Chapter 4: The short, hot summer
The dangers of drinking in Lenin
Square
As spring finally gave way to summer, the weather became beautifully warm and many an hour was spent strolling around and drinking beer with my students in the town square. We would often sit on benches talking until four or five in the morning, attracting the odd inquisitive local eager to say hello to the unexpected foreigner in town but nobody ever giving me any hassle. My students also liked to walk and talk for hours on end, beers in hand, with no destination in mind. They despaired of my asking where we were heading, explaining that they just liked to walk. I realised that my questions were born of my Western habit of always being on the move, with some purpose in mind or appointment to keep, and soon came to appreciate this wandering, worry-free method of sociably passing the time. I also picked up the local habit of leaving my empty beer bottles on walls ready for collection by the local homeless. These unfortunate types would trawl around with clinking sacks full of tins and bottles, each worth a rouble (two pence) or so when returned to the beer factory- bottles did not stay uncollected for long. Summer cafes sprung up around the city, the almost cosmopolitan air of the Siberian summer evenings illustrating how Chita, greenery springing untidily from every cranny, changes totally during the brief summer months.
One evening, having
been all too blasé about wandering Chita’s streets at all hours, I finally
learned a lesson. Standing with two female students on the corner of Lenin
Square in the small hours of the morning, we were surrounded by a gang of seven
or so drunk Russian lads. They tried the ‘Mozhno poznokomets?’ line on
my companions but were rebuffed, me remaining silent in order not to give away
my foreignness. However, they soon twigged I was English and the most odious
individual began to repeat the English word “Fool” aggressively to me. His
drunken friend suddenly recited fluently, “I haven’t seen you in ages”, to which
I politely responded “Oh, you speak English?” He parroted “I haven’t seen you
in ages”, demonstrating that he did not in fact speak more than six or seven
words of English. This bunch of student simpletons then asked me for money,
causing me to make a hasty exit with my two student cohorts. We made it safely
down Lenin Street for a few hundred yards and then heard footsteps rapidly
approaching us. Four of the lads had run back to us and were now aggressively
demanding money, stating that as a foreigner I must be loaded. One of the girls
tried to call the police, by now becoming seriously worried, but I was
confident that I could run much faster than these sozzled oafs so told the
girls to walk away in preparation for me doing a runner in the opposite direction.
At this moment a large group of Buryats walked past and the girls appealed to
them for help. Relations between Buryats and locals are often strained but
their response was immediate, one of the heftiest chaps I’ve ever seen striding
across and saying to my would-be assailants “Is there a problem here?” They
melted into the background. The Buryat introduced himself as a wrestler from
Ulan Ude, in town visiting friends, and was a genuine bloke wanting nothing
more than a friendly chat in return for his bailing me out. The Russian lads
skulked in the background, evidently waiting for him and his friends to depart,
but he told them to scarper and, weighing up their chances against the Buryats,
they obeyed. The Buryat wrestler wrote down his address, invited me to drop in
if ever I was in Ulan Ude, and escorted me home. Had he not been wandering the
streets at that late hour, my lesson may have been learned in an altogether
harder way. I resolved to avoid Lenin Square in the early hours of Saturday and
Sunday mornings.
Chita was sometimes known locally as ‘Chitago’, such was its criminal image. Things had cleaned up considerably since the chaotic days of the early 1990s, I was assured, and in my own life as an individual Western English teacher, the darker side of Siberian life barely affected me. However, stories of mafia control over the city abounded and a shooting during mid-2005, though attracting the usual stories of controlled police hit jobs, was widely known to have been related to a dispute between local criminal fraternities.
As the Soviet Union
collapsed, so bubbled over the black market which had been seething underneath,
illicit traders being by far a more efficient means of distributing goods than
the failing command economy. Party leaders quickly used their positions of
influence to appropriate state resources and set themselves up as businessmen.
To this day the Russian word ‘biznismen’ is used to cover all manner of
legal and illegal activities- if an individual describes himself as such, it is
probably best not to enquire further as to the line of his biznis. In
Chita as across much of Russia the early 90s saw violent turf wars as rival
gangs sought to carve out their own territories. Nowadays these territories are
apparently quite well defined and I was told that all businesses must pay
‘security fees’, usually equal to one percent of turnover. This apparently
applies to the grandmothers who sit on street corners selling sunflower seeds
and socks in all weathers just as it does to the shiny new mobile phone stores
and supermarkets springing up around the city. I asked one fast food vendor
about this and he told me that he paid about forty quid per month to some chap
whom he could call if he had any trouble from anyone, anytime. One call to the
magic number and the recipient of his forty quid fee would screech up to the
shop and violently dispatch anybody causing trouble. In the eyes of the fast
food vendor this was not a bad deal.
Fortunately, I never
came across direct evidence of mafia activity though I met a fair few
characters whom I would bet had their fingers in a few suspect pies. I also
knew one girl who had taken a job working for an apparently legit firm that,
she soon found out, conducted all manner of black market activity. Her pay
packet was high and the Russian tax man knew nothing of her employment, but she
was truly worried about her future as she wanted to quit the dodgy enterprise
but, as she put it, she “Knew too much”. She also suggested that she had been
contacted by the local anti-corruption agencies but that she was not about to
risk her safety by cooperating.
Security guards were
employed in such numbers that they seemed the major form of occupation in
Chita. Most of these spent their time smoking or spitting outside shops,
carrying plastic batons and generally looking like cavemen. When I learned that
many of these were paid inflated salaries as they were in fact front men for
the mob- their pay packet a convenient way of passing on ‘security fees’- their
ubiquitous presence began to make a little more sense.
“You either pay the
police for protection, or you pay the mafia”, I was told with certainty on a
few occasions. The gleaming, huge new Hummer often seen driving ostentatiously
among the coughing Russian bangers suggested that for some, business was still
brisk in today’s Russia.
Having been one of
only a handful of Westerners in Chita during the colder months, one Saturday I
was surprised to be introduced to a bunch of Americans. Around fifteen
‘missionaries’, as they seemed to consider themselves, were visiting the city’s
Baptist church. The source of revenue for the church’s recent renovation became
apparent. Some of the Americans were genial and genuine, though their less than
discreet Yanks-on-Tour behaviour made me cringe on occasion. Wandering around
the city, sporting brightly coloured matching T-shirts, speaking very loudly in
English and buying anything that moved because it was “All sooo cheap”
drew a few curious glances from the locals. A couple of my students were
translating for the group and we were all invited back to the church. I asked
what the missionary work entailed and was told that the group travelled to
Chita every year to visit Baptist churches in the city and around the region. I
politely questioned whether this was not preaching to the converted, and was
later told by more than one Russian that many of the Americans came at least in
part to do a little business whilst not evangelising. The interaction between
Russian students and Californians was fascinating. The Yanks would greet
everybody as if they were old friends, with an open and smiling “How are
you?” The Russians found this behaviour completely false, used to greeting
people cordially but generally saving the long-lost-friend bit until they felt
they knew someone, or at least had gotten drunk with them. The British greeting
lies somewhere between the Russian and American approaches, as does much of
British culture, though of course we are closer to our transatlantic cousins on
most fronts. A week or two later I also met an interesting large American
missionary named Doug who claimed to have been a bodyguard to the US political
elite and to have played in Elvis’s band. He was utterly convinced that the
local security services were bugging my flat, as this was what they did to all
Westerners. He was a warm-hearted chap and a great cook, but I dread to think
what the converted may end up believing if they took all of his words too
seriously.
Susan and the street
kids
Despite my cynicism
regarding the American missionaries, I saw first-hand in Chita how religious
charities can have hugely positive effects. I was introduced to Chita’s only
Scottish resident, a talkative girl named Susan whose skater wear, winter training
shoes and lack of make-up made her appear curious to Russian eyes. Her
favourite leisure pastime was to take a taxi bus to the edge of the city and
walk into the forested hills until she found some rocks to clamber around. She
worked nine months of the year as an unpaid volunteer for a Christian charity
whose main purpose was to help the underprivileged children of Chita. On the
surface, Chita seems a city in which most people get by reasonably, but scratch
beneath this veneer and the poverty can be extreme. One day I accompanied Susan
on her daily bus run around the city, stopping at designated points in poorer
districts to feed the ‘street kids’, as she termed them. Alas, many orphans do
live on Chita’s streets in all weathers but in the suburbs we were encountering
children whose parents were incapable or unwilling to look after them, often
due to alcoholism. As the bus pulled up, there would be waiting ten or fifteen
kids from teen age downwards, some aged only five or six but cradling younger
siblings in their arms. One house in the poor Shkol Semnatsat district
was particularly striking, a family of ten ragged children disgorging form one
tiny brick shack. The kids would pile onto the bus, downing platefuls of the
noodles, bread and lemonade dished up by the charity volunteers. The charity
drivers were reformed drug addicts, heroin apparently being another major
problem in Chita though it was not visible beyond the odd carelessly discarded
needle. The charity’s work was undoubtedly invaluable to these disadvantaged
children but also illustrated how quickly the rich-poor gap had grown in the
fifteen years since some in Chita began to accumulate fabulous personal
fortunes.
Susan worked three
months in Scotland as a lifeguard in order to fund her charity work, but in
2005 found herself a victim to a typically self-defeating act of Russian
bureaucracy. Alarmed by the alleged involvement of American organisations in
assisting the Orange and Purple ‘Revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia, the
Kremlin decided to crack down on foreign non-governmental organisations by
drastically tightening legislation. Her application for a renewed charity visa
was rejected. Here was a girl motivated only by a desire to help the needy-
such were her convictions- at her own expense. Yet, Russia had turned her away.
The final week
During my final week
in Chita I was invited to attend my students’ graduation party. The venue was a
delightful restaurant, the tables bedecked with food galore and the students
obviously having dug deep for this final fling. Tradition dictates that every
ten minutes or so, somebody stands, everybody stops eating and drinking and a
toast is made. Glasses are drained and refilled, and the eating and
conversation continues as before. By now I was becoming reasonably used to
drinking vodka and I fell easily into the toasting routine. I even made a quick
toast in Russian, saying with feeling that I had greatly enjoyed my time in
Chita and did not want to leave. My undoing was that individual students would come
up for individual toasts between the main ones, in particular one chap who
would declare that he loved me more and more as we became more and more
plastered. I thus became disgracefully drunk and cannot remember much beyond a
certain point when I was asked to say a few words on stage and declared to the
audience of students and fellow teachers that I was now a nazhuralsa-
local slang for an alcoholic old soak. My behaviour was not much of an example
to set, but by this stage of my Russian experience my students certainly did
not consider me a role model; rather, a semi-alcoholic curiosity. The next
thing I knew I was waking up the next morning beside the girl I was seeing at
the time, recalling nothing of actually getting to her flat but being informed over
the next few days by several amused witnesses of the drunken antics I had
indulged in. Thankfully, nothing too disgraceful had transpired.
On my final evening
in Chita, I was waiting in Lenin Square with my friends Artyom and Sveta for
Inna to come and drive us to a restaurant for a farewell meal. Artyom went
across to the Zabaikalye Hotel to see if the cash machine was working and
returned looking intrigued. He told me there was a black man sitting on the
steps of the hotel, speaking English. I had simply never seen a black face in
Chita. I walked over and sure enough, a young African fellow was chatting with
one of my students. He looked weary as I introduced myself but warmed as he
realised I was English, not drunk and not viewing him as a zoo animal. He was a
footballer from Cameroon, in town to play against local side Lokomotiv Chita,
but had found life in Russia difficult and wanted to leave for less
chauvinistic shores. We discussed football in Cameroon while behind us a
militia man had taken to fending off the fascinated attention of passing
sloshed individuals who wanted to say hello to the black man. I wished him luck
and off we went for our meal.
I spent that night
cleaning my flat, having not found time to do so during a chaotic last week which
I had spent saying my goodbyes. The following day, after being charged more
than a week’s wages at the airport for excess baggage charges, I waved goodbye
to my farewell committee of Inna, Artyom and Sveta. As I left, Artyom handed me
a letter which he had written in English, telling me not to open it until I was
in the air. I reproduce it here, with his blessing, exactly as written:
Hi, Mr Brooks!
I’m writing this letter
while you’re doing your flat. I wish you a good journey and hope you won’t get
shit-faced[1]
in a plane. I’ll sketch a plan for you, use it when people ask you about
Russia.
-Big cities are not so
friendly (Moscow, policemen, ‘uchitelnitsa’[2]).
-Distant towns are
friendly, but only when people know you, when they are not drunk and when you
are friends.
-Young people drink a lot,
smoke a lot (‘cause it’s cheap, ve-e-ery cheap).
-Chita seems to contain
only girls, beautiful mostly (except babushkas).
-It’s very difficult not
to nazhrat’sya[3] for a
foreigner, ‘cause everybody wants to drink with you (so it happens so, that you
begin to drink more than Russians, ‘cause for example you have 7 friends, and
drink with each of them every day, so you drink every day, and they only once a
week, yeah, paradox….) .
-It’s easy to get
acquainted with girls, very easy! Just some up and say “Mozhno poznokomets?”
-CD, DVD,
MP3 and other formats cost cheaper in Russia, nearly ten times cheaper!
-Sometimes it seems that
the only food in Chita is pelmeni or chebureki, or pozi[4].
It’s RUSSIAN FAST FOOD…..
-Love affairs are not
clear for a foreigner, I’m sure, ‘cause even Russians do not understand
sometimes how the girls do behave.
-Russian ‘heart-openness’
sometimes shocks a bit, manners, behaviour, at least, very sincere. But with
hospitality everything is OK.
-Sometimes Russians do
behave according to a proverb: “When at Rome, do as the Romans”, I don’t know
how to explain this but I think that you’ve caught the idea.
-Russians like to take
photos, yeah, really, they are keen on this. Photos is their hobby, on the same
level as drinking.
-Russians like (love) to
waste their time with walking and talking, especially me, they can do it during
several hours, without any sign of getting tired.
-Nearly everybody in
Russia speaks English, at least they know such phrases as “I haven’t seen you
for ages! Fuck you! Mother fucker! What’s your name? Money-money….. hello
and….. YES”.
-Instead of cameras in
shops we do have a lot of babushkas[5],
ah, babushkas are everywhere- in the street selling sunflower seeds or socks,
or newspapers.
-And a lot of tramps, they
collect bottles and get 1/50 of pound per each, firms just pour into them beer
again and sell, yeah, very profitable.
-Russians can cook, wash,
repair, build and so on, but hardly cope with Internet or automatic washing
machine (but believe me chap, the most of these items don’t belong to Chita,
‘cause we’re not well-civilised, and considered to be one of the poorest
regions in Russia).
-We are not at all polite,
especially with friends, ‘cause we consider it useless with people whom you
like, who like you. As for me, I am rude but because in such a way I express my
best attitude to people.
-In Chita people do not
have certain strict plans for activity, especially students, everything is
spontaneous and chaos-like, like everything in Russia.
-Russians do not trust
each other, yeah, they really don’t, but to friends they do. A problem of
Russia.
-Russians do not like to
write long letters, that is why I stop it, ‘cause it may be endless.
Yours faithfully,
Artyom V Rekunov. See you
soon!
I couldn’t have put
it better myself.
[1] My students always were keen to mimic my English slang
[2] See Chapter One
[3] To drink heavily and regularly
[4] A steam-cooked Buryat dish of mincemeat balls wrapped in pastry, usually eaten with mayonnaise
[5] Instead of the UK’s ubiquitous CCTV, many shops and museums simply pay old women a pittance to sit and stare at customers to ensure nothing is stolen