Going Back - VII

(continued)

It was with something slightly less than optimism and confidence that we finally moved into Zone V, which was to be our permanent home. The Zone was a dimly lit world of scurrying feet and elevators: the air was fetid, with an all-pervasive odour of cooked cabbage and valerianka, or valerian extract, used as a panacea for most ills, but especially as a sedative. On each floor, long corridors of rooms were fronted by a large desk, opposite the elevator bank, where the dezhurnaya, or female concierge, sat, keeping a careful watch on those who came and went, and checking propuski now and then. The rooms varied in size. On this, my first visit, I got a single room on the ninth floor – I later discovered that it was really half of a regular room – at some point in the late 1950s a decision had been made to partition the rooms with hardboard, so as to make more of them. The resulting hardboard wall was extremely thin. There was a shared toilet, and a shower which lay behind an ancient, rubberised curtain. We had already been warned about the cockroaches in the shower basin – getting rid of them was a task that had to be undertaken each day. The room could be made partially secure by inserting the small brass block of the "cylinder blocking key", which first had to be wrapped in sellotape to make it fit, into the door's lock.

At the end of each corridor, there was a communal kitchen, with two large and ancient-looking electric stoves, a sink and a table. There was also the musornyi provod, or garbage chute, which seemed to lead directly to some indeterminate spot in the yard far below. A sign on the wall said: eto kukhnya, a ne khlev!, which translates as “This is a kitchen, not a pig-sty!”. Cleaning was done by roster, organized by the floor's Komsomol (Young Communist) brigade, and for the first four weeks we foreign students were exempt. The cleaning involved cleaning the kitchen and sweeping the floors of the corridor with a broom.

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kefir (a kind of yoghurt), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

On one day a week we were permitted to visit the British Embassy store, down in the yard of the embassy premises on Naberezhnaya Morisa Toreza (now Sofiyskaya Naberezhnaya), where with hard currency we could buy some of the goods available to diplomatic staff: breakfast cereals, instant coffee, toilet requisites, toothpaste, Cadbury’s chocolate, and so on. One had to be careful when carrying these items back on the bus or Metro not to let them be glimpsed by members of the Moscow public: if they were seen, an attempt was often made by druzhinniki (vigilante police volunteers) - whether genuine or not - to confiscate them. Without the extra conveniences supplied by the embassy store, day-to-day life would have been more difficult than it was. None the less, we pressed on with our new lives!

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back
Going Back-II
Going Back-III
Going Back-IV
Going Back-V
Going Back-VI