Potentially Endless Summer

Between 1992 and 1994, I spent a combined seven months in Russia. At first, it was just to get away from college for a semester. But I also had deeper interests: my parents had spent more of the ’70s in “Let the Soviet Jews Emigrate” rallies than in bell bottoms. And the Soviet Union had just ended, so I was eager to see how everything was all fixed now.

My semester abroad was in St. Petersburg, still trying to remember not to call itself “Leningrad.” I was assigned to live with a Russian Orthodox family, and had some trepidations about anti-Semitism. As it turned out, Slava, Lena and their son Boris were just fine with my Judaism but didn’t quite understand it, either. On Paskha, the Orthodox Easter, they kept asking me whether I’d called my family yet to congratulate them on the resurrection of Christ.

My semester abroad was in St. Petersburg, still trying to remember not to call itself “Leningrad.”

I studied Russian at the Mining Institute (because nothing helps you master the genitive plural like giant posters of quartz). There, our teacher, Katya, sought to open our eyes to the real Russia – like the surprising fact that everyone there hated Gorbachev. But the biggest reality check I got was the next June, when she found me a place to stay for the summer: sharing a one-room apartment with her recently divorced friend Sergei… in a ***kommunalka***.

The kommunalka is what we in the West call a “communal apartment,” or “group house,” except that its residents didn’t choose to be there. This one was built in the ’20s, and from the outside looked like one of those grand, beautiful (if crumbling) buildings Petersburg is littered with. I was having romantic visions from ***Dr. Zhivago*** as I approached the house. But once inside, those quickly dissolved into Kafka: Three families, each forced into a one-room living room/bedroom/everything room; and one kitchen, telephone, shower and toilet for the six of us to share. The kommunalka is what we in the West call a “communal apartment,” or “group house,” except that its residents didn’t choose to be there.

Sergei was a policeman who seemed to make his own hours (which didn’t exactly comfort me about the law enforcement system). We had two sets of neighbors: Lyudmila and her too-old-to-be-living-at-home son Andrei, who seemed to disappear for days at a time, returning full of outlandish schemes to get rich selling gasoline in Ukraine; and the middle-aged couple who rarely spoke, but filled our shared corridor with tons of sporting equipment, including an ominous drill the husband used for his Arctic ice-fishing expeditions. At first, I thought this was wildly exotic and manly, until I learned it consisted of drinking and sitting over a hole. Which is still pretty manly, come to think of it.

I was having romantic visions from Dr. Zhivago as I approached the house. But once inside, those quickly dissolved into Kafka

As sad as the digs were, I was impressed to find that the Russian “communal spirit” I’d read about actually worked. Imagine six American strangers, ***way*** post-college, forced to share one filthy toilet and one shower, in a city that sometimes lost hot water for hours at a time. In America, we’d bring in cameras and call that a reality show. In Russia, you’d be bored stiff at the utter peace and cooperation.

The kitchen was a bit more of an adventure. Although Sergei’s culinary ambitions rarely soared beyond ***kolbasa*** fried in a cast-iron pan, I liked to cook. But, fearful of the shortages I expected to find in early-’90s Russia, I had bought a cookbook titled something like, “Dishes You Can Make With Six Ingredients or Less.” It also didn’t help that I was a vegetarian in a country that – I was soon to learn – doesn’t even have an indigenous word for the term.

So there I was, congratulating myself on having braved the markets – with their ingenious pay-beforehand system and separate store for every conceivable food product. I was “roughing it” and enjoying a familiar activity from home. And then Lyudmila walked in.

Lyudmila was a baker, always bringing us home unpurchased ***bulki, pirozhki***, and the like. She was a large, stocky woman, with a voice and personality twice her size – the type of person you don’t even try to fight with to get onto a crowded bus.

Before whatever vegetable I’d managed to scrounge hit the pan, Lyudmila had grabbed it, sniffing, “You have no idea how to shop!” Then, as she tossed it into the garbage, “I’ll murder you!” A woman who had spent her life waiting in line for produce was literally instructing me to throw it away.

However, once I’d accepted her authority unquestioningly, Lyudmila’s involvement had its positive sides. She taught me how to make all kinds of dishes, giving me a whole new respect for borsch – which, growing up in America, you learned to hate as a sickly-sweet purple liquid in a jar. In Russia, it was dinner, and it was awesome.

The kommunalka is what we in the West call a “communal apartment,” or “group house,” except that its residents didn’t choose to be there.

But I only got a real sense of just how trapped freshly post-Soviet Russians were in their situation (financial, geographic, apartmental), when it happened to me.

Even though the Soviet government had fallen, many of its rules and practices were still in effect. That included the requirement that someone visiting the country on a tourist visa had to account for where they were staying every day of their visit. You could either be someone’s personal guest for a set period of time (for which the application process was long and cumbersome), or you could be registered with a hotel or official tourist institution.

I had planned to come for only a month, but wanted to stay for two. So another friend of Katya’s, who works at a hotel, helped me forge an extended date on my visa. Unfortunately, passport control at Pulkovo Airport refused to honor it, as well as the bribes I offered (To my question: “What do you want?” he replied, “To throw you in jail”). Article after article I had read about Russia’s legendary corruption, and I had to be in the line with the last honest guy?

So I trudged back to my kommunalka, and the neighbors listened in amusement as I stayed on the communal phone for nearly two days straight, trying to find a way out. The irony was particularly great for my parents, who had spent so much time and energy trying to get the refuseniks out – now their son had become one.

Eventually, I found a series of procedures (and tariffs) that would clear the way out. But as I went home, I knew I would always take with me the sense of a country paradoxically both trapped in place, and dying to break out of those communal walls. Oh, and a kick-ass recipe for borsch.

Rob Kutner is a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the author of the new humor book, APOCALYPSE HOW: Turn the End Times into the Best of Times!