translated by Rodney Livingstone
Leonid Brezhnev was a petrolhead. His personal fleet included not only two Cadillacs, conferred on him by President Nixon, but also a Lincoln Continental, Citroën, Chevrolet and Chrysler — and I’m still on the Cs. The joke that went round Moscow was that the Soviet leader’s mother feared expropriation of their property: “But Lenya, what if the Bolsheviks come back?” But her massive, morose, mono-browed, medal-jangling son needn’t have worried.
Time was when every second Muscovite lived in a communal apartment, multi-generational families allotted no more than a single room of their own. Living cheek by jowl meant knowing one’s neighbors by their nocturnal moans and conjecturing the contents of their dinners from the decibels of their matutinal flatulence, as the poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky observed in his essay “In a Room and a Half” — 11 people were accommodated in the communal apartment in Leningrad in which he grew up. It was all a little too close for comfort.
