The Third Glass

The Third Glass, by Zinovy Zinik

A decade has passed since the Iron Curtain finally came tumbling down, and many erstwhile riddles and mysteries of Russia have been resolved. It turns out that when they are drunk Russians, like certain Scots, may start looking for a fight. Like the Irish, they sometimes turn into solipsists, launching into long monologues and not listening to the person they're talking to. They like to cut a dash, as certain French individuals do. They become melancholy and tearful, like the Germans. They start to dance and sing, like the Italians and the Greeks. Or they slump under the table, like the Scandinavians. And so on.

All this is true. Externally all happy alcoholics are alike, but all unhappy alcoholics are unhappy after their own fashion. However, both the similarities and the differences here are deceptive. The whole purpose of the western European ritual of drinking, from the Parisian cafe, the Spanish bodega and the Greek taverna to the English pub, is to enliven the daily routine, to re-affirm yet again the sense of reality, to feel once again that you are part of society, a member of the collective. The most irredeemable Irish lush drinks to assert his dignity in the eyes of his companion. Russian carousing pursues a diametrically opposed goal: it is a flight from reality, it is liberation from the collective, a vault into other spheres of existence, or rather, non-existence. In this sense, alcoholic intoxication Russian-style has more in common with tripping out on psychedelic drugs. The hallucinatory effect of vodka is effectively enhanced by the Russian national obsession with mushrooms. Downing shots of vodka is like shooting up heroin. In Russia they don't drink, they mainline, but orally.

It all starts in a thoroughly civilised fashion, with the table covered and set with hors d'oeuvres and neat little single-shot glasses. Nowadays, after a few years of capitalism in the service sector, the variety of vodka labels is still a delight to behold, and the hors d'oeuvres are straight out of pre-Revolutionary literature. But it all terminates in paralysis and collapse, puking and wailing and the loss of consciousness. And of conscience too, in the sense that next morning you can always say, "I don't remember a thing". Indeed, if the morning after a drinking bout is not marked by a total loss of memory from some specific point of the previous day's events onwards (perhaps when you went out to the shop for the fourth bottle), the session is regarded as something of a failure.

The best-loved drinking stories are always about how there was something happening at the beginning, and then, quick as a flash, something else entirely different and totally absurd was going on. First you were in one place and then, in the blinking of any eye, you are somewhere quite different and unfamiliar. This disjunction of event and location is an attempt at temporary virtual escape from history, it is an emigration beyond the borders of your own life, in search of a new home, of freedom, equality and brotherhood, beyond the bounds of the present, to where everything is different, where there are no authorities and no family. Every binge is a journey into the unknown. From the forgotten pages of Russian literature we know of inspired alcoholic conversations in the carriages of long-distance trains, which constitute a zone lying outside normal time and space, where passengers who will be together for six hours and then never see each other again need have no fear of mutual confidences.

One of the drinking rituals practised by serious Moscow drunks from last century right up to the 1960s was actually called "A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg" (a reversal of the direction of the narrator's journey in an 18th century literary classic). A map of the Moscow-St. Petersburg railway line is spread out on the table among the bottles and the glasses. The communicants take it in turn to ring a bell and announce the name of the next station. At the station everyone "gets off the train" and drinks another glass of vodka at the "station buffet". The number of stations and buffets along the line is rather large, and I know very few people who have actually ever reached St. Petersburg. Venedikt Erofeiev's classic of Soviet prose, "Moscow-Petushki" is essentially constructed on the same principle (the chapters are named after stations); attempting to find his way to Red Square, the hero keeps finding himself at the Kursk Railway Station, where the suburban train runs to the village of Petushki. Most of these semi-fictional stories concerning pathological intoxication relate incidents concerning public transport. The most specifically Soviet of them tells how a drunken husband brought home a statue of Lenin. Next morning he explains to his wife that he mistook Lenin's legendary upraised arm gesturing into the Radiant Future for an attempt to hail a taxi. Wife: "But he's made of plaster!" Husband: "I thought he got covered in frost while he was waiting".

The prison gates have swung open, the iron curtain has tumbled, but Russians are still attempting to breach the defensive lines of their own psyche via the narrow neck of a vodka bottle. What can the problem be? A simple lack of civilisation? Does a single step away from the main street, so similar to the civilisation of Berlin or Paris, transport you into the embrace of Russian barbarism? Or perhaps it's that inhuman frost, when nature lies dead for almost half the year and darkness follows hard on the dawn? A man who's fallen into oblivion needs some kind of shock therapy to bring him round.

It's also a way of conquering fear -- of the police, of your wife, of life in general. Take the humorous ritual called "The Tiger's Here". The procedure is simple enough. The glasses are filled with vodka. The vodka is drunk. Then one of the company shouts, "The tiger's here!", and everyone has to hide under the table. Then the imaginary tiger goes away. Everybody crawls out from under the table and the vodka is poured. Then the tiger comes again and everybody hides under the table. The winner is the one who carries on emerging from under the table for longest. The joy of this ritual lies in its conquest of fear -- in Stalinist times fear was inseparable from a state of public optimism.

Then there is the opposite case of the confessional fit. More precisely, a descent into a condition in which anything is permitted. An enemy becomes a brother, a hated wife becomes a passionate lover, a well-known idiot becomes the most intelligent man in the company. This is the dark underworld where everything is in reverse, everything has been pulled inside out. The nineteenth-century writer Leskov, a connoisseur of the darker sectarian aspects of the Russian psyche, has a story entitled "Chertogon" ("driving out the devil") in which drinking until consciousness is obliterated is presented as a kind of purification, as a purgation of the profoundly sinful soul. It is no accident that vodka is popular after a visit to the bath-house: the steam-bath, including a flogging with birch twigs, purifies the body, and the vodka purifies the soul. It is a method of spiritual transformation, an attempt to escape into a different world and become a different person. Booze is the condensed book version of Madame Blavatskaya and Gurdjieff for the masses -- contained in a half-litre bottle.

In Russia drink has always been associated with religious sentiment (remember Rogozhin and Count Mishkin's joint meditation over the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot" by Dostoievsky). Vodka itself, the original Russian moonshine, was invented by monks. It was the "living" or "fiery" water that made soldiers perform incredible feats in battle. That was why the secret of this liquid was defended so fervently. The greatest authorities on this matter, such as William Pokhlyobkin (the underground guru of Russian cuisine in 1970s Moscow), tell us that the traditional opposition of patriarch and tsar, in fact the entire conflict between church and state, began from an attempt by the tsar's authorities to expropriate the prerogative of producing strong drink, the very spirits from which Russian spirituality is derived.
The political history of Russia is inseparable from the history of vodka production. Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of the new Russian revolution, committed a fatal error when he introduced unpopular restrictive measures licensing the sale of vodka in public places. It was the step that precipitated his downfall; as you may remember, he was removed from office by the hard drinker Yeltsin, who demonstrated greater understanding and leniency towards the spirit of the nation. True democracy has triumphed and now it seems that every political trend and personality is represented in Russia's alcohol emporia. You can find a German vodka called "Rasputin" and a hooch named after the rabble-rouser Zhirinovsky; the koscher vodka "Kegelevich" from Israel peacefully coexists in the street kiosks with her Slav sister "Stolichnaya". In the life of the vodka drinker there is apparently no longer any division between authorities and underground, East and West, socialism and capitalism.

This pluralism, though, is superficial. Drinkers of vodka are not divided by the labels on the bottle, nor even by the quality of the drink. The ritual of consuming vodka is a special kind of yoga, with its own system of breathing. Or rather, with two systems of breathing. According to the first system, you have to breathe in deeply, gulp down an entire glassful and then, still holding your breath, take a bite of something salty. Only after that can you let the air out of your lungs. The second system is just the opposite: you breathe out, completely emptying your lungs, gulp down a glass of vodka, take a bite of something salty while holding your breath, and only then are you allowed to take a deep breath in. For all the difference between the two systems, the goal is not simply to avoid scalding the larynx with strong spirit and to kill the unpleasant taste of home-brew. The procedure triggers a sudden injection of oxygen into the brain, which has a narcotic effect on the drinker. More even than that, it is a fine exercise which develops the musculature of the lungs and improves their efficiency.

Every drink, from pastis to sherry, is consumed in a special atmosphere, a specific milieu with associated rituals. Russians also consume all kinds of drinks in different circumstances. In fact, you might say that Russians drink anything in any circumstances. Indeed, from Russian folklore we learn that Russians drink cocktails of nail varnish and anti-perspirant. Jesus turned water into wine, but we turn any kind of wine into vodka. At the beer kiosks Russian drinkers pour vodka into the beer until the beer tastes just like vodka. We drink sherry and Pernod and Cuban rum, but we drink them all as though they were just different types of vodka with exotic labels on the bottle. Even brandy is no more than another variety of vodka. Brandy owes its appearance in Russia less to the French than to Stalin's Georgian connections; drinking it was a mark of respect for the great leader. And it was drunk by the bottle, like any other kind of vodka. Port wine or brandy, it makes no difference, it's all drunk in shot glasses (or tumblers) and all with sprats. Vodka has a bitter, stale taste that stings the nose, so you take salt cucumbers or herring with it. And if you haven't got either, you can always take a sniff at your sleeve instead in order to kill the taste of what you've just drunk. The process of eating with vodka involves dialectical self-negation. In the act of self-extinction, the material becomes a manifestation of the purely spiritual.

All alcoholics are alchemists at heart, because they attempt to extract strong spirit from the most improbable of mixtures. I once heard about a group of rough labourers who found themselves stuck out in a country village with no vodka, and the local shop had nothing but tooth powder. It seems that the minimal amount of alcohol contained in tooth powder can be extracted by gradually washing a huge amount of that perfumed stuff in a basin: all of the spirit rises to the surface and the chalk sinks. Panning out the grains of alcoholic gold like this takes many hours. Eventually, each of the labourers had half a glassful of a dubious cloudy white mixture. They all swallowed it down and began feeling better, then a few minutes later they began puking. But they puked in streams of pure white, and the smell was perfumed, like tooth powder. That must be the way angels puke.

A Russian friend of mine once discovered a bottle of "Solntsedar" ("Gift of the Sun") fortified wine standing on his windowsill behind the curtain. It had been left there following a raucous drunken evening. During the month or so it had been standing there the liquid had undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. It had divided into two parts, transparent at the top and dark below. The top half smelled like acetylene. The colour of the bottom half was as dense as pitch, and it felt very sticky. He used it around the house for a long time as glue, and it stuck well. Apparently "Solntsedar" used to be produced in Algeria and, as we discovered later, exported in oil tankers. The effect of "Solntsedar" was unpredictable, especially when it was drunk by the beer-glass in self-service bars.

I remember when these emporia first appeared in Moscow in the 60s as one of the fruits of Khruschev's enthusiasm for American technology, from milk cartons to hydroponics. An automated boozer appeared close to Moscow University, looking like a piece of real America: chrome plated machines with a slot for coins and a niche with a tap for pouring the brew. Total anonymity and no queue. There was even a propeller on the ceiling -- genuine transatlantic luxury. But that was as far as the similarity with America went. The place was packed with a smoking, spitting, swearing crowd: all the swear words just hung in the air, where the propeller stirred them around like an aluminium spoon mixing thick porridge. There was not a trace of ventilation, and the propeller squeaked and groaned. Instead of an infinite variety of beverages, there was only one liquid that could be squeezed out of the machines, a fortified wine with a taste like a mixture of cheap sherry and petrol. It was "Solntsedar" -- the Gift of the Sun. It was pointless even discussing the taste; you just had to hold your breath and swallow the entire dose in a single gulp, otherwise there was no way you could force it down. And you had to force down a great deal -- the only drinking vessels were half-litre beer glasses. The effect was astonishing, as though you'd stuck your fingers into a 220-volt mains socket; a moment after this electric shock, your guts locked solid, and that was followed by the rapid extinction of consciousness. The world around you was transformed into something quite otherworldly, the blood pounded in your head, weird voices boomed and echoed in your ears, bloated faces loomed up in distorted perspective, and the propeller circled above you like an emissary of doom. Everything began going round and round. In this condition you went up for a second helping. The machine didn't always work, so you beat it with your fist. Once, after the third blow, I heard a voice: "Stop that hammering, you devils! I'm pouring it now", and a trickle of liquid emerged from the machine. That is to say, all of the machines were merely a pretence, a façade; the same old serving-woman was standing there behind the wall, collecting the coins and pouring out the port wine by hand. Or was it the voice of some invisible angel?

In the Russian drinking ritual all external forms are spectral and uncertain, subject to unpredictable metamorphoses. Even the place where the vodka is consumed should preferably be extraordinary and not entirely legal. Despite all the restaurants and bars built in recent years, Russians still seek out places of their own, places not designated by anybody else, preferably marked by signs of decadence and decay, with crooked-legged tables and broken windows, so as not to feel embarrassed, so the world outside should not attempt to impose its own laws. Best of all in an obscure corner, in a kiosk, in a back yard, on the steps of an entrance, on a bench in a city square.

No matter how hard they try to make the Russian adopt a more civilised drinking ritual, in the American style or any other, he still hankers after a threesome. Meet someone on the street, wink at them, tap your Adam's apple (to ask: how about a drink?), chip in together, and off you go to the wine shop. There are stories which begin with who joined a threesome where for an illegal drink. This is a specialised field of folklore: where they got the glass, how they found the place. My own favourite story is how the newspaper "Pravda" was used to cover up the operation -- nobody would ever think of looking inside that! A glass is downed in a single gulp and then the metamorphoses begin; the fusion of three souls into a triune unity (threesome drinking is the Russian version of the Holy Trinity). Then the trinity sets off for a different world, drawn by a three-in-hand of horses, with a coachman drunk on "Troika" eau-de-cologne.

Such in general is the narcotic impact of vodka: after each glass you become a different person. Or perhaps not after each glass, but after each third one. That is why you so often hear Russians say "I've only had three glasses"; because the fourth glass is already drunk by a quite different person, who in turn, having drunk three glasses, becomes another person again, drinking his own first, second and third glasses. This magical number is no simple accident: with the third glass the drinker achieves a state of absolute bliss, heaven on earth, true paradise. However, this sensation does not last for long, and he reaches out for a fourth glass, but the fourth glass does not produce the desired result. All the glasses that follow are attempts to regain the paradise lost of the third glass.

© Zinovy Zinik