Autobiographical

So Voronezh it was. A relatively small town in the South-West of Russia, with a population of approximately 850,000 in 1984, located 535 kilometres from Moscow. To get there, we were loaded onto a rickety overnight train. As it was still September, I couldn’t fathom why everyone was wearing boots. Late at night in almost pitch darkness I had to go to the toilet. It was then that I understood: there was a blockage, apparently a regular occurrence on the night train, leading to overflow. Hence the need for boots to stay dry. I evidently failed in that mission. And naturally there was no toilet paper, one of the phenomena I had read about, but had obstinately refused to believe. However much one might have mocked British Rail back in the day, on my return to the UK I was grateful for the cleanliness and care for customers in comparison. As the train approached the city, virtually all of us were overcome by a sense of apprehension.

And yet it was bright and sunny that morning, lifting the mood.. We were deposited by bus at Hostel No. 2. It would probably be more appropriate to call it a dorm or student accommodation. We were divided into groups of two and taken up to the 4^thfloor, if memory serves me right. Two of us would be distributed at random to a room with four beds. The other beds were occupied allegedly by Soviet students, but most likely KGB operatives or both. They would monitor our movements in the days and months to come. I appeared that one of the two in the room I inhabited was a high-ranking party member, as a procession of changing young females would pass the night regularly with him. However, at least we now had the perfect opportunity to practice our Russian which was admittedly rudimentary at that point.

As well as the Soviet guards checking our every move, we were to become familiar with similarly unpleasant termites in the kitchen, corridor and worst of all in our rooms – at times the beady-eyed cockroaches seemed omnipresent, scuttling around freely, most ominously during the night.

The toilet was another unpleasant feature – the flush hardly ever worked. So after doing your business, you would put the “informative” material that had served as your toilet roll in a wastepaper basket. It goes with saying that the pungent smell and unavoidable sight of the product within hastened the time spent on that seat.

And this is the moment when we realised why the daily newspapers Izvestiya (News) and Pravda (Truth, albeit not really) would sell out fairly quickly. They would be cut up by the locals into squares and assume their main function as toilet paper.  

I remember one day in early December when the supermarket Detsky Mir (Children’s World), which sold all manner of goods, from chess sets and toys to school supplies, shoes and clothing, also unexpectedly had a delivery of Soviet toilet rolls. Naturally this long sought-after product triggered a long queue within a matter of seconds. 

As a rule, such queuing was a feature of everyday life, as the Soviet central planning system led to inefficient distribution, overproduction and the simultaneous inadequate supply of the goods most in demand, with little consideration of the requirements of different population categories. For example, there were never enough shoes of the right size, while the quality tended to be shoddy. The population would wait until the arrival of better imports from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).  As this was the height of the Cold War, the majority of resources in the USSR, and in particular in Russia, would be channelled to heavy machine building and the manufacturing of various weapons, once again marked by overproduction, in particular of tanks.  

So shopping in general was a protracted experience and bizarre to a Westerner. Initially you had to queue up in a store and indicate what you wanted to buy. The shop assistant would hand out a piece of paper where they had written down the name and price of the good, for example, potatoes. Then you would go and join a second queue to pay the cashier at a kiosk, have the chit stamped and then queue for the third time to hand over the chit for the potatoes. Of course, if you had the misfortune to forget anything, you would have to repeat the whole process. Even more strangely, I was to experience this bureaucratic nightmare a few years later at a bookshop where I was to spend considerable time in the centre of London. But that is another story.