Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes by Caroline Walton, Ivan Petrov Page B

to gain some solitude in the isolator.
    In the evenings we exercise by shuffling around a small square. By unspoken agreement the walkers do not disturb each other. Ifyou pace up and down for long enough you start to feel almost light-headed and detached from your surroundings. For a minute or two you can forget you are in a camp. Returning from one of these evening shuffles a tall Jew named Yura Kots approaches me and remarks casually: “Wine drinkers smell different in the morning.”
    “So they do,” I reply, “but what makes you say so?”
    “This is going to be the first sentence of the novel that I’ll write when I get out of here.”
    “D’you know the joke about the madman who spent all day writing?”
    “Tell me. I could do with a laugh.”
    “A doctor comes up to him and asks: ‘What are you writing?’”
    “‘A letter,’ he replies.”
    “‘Who to?’”
    “‘Myself.’”
    “‘And what does it say?’”
    “‘How should I know? I’ll find out when I get it.’”
    “But I really am going to write a novel,” Kots insists.
    “When?”
    “When I leave here.”
    After that Kots and I take our shuffles beside each other. Each month he receives a parcel of books which he passes on to me when he has finished. In the evenings we discuss our readings and study German together.
    By profession Kots is a card-sharp, but he was sent to camp for theft. One day he lost to more experienced players. A card debt is a very serious matter. In order to repay it Kots robbed his former college. He was caught trying to make off with a tape recorder and given three years.
    I am surprised to see that Kots subscribes to ‘Young Communist.’
    “What’s up, need extra toilet paper?”
    “No.”
    “Then why do you order that rubbish?”
    “There are a lot of things written here that you won’t find anywhere else.”
    He shows me some notes on the last page about a debate between Sartre and Camus. This took place a few years ago but everything goes through the USSR like a giraffe’s neck and Kots has to keep up-to-date on western literature in order to maintain his pose as an intellectual.
    Kots toured the country, presenting himself now as an architect, now as a doctor. He met his victims on long-distance trains or on the beaches of health spas. While he was swindling someone at cards he would remark casually to his victim: “Of course, Camus was not really an existentialist…”
    Marcel Proust was Kots’ trump card, deadlier than a Kalashnikov in his hands. The credulous intelligentsia, who thought that culture was something you picked up with your university degree, were impressed. Kots would quickly empty his opponents’ pockets and then disappear.
    Although I admire Kots and envy him his freedom I never think of following his example. A life of crime seems too complicated, and if I’m honest, I know it is beyond my capabilities. Besides, it will inevitably lead me back to prison. I have never held romantic notions about the brotherhood of thieves. They only band together when it is profitable to do so or when they are afraid. It’s not hard to give away what has been easily come by, so thieves are accustomed to dividing up their booty. But when itcomes down to parting with their last it is a very different story. When they are in difficulties thieves display as much solidarity as spiders in a jar.
    No one in my family has been to prison before me. I don’t count my father. Those were different times. Besides, that was for a political ‘crime.’ Nowadays political crimes aren’t regarded as crimes at all, although on the outside people still try to keep their distance from former political prisoners, ‘to keep away from sin’ they say.
    Even though I am not attracted to a life of crime I do not condemn my fellow inmates. After two weeks behind barbed wire I learn not to judge others. At first I hold myself a bit aloof. I figure that the other prisoners are probably inside for a reason while I