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Saturday, 5 February, 2000, 02:49 GMT

USSR to Promised Land

By Tim Whewell

My cousin Fima is not a bit like me. For one thing, his shoulders reach the seam in your shirt that shoulders are supposed to reach. Indeed, they go past it - on both sides.

Cousin Fima is cocky, street-wise - and, as a qualified welder, instantly employable in any shade of economy from black to snowy white.

Need that finishing touch to make your Lada move more smoothly or indeed to make it move at all? And what about a nice piece of ornamental fencing round your granny's grave? Fima's your man.

But what I found most romantic, when we first met, was that Fima had just spent two years in the Soviet Army.

He did not care

That was back in 1981. I was a goggle-eyed exchange student at a university buried somewhere in Russia's Central Black Earth Belt.

The newly-demobilised Fima loped up the main steps of the dormitory, clicked open his case, and displayed the note with the English name to anyone who might know where I was.

The KGB narks who shared our rooms had never seen a sight to excite their controllers so much. But Cousin Fima did not care.

Privileged, ambitious types might suffer for consorting with hostile foreign elements. There were no sanctions that could be applied to Fima. He belonged to the proletariat.

Great Soviet outdoors

We spent a few days in the great Soviet outdoors, building fires, gnawing chicken, swimming and drinking. What I wanted to know about was the army - the often fatal bullying, the suicides of young conscripts. How bad was it really?

Cousin Fima looked blank. He had never seen anything like that. In the proud but uncomfortable phrase Russians used to use about the army, military service had stamped his manhood. How could I not feel inadequate?

And he went on to beat me again and again at Risk, the highly subversive board game I had somehow smuggled in through Soviet customs. Even territories well outside the Kremlin's legitimate interests - Newfoundland, Alberta, Western Australia - fell effortlessly before his dice.

Of course, Fima was not really my cousin. He might have been the cousin of the wife of a cousin - the seventh water on the jelly, as Russians say - incomprehensibly - to describe very distant relatives.

Fima hit the West

white buildings and dome building

But even the seventh water was good enough for me to boast about. And good enough for him to ring me up, one day when I was back in Britain, and announce that much as he ha always loved the USSR, as a Jew he might have an even better time in Israel and could I please sort it out?

So Fima hit the West. En route to the Promised Land, he passed though London and was not impressed.

On seeing the Isle of Dogs - with its bizarre urban farm reflected in the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf - he informed us that cattle also walked through the back streets of his home town, Zhitomir.

And a trip up the M4 - which does not go through many villages - convinced him, unshakeably, that southern England is an almost deserted land.

And then, down the years, a stream of seasonal greetings from an anonymous dormitory town outside Jerusalem.

Fima was welding bullet-proof glass into limousines for the Israeli cabinet. Would I come and join him or at least pay a visit?

A reminder of life in Russia

So eventually I did. And on the hot desert wind came the overpowering scent of everything I remembered from my life in Russia.

The staircase of the crumbling, concrete housing block was pickled in the old acrid odours - cats, cooking fat, mouldy potatoes.

In the cramped flat, under framed photos of the grandparents decked in Soviet war medals, we threw back vodka and sweet champagne and jabbed at some unnaturally pink salami that looked suspiciously as if it had once oinked.

Fima - now a family man - was mellow. He and his wife both had steady jobs - and the chance to earn more on the side. The state had provided the housing and the work as well as medical care and a school for his teenage daughter.

There was an invincible army that gave young people a proper sense of discipline and patriotism.

Wages were not high but with "contacts" and an extended family around you, you could get most things - his brother-in-law had saved up for an old car, and at weekends they all crammed in for picnics in the country.

Just like the USSR

The worst thing was the difficulty of travelling abroad - the factory only stopped around Jewish holidays, when air fares were at a premium.

In fact, apart from all the Judaism, Fima said, Israel was just like the USSR as he and I remembered it under Leonid Brezhnev, before Gorbachev mashed the place up.

That was the highest praise he could give. And who was I to argue with a former warrior of the Red Army? Particularly one who was almost family.

Internet Links: Red Army and Soviet Army information
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