Un grand verre en caoutchouc
My last post about Armenia has attracted the attention of many parties, ranging from the Sayat Nova Society, the somewhat tautological but nonetheless alarming Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia ("We mean Turkey," they admitted), lawyers acting for Steffan ap Sioncs, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and a rather forward lady called Millî İstihbarat Teşkilâtı.
With such acclaim and gunfire ringing in my ears, I am happy to present the next chapter of my secret life of Armenia.
In 1986, the group of Russian-language students to which I was loosely attached set off on a trip from the sepia-tinted town of Voronezh for a week of summer sun in Soviet Armenia.
"The blokes will screw you, mate," chortled my room-mate Sergei through his morning moonshine mouthwash. "They're like that down there. Goes back to Roman times." He was studying something in the history faculty, usually the plump Cossack rump of Olga the hostel bike.
Reassured that I wouldn't be lonely, I clambered aboard the Aeroflot air trolley-bus for Yerevan, the Murmansk of the South.
My sympathy for the Armenians, combined with a general loucheness, had drawn me into the orbit of a small-time black-marketeer called Tigran. Nominally a student in the economics faculty, he spent his time trading vodka and jeans in a pleasant wooden house behind Voronezh railway station.
Now, the Soviets had just decided to give Prohibition a chance, on the grounds that it had worked so well in the United States and the Arabian Peninsula seemed a reasonable place.
As a result planes were falling from the skies as ground crews drank the flight fuel, the criminals who came to own the Russian economy accumulated the capital and contacts to get properly organised, factories stopped producing combustible television sets as workers bunked off to source some sauce, and housewives found their weekly shopping basket reduced to a bucket of fermented potatoes and two straws.
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