How to Outdrink the RUSSIANS

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Visiting St Petersburg before drinking vodka...

Russians have a tremendous reputation, to the point that most people don't even include them when discussing comparative merits related to drinking. It's like they're on a podium of their own, disconnected from us modest Europeans in the same way that their language is abstruse and maybe even hostile to our own.

After having spent some time in the city of St Petersburg, and even having learnt a little of their idiom, I can say that their reputation is only partly deserved. The full picture needs some elucidation. I can testify that the Russians drink spirits with a fervour and a stamina no-one in Europe, or anywhere else I know, have a hope in hell of matching. The prime lubricant is, of course, vodka. The way they down it is insane, and that's the end of it. Shot after shot after shot after shot after shot. And while they do assume a certain euphoria, little if anything else in their demeanour would reveal them to be drunk. They don't stagger, they don't slur, they don't fall down, they don't lose the thread of their conversations, they don't stop doing whatever it is they're doing. They do earn a killer breath, true, and they dance like idiots, but the latter is only because they don't know how to dance - their technique is poor of its own accord, with no need for the inebriation to explicate it.

They're very strong on other liquors as well. Cognac, brandy, rum, you name it. The heavier, the better, usually that's the rule. Sweeter spirits, of the type yours truly most enjoys, are considered to be toothpaste, if that.



What really surprised me about the Russians, and what makes them not just accessible but even relatively easy to outdrink, is that they can't take beer. Other drinks of lighter kind, like cheap champagne, are also a barrier for them. I know this sounds absurd, but I've seen it happen with my own eyes, and with multiple individuals. Hell, I even drank a few of them under the table myself. On one occasion on the Nievska, we went out three of us for a pub crawl and within the third beer they were already whoozing. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on with them as the day before I'd seen them down a bottle of whisky between the two of them and they were waltzing down the Prospect. (This is another common practice which, when going out drinking with Russians, you must at all costs AVOID: they usually buy a bottle of heavy spirits at a supermarket on the way to wherever they're going, and they down it as they walk, so that by the time they get there, it's all finished. Try drinking with them at that point, and you'll be so drunk by the time you get to your destination that you probably won't be allowed inside, never mind start a duel).

It was only later in the night that I figured that what had messed them up had been the beer. They were so unaccustomed to it, that even a couple of litres had sent them flying. Russians are the diametric opposite of the Germans: while the latter can take obscene amounts of beer, but they faint if someone opens a bottle of limoncello in the vicinities and they perceive its scent, the Russians can imbibe enough vodka (et similia) to kill an adult mule, but they flake when having to handle beer. More than that, they don't even have the culture, the understanding or the conception of what beer is. There's one video where I'm downing a litre-pint (a rather common exercise at the Oktoberfest), and it happened to be shot in Petersburg. You've got to believe that the people around me were literally gaping, even though my pace was much of an adagio. They reacted just like I did when I first saw them downing vodka, as it were.

...and strolling through St Petersburg AFTER vodka. Yeah, that's snow

When drinking with a Russian, take care not to begin with the spirits until as late as possible. Demand that no drinking should start until it is 'officially' sanctioned, that is to say, at the pub. Then buy the first and maybe the second rounds of drinks yourself, and use the auctoritas awarded to you by your generosity to make these beer or cider. Try organising a drinking game involving several glasses of beer and the downing of them (this will increase the likelihood that everyone will stick to this beverage later on, too).

Keep to these rules, and you'll see that the egregious reputation of the Russians doesn't make for such an invincible dragon after all.

Remembering Saint Petersburg 2

No-one knows snow who has not been to Russia, I thought, remembering an old film with Sofia Loren. I was going home via broad Nevsky prospect, on the black and slippery sidewalk, at some time past three or four. Two fellows came the other way, one with a pair of drooping plastic bags in his hands, and the other said something to me in Russian when I walked up. I stopped. 'Ya ne gavarish Russki,' I emitted. There was a bitter wind, funnelled through the long vein of the Prospect. Above, the darkness seemed to go on forever past the last lamps and windows. My interlocutors managed to make themselves understood. I offered them the cigarette they were asking for, and the one who masticated some English cracked into a smile. 'Come and have a beer with us,' he said, and lifted the plastic bag towards me: I saw there were a couple of beers in it, hugging like protons in the stomach of plastic.

I followed them only a few steps further and they pushed open a pair of gates, these heavy, glass-and-steel gates, which gave into a building. Inside, it was lugubrious. The light was feeble, and the place was dirty. A beggar sat on the steps which rose towards the reception, his beard almost colourless and the skin of his hands thick like wood. Another man stood next to the beggar, not unlike my two companions.

This trio, beggar excluded, sold trinkets to tourists. They bulged out of their rucksacks, little wooden artefacts of different colours which seemed to me of no value at all. I saw a few of them were made of tissue (or something like that - I can't remember). They passed a bottle of perfectly transparent glass, holding a perfectly transparent liquid, no labels nor anything, and I took a sip too. Vodka of the most malevolent type. I passed it back and decided not to have any more. They'd already opened one of the beers and offered it to me while they shared - among the four of them - the lone cigarette I'd given them. The beer was impossible to drink - the surface was strafed with a sort of icy foam, like sorbet. No more than a trickle came out, and it was so cold it hurt to drink. The polyglot merchant took the beer from me and rested it on a thin grey pipe next to the wall, waiting for it to melt a little. I lit myself a cigarette in the meantime. When it was finished, I took the beer again, drank a few more sips of it, gave it back to them and left.

Outside, it was back in the hostile frore. I pulled my hood down and tramped back on my way. The Hermitage Museum glowed at me through the square, green and golden and candid. I turned the corner and walked by mounds of shovelled snow. My hostel was only a few minutes away.

There's a poem by Rupert Brooke where he says, if I should die, there will be a spot in foreign lands that is forever England. I have no England to die for, of course, but maybe in a certain sense that little spot is mine. Or it is the other way round - now a little bit of my past belongs to that spot, having been annexed by that little square of wet concrete. It can go either way. Anyway, wars of the spirit do not have adversaries and maps. They're campaigns against the grey, efforts to save a little place or a day or a meaning from the anonymous space that later becomes our memory (a bit like the city of Saint Petersburg itself, where a luminous centre stands steadfast surrounded by seas of undead soviet blocks in the suburbs). If it isn't a war, it's fierce all the same. And if it isn't of the spirit, it's of something else that defies taxonomy.

As for the soldiers who fight by our side, they don't need much in the way of equipment. Our allies are made where we find them.