
When Alla drank with her girlfriends, she’d pour limonad into my own twelve-sided glass before apportioning vodka among real co-bottlers in exact fifty-gram rations. Glaz-almaz (eye sharp as a diamond)—the co-bottlers congratulated her pour.
Following their cue, I’d stare lovingly at my glass and bark an anticipatory nu (so) before the toasting commenced. Toasting was mandatory. Anything from an existential “Budem” (We shall be) to flowery encomiums for every dead relative. People from the Caucasus particularly excelled at encomiums.
Like the adults I’d exhale sharply—then tilt back my head. Down it all in one gulp, aimed right at the tonsils. Yelp “Khorosho poshla” (it went down well) and purposefully swallow an appetizer before properly inhaling again.
Drinking without a zakuska (a food chaser) was another taboo. Cucumber pickles, herring, caviars, sharp crunchy sauerkraut, garlicky sausage. The limitless repertoire of little extra-savory Russian dishes seems to have been created expressly to accompany vodka. In the lean post-war years Alla and the teenage Sergei grated onion, soaked it in salt, and smothered it in mayo—the zakuska of poverty. Men tippling at work favored foil-wrapped rectangles of processed Friendship Cheese, or a Spam-like conserve with a bucolic name: Zavtrak Turista (Breakfast of Tourists). Foodless altogether? After the shot you made a show of inhaling your sleeve. Hence the expression zakusit’ manufakturoy (to chase with fabric). Just one of the countless untranslatables comprehensible only to those who drank in the USSR.
Silence, finally, was also a despised drinker no-no. The Deep Truth found in a glass demanded to be shared with co-bottlers. In one of Alla’s favorite jokes, an intelligent (intellectual) is harangued by two allkogoliks to chip in to make three. (Rounding up strangers to split a pollitra was customary; co-bottling always required a quorum of three.) To get rid of the drunks, the reluctant intelligent hands them a ruble, but they insist that he drink his share. He does. He runs off. His co-bottlers chase after him halfway around Moscow.
“What… what do you want from me now?” he cries out. “A popizdet’?” Obscene slang roughly translatable as “How about shooting the shit, dude?”
The fifty-gram gulps of moonshine, the herring, the pickles, the toasts—shooting the shit in a five-meter Moscow kitchen shrouded in smoke from coarse Yava cigarettes—these were what reestablished a fragile bond between me and my father, in the snow-mantled capital of perestroika.
We’re back in December ’87 once again, our visitor fairy tale reanimated.
This bond with Dad was, and would remain, unsentimental, a friendship, masculine almost, rather than one of those histrionic, kiss-kiss Russian kinships. And in future years it would be oiled and lubricated with vodka and spirt—samogon, too. Because as an offspring of the USSR, how to truly know your own father—or Rodina?—until you’ve become his adult equal, a fellow co-bottler?
It didn’t take many hours of boozing with Dad to realize how wrong I’d been about him at Sheremetyevo Airport. I, a smiley American now, arriving from a country that urged you to put your money where your mouth was—I mistook Sergei’s sunken mouth for the sign of a terrible life of decay. He saw things differently. In the loss of his teeth he’d found liberation, it turns out—from convention, from toothpaste lines, from the medieval barbarism of Soviet dentistry. His first few teeth had been knocked out accidentally by his baby, Andrei; gum disease took the rest. With each new gap in his mouth my father felt closer and closer to freedom.