Minsk in 1975 got 5 stars for novelty value (Minsk)

Member Name: Immlang

Product:	Minsk
Date:	04/06/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: See life in the Soviet Union of old

Disadvantages: Life was pretty awful

This is pretty unfair of me as what I'm about to write probably bears no relation at all to the modern city of Minsk, but here goes anyway... on Minsk as I remember it from 1975 when I was a member of a group of 4 students from Salford University who went there to study Russian from October to December.

The journey

Having crossed by ferry to Ostend on the coast of Belgium we boarded the Moscow train. It wasn't really a Moscow train as only one of its carriages would end up in Moscow and all the rest would be shed somewhere along the way. We were to get off at Minsk before Moscow. We were met by a very friendly conductor. It wasn't long before we opened the bottles of duty free spirits we had bought on the ferry. The conductor produced a bottle of "Zubrovka", which roughly translates as "Bison Juice", some salami, some bread and we set to for what amounted to a 24 hour bash as the train went through Belgium, West Germany, East Germany, Poland and on to Belorussia. I vaguely remember going through the barbed wire, fortifications and machine gun posts of the Berlin Wall, but being young and foolish students we were pretty well plastered by then. I can also remember the entire carriage being jacked up somewhere in Poland and the wheels removed to be replaced by ones set wider apart to suit the broader gauge of Soviet Railways. We saw steam locomotives and lots and lots of fields.

The border

We had wondered if it would be hard to cross into the Soviet Union. Not a bit of it. Just out of devilment, for I wasn't a believer, I had taken a bible with me. It was obviously a bible, leather bound, with Holy Bible written on the front. The border guard looked me in the eye and said, "What is this? Poetry?" "Da", I replied. "No problem", he said.

The arrival

We arrived at Minsk station in the early hours of the morning. We were seriously drunk. There was a welcoming committee made up of carefully selected politically sound students from the Minsk State Teacher Training Institute for Foreign Languages to meet us. They didn't seem in the least surprised to see the state we were in. They took us into a building and plied us with a veritable feast of roast meat, salad, herrings, caviar, wine - the whole shooting match. We, of course did not appreciate this in the least, thinking more of somewhere discreet to throw up than of eating or drinking anything else. Little were we to know that that would be our last sight or smell of "proper" food for the next 3 months.

Home

Home was to be a room in the aforementioned Teacher Training Institute. The room consisted of 5 single beds placed round the perimeter with a wooden table in the middle. We later found out that we had the luxury rooms, as the Soviet students had 6 beds to a room. The rooms were on long corridors, with a babushka (=grandmother) stationed 24/7 on each corridor to keep an eye on all the students. There were 2 bathrooms on each floor, one for each gender. The sinks had cold water only and no plugs. There were mirrors, but they were on the opposite side of the room from the sinks. This made shaving an interesting exercise in that you would lather your face at the sink, step across the room with your razor in your hand, have a couple of strokes with the razor, go back to the sink to rinse the blade and possibly top up the lather, then back to the mirror, and so on. Now we know why so many Russians had beards.
The toilets deserve special mention. The pans looked more or less like a British pan, except they had a flat portion designed to catch solid excreta. Apparently, this was so it could be examined and analysed if necessary. There were no toilet seats; instead, there were steel platforms either side of the pan at the height of the pan. The idea was that you put your feet on them and crouched over the pan to do your business. Toilet paper was unobtainable in 1975 Minsk and there was a supply of cut up newspaper thoughtfully left in each cubicle. Mind you, having read Pravda it was good to find a genuine use for it. We had been forewarned and had taken a 3 month supply of VSP (very soft paper) with us. We had to keep this hidden as it, like everything else we owned, was subject to be stolen by the Soviet students. The plumbing was not up to having paper down it so we used a neat little basket. We discovered that the baskets were not emptied at the weekend, so to get to the cubicle by Sunday evening you had to wade through a sea of soiled soviet newspaper spewing out of the basket onto the floor.
The showers had their idiosyncrasies too. They were located in the bowels of the building, several floors below our room. It was, of course, a communal shower with no cubicles or privacy of any kind. No-one told us that it was male students on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and female the other days, until one of us lads wandered down for a shower on a Tuesday.

The food

Aargh. The food. Imagine beetroot soup. Pretty nice, most people would think. Now imagine cabbage soup. That's not so bad either. Now imagine having them on alternate days, every day for three months. That's what we had, with bread and potatoes. Lots of bread and mountains of potatoes. There was fruit, so long as you liked apples, and there was booze. We soon found out why our welcoming party was not fazed by our state on arrival as drunkenness was the state of an awful lot of the people we met. The babushkas on each floor were meant to stop shady goings-on, but like the Soviet students we soon learnt how to smuggle beer and vodka into our room - and there wasn't much else to do so we carried on as we had started on that train. I've never touched vodka since my return from Minsk in 1975; in fact the smell of it now still makes me retch. Come to that, I've not touched beetroot or cabbage soup either. Fortunately I'm OK with bread, potatoes and apples.
There's lots more to be said, but I'll post this for now and if it gets reasonable feedback add to it.

Summary: Glad I went