MY RUSSIAN husband, Costya, rolled home drunk at 5 a.m. the other morning, mumbling something about having being with prostitutes. "Oh really dear? Well you can go and sleep in the spare room." Over a late breakfast, he told me what had actually happened.
He had been walking home at about one o'clock the previous evening when the police stopped him on the street for a document check. Our Novoslobodskaya district of central Moscow is crawling with cops, who are evidently beginning a social clean-up before 850th anniversary celebrations in September.
Just as they did before the 1980 Olympic Games, the city authorities are expelling people without a propiska or residence permit, a Soviet era instrument for control.
Costya did not have his internal passport on him so the police took him down to the station near the Savyolovsky railway terminus.
Here he found himself in the company of Vasya, a drunk who had been so rowdy his neighbours had called the police and they had taken him away still wearing his carpet slippers, and about 10 prostitutes from the railway station. Vasya and the girls were kept together in a cage but Costya was allowed to sit on a seat nearby.
"The message seemed to be, 'look lad, you understand we have a job to do, just be patient and you'll be OK'," said Costya. "But I realise these cops had complete arbitrary power. If I made a false move, they could do anything they liked. I decided to borrow your reporting techniques and become a fly on the wall." I bring you Costya's report because the whole issue of vice and the abuse of power is very much in the headlines in Russia at the moment.
The Interior Minister, Mr Anatoly Kulikov, usually vociferous on the subject of Chechen terrorism, has switched to fulminating about the high- class prostitutes who line the Tverskaya street, which runs to the very gate of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, President Yeltsin has granted a request from the Justice Minister, Mr Valentin Kovalyov, for a temporary suspension from duty so he can clear his name after the airing of a video purportedly showing him romping with a group of women in a sauna in a nightclub run by the Mafia.
His first deputy, Mr Georgy Kulikov, will fill in for him, the Kremlin said yesterday.
Sex scandals are a novelty in Russia. Impropriety could bring a politician down in Europe but the Asians just laugh about such matters, commented the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. "The outcome of the Kovalyov affair will prove conclusively whether Russia belongs to Europe or Asia."
Costya's experience was of a much more mundane level. The prostitutes involved were not the authorities in this case were ordinary beat cops. But the little scene that was played out in the Savyolovsky police station spoke volumes about the Russian law and order system and illustrated why this country still cannot claim to be a perfect democracy.
Vasya the drunk was squeezed into the cage with the 10 tarts. Unfortunately for him, he was unable to keep his cool. He began whining that it was beneath his dignity to be kept together with prostitutes. So the police took him down the corridor and beat him up. The girls were a mixed bunch, some experienced, some naive, but all painfully young. "They kept giving their dates of birth - 1980, 1981," said Costya. "I was shocked be-cause they looked as if they were in their 30s.
They had mostly come for a night's work from villages in the Moscow region. "Without exception, they looked very ugly, perhaps because they had deliberately deadened themselves to do the job," said Costya. One wore the cliched fishnet stockings but the crimpelene trousers suit seemed to be the preferred mode. They all caked their faces in make-up.
One girl was taken out of the cage and came back crying because she thought she would end up in jail. The more experienced prostitutes reassured her. They knew a the police computer. "Just like the GAI," said Costyn, referring to Russia's notoriously corrupt traffic police.
A girl with needle marks on her arms looked worried but she had the
The others were not so lucky. "I don't even have the bus fare home to Domodyedovo," cried one. So the police found a solution; payment in kind. A particularly ugly lass was ordered to fill out the forms to pay the police station gas and electricity bills while the girl in the fishnet tights was "invited" into an inner office.
The police had taken Costya to the station by car but, when they released him, they left him to walk home. He bought a bottle of vodka from an all-night kiosk and downed it on the way to relieve his feelings of impotence and disgust. Which was why he was dead drunk on arrival home. That was his story anyway, and he was sticking to it.