Nakhodka High Life, Part II

Oxana’s battles with the Swamp ZheK commenced our very first full day in Nakhodka

Oxana comes from a venerable Soviet navy family; her father, the formidable Stanislav Stepanovich, a ranking colonel, brooks no nonsense. Shortly after I first began dating his daughter, I was visiting at their apartment in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, and I ventured an opinion about the progressive democratic views of a local politician whom I had just met. “WHAT!” he thundered at me, incredulous. “You believed what that IDIOT told you?! He’s a CROOK!” Stepanovich then proceeded to tell me in detail how the politician had conspired to misappropriate some funds earmarked for a construction project into building his personal dacha.

As a child of a military family, Oxana was used to order, stability and precision. Her family’s apartment was in the military neighborhood in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, and the local ZheK dealt quickly with plumbing problems and electricity outages. Nobody from a service bureau had ever hung up on Oxana in her life. After morning coffee, she ventured forth to find the offending ZheK and put them in their proper place.

First, though, we had to find the place. Compounding our unfamiliarity with the Swamp’s layout was the fact that its builders neglected to use any sort of identifiable logic in its construction. It was the ultimate late-Soviet period housing development, a sprawl of identical unpainted five-story concrete apartment blocks dissected by mud fields. Parallel mud fields, it could be surmised, were roads, since they had potholes and wheel marks. The more random mud fields – communal living spaces, or dvori – held random playground equipment and collections of busted up benches among drifts of wastepaper and broken glass.

The streets of the Swamp squiggled around the mud fields in random array. All were named Soviet Street. There was First Soviet Street, Second Soviet Street, Third Soviet Street, Fourth Soviet Street, Fifth Soviet Street, Sixth Soviet Street, Seventh Soviet Street, and Eighth Soviet Street and Ninth Soviet Street. The street names weren’t always painted on the sides of buildings, so at a crossroads it was impossible to tell which Soviet Street went in which direction. The building numbers in some places alternated odd and even on opposite sides of the road, and in others sequentially, with odd and even numbered buildings on the same side of the street and then wrapping around to the other side. On a few Soviet Streets, odd and even building numbers on opposite sides of the streets switched abruptly to sequential numbers, and vice versa. Some of the Soviet Streets were mis-numbered. Squads of cats skulked in feral groups and fled into dark basement windows when we approached. Sidewalks dead-ended in mud holes of green water.

Forty-five minutes of exploration finally landed us at the ZheK doorway, where we were only seventeenth in line. It wasn’t ten yet and I was already sweating in gobs. Finally, after an hour and forty-five minutes, our turn came. We approached a tiny closed door, which the Russians call an okoshka, and are an integral part of their bureaucratic life. Civil servants hide behind okoshki like the guard at the gate of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, and open and close them on whim. An okoshka reveals only the face of the civil servant and is always situated at shoulder level, so that a petitioner must bend and kowtow obsequiously before it.

The Swamp ZheK okoshka flung open, revealing a glaring fat female face. “WHAT!” screamed the face. Oxana took a startled step back.

“…we had some problems with our water this morning…”
“WHAT? WHERE DO YOU LIVE?”
Oxana gave the address. The okoshka slammed shut. Oxana rapped twice.
“WHAT?” shouted the woman. “STOP BOTHERING ME!!” The okoshka slammed shut again.
We looked at each other, shrugged and waited. A few minutes later, the okoshka opened.
“EVERYTHING’S PAID TO THE END OF THE MONTH!” the woman bellowed.
“…but we didn’t have water this morning…”
“WHEN?!!”
“…this morning…”
“WHEN?!!”
“…when we got up…”
“WHAT BUSINESS OF MINE IS IT WHEN YOU WAKE UP!! MAKE SENSE!!”
Oxana blew up at this: “WHO do you think YOU ARE! WE DON’T HAVE WATER! WHY!?”
“NOBODY HAS WATER! IT’S A SHORTAGE!” The woman glowered. “I CAN’T WASH, EITHER!” and slammed the okoshka shut.

Later during our stay in the Swamp, we found out the cause of the water shortages. Nakhodka, and the entire Primorye, is one of the lushest and most well-watered regions in all of Russia, its hills and valleys awash in stunning green and gold vegetation, its rivers strong and pure, and its lakes deep and plentiful. Soviet planners, taking advantage of the Swamp’s proximity to a river, put the pumping station for its water supply on a flood plain. If the river rose too high, it shorted out the electricity and the Swamp lost its water; if the river fell too low, the intake marooned above the waterline, and the Swamp went dry. Optimal conditions for water supply existed approximately three days per month. The rest of the time, just enough water could be taken in to supply the Swamp between the hours of one o’clock and five o’clock in the morning.

Equally vexing were the brownouts. Nakhodka, like many cities in the Russian Far East, has a tenuous relationship with electricity. It depends on creaky, Soviet-era coal-fired generator stations for its power, and problems are legion; coal shortages, equipment breakdowns, plant managers with visions of grandeur ransacking the budget, problems that add up to one thing: Cold dinners in dark apartments.

The electricity, we soon found out, went on at eleven p.m. and turned off at seven a.m. The trick was to cook something for dinner while eating breakfast, and then at night, get breakfast ready before going to sleep. Properly coordinated with the water schedule, it was possible to live a reasonable schedule with two sleep periods; one upon arriving home from work, from seven until nine or ten p.m., and then a second one, from about midnight until four a.m. This way all of the washing and cooking and cleaning could be done daily. Oxana and I would shuffle home from work and nap for a while before getting up for a few hours of housework in the middle of the night; a look out of our window confirmed that everybody else in the Swamp operated on the same schedule.

Once we figured this out, life became tolerable. Bizarre REM patterns reduced us to a semi-stunned state for most of our waking life, like being ever so slightly high. We only tipped over the edge when catastrophes hit, such as the time a flood knocked the pumping station out of commission for two weeks. To keep the Swamp supplied with drinking water, ZheK organized tanker trucks, big brown ZILs that chugged into the yard honking to announce their arrival. Immediately a rush of housewives carrying buckets and bottles surrounded them, collecting as much liquid as they could to last until the next day. For American conservationists, I offer this challenge: Try to live for 24 hours on three gallons of water. A gallon for a sponge bath; a gallon for dinner and breakfast; and a gallon for the rest, with all of the waste water going to flush the toilet. It can be done but by day 3, you will definitely need a hot shower, and by the time the water comes coughing out of the faucets at the end of day 8, you will shed tears of joy at the first rusty brown trickles.

All of this, of course, is to say that Nakhodka is representative of a typical working-class, middle-sized Russian city. The people are, for the most part, poor – talk of oligarchs and Russian billionaires dominates the American press, because people in general worship wealth and think that rich people are more interesting than poor people are, but Nakhodka (or something similar) is the reality for most Russians. They put up with a dilapidated infrastructure, bad drinking water, cramped and poorly built apartments and bad food because their poverty leaves them no choice. This is the Russia where the average wage is a few hundred dollars a month and life expectancy for men is under sixty years.