“One cannot live in a society
and be free from society.”
Vladimir Lenin
In this story, I will tell you about my reckless solo hike through the Siberian wilderness that took place toward the end of the 1980s. Thankfully, I wasn’t seriously injured or killed during that adventure, but those three days spent in the wild significantly impacted my life and creed. It wasn’t a heroic voyage. Rather, it was a successful but awkward fight for survival, a battle against various natural obstacles and my own foolishness — and I have to say that the latter one probably was the toughest. However, before I begin, I would like to paint a general picture of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union in that period.
Those times and places are distant memories for me now. Some of them are dim and imprecise; others have remained well-preserved like the glass-eyed specimens in a taxidermy museum, stuffed with the old sawdust of sentiment. Those recollections are neither good nor bad. They are an integral part of my existence — small snapshots of the universe taken by my mind in order to pin them, when the time comes, onto the shabby wall of eternity.
They were great times. The standoff between the Soviet Union and the Western world had come to its end; officially, they were not enemies anymore. Three years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the world map underwent some very dramatic changes, but I didn’t see it that way. What I did see was an old lady collapsing in front of my window: they simply had no money to clear ice from the pavements. So, with your permission, I shall begin. By the way, the old lady was all right. She stood up, cursed this world, and carried on.
First things first, we were poor, almost all of us — almost. To paraphrase Orwell, I would say that all Soviet people in those times were poor, but some of them were poorer than others. Private property was illegitimate and existed in the very truncated form of “individual property” — the things an individual could possess only for their personal use. Of course, there were some happy exceptions to that rule. The authorities in those times were incredibly good at explaining to the people why they (the people, not the authorities) should live in need and feel proud of that fact. Posters with slogans like “Poor People but Strong Country” might have never hung on the walls, but this sentiment lingered at every corner. Furthermore, you would never spot a beggar. Mendicancy was an offense, and they would easily send paupers to the labor camps.
The economy of the country had been wrecked by bad management and enormous expenditures during the Arms Race. Almost all goods and services were in short supply or simply non-existent. Long, so-called “mausoleum” lines (analogous to the line at Lenin’s Mausoleum, which, when it had been popular, could stretch for miles) were practically everywhere — at the shops, cafes, bus stops, hospitals and so on.
Virtually every family — drivers, workers, teachers, engineers — had a scrap of land where they grew potatoes to feed themselves in winter. My parents, senior doctors, had to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to stand in line at a dairy shop waiting hours outside (no exaggeration here) in the Siberian frost to buy some milk. The shop suppliers used to stock the minimal amounts of goods, and those who turned up even a little bit late returned home empty-handed. Of course, there was a well-developed system of privileges one could beg for, like special shops and personal rations. However, my parents, as well as the rest of our family, preferred to have a flat stomach but a straight back.
Whatever it is, people will be people, and at that time, they would bend backward to get things they desired. The whole process was called “fetching a thing,” and some individuals were incredibly good at it. They were called “dostaváli” or “fetchers.” Their energy and pushiness could be roughly associated with the Western spirit of enterprise. Most people, however, didn’t like fetchers. For them, almost any initiative looked suspicious (“Are you working for America, bub?”) unless it was an “approved” initiative.
A short flat phrase like “Where did you fetch it from? From there?” could convey something profoundly passionate such as “What on earth! Where did you snatch up this fancy, gorgeous, trendy, enviable angora scarf, you lucky rascal?” The word “there” invariably meant “from the West” or “imported,” which, in turn, meant “cool,” or “of high quality.” The phrase “I wore a pair of imported shoes for the party” meant that “all the girls at the event were mine”… unless they were sober.
The Western world itself, however, according to the mass media of the early 80s, looked pretty awful. It was depicted as an utterly hostile snaggle-toothed colossus which, corroded by its own sins, stood in the way of that peaceful and prosperous country marching to Marx’s Garden of Eden (I mean Karl Marx, not the Marx brothers, of course). That dodgy giant could have collapsed at any minute and blocked the way, so it was wise to keep gunpowder at the ready. So they kept it ready, and in 1983, they shot down a Korean Boeing 747 with almost three-hundred living souls on board. On the western frontiers, at the same time, the groups of enemy armies stood face to face on full alert, ready to strike. The tension between the two camps was enormous. Sweaty hands hovered half an inch over red buttons. The prospect of thermonuclear apocalypse was looming on the horizon. Then, fingers snapped, Ronnie, Maggie, and Gorbie struck a deal, and everything became just peachy.
But we frozen Siberian dudes were far removed from it. Basically, we were far from everything in the world. We were 3,000 miles away from Moscow, 2,000 from Beijing, 6,000 from San Francisco, and, in all honesty, I can’t tell you how close we were then to Pyongyang.
At some point in the mid-80s, the government introduced ration cards for virtually all everyday products, but in some regions, those cards had existed since the 70s. In the late 80s, when the economic situation was close to disaster, and the prospect of hunger riots was more than real, the government kindly permitted people to open small businesses and cooperatives. Apparently, according to their plans, those small ventures, like vine aphids, would secrete a sweet goop that hard-working red ants would collect and carry into their Bolshevik nest. It enjoyed some sort of success for a while, but you can’t revive a corpse by injecting young blood into its collapsed veins. It was too late. The giant creature was dying, but its fleas had to survive. So, we persevered.
You may think that most of the people were unhappy because of all this. But no. They lived their lives on their own scale and didn’t give a damn about all the mess. The old girls would socialize, standing in those long “mausoleum” lines, and the old boys in stretched undershirts played dominoes in overgrown gardens, while the cosmonauts were sailing among the stars, making us proud and our life seem surreal. And you could turn into a really cool guy if you had a box of Marlboro in your breast pocket and wore a pair of jeans — yes, obtained from “there.”
Nobody went on strike. The troubles were there, over the fence, abroad, in the wild West — crises, disparity, child labor, and wars. No, not there, thank you. No one dared to leave this safe harbor. Ordinary people would just sit and wait for change, whether in their lives or in their shallow pockets, grumbling under their breath and hoping for better times, as their great grandfathers had done before them.
Let me say it again: I’m not trying to write an encyclopedia of that era. I was raised in the outskirts of a provincial Siberian town in a quarter with a pretty bad reputation. Why there? Well, it’s quite a long and uninteresting story. Here, I just want to share the things I saw in person, touched or felt, or heard from my neighbor over a bottle of “tea.”
Who knows, maybe just ten yards from my place, people could have been a far cry from what I was used to. They might have played Tchaikovsky on the harp all day and, speaking in Pushkin verses to each other, discussed the Swedish model of socialism and family… and farted softly, exuding the smell of vanilla orchids — I can’t groundlessly deny that possibility. However, I wasn’t lucky enough to be introduced to those guys or witness their existence.
The people I did meet on my way, most of them, were good. They had big hearts and naive souls hidden under a thick crust of disbelief. You could trust them unless you, yourself, were mistrusted. Their patience was bottomless. They didn’t want to gamble, preferring “the certainty of less.” All those hustlers from cooperative shops were okay from the drunken guys’ “pint of view,” as long as they knew their place. But some perceptive individuals foresaw much more significant changes. As one of the criminal bosses of those times said, “It’s coming! Our times are coming!”
Not that I rubbed shoulders with the mafia guys — not at all. Maybe just by chance, sitting in a queue at the dentist. However, like many others, I was sufficiently exposed to the rampant street crime. By the age of seventeen, I had been beaten black and blue a few times (once nearly to death), stabbed with a knife, robbed, mugged, beaten, and robbed again.
Why? Probably because I looked nerdy, or perhaps because I didn’t smoke back then. It was as simple as a stone-age ax: a gang of youth would approach their victim and ask for a cigarette. Whether he had it or not didn’t matter. Any answer would be turned against you anyway and used as a trigger for a reprisal — especially if you said “no.”
It may sound awful, but as Dostoevsky once said, “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” — the only thing I regarded in his writings. But in those times we had something even more potent than all-seeing air defense — defensive thinking, which said, “You may get into trouble anyway, no matter where or who you are.” You could live in a rich and beautiful country by the ocean, fully aware that one day that paradise, hit by a deadly earthquake, could bury you under its ruins. You could also spend your whole life in a pastoral village somewhere in the Alps, healing sick bees and hamsters, and be murdered one day by a stray psycho with a chainsaw, or live in slums, absolutely secure and happy because you have nothing that can be stolen, and your grandson never charges you for hashish.
The human mind is incredibly resourceful in justifying the reality it lives in. For example, it can tell you, “Statistics is a very clever thing, bub, but it doesn’t work for a random man.” Clever, huh? Up to that point, I could blame only myself: most likely, a guy without a pack of cigarettes in his pocket had caused the sensitive thugs to feel neglected and pushed them toward violence. Who knows? I started smoking years later, but it didn’t resolve the safety issues. So, I quit.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.