Cheers Comrade Lenin

By Christopher Chapman

A first hand insight by the co-author into the life of an ill-assorted family living in the USSR during the 1960's, during her teens. Set deep in Ukraine's farming community, the book describes the methods employed by the Gavrishko family, during a typical summer, to not only overcome the Kremlin’s dictates and petty rules, but to use them to their advantage. The family, a self confessed war hero father who craves for a quiet life, a Lenin inspired, workhorse mother, an eccentric grandfather who spent many years in Siberian Gulags and a nonconformist grandmother. Add a mad beekeeper uncle, a once famous alcoholic actress aunt, an arrogant Moscow based cousin and an ignorant, alcoholic Communist party collective farm manager combination, evokes a recipe for a mad cap way of life.From the first day of spring to late autumn, the narrative places various members of the family into outlandish predicaments that are dealt with in ways that, to a western orientated observer seem quite farcical, but to the Gavrishko family were a natural way of overcoming the odds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Chapman
• Release date: Nov 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466075184

Christopher Chapman

After 50 odd years of wandering around the globe in a state of drunken debauchery I have now settled down in South Wales sans the debauchery and before the memory cells go completely am writing humorous articles and books in a nostalgic vein, about it all.

Book preview

Cheers Comrade Lenin

Copyright © 2007 Lara & Chris Chapman

Smashwords Edition

Not so much about living under the Soviet

Regime; more about disregarding it altogether.

Dedicated to the memory of the family and friends of Lara Gavrishko. Without them, this book would have been a mere figment of the imagination

Cheers Comrade Lenin

Chapter 1

The First Day of Spring

Lara felt the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. The dream she was luxuriating in took on a sudden, fearful distortion. The blissful joy of wandering through buttercup filled meadows, playing hopscotch with pats of old crusted cow dung, and nothing but cries of skylarks, lapwings and the burbling of a nearby brook to keep her company, suddenly shattered. The brook’s burbling took on the proportions of a giant waterfall and a booming roar replaced the bird warbling. Within a millisecond, the thunderous rumble seized Lara’s body and she sat bolt upright in sheer terror. The deep rumble started again. It was above her head, somewhere in the heavens. It grew in volume, coming nearer. She unconsciously bit her lip in terror as she waited for the inevitable ghastly monster to engulf her in an orgy of bloodletting. A white apparition suddenly rushed past the window. She heard a spine-chilling shriek. Wooden window panes rattled, the house shook and Lara’s bladder emptied like a bursting floodgate.

‘Bloody hell,’ someone shouted, from far away.

‘Bloody hell,’ echoed Lara, after her nervous system regained a modicum of control. She pinched her thigh and concluded that she was indeed alive and kicking, although rather damp; furthermore, the winter snows were melting.

Outside the Gavrishko home, a modest stone built house in a remote farming village, set deep in the heart of Ukraine, a dripping effigy of the abominable snowman figure materialised. ‘Bloody bastard,’ it muttered, and slowly staggered through an open door into the kitchen, straight into the arms of Grandmother Gavrishko.

Grandmother Gavrishko, ‘Babushka’, to her nearest and dearest, wasn’t actually waiting in the kitchen with her arms extended for the apparition that suddenly confronted her. She was in the middle, if highly illegal, offering of thanksgiving to the Lord God Almighty, that the spring thaw was starting.

‘Oh God almighty,’ she screamed, changing her mode of appeal somewhat. ‘What the hell…?’

‘Bloody bastard,’ cried the effigy, manifesting itself into her husband by shaking half a ton of snow onto the carefully polished wooden floor.

‘Get out,’ screamed Babushka, grabbing a switch broom. She looked as if she was about to jump onto it side-saddle and attack her bedraggled husband like a dive-bomber. With her long flowing black dress showing a glimpse of her goose fat impregnated boots, all she lacked was a pointed hat.

‘Oomph,’ gasped Grandfather Gavrishko, as she jabbed him in the solar plexus with the handle. He staggered backwards and started a coughing fit. ‘Siberia,’ he croaked, ‘…bloody Siberia.’

Babushka stopped her onslaught, threw the broom down and put her hands on her hips. She stood quite still and watched the poor man regain his breath. ‘Why oh why do you always bring that up?’ she said. ‘Every time you can't take your punishment like a man you always bring that up?’

Grandfather Gavrishko slowly stood up. His deep blue eyes pierced through snow-encrusted eyebrows. The huge smoke stained walrus moustache, now resembling a dilapidated snowplough, twitched. ‘Thirteen years in Siberia does things to a man.’ He pointed a long bony finger at his wife. ‘Thirteen years out of your life, serving a sentence for that bastard Stalin, in bastard freezing snow.’

The fury in Babushka’s eyes softened, replaced by a hint of compassion.

Her husband watched her intently. ‘Seen so much snow,’ he went on, never want to see it ever again, and what happens. I go out to make a path for you…you old crow, so you won’t slip on the ice, on the way to milk the cow, and look what happened?’

‘What happened?’ asked Lara, dashing into the kitchen, her rude awakening, forgotten.

‘I've been avalanched, that’s what happened,’ said her Grandfather.

‘Oh,’ muttered Lara, as though ‘being avalanched’ was a natural phenomenon that happened every day. She started searching for her boots amongst the seemingly endless assortment of family Gavrishko footwear, which overflowed from a huge wooden box, kept by the back kitchen door.

‘Morning,’ said Vladimir Ivanovich Gavrishko, ambling into the kitchen, fastening the dozen or so fly buttons on his favourite brown corduroy trousers. The father of fifteen-year-old Lara, a school teacher and, by his own admission, unsung war hero. He was also the son of the almost, but not quite reconciled gladiators. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Grandfather’s been avalanched,’ Lara told him, not in the least bit interested in family dramatics, and still trying to get to grips with the multitude of knotted laces which held her knee length boots together.

‘Has he by God,’ said her father, ‘When?’

‘Five minutes ago,’ announced his mother, ‘The roof fell on him.’

Vladimir looked out of the window and a glazed look came into his eyes. ‘Had the roof fall in on me, more than once,’ he mumbled. ‘Damn good job as well sometimes, especially when a bloody big Panzer tank rolls on top of you.’

He glanced at his father and jolted his memory forward into the present day. ‘What roof?’

‘The snow off our roof.’ said Lara, skipping past her bemused father. ‘It’s Spring,’ she shouted and ran out, through the back door into the garden.

‘…Ah,’ muttered her father, eyes widening a little. His usual care worn but utterly blissful manner took on a new dimension, but only for a second or two. Looking out through the open door, he remembered past thaws, and he remembered the mud. Thaws always brought mud.

Spring always took him back to mud. The spring mud of 1945, when as Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich Gavrishko, he was up to his waist in it, chasing German Panzer Battalions back towards Hitler’s lair. ‘Christ, that was mud,’ he said quite audibly.

‘Snow,’ said his piqued father, pointing roughly towards the roof. ‘It was bloody snow.’ He looked at his son. He wasn’t listening. Vladimir was staring at his cabinet of war medals.

A shout of ‘What's going on?’ followed by ‘Where’s Lara?’ from upstairs by Lara’s tyrannical mother Irina, broke the spell.

Vladimir rolled his eyes to the heavens and walked to the open doorway, completely ignoring the question. He surveyed the thawing landscape and held his head up high, savouring the movement of slightly scented air that caressed his face. Looking up he watched clouds, soft gentle billowing clouds, scudding across a clear blue heaven. A droplet of water tumbled down his cheek, but it was no longer icy and hard, just soft and gentle. He looked around and saw that the snow which had been cradled in the trees all winter, like over stuffed sofas, was melting. The straw thatched roofs of neighbouring houses, which yesterday were blanketed with unremitting whiteness, were, even as he watched, beginning to appear.

‘I will not ask you again.’ demanded Irina from on high. ‘Where is Lara?’

The spell broken Vladimir slowly raised an arm and pointed towards the garden. ‘She’s out there, he said, ‘Come and look.’

Mother and father Gavrishko, Grandfather and Babushka Gavrishko stood in the doorway, fighting for space and watched Lara, her nightdress soaking wet and flapping around her head performing cartwheels of delight, in the fast melting snow.

‘Bravo,’ shouted her Grandfather, forgetting the avalanche.

‘Hurrah,’ proclaimed her father forgetting the mud.

‘Wonderful,’ shouted her grandmother, forgetting the avalanche and the mud.

‘Lara come in immediately,’ screamed her mother, ‘And put some knickers on.’

****

Chapter 2

The Bunker.

Very early one morning, a few days after spring had blossomed forth; Vladimir Gavrishko stepped outside into the back garden. He was carrying a door.

His careworn eyes searched the heavens for signs of highflying insects; his twitching nose sniffed the warm spring breeze for scents of early opening violets and his frost bitten ears twitched for sounds of marital confrontation. Judging by the highflying swifts, the insects were high on the wing. This boded well for fine sunny weather. Violets were exuding aromas. Which meant the earth was warming nicely.

Vladimir hoped Irina was still asleep; although it would have been nice to know for sure. To be forewarned. He stepped gingerly between her highly cherished herb and rose beds; senses acutely attuned for the bellow of an instant summons to attend his wife’s whims, but nothing. No human sound spoilt the tranquillity. At the edge of the apple orchard Vladimir stopped, looked furtively round and seeing no sign of attack, dived complete with the door headlong into a rotting compost heap.

It was a cunning ploy; at least that was the idea when the idea blossomed.

It was early one morning last summer. The edge of sleep and wakefulness was a veritable goldmine of ideas for Vladimir. Most of the time, he forgot what the idea was as soon as he woke, but this one stuck. He would construct a private hideaway, a bolt-hole, a place where solitude and sanctuary could be sustained without arousing his wife’s suspicions. It was from her that he wanted sanctuary.

Everybody wanted sanctuary from Irina. The demon School Mistress, who brought her demonizing home, and demonized her family.

This idea was so vivid, so clear-cut in its simplicity that he got out of bed, dressed quickly and went down to the kitchen, poured himself a heart starter of mulled apricot wine, and drew up a plan before even Babushka, who was normally first to rise, surfaced.

The Babushkas’ run the homes, and they were, if not the lifeblood of the family, certainly the heart. Every home needs a housewife, if not a wife, so every home had a Babushka. As retired old ladies, they lived with their children and their children, and they lived forever.

‘I heard,’ Vladimir announced two hours later, at breakfast, when all the family had assembled around the vast, old oak kitchen table, ‘That the Imperialist West is drawing up a plan to invade us.’

‘Where from?’ said his father, haphazardly negotiating a spoon of porridge through his walrus moustache.

‘The West,’ Vladimir replied.

‘I mean where did you hear it from?’

‘The wireless.’

‘We haven’t got a wireless… Have we?’ said Babushka, having only a vague idea of what exactly a wireless was.

‘Never mind what wireless’, said Vladimir, somewhat thrown by this small defect in his planning. ‘I heard it, and it was very explicit. The Americans are going to invade us because they are very short of food, and we have plenty.’

‘We’ve only got pickles and a few apples’ said Babushka.

‘We've got a cow and a pig,’ said Grandfather Gavrishko.

‘And chickens and cheese and butter,’ added Lara, his fifteen year old daughter

‘What utter rubbish,’ said Irina, ‘they wouldn’t dare invade us.’ She looked at Vladimir’s face and started to suspect a plot. A plot hatching in her husband’s devious mind. She held her tongue and waited for developments.

‘Not us personally you fools… the country’, said an exasperated Vladimir, frightened that his plan was in danger.

Then he saw his opening.

‘Although we would of course be in the forefront of any invasion.’

‘Is all this leading anywhere?’ asked Irina.

Vladimir looked at his wife and plunged in at the deep end, ‘I'm going to build us a bunker,’ he said. ‘The Germans caught us out last time and I don’t want to go through that again’.

All the mud and misery, thought Lara.

‘All the mud and misery,’ said her father.

He looked earnestly at his wife and clasped her hand on the table. ‘I'm thinking of you my dear.’

‘Oh yes,’ said his wife sarcastically, ‘And where do you propose to build this edifice to my devotion?’

‘Underneath the compost heap, it’ll be underground. It’ll be the last place the Americans will look. They don’t like compost. You won’t know it's there my love.’

‘If you don’t know it's there,’ said Lara, after a thoughtful moment, ‘How will we find it?’

‘Don’t want to find it,’ said Babushka ‘Went into a bunker once, in the war. Full of rats and groping men.’

Grandfather looked up, ‘What groping men, you didn’t tell me?’

‘Lots I didn’t tell you,’ replied his wife, ‘I was groped more times than I care to remember… so I've forgotten.’

‘What’s groped?’ asked Lara.

‘Eat your porridge,’ ordered her mother. She looked at Vladimir; at least it would keep him out of mischief, ‘When do you intend to build this bunker?’

‘I shall start this morning,’ he said quickly, realising that he should curtail the debate before any more awkward questions developed.

During that summer, Vladimir dug and dug; he was rarely seen. So long as he had enough room for a couple of chairs, a bookcase, his precious medal cabinet and a basic support system for a returned war hero and a cunningly disguised trap door made of hessian sacking and compost. Just a hole big enough to hide a barrel or two of highly potent homemade spirit called samogon. Here he could entertain like-minded cronies in apparent concealment and gay abandon, a subterfuge, away from Irina’s eagle eye. Sanctuary was the totality of his plan. That’s all he wanted out of life.

The manner of Vladimir’s summer life style had not escaped his family. They all knew what his diversion was concealing. Furtive comings and goings throughout the day and night by the village men folk, flattened rose bushes, trodden flower borders and the sound of revelry from under the compost heap brought Irina to boiling point.

By the time the first snows heralded the onset of winter and the fact that Irina hadn’t boiled over was looked upon as a major miracle. Vladimir took this as an omen of her acceptance, although he was the only member of the family who did. The bunker stayed intact through the winter and although accessible only after a tunnel through three metres of snow was dug, it was well worth the effort. In his bunker he spent the cold months drawing up plans for extensions, plumbing and cooking facilities for the next spring.

The rest of the family knew that an explosion was looming. Although Vladimir had got away with his plans for last year, everybody was as sure as hell that Irina would blow up if he continued this spring.

Irina was a sight to behold when she detonated. The explosive rate of her detonations was always dependent on the amount of time she spent priming the fuse, that, and the length of the fuse she permitted the miscreant with, in order to blow themselves into absolute oblivion.

****

Chapter 3

Irina Detonates

Irina Semenovna Gavrishko came to Vilnek on a whim. She had once watched a film at Moscow University, while taking a degree in teaching. It was a propaganda film about an idyllic area in western Ukraine, set in a valley with a river meandering gently through the lush meadows. The village surrounded by forest covered mountains and mantled in rich fertile soil.

Coming from an area in the east of the country, where the only panorama for miles around were endless factory chimneys churning out clouds of black dust and smoke the idea of Vilnek was overpowering.

The schools in that area apparently needed teachers. She applied on the spot, and was duly appointed as chemistry teacher to Vilnek village school. Irina was eager and fired up with Leninist doctrine and voracious career ambition. It was while still overcome with the euphoria of the surroundings, she fell for the handsome recently returned war hero who also taught at the same school.

Yes, the village was surrounded by snow capped mountains. It did have a meandering river, feeding a lake. It was surrounded by forests and