Comrade Jim by Jim Riordan

Author:Jim Riordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

There were times I’d wake up and pinch myself. Was it all a dream? How had I got here? A working-class kid from Portsmouth? What I couldn’t forget was that I was living in a world still uncomfortably close to its terrible tragic past: purges and war, torture and execution. Millions, yes, millions, of innocent people had suffered. Stalin was only eight years dead in his glass coffin which I visited more than once in the Red Square Mausoleum before he was turfed out. At the same time, I was dreaming of the glorious future, of the day when communism would prevail all over the world. To an impressionable Pompey lad still struggling to take it all in and make sense of it, Russia was, as Churchill once put it, ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.

But unofficial excursions had revealed a darker side to Soviet life. For example, my wife had spent ten days in the nursing home with a Kremlin cook where Tania was born. Olga was a jolly lady who used to amuse the other mothers by spraying patterns on the wall with milk from her bountiful breasts. She and her husband, and sundry other family members, lived in a typical rural wooden house at Barvikha, a forty-minute ride on the elektrichka train from the city centre.

Annick, Tania and I enjoyed many a feast at Olga’s and Vitaly’s table. The couple, both Kremlin cooks, reminded me of the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife: while Olga was languid and big in all proportions, Vitaly was a skinny little chap, full of nervous energy. His party piece was to produce a full bottle of vodka out of thin air just after I’d downed my half of the first bottle, when I thought I was safe.

In winter we went skiing with Olga’s sister, Sveta, in the Russian forest with its towering fir and pine trees; in summer we gathered wild strawberries and mushrooms, scaring away elk and wild boar. Vitaly and I would flagellate one another with birch twigs in the near-stifling Russian bath-house before taking a dip in the bracing stream that ran through the village. Then back to the table for more ritual vodka drinking (down the hatch, no dilution), accompanied by lumps of fat, black bread, numerous side dishes (they were Kremlin cooks, after all!), beetroot soup, kebabs, pelmeni (little packets of mincemeat wrapped in pastry). Mmm. The only problem was that I was a sucker for taking up the Russian challenge to my British manhood and tried valiantly and foolishly to keep up with the toasts.

Before the hospitality took a hold, I did notice that the village possessed no gas or running water (they used the village pump). That was not unusual. What was surprising, however, was that the neighbouring dacha colony belonging to Party Central Committee members enjoyed all mod cons: gas, piped hot water, electricity, telephone. As with the earlier revelation about the perks available to Party bigwigs, this was another rude reminder that all was not as it should be in the land of social equality.

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