Description
It started with the prices. Everything began to get expensive.
Back in the day, Mom would hand me 10 kopecks, and I’d dash to the kiosk for an ice cream. But at some point, the price began to spiral—weekly, maybe even faster: 15, 25, 50 kopecks, a ruble, three rubles, five. By the time an ice cream hit the one-ruble mark, my parents simply didn’t have the money for it anymore. Shortly after, shops began demanding coupons alongside cash. Even for matches. Germany sent humanitarian aid, often offloading expired goods, and our family managed to snag a couple of crates. I mostly remember disliking the German bread—its taste was unaccustomedly sour—and the powdered milk. That milk was unpopular; it sat in the cupboard for years, untouched by anyone.
The crisis drove urban laborers back to the villages, to plots of land where they could grow food and stockpile provisions for cold winters and hard times. For a while, money lost its purchasing power entirely, and barter became the norm. In those heavy periods of hopelessness, alcohol became the ultimate currency.
With a bottle, you could pay for village services—like getting a neighbor to plow a potato field with his horse. You could bribe a forester to turn a blind eye while you secured logs for a bathhouse. Or, in a twist of absolute absurdity, you could even pay off a traffic cop who had stopped you for drunk driving.
My parents distilled moonshine—samogon—in our city apartment, and then went to the village to help my grandmother do the same. The stills were contraptions of intricate, varied designs that always captured my attention. Sometimes I would sit in the kitchen, just watching the process, trying to decipher how it all worked. I had once stumbled upon an entry on perfume manufacturing in a Soviet encyclopedia that detailed the distillation process; now, I was witnessing the industrial reality firsthand.
The mash, from which the alcohol was evaporated, was brewed from anything containing sugar. Particularly prized was "beetroot samogon," made from sugar beets. Local "experts" claimed it left no hangover the next morning (my own experience, years later, proved this to be absolute rubbish).
Over a couple of years, the first well-to-do families began to emerge in the village where I spent my summers. They built larger houses, installed satellite dishes, and bought foreign cars imported from Poland. Their capital came from moonshine, which they produced on a nearly industrial scale. You could buy from them around the clock. People even drove in from neighboring towns just to get their "Sam." My parents, however, never quite succeeded in this trade; they lacked cheap access to sugar. They distilled only for barter and for themselves.
"Alcohol is evil."
When this statement comes from the mouth of a drunken adult, it sounds foolish and insincere. A child will never believe it. And I didn't believe it either.
One day, while skipping school with classmates, I suggested we try fresh samogon, just like the adults did. It ended poorly. We screamed pop songs at the top of our lungs, smashed a couple of glasses, and broke a chair. I passed out on a bench in front of my history teacher's house. She called my parents to tell them where I could be found.
I didn't feel ashamed in front of my parents—I had seen them in a similar state many times. But the next day, I simply couldn't look the history teacher in the eye.
Flux + Kylodzi low-rank adaptation, digital manipulation, loop by Hailuo, dither, converting to GIF
768 × 1144 px