Azazello: Biography of a Fallen Angel in the Lands of Soviets

Azazello received his moniker without his consent and not knowing what it meant. His namesake, and the inspiration for his name, was Mikhail Bulgakov’s eponymous character from his novel The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s description of Azazello, who is part of Woland’s entourage, is not very flattering, but conjures up a man of strength and energy: Azazello “turned out to be short of stature, a fiery redhead with a fang, in a starched shirt, a good-quality striped suit, patent leather shoes, and with a bowler hat on his head.”[1] Azazello remembered that sometime in 1973 he was sitting on Gorky Street when suddenly two hippie girls started laughing and whispering about him. When he got up and confronted them, they asked him: “Do you know that you look like Azazello?” Azazello, at this point still Tolia, was confused, since he had not read The Master and Margarita. Yet the name stuck. Over the years, Azazello became one of the few hippies whose real name truly receded into the background to the extent that even fairly close friends did not know his last name and more distant people not even his first name. He embraced Azazello and became Azazello. “Few know that I am Shilenok, Anatolii Viktorovich,” he declared proudly in an interview. And even he had almost forgotten that he was once born as Anatolii Kalabin, the surname of the father he lost in a train accident when he was six years old.^[2]

            Just as Bulgakov wrote much ambivalence into his character Azazello, bestowing on him both destructive and seductive features, the person Azazello embraced a reputation as both a devilish and divine creature. A heavy-boned, tall red-head, he rejected comments made about his coarseness. Rather, he considered himself “golden” rather than “ginger”. He frequently alluded to the aura he carried and the exceptionality he felt. The seed of his beliefs about his angelic status had germinated shortly before his naming on Gorky Street, when he had met a Belgian girl in Leningrad with whom he conducted a passionate love affair during the summer of 1975. For a number of complicated reasons typical of many of the situations Azazello found himself in during his life, he was thrown out of a Russian bath house, where, via a contact among the staff, he and a friend had tried to bathe in the women’s section afterhours. The Belgian girl—enriched by her credentials as a representative of the West—photographed him with wet hair and scantily clad, right after he had been ejected onto the street. She pronounced his looks “golden”—and Azazello latched onto this term with gusto.

 

Exterior attributes were very important for him—and became even more important as he delved into the world of hippies, whose main marker of distinction was their style. The Belgian girl was not the last woman who elevated Azazello from the fate of being a tall, lanky, rough-edged hippie from working-class Moscow into a higher sphere. In 1976 he entered into a relationship with the most glamorous of all hippie girls in Moscow: Ofelia, alias Sveta Barabash, former student at the prestigious journalism faculty of Moscow State University and an intellectual and creative superpower in the hippie community. Ofelia and Azazello soon became a quasi-brand that was known in and shaped the hippie scene for the following ten years. Over time, they turned the moniker “Azazello” on its head: Azazello did not stand for monstrous ugliness anymore, but, on the contrary, for breathtaking beauty. The young hippie Valerii Stainer remembers seeing Ofelia and Azazello on the street in the late seventies and feeling almost overwhelmed by their beauty: “They looked very, very beautiful, with long hair, like angels. I cannot find a better comparison. Angels—like someone from a different galaxy, who came on flying saucers and so on. In general, I was simply in shock when I first saw them.”^[3] Azazello would have agreed with the assumption that such looks suggested otherworldliness – and indeed the ability to fly. His life consisted of repeated attempts to fly—into higher consciousness and creativity, out of the Soviet Union, into the universe of his self, endowed with the wings of poetry and artistry. Yet he was also an angel who crashed again and again onto the hard floor of reality. He crashed onto the hard floor of incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, twice. He dropped into the abyss of drug addiction again and again. And finally, he fell onto the hard asphalt of a Moscow street, when, on 25 August 2016, he ran into a car or a car ran into him. It is not unlikely that he was high, or drunk, or both. And while he knew that there were historians who were interested in him, little would he have believed that his work and life would ever be made public. Surely, this very article and digital archive must count as a resurrection of the red-haired hippie angel and a last flight, high into the cyberspace of eternity, which had remained a mystery to him during his lifetime.

 

Born in the Pre-cosmic Age, Raised on Soviet Earth

Azazello had an acute sense of history and of where he and his family fit into the great scheme of history. He began one interview by saying, “I was born on 3 April 1956 in the last year of the pre-cosmic age.”^[4] He then made it clear that in his periodization he was thinking of the Soviet satellite Sputnik’s successful orbit in 1957 (“before that only bombs were flying”), which was befitting for someone with a keen interest in all kinds of natural sciences. But it also betrayed his awareness of Soviet history as well as his sharp, and at times somewhat idiosyncratic, analytical gaze at his place in history. Startingly, in the same interview he started an account of his family’s history with the legend of General Karbyshev. The significance of the Soviet hero – who, imprisoned in a German concentration camp, refused to cooperate with the German collaborator General Vlasov and who was punished by being doused with water and left to freeze to death in the icy winter night – only becomes clear when Azazello comes to the fate of his own grandfather, who was thrown into a NKVD prison one freezing winter’s night in the 1930s. His grandfather was an old Bolshevik, had fought on the frontlines of the revolution, and, like so many of his generation, found himself arrested during the Ezhov years. He left prison under Beria’s amnesty in 1940, and was mysteriously and severely injured by a car that ran a red light when he complained to the authorities about how he had been treated.^[5] He survived and became an important presence in the life of the young Tolia, whom, however, he never told that he had been imprisoned. Yet one day, when the six-year-old Tolia drew a picture of two grandfathers—one his own, who had survived Bolshevik prison, and one of ‘grandfather’ Lenin—his mother was horrified. As had happened in so many Soviet families, his parents had let Tolia, a beloved only child born after two other children had died in infancy, grow up in ignorance of their own sentiments, political convictions and family history. His mother and aunt mainly kept stumm about politics. His father was one of those nondescript Soviet fathers who only appeared in the memory of their children when their alcohol abuse got them killed. Azazello struggled to remember what exactly his father did for a living, recalling only that he was some kind of mechanic at the Bezkudnikovo bus depot. When Tolia was seven, his mother came to school in tears one day. “Your father died,” she told Tolia. He had been run over by a train on his way home from work. Drunk, he had not noticed that behind the first train, which had passed him, a second one was approaching. According to the police (and as recounted by Azazello), the train driver did not even brake. He simply did not notice Tolia’s father. The accident was not unusual in the Moscow neighbourhood Tolia grew up in. Men were drunk and vulnerable. Or old and blind like Tolia’s grandfather. It was the women who picked up the pieces and pushed the family forward.

            Tolia’s mother was what today would be called a helicopter parent. Tolia was only sent to school when he was six and never attended a Soviet nursery. His mother preferred to keep him under her own watch. His family nicknamed him “Tsyplenok”—little chicken—since he was under the wing of a strong mother hen. Azazello called his upbringing “ordinary,” which meant Soviet in a not very ideological way. His parents neither supported nor opposed Soviet power. At least not openly. The Soviet system was simply a given. A fact that existed like summer and winter. The Soviet state, in turn, also did very little to turn Tolia into a convinced (and convincing) Soviet citizen. By the early 1960s, the Komsomol had ceased to be an exciting organization and had petrified into a stale bureaucratic and careerist institution. His entry into the Komsomol was an enforced mass event in which he and the rest of his class were carted to the local Komsomol committee to obtain membership collectively with little examination of their ideological “preparedness.” While this saved Tolia from committing to Soviet values, it also devalued the worth of the Komsomol, not only in his eyes but for his whole generation. There were few Soviet youngsters in the later 1960s who still believed that the Komsomol was an agent of revolution or represented their interests, especially in a working-class part of Moscow. At the same time, however, Tolia was an enthusiastic participant in all kinds of official activity circles at the local pioneer palace. Indeed, one of his poems makes direct reference to the inspirations he received in a pioneer camp:

 

at the pioneer camp

they showed us a film called “the drums of destiny,”

which had crocodiles, lions, and raging elephants—

exoticism meets romanticism. (Poems slide 402)

 

But the next lines describe how the system itself, and his whole social environment, put limitations on this kind of inspiration:

 

as a child, i was often told

that dreaming a lot was dangerous,

that it could be harmful, in fact,

to soar above the mountains

like a slowly fading cloud. (Poems slide 402)

 

Yet ultimately it was Soviet education that introduced him to the world that was to so fatefully become his own. One of his favourite pastimes was listening to Viktor Tartarskii’s radio show “Record on Your Own Magnitafon.” According to Azazello, after 25 minutes of “shit”, there were five valuable minutes of the Beatles. While deriding the programme (mostly), here lie the roots of Azazello’s ascent into the lofty sky of hippiedom. Music was to be a motor, companion, and inspiration for the rest of his life, providing lyrical as well as musical commentary to the Azazello narrative. Like the idols of his early musical life, he soon started to grow his hair a bit longer. And this in turn began his descent toward the margins of Soviet society. His hair was the issue that turned him into the rebel he was going to be for the rest of his life.

            His mother had to work and, after his father’s death, Azazello drifted away from her supervision. After his grandfather died, he stopped doing his homework and soon quit going to lessons altogether. Nonetheless—despite his not-so-great grades—he was chosen to represent his school at the geography Olympiad, where he took second place. Yet his dedication to school was reaching ever-new lows until his mother sent him to a new school for ninth grade. There, his longish hair suddenly became an issue of grave concern, even causing a teacher to show up at his home. His mother offered him twenty-five rubles, a tidy sum at the time, if he would cut his hair. She was not at home much, but she gave Azazello rather generous amounts of money to make up for her absence. This combination proved fatal for Azazello’s schooling. He ran from the hairdresser’s with only half of his hair cut. In ninth grade, he stopped going to school after three weeks (he was barely fifteen at the time). Instead, he went to the city centre and bought himself books. He also had his first taste of wine and his first smoke of a cigarette. He met other long-haired types and some “others,” as he expressed it. The others were small-time criminals and hooligans who also sometimes wore their hair long yet had little do with the intellectual and predominantly middle-class hippie crowd. It was 1971.

 

Meeting Hippies

Azazello became what was later known as a “pioneer”—a young new face in the hippie crowd. He was a good five to six years younger than the people who had established hippiedom in Moscow in the late 1960s. He missed the seminal event of 1971: the fateful and ill-fated anti-Vietnam demonstration of June 1, which resulted in the arrest of almost all the participants—possibly as many as 3,000 people. The sense of hierarchy among the hippie crowd was alive and well. Azazello and his peers had to buy fortified wine in lieu of paying “membership dues to the Komsomol.” “Human nature—it wants to position itself…I know two grams more—look how smart I am,” Azazello observed speaking about this time. In fact, little is known about Azazello’s first few years on the strit, as the hippies called ulitsa Gorkogo in an attempt to Westernize their habitat. At the time, his nickname was Michael Bormarovich, but we do not know what this moniker signified. While living in New York, the writer, mystic, and Gurdjieff disciple Arkadii Rovner, who composed a novel based on the recollections of the recently emigrated hippie Aleksandr Dvorkin, implied that Azazello (called Ariel in the book) was hanging out mainly with so-called urla—small-time gangsters—in his early hippie period.^[6] Azazello conceded in interviews that he was acquainted with a variety of people in the underground, yet he was far from unusual in having connections which reached into the criminal sphere. Sveta Markova, hippie style icon and spiritual leader of the crowd that looked down on Azazello’s hooligan friends, was extremely close with a number of serious criminal authorities in Moscow.^[7] Currency speculation, black-market trading, consumption of alcohol and drugs, and ordinary violence were part of Moscow hippie everyday life, especially after the crackdown on the 1971 demonstration virtually purged the student element from the hippie ranks, leaving mostly professional loafers and drifters at the core, or those whom the system quickly turned into such. Life in Moscow’s city centre was adventurous, dangerous, communal, eccentric, and, at times, cutthroat. Hippies frequently got into fights with hooligans from the outskirts of Moscow, some of whom came into the centre specifically looking for a fight with long-haired youngsters. Moscow’s longtime hippie leader Solntse was stabbed by a fellow hippie during an argument in 1973, not far from the Bolshoi Theater. Some hippies were involved in currency speculation and icon trading.

            In the early 1970s hippies also shared a space in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, the so-called Pliushka, with Moscow’s gay community, who, unlike hippies, were indeed breaking Soviet law. The relationship between the two communities was one of a shared fate, yet was marked by mutual suspicion. Both groups were pariahs in Soviet society, yet most young hippies showed little progressive thought about the “blues,” as gays were called in Soviet slang. Azazello recalls that his first encounter with homosexuality was when he was sitting on a bench in front of the Bolshoi, and an older man sat down next to him and started a conversation about the length of his erection. His initial horror was soon replaced by pragmatism. Hippies at times used willing gay men as providers of much-needed places to sleep and for shooting up. But, as Azazello defiantly said in the interview, in general, his view of gays was “negative” and it “was not going to change anymore, because I do not see a shrink.”, making fun of the Western culture of therapy. ^[8] At the time, however, the more immediate concern of both communities was to what extent they posed a security risk to each other: gays could inform about hippies’ drug use, while hippies could expose homosexual activities. Both carried a sentence in a psychiatric institution or prison. The period of the authorities’ relative laissez-faire, which had been in place until the 1971 demonstration, was also definitely over, especially for someone like Tolia who was not protected by powerful parents. Azazello remembered that because they did not have a telephone at home, a constable had to fetch her to pick him up when he was arrested. By the time she arrived, she always had to bring a pair of fresh trousers, since, inevitably, the ones he had been wearing had already been cut up because of their impermissible flaws.^[9] In 1972 the Komsomol established a special brigade at the local police station near the Dolgoruky monument (the so-called Berezka, named after the nearby foreign currency store), which was known to do the police’s dirty work, applying violence with zeal to the undesirables on Gorky Street. Their manual cited nine areas of special concern, which ranged from illegal book dealers to hippies, from drug-takers to foreign tourists.^[10] Unlike the police, the legal basis on which the Komsomol patrols operated was hazy and as a result, their privileges were extensive. They were the ones who cut the sixteen-year-old Azazello’s hair when he was picked up in a raid in 1972, the year Nixon came to town. He remembered the humiliation and rage, especially since his older peers were let go, while he, as a minor, was not considered to have any rights over his look. It was one of three times that his hair was forcefully shorn. Each time it was a traumatic parting from something he considered “a deep essence and a symbol of strength.”^[11] The police, too, were known to beat up male hippies and harass female hippies (yet to a much lesser extent and definitely with less physical force). Azazello remembers being beaten up in the Petrovka police station so severely that for months he peed blood.^[12] In 1973 Azazello increasingly got to know older, established hippies, like Kostia Mango, who took him along to the flat belonging to Sveta Markova, who was also known as Tsarevna Liaguzhka. This was the Moscow hippie elite—intellectual youngsters from extremely privileged families (generals, party officials, and KGB officers abound among the parents of those who hung out in the Markova apartment). Yet it was only in 1974 that something significant happened in his hippie life. A true hippie friend appeared. And this friend lived in the building with the café that was to become synonymous with the renewal of the Moscow hippie movement after the failed demonstration. Ilia Kestner was an immediate soulmate. And he was not a hooligan.  Shortly afterwards Azazello became the boyfriend of the most famous and most influential of all Moscow hippie girls: Ofelia. In a quick succession of events, Azazello was catapulted from the sidelines of the community into its very centre.

            Like Azazello, Ilia Kestner was a true Muscovite. He was born right in the centre, in a communal apartment in an apartment house on the boulevard ring, the pretty, tree-lined avenue circling inner Moscow. The building had a little café that put some tables on the street in the summer. It was a bit back from Gorky Street and hence somewhat hidden from both tourists and the police who controlled the central area. Hippies who were distancing themselves from the drunken crowd on Pushkin Square – where Moscow’s first hippie leader, Solntse, alias Iura Burakov, held court – gradually gravitated towards the Babylon, as they called the new place, but which in official Soviet life was named Café Aromat. It was to become the seminal meeting place for the local more intellectual hippie crowd in Moscow for the next ten years. And Azazello, who became Kestner’s best friend, was sitting right in the middle from the very beginning. Kestner described his first impression of Azazello, who was tall and ginger-haired and created quite a striking effect, as follows: “This guy with a shock of hair and the proud manners of an Indian came. He walked very straight and with his look—you had to give it to him—with his look he simply offended people. Just like that. He always wore Soviet jeans—torn to the point of indecency…”^[13] Kestner (who never acquired a hippie nickname) and Azazello realized that they shared the same taste in music, the same sense ofhumour, and the same drive to create something, even if they were not quite sure yet what this something was meant to be. They loved Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and the Stones and, like many people of their generation, spent a lot of time listening to music, copying it, and deciphering lyrics in English. Azazello’s notebooks testify that his written English was of a high standard thanks to his mastery of song lyrics. Kestner also remembers the intense drive that lived inside his friend: “He already was a creative person. And a creative person—this means a fluid personality, not fixated on something particular. He was like tralala, very pleasant to chat to, agreeing with everyone. But one could feel that there was some kind of calling.”^[14]

            Kestner and Azazello started writing fairy tales together. These were canny allegories of their visions of what it meant to be a hippie in the world in general, and in the Soviet world in particular. Azazello started to make use of a trope that was to recur in his drawings and writings later on: the allegorical depiction of hippie values through fairy-tale creatures. The tales also betray Azazello’s interest in geography by couching the idea of hippiedom as a map: protagonists come from the “country of purple haze” (an allusion to Jimi Hendrix’s seminal song from 1970), traverse the “land of libellas” in order to reach the “land of happiness,” they ride over mountains and into lush valleys, admire the colour of deserts, and marvel at the majesty of the ocean. Kestner and Azazello’s alter ego is a person identified only as strannik—the wanderer—emphasizing their own personal restlessness and that of their generational cohort. (Slides 0498-0500). While naïve and stylistically rough, these early fairy tales demonstrate the earnestness with which the two boys approached the hippie creed. Behind the infantile utopianism about the promise of a “land of happiness,” there are pledges of living communally, peacefully, and altruistically. There is also a palpable sense of alienation and persecution which is introduced right at the beginning of the first fairy tale of the five that survived in Ilia Kestner’s hands. The hero is expelled from his own land of beautiful haze (the Hendrix original at first seems to suggest the intoxicating powers of love are the origins of purple haze, but subsequent lines in the song clearly point to a drug high) by unspecified evil people, which sends him searching for a new home.^[15] The sense of loss is thus present from the very beginning and persists throughout.^[16] Loss of an unspecified, but nonetheless, painful nature is a trope that was prevalent in the hippie community’s self-descriptions. Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, hippie and leader of the underground Christian Seminar, described hippies in a samizdat publication from 1975 as “sensitive children, who ran away from Soviet families, and considered themselves lighthouses of Western pop civilization in the darkness of the environment that surrounded them, where svoy [Soviet people] were like shadows of their party and administrative job titles…Their ideal—impossible under Soviet conditions—was the creation of communes where they could save themselves from all evil (children’s homes, psychological hospitals, and parents). Until then they found pleasure in the clean sounds of rock music and the narcotic delirium of marihuana.”^[17] Azazello’s fairy tales are a more playful take on the theme, his life a more hard-core version of Ogorodnikov’s description. Azazello did not find the “land of happiness” nor did he end up living in a commune, even though he certainly lived “communally.” His poetry would pick up many of the themes first introduced in the fairy tales: loss, death, redemption, ups and downs, beauty. There is only one female protagonist in his fairy tale. An Eve-like creature, she appears naked out of nowhere to the searching wanderer. She and Azazello’s alter ego, the wanderer, end up living in a paradise-like state of eternal bliss and sexuality. At least some bits of this vision were about to become Azazello’s reality as well as his aspirations.

 

Finding Ofelia

Azazello’s romance with Ofelia started on the steps of the Surikov art school, where both of them worked as nude models—a favourite and very suitable place of employment for hippies, who considered their bodies artistic facts and saw art and life as inseparably intertwined. Azazello had known Ofelia de facto since 1974, but again and again in interviews he emphasized how much getting together (which happened in March 1976) was a turning point for him, as both a hippie and a person. Becoming Ofelia’s partner was like a rebirth: “What exactly are sixteen-seventeen-eighteen-year-old guys who had nothing to do? We assembled in underground passages because it was warm there. The police chased us out. This is how we met. We stood out because of our restlessness—we did nothing. Hippiedom for me starts with ‘samostroika’—making stuff oneself. When you stopped being dependent on expensive jeans…Ofelia was the one who taught me how to tailor…Ofelia gave me the confidence that I could tailor, but before that it had been difficult. Before that there were other girls.”^[18] Consciously or unconsciously, Azazello not only credits Ofelia with making him a real hippie, he also adopts her definition of hippiedom as a creative process that requires dedication and commitment, not just in thought but in deeds and in one’s appearance. As many hippies did, Azazello liked to cast his life as a symbolic narrative, with single events standing in for complex developments and trajectories. Hence, his encounter with Ofelia turns up in many disguises in his testimony even though, interestingly, his written work rarely mentions her (which might be a result of the particular sample of his poems that survived). Alongside the tropes of “awakening” and “rebirth,” Azazello also described becoming Ofelia’s boyfriend as a version of Adam’s seduction by Eve, when spring broke after a cold winter, or as a generational shift.

 

It was a day in March—I have a very good memory for dates. It was the twelfth or thirteenth of March in ‘76. I worked at the Surikov Institute. And she did too. And she came from work. And I went to work. Life seemed tough at the time. Cold. Spring was held up. I came up the stairs and she was about to go down. And I thought that this was some kind of omen. I had no flat at the time where I could spend the night. And she said, “Hello, hello, how are things?” And I tell her that not everything is great [v kaif]. And she says, “If you want to, come to me this evening.” And she bites into an apple and passes it on to me. I don’t have a clear thought in my head and simply say, “Ok.” And when she is going down the stairs, I call after her, “Give me a fiver.” I had no money at all.^[19]

 

Regardless of how much this recollection reflected the reality of that March day in 1976, the way Azazello recounts it reveals a lot about the relationship he was about to embark on. Ofelia gives him an apple as a sign that he was her chosen one. Aside from the biblical reference, which adds a certain sinister quality to the act (after all, this is the act that causes the expulsion from paradise), it is of course also the gender inversion of Paris bestowing the apple on Aphrodite in classical Greek mythology. While Ofelia’s legendary beauty and sexual attractiveness could easily make her a good candidate for the persona of a goddess, Azazello bestows agency, not objectification, on her. In fact, he is the object and Ofelia the arbiter, decision-maker, and historical agent. Feminist thought was not a subject discussed much in hippie conversations (official policies of emancipation were taken as a given and tainted by their association with the system; second-wave feminism found little resonance), but here and in other self-documentations, Azazello reveals himself as a kind of enlightened Russian male, which puts him in the minority, not only in Soviet society but even among his hippie peers. He accepted Ofelia’s leadership because he was six years her junior, but he genuinely enjoyed learning from her: “Ofelia, she was so astonishing, she had so much charisma.” In another throwaway comment, he compared his current girlfriend, Julia, to Ofelia. While Julia would demand that he change the music they were listening to, she would not make any suggestions about what she wanted to hear. Ofelia in contrast would have a precise idea of what she wanted to listen to, which required a good knowledge of the musical canon. And this knowledge evoked Azazello’s admiration. He himself was a constant and keen collector of music and knowledge about music.

            Ofelia’s authority (and indeed authoritarianism) was at times more problematic. Ofelia was legendary, even among her friends, for imposing her vision of hippie life on others, without compromise. This vision ranged from the truly visionary—her incredible creativity and concurrent philosophical vision—to the whimsical, for example, her fixation on the letter L as particularly beautiful, which made her rename all her friends with nicknames starting with L. The novelist Arkadii Rovner’s portrait of her showed her in a less than flattering light, painting her as some kind of madam, enticing, favouring, and castigating her predominantly male, mostly younger fellowship at random. Yet even in Rovner’s mean-spirited portrait it is clear that Ofelia possessed wisdom and attractive qualities which made her irresistible to her reluctant protagonists. Her thirst for reforms, creating new systems, and uncompromising actions would eventually drive her and Azazello apart (with Azazello’s moods, violence, and drunkenness playing their own parts), but on that day in March 1976 their desires aligned. The apple was his. The seduction took place. Ofelia set the terms, the times, the setting. But Azazello also had his own interests. Ofelia provided a bed, a place to stay, and presumably the five rubles. He had no home and was about to be done for because of so-called parasitism, meaning he had been caught not working, which was a criminal offence in the Soviet Union. Two years of jail were looming over him. Ofelia in turn was a hippie who was past her first bloom. She was twenty-six. Her husband, Igor Degtariuk, had recently been jailed for drug offences. Her young lover Laimi (Aleksei Frumkin) had emigrated to the US. Another young lover, Sergei Batovrin, had chosen a younger woman over her.^[20] Azazello might not have known all this at the moment he accepted her invitation on the steps of the Surikov art school. But he did notice that he was on his way up, while she was about to descend—and he saw something symbolic in that. And something else disturbed their early bliss. Azazello displayed a surprisingly traditional understanding of marriage. In his opinion, Ofelia should have waited for the jailed Degtariuk, rather than taking Azazello on. However, schooled by her friend Sveta Markova and Iurii Mamleev’s wife, Lydia Piatnitskaia, both of whom believed that love and sex had healing powers that needed to be shared freely, Ofelia was a true believer in non-possessive love.^[21] And yet, Ofelia and Azazello were to become the hippie couple in Moscow for the next ten years, influencing and inspiring hundreds of younger hippies and constituting a beacon of hippieness in the capital.

            The first evening, however, did not go well. Azazello had a bad drug trip or a stomach bug; in any case, he was throwing up all evening. Ofelia tended to him and patiently waited for him to recover so they could seal their new relationship. For Azazello, this new situation elevated him into a higher stratum of his social world. Ofelia was a hippie of the first hour, reaching back to a time when Moscow hippies were a band of young people at Moscow’s journalism faculty plus some rock music lovers hanging around Maiakovskaia Square. Via her first husband, Igor Dudinskii, she was linked with the so-called Iuzhinskii circle, which met in the writer Iurii Mamleev’s tiny room. Mamleev lived (and wrote about) the bohemian life, experimenting with new forms of literary expression as well as free love, drugs, and mysticism. His circle engaged with dissident thought of all kinds, including such seemingly contradictory ideas as Sufism, liberalism, nationalism, and Eastern spirituality. This group cultivated a tight, almost communal, feeling among its members that blurred the boundaries between life and fiction, with drugs and alcohol used as stimulants to create an atmosphere of hyper-creativity, which fostered the group’s strong sense of self-importance as historical agents. Although her friend Sveta Markova, who ran a similar salon with a more hippie bent in her apartment near Prospekt Mira, pried Ofelia away from this heady environment (plus Mamleev emigrated to the US in 1970 and the house in Iuzhinskii pereulok was demolished), certain aspects of the Iuzhinskii circle stayed with her or chimed well with the hippie thought she encountered via Sveta. Ofelia was a firm believer in non-possessive love, the healing powers of sexual encounters, the abolition of certain kinds of human emotions such as greed, conformity, and aggression, and the need to change systems at the most microscopic level in order to change the world. She and her circle also had a lingering fascination with dark matters such as communication with the dead, devil worship, and the supernatural. The vehicle for finding both the light and the dark sides of spirituality was drugs, which were used to various degrees by the entire underground. Sveta Markova was an avid consumer of morphine and mak—an opiate made from a syrup derived from poppy seeds—as well as a variety of pharmaceuticals. She and Ofelia embraced drugs as an escape route from drab Soviet reality into a world that was more colourful, more intense, and more unpredictable than the lives of the people around them. The fact that both Svetas came from privileged households with parents in the highest echelons of the system underlined rather than detracted from their sense of alienation from the Soviet world that had socialized them. One taking over from the other, the two Svetas were the intellectual pathbreakers for the hippie community in Moscow, going far beyond what their male peers offered in terms of ideology and intellectual justification. Unfortunately for historians, neither Sveta saw any need to set down her thoughts for posterity in writing. Or possibly consciously rejected writing, even though Azazello testified that Ofelia wrote a few poems—possibly out of a sense of devotion to poetry, which permeated both official and nonofficial Soviet culture. Ofelia’s thoughts are hence most visible in the lives and testimony of others. Not least in the life, persona, and style of Azazello, who became her longest and most faithful disciple and someone who wrote almost obsessively.

            Until their fateful staircase encounter in 1976, Ofelia was moving very much in the circles that life had destined her for, even if her nonconformist behaviour had already destroyed the journalism career she had embarked on at the university. Her mother was a former KGB undercover spy, who, according to Sveta’s husband, Sasha Penannen, was posted to Oxford as a language teacher in the postwar years. After she was recalled (which seems to have been shortly before she became pregnant with Ofelia or, according to Penannen, because she became pregnant with Ofelia), she taught English to budding spies or Soviet astronauts or both. We do not know to what extent her daughter’s activities impacted her standing in the KGB. Again, according to Penannen, she supposedly once hid his, her daughter’s, and Sveta Markova’s file by misplacing it in the archive, when she noticed that it was stamped “to be kept in perpetuity.” But these kinds of stories were popular in the world of the Moscow underground, where conspiracy theories were rife and in reality, they tell us little about how much power she really held in the testosterone-driven world of the KGB. Ofelia’s father, however, was the less colourful—and less noticed—of her parents. He was an apparatchik in the Aviation Ministry and seems to have been the silent kind. Azazello called him Starikashka or Dolgopiat, because he was an advocate of clean and healthy living.^[22] While Ofelia’s parents did not approve of their daughter’s choices, they never seem to have disowned her or driven her out of the house, which is what happened to many other hippies from privileged families, whose behaviour destroyed their parents’ careers. Ofelia’s mother taught her the excellent English that made her an unrivalled authority on English song lyrics. On every birthday, her father gave her and Azazello ten high-quality coloured pencils, tacitly supporting their artistic creativity.

            Ofelia entered the journalism faculty of Moscow State University in 1967 and in doing so followed a well-established path for the offspring of the Soviet international elite. Yet she also followed in the nomenklatura children’s tradition of rule-breaking and boundary-testing. She was thrown out of the university in 1971, shortly before completing her studies, officially because of a scam involving her giving her student card to other hippies to obtain free rail travel, but probably more because of an accumulation of incidents, her outward appearance, and her unwillingness to swear off her hippie lifestyle. After she split from Dudinskii and a string of other eminent hippie boyfriends, including Iura Burakov, alias Solntse, the undisputed leader of the early hippie sistema in Moscow, she fell for Igor Degtariuk, who was also known as the Jimi Hendrix of Moscow. Degtariuk was slender in stature but big in attitude: a gifted musician, an uncompromising hippie, an avid drug user, and probably a violent boyfriend.^[23] At the same time she had a number of relationships with younger men: among them, Aleksei Frumkin, a very pretty and very young Jewish boy with dreamy eyes, and Sergei Batovrin, the young son of a Soviet diplomat, who had recently returned from New York and who displayed the same uncompromising stance towards Soviet life that she did herself.

            The year 1975 was possibly the high point in Ofelia’s hippie life. Relentless activism and disobedience on the part of Moscow and Leningrad nonconformist artists had resulted in unofficial artists being given permission to organize two official exhibitions on the grounds of Moscow’s All-Union Trade Exhibition. The second exhibition featured artwork by hippies (via Sveta Markova, Ofelia had good contacts in the artistic scene). For the occasion, they assembled under the auspices of a self-appointed art collective called Volosy—hair. The collective’s main contribution was a hippie flag with patchwork stitched on a red flag and designed to express the essence of hippie beliefs. Moscow officials raised objections, not because of the prominent poppy flower but because the flag included the words “country without borders.” In a sequence of spectacular confiscations of the flags (the original and a duplicate made to replace the first) and other artwork, the exhibition went down as a moral triumph of dissident voices against ham-fisted officialdom in front of the assembled Western press. Azazello contributed one picture but during the exhibition he was in Leningrad, where he conducted a love affair with a visiting Belgian girl. He clearly knew the hippie artists involved only as distant stars of the scene who assembled at Café Aromat. Ofelia and her collaborators in Volosy ended up with an article and a picture in Newsweek and had to scurry down to the Crimea after the exhibition in order to let the heat in the capital cool down. When they returned after a freezing winter in Koktebel, they were forced to realize that the carnival of disobedience had ended. The boisterousness of the exhibition days was over. Moscow everyday life set in again. Newer and younger hippies flocked to Café Aromat, admiring Ofelia and her people, but also doing their own thing—namely extensive travel all over the country. Ofelia was not one to travel much. Physical travel never excited her as much as the spiritual journeys induced by ever more clever cocktails of drugs. Yet the latter soon made the former necessary.

            Ofelia’s relatively sheltered life was increasingly shaken up by a more and more desperate and dependent drug usage, which soon included regular trips to places like Lvov to get new supplies of poppies (to make so-called mak) or morphine. Degtariuk sold his electric guitar to take full advantage of an opportunity to buy a large amount of morphine, essentially entering the territory of professional drug dealing. The deal went wrong. Degtariuk ended up in a penal psychiatric institution, his Estonian collaborators were sentenced to death, and Ofelia only narrowly avoided being sentenced as an accomplice. That incident ended the first phase of Ofelia’s life as a hippie. Degtariuk was in prison. Her friend Sveta Markova and her husband, Sasha Penannen, had been expelled from the Soviet Union and were en route to the States. Her group, Volosy, was in the process of disintegrating. Frumkin and his friend Aleksandr Dvorkin (the likely source for Rovner’s chapter on Ofelia and her group in his novel Kalalatsy) received permission to emigrate along “the Jewish route,” meaning that they received invitations from Israel and were granted exit visas. The two other female members of the collective, Shmel (Liubov Chuprasova) and Dendilain (Elena Gundareva), faded from the hippie scene. Ofelia, according to her long-time friend Nadezhda Kazantseva, struggled with a sense of aging and seems to have been very shaken up when Sergei Batovrin, one of her boy-protégés, chose to marry a young nobody who was nothing in the hippie scene. “It is very hard to forgive other women for being younger than you,” Kazantseva said of Ofelia.^[24] Sergei Bolshakov recounted that because his mother was a psychiatrist, he was called in for help, because “a young witch had ensnared a true hippie.” It was at this point that Ofelia saw Azazello coming up the stairs at the Surikov art school.

            Ofelia’s old crowd were not enchanted by Azazello’s arrival in their midst. They were children of intelligentsia households and mostly from quite privileged homes with parents in positions of power and influence. Hippies from the outskirts were rare in that milieu. Ofelia’s friend Sergei Bolshakov was less than flattering about Ofelia’s new partner: “Azazello—that means some kind of house in the countryside, general working class, totally. Ofelia seemed a more interesting, intellectual existence, more developed. I just could not accept him at all. We never really talked.”^[25] As was mentioned, Azazello also gets very bad press as Pavel in Arkardii Rovner’s novel, which is based on the testimony of Aleksandr Dvorkin, who was a close associate of Ofelia’s circle before he emigrated to the US (and much later wrote his own memoirs)[26]:

 

Ofelia started a romance with Pavel, who now started to wash his dirty hair and stopped…But his eyes remained…Ofelia thought up a new name for him: Ariel. “I am about to explode,” he complained…., “I have not fucked Ofelia for three days.” Alena once said, “Pavel was rough and we did not let him get close to us, but then he became Ariel and Ofelia’s favorite, and now he is one of us, a real hippie.” When Ariel went out with Ofelia and encountered his old friends, he blushed, dithered, and tried to avoid them. They called out to him: “Pashka, old friend, come and speak to us.” He answered, “Idiots, I don’t feel like it. And anyway, I am now Ariel.” Ofelia said of him, “Of all people, I love flowers and butterflies most.”^[27]

 

There is no doubt that Azazello became a new project for Ofelia. She taught him how to tailor and encouraged him to draw, paint, and write poetry. He was enchanted. A poem surviving from this period is devoted to her: “My little one. You are higher than the rainbow. You can reach the stars with your hand….”^[28] These were years of creativity and personal growth for Azazello. He reflected in an interview, “You have to understand, I have this conviction that every person can draw as long as they are not fearful of it. Forget how you paint. I learned how to draw for two years. Count it. Until I was happy with the result. I had these pictures, which I painted over six–seven times, again and again and again, you understand? And the best of it—you like to draw. You sit and you draw, and next to you sits Ofelia. I look up—and simply from the corner of my eyes I see that, without any kind of narcotics, she is full of kaif [having fun]. She likes it.…”^[29]

            We know from Azazello himself and from others that Ofelia was not only an artistic influence. She was much more than that—she was a moral and ideological influence. For her, this endeavour was not separate from her art. Ofelia clearly considered hippiedom a Gesamtkunstwerk with its own style, art, and character. Being a hippie meant a personal revolution—a permanent perfecting of the self vis-à-vis society and the universe, a constant exploration of the inner self, and a relentless quest to make sense of the world. Unfortunately, not much has survived of Ofelia’s wisdom except in the minds of the people who knew her. Unlike some of her contemporaries such as Iura Diversant, she seems to have thought little of writing down her thoughts or systematizing her beliefs, even though anecdotal evidence suggests that she was quite forceful in her persuasion and in her younger years even a bit tyrannical when it came to people in her inner circle adhering to her beliefs. Once in a while, Azazello will refer to one of Ofelia’s bon mots, but it is likely that already in the mid-1970s her influence, coming from a seasoned hippie, resonated deeply with the young, inexperienced Azazello—certainly also because they seem to have shared a number of traits, not least an uncompromising personal morality. They also shared a deep veneration for the effects of narcotics, which they prized as enablers of a different consciousness. Like all hippies, they read texts of a spiritual nature, but it is not clear how much they were taken in by that aspect of hippiedom. Neither Ofelia nor Azazello followed the path toward the Orthodox Church that so many hippies took, even though Azazello was baptized by a fellow hippie, Sergei Rybko, who had become a priest in the late 1980s under the influence of Father Nikolai (Konstantin Skrobotov), who had been at the first hippie summer camp at Gauja, Latvia in 1978. Azazello’s lasting memory of this event is characteristically satirical. Rybko not only made him read a lot for about half a year, he also asked him a lot of intimate question about his sexual life and drug usage: “Why not, I thought, the guy is bored. You don’t have to tell me anything, I know how in Optina the monks drink…and I can tell you more: they had plenty of amphetamine stimulation. There it was like, wow.”[30]

            Echoing his spiritual detachment towards his baptism, Azazello had a conflicted relationship with spirituality. On the one hand, he clearly seemed to be on a quest. He was responsive to beauty in nature, his dreams, and his visions. He was hugely into symbolism, both in his poetry and his visual art. His fairy tales about knights, snakes, birds, and lonely wanderers all seem to suggest someone who is receptive to spiritual forces. And yet, Azazello himself was quite down to earth in his view of the world. He was more into biological and geographical forces than spiritual claims. He was more a sceptic than a believer—and that even though he was living in a world of people who championed the spiritual over the rational and loved to think in terms of abstract concepts rather than empirical facts. One notebook he and Ofelia received from a friend is a painstakingly transcribed guide to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs called Past Sansari, which describes the circle of never-ending wandering between worlds and birth and death and the mundane life in between. The route to freedom from recurrent suffering is achieved through acceptance, by understanding the cycle of existence and inner freedom. The notebook contains chants, breathing exercises to archive samadhi—the state of bliss—and an explanation of the spiritual foundations of vegetarianism. In English these ideas are better known as the wheel of Samsara. In the Soviet Union they were part of the underground culture and transmitted mostly via samizdat. A lot of work was clearly put into the notebook, which Azazello claims was done by a fellow hippie called Zmei (which means snake and might be a reference to the Hindu game Snakes and Ladders). Zmei was likely one of the authors and transcribers, but several hands were probably involved in the production. Not all of the lines have the same sincere tone. On page 27 the notebook discusses the relationship between reason and consequence and the role of truth. The first reason stated is “I want to fuck,” which is followed by the consequence of “I make fuck.” Underneath is the more serious “I want good” as a reason and “I pray” as the consequence. The discussion on Istina (truth) that follows is clearly a citation, stating truth as something neutral and something that destroys illusions.

 

Az03-1979-1980-27.

 

            We can find bits of what we read in this notebook in Azazello’s life. We know that for a long time he was a vegetarian. The quest for truth, meaning authenticity, was something he returned to in many of his deliberations about himself, love, friendship, and life. And yet Azazello also gives us hints that he is sceptical of Zmei and his notebook—or at least he doesn’t take it so seriously that this would prevent him from making fun of it: “And there, this Zmei,…I always said to Ofelia, ‘Ofelia, he is writing to you. Don’t you feel it?’ I was bored listening to him.”[31] He then trails off, musing about Zmei and his diploma from a faculty of philology, how Zmei died in the mid-1990s, and how drugs make even good people turn bad. The upshot of all of this seems to have been that Azazello did not believe in a God who promised help but did not deliver. Living among drug addicts makes you godless.[32]

            Indeed, in the late 1970s Azazello and Ofelia were thinking of physical emigration rather than spiritual escape. They had plans to follow their friends and leave along the “Jewish route” to the US. Ofelia had already declared her intention to do so in the Newsweek article and boasted of her links with Jewish Zionists. But in fact she had her own connections. Ofelia’s former boyfriend Aleksei Polev, nicknamed Shekspir, prepared an invitation for her twice (interestingly, Sasha Penannen, who was in Los Angeles, arranged this rather than Ofelia herself).^[33] Accounts of what happened vary, but it seems that Ofelia was granted permission to leave to join to her “fiancé” in Jerusalem, while Azazello, who had applied under the name Kalabin, was refused permission. Ofelia, who seemed to have a knack for practical solutions, then made Azazello marry a Belorussian artist’s model at the Surikov Institute who needed a Moscow registration, while Azazello needed a new surname to apply again. Yet his second application, this time using the surname Shirinok, was also rejected. Ofelia withdrew her application. The whole only accidentally romantic episode resulted in Azazello and Ofelia registering their partnership at a ZAGS, the Soviet wedding registry. Officials told Azazello that “they were thinking of his mother. She will die without you.” He was furious and frustrated by the hypocrisy of the decision to reject his application to emigrate, which was made by an administrator who blatantly took bribes.^[34] But Azazello and Ofelia had nothing to bribe with and hence they remained where they were—at that time in a flat near the Tanganka, where they had painted the walls with psychedelic images and which was host to many hippie gatherings, especially those that involved druggy trips into a world which was easier to reach than the US or Israel. Azazello seems to have explored other routes in the following years, including buying the necessary papers from a guy at the “bird’s market” near the Taganskaia station and visiting a sexually voracious fixer, with whom he did not dare to stay overnight. In 1982, according to Azazello’s memory, Ofelia too received a letter of denial (which clashes with the version that she withdrew her application but might relate to yet another application).

            After the attempts to escape to Israel or the US failed, their travels seem to have taken them into the realm of psychedelic and opiate highs more and more often. In the early eighties Ofelia and Azazello moved to the flat near the Taganka and, because they needed money, Azazello took a back-breaking job at the Female Fashion shop, where he was the sole porter for the store’s goods, even though the plan called for thirty porters to be working there. He quit soon thereafter, taking two leather pigskins as compensation, which he turned into a jacket—the only item of clothing that survived the purge of his stuff when he was in the psychiatric hospital for three years. The outside world, and even other hippies, increasingly defined Azazello and Ofelia and their crowd as drug addicts who were wrapped up in their own needs and the world of procurement and consumption.^[35] Yet the couple still sat at the center of various overlapping circles of friends and hippie life, not least on the stools of Café Aromat, which was at the geographical heart of a new generation of hippies who felt alienated by the excessive drunkenness of the old hippies on Pushkin Square and were looking for a more spiritual kind of alternative world. They still had the power to seduce young hippie pioneers such as Valerii Stainer, alias Kiss, who decided to become a hippie after he laid eyes on Azazello’s and Ofelia’s attire. From April to July 1981, Azazello traveled to Central Asia with Nikolai Konstantinov, alias Faif (he acquired all-Union fame in 1976 when he was cast as an actor in what was a cult movie at the time, Rozygrysh), and a woman named Alla Tumanova. In 1982 Azazello repeated the trip with Ofelia, which is documented by several drawings in Azazello’s archive, some of which might be Ofelia’s. Ofelia left a rare trace of her writing, describing an encounter with an old Central Asian man. But not all impressions were positive. Ofelia was attacked on her way back from the post office, where she had had to stand in line in the baking July heat while Azazello stayed back because he was going cold turkey. Azazello heard her cries in the staircase and went to help her struggle with a violent suitor.

            In general, like many other hippies, their verdict was that the Soviet Orient was very different indeed. Azazello concluded that even though they met a few people of their kind in Tashkent, the “mentality of people there is very different, very difficult.” He was self-reflective enough to see the colonial overtones in his statement, adding a comment about “the white man’s burden” in his usual open-ended style (meaning it is not quite clear whether that was an ironic self-criticism or a genuine colonial belief).[36] The contacts that appear in his notebook, which evidently went with him and Ofelia to Tashkent, contain a few local addresses, but they all seem to belong to ethnic Russians or Jews: Aleksandr Raevskii (these days a photographer still residing in Tashkent), Konstantin Titov (now an artist living in San Francisco). The Soviet hippie sistema was at its very outer edges in Tashkent, but it was still working. Konstantin Titov remembers that his house was a kind of haven for the traveling hippies from Russia, whom he directed to Samarkand, Bukhara, the mountains, or simply the next hash fields. Azazello remembers with glee that he got hold of very good hashish from the old janitor at the Samarkand Palace of Pioneers. Hashish was everywhere. Not only among the old, but also among the young—the young drivers of the communal taxis who weaved through traffic “with their mates and the smoke of grass flying by.”[37] The year Azazello was traveling with Faif he also went to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, where Faif’s biological father lived. Azazello liked it there too, except for the heat, which he commented on frequently. At the same time, life in Central Asia was exceedingly cheap and reassuringly adventurous. In that sense, for Azazello Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan fulfilled the function of the Western Asian hippie trail: a journey through a land both foreign and familiar and a recognition that out there were lifestyles that were very different to Moscow habits—for better or for worse.

            Azazello was impressed enough with Central Asia to persuade Ofelia to travel with him the next year. They contacted Titov again and traveled with him and a dozen other hippies, mostly from the Baltics, to Samarkand. He and Ofelia generally liked Samarkand a lot. Several carefully coloured drawings in Azaello’s archive show motifs from the city’s wonders, especially Shahi-Zinda, the famous necropolis on its outskirts. (This particular drawing might indeed have been done by Ofelia’s hand). Central Asia seems to have left more of an artistic than a spiritual impression. The colourful local patterns chimed well with Ofelia’s and Azazello’s aesthetics of colour. The filigree ornamentation adorning Islamic tiles and textiles played into their interest in folk art and costume. The paintings also reflect their interest in the local natural light, with the sun taking a prominent role in many of them. In one of the central Asian felt-pen paintings, Azazello depicts Ofelia looking like a witch with her wide-brimmed hat, sitting on grass surrounded by poppies and the orange sun burning down on her. Her hippie-ish clothes and shape fit her surroundings perfectly. While not quite Shangri-La, Central Asia was the closest Soviet hippies could get to a place that was otherworldly.

 

AZ- green folder – 041

 

AZ- green folder – 025

 

Az – green folder – 32

 

Az-green folder – 045

 

Titov, who was probably the person most devoted to hippiedom among the young bohemians in Tashkent, remembers that at first he thought Azazello was a bit snobbish, but they soon started to talk a lot, even though Faif remained his closer friend. Titov, who had been sent to Afghanistan as a young recruit, had been injured there. Azazello, he said, was quite curious about Afghan recruits and their experiences, very quickly grasping the trauma that was to engulf a whole generation of young men.[38] Annemie Ummels, who met Azazello ten years later in Moscow, reported that at that time he was sharing a house with a number of Afghan veterans and was even something like their leader. When Azazello visited Tashkent, however, hippies had little experience with the army, since most of them escaped military service by simulating mental illness. Titov also remembers many conversations with Azazello about the nature of hippiedom. Interestingly, Ofelia participated in these conversations mostly passively, letting Azazello do the talking. To the outside world, he was the one who emerged as the leader, even though Titov remembers that both of them were legendary and infamous—not least, because as he observed, they were the ones who treated their bodies with such harshness in the quest for the perfect kaif. The extent of their dependency, however, was hidden to him—a secret only Azazello and Ofelia knew when their withdrawal hit. At the end of the summer Konstantin joined his Moscow friends on their way back and spent time with them in Moscow, where he embarked on his reverse hippie trail from East to West, traveling to Vilnius.

            Azazello and Ofelia also traveled west, frequently and mostly with a very definite purpose: Lvov was a popular destination and a preferred gateway for opium derived from the poppies that were harvested in the surrounding territories. Lvov, unlike Tashkent, had a vivid hippie scene and a well-oiled system for collecting and selling all kinds of opiates. When their friend Sergei Troianskii, who had already opened up the drug road into the western borderlands in 1979 with procurement trips to Podole, got himself arrested for selling drugs along with Dzhuzi (Aleksei Eganov), at that time the husband of Ofelia’s friend Ioko, and Iura Diversant, Ofelia and Azazello fled to Lvov. The timeline and sequence of events gets hazy and difficult to pin down, since we have to rely on Azazello’s testimony, but it is clear that both he and Ofelia were on the authorities’ radar from then on, facing repeated arrests and incarcerations. Both of them were locked up in the same psychiatric hospital in 1981 (probably after Azazello’s first Central Asian trip): Azazello in one wing and Ofelia in the other. Azazello broke the rules to visit her. Because of some medically mandated preventive isolation measures imposed on his section of the hospital, his stay lasted six months. Ofelia was out earlier.

            For Ofelia and Azazello, Lvov remained a regular destination and the central hub for their drug runs. The connection was deepened when Ioko left Dzhuzi and met Lvov hippie Artur Voloshin in 1982. Ioko recounts that she was often sent on her own to collect “stuff” from Western Ukraine, especially from Volchenets on the Ukrainain-Moldovian border, where she used the train’s two-minute stopover to buy sacks of poppy flowers from her trusted local contacts for twenty-five rubles a bag. Iura Diversant took the even riskier route of collecting poppies from government fields near Lvov, which could get you chased by dogs or even shot. But chasing drugs was not all misery. In 1979 Ioko and Dzhuzi found themselves in a field in Moldavia, where Dzhuzi, a chemist by education, distilled some proper heroine, evoking the most incredible kaif as the sun rose. We do not know the precise adventures of Azazello and Ofelia during this time, but they are likely to be similar, since the same group travelled together again and again—except for Dzhuzi, who disappeared into prison in 1980 and then the Serbskii Psychiatric Institute for two and half years. Lvov and its surroundings become Moscow hippies’ escape and their perdition. They loved the village of Velikie Gribovichi, where residents sold mak from their doorsteps, but they risked their freedom every time they entered a train with their luggage stuffed with opium. At some point Ioko, Ofelia, and Azazello embarked on a trip together, but Ioko found Azazello so impossible that she returned to Moscow only a few hours into the journey. According to her, the drug runs continued into the late 1980s.[39] For Azazello they ended in 1987 when he was arrested at Moscow’s Kiev station. It turned out to be the end of an era for him.

Azazello, the “We” and the “I”

A closer look at the dense contents of the notebooks – which were made up of a variety of media, including poems, song lyrics, drawings, phone numbers, philosophical deliberations, newspaper cuttings, and even artwork created out of bloodstains – indicates three main concerns for Azazello at the time—or better, three areas where he felt he expressed himself. First, almost certainly under Ofelia’s influence, he tried to define what it means to be a hippie. This attempt at individual and collective self-definition found its expression in the aforementioned fairy tales, but also in more overt explanations such as manifestos and poems directly invoking hippie practices and characteristics. On top of this, almost all of the drawings make references to hippie insignia or idealized versions of hippiedom. Tightly intertwined and inseparable from this first concern was the matter of narcotics, which were seen as integral to hippie existence. Their effect fostered, and was reflected in, the numerous drawings and most of the writing. Finally, a strong love for music is evident in the notebooks, which are filled with references to particular songs and groups. The implication is that music and its “feel” joined drugs in creating what Soviet hippies called “kaif”—that feeling of elevation, knowledge, contentment, and adventure that hippies chased using various methods. Kaif was what united all three areas of Azazello’s creativity.

            The idea of hippiedom seems to have been of most interest to him in his early years with Ofelia. It is also during these years that Azazello’s notebooks are the most optimistic and that he is his most productive. Strange fantasy creatures leap from the pages and castles and surreal landscapes adorn every page. The sheer multitude of drawings from that time suggests that Azazello was the artistic equivalent of a grafoman (Russian slang for an over-productive writer). One page in a notebook dated from 1977–78 refers directly to the question of “Who are hippies?” While the words sound more like Ofelia, the drawings are characteristically Azazello—a bit provocative, a bit surreal, hugely detailed, and suggesting a wry smile on the artist’s face. The text, which is in Azazello’s handwriting, reads, “Hippies—this is not fashion (even though it can be expressed as such [inserted by hand later]), nor a philosophical direction, and not a phenomenon in sociology, hippie—that is the psychological state of man, and that means the only one and not otherwise.” Lower down is another aphorism expressing what hippies are: “We walk and sing, we walk and laugh, and we smoke hashish and blow the smoke over flowers.” (AZ 04-1977-1978-23) Aside from the demonstrative carelessness of the latter and the indoctrinating seriousness of the former, these two phrases also point to hippies’ conviction that their way of life is the natural way to live, one which is devoid of pretensions and as close to man’s original state as possible. Azazello then illustrates this point with a variety of drawings on that page, the main figure being a version of himself (on looking closer, it becomes apparent that Azazello only ever painted himself or Ofelia) clad in hippie attire: epaulets over meagre shoulders and stick-thin arms (most drug-taking hippies were quite undernourished), a Sgt. Pepper-style jacket with two pockets with eyes, out of one of which a syringe is lurking a cross on his chest, a peace tattoo on his arm (even though hippies usually did not tattoo themselves). A figure shaped something like a lightning flash draws attention to his crotch—a feature that in real life existed on at least one pair of hippie trousers Sveta Markova made for Shekspir. Next to the main drawing is an allegorical drawing of a little castle labelled “Evil Chinese Empire,” but whose real significance lies in the kneeling hippie lavishing attention on several poppies. Poppies contained the seeds from which the hippies’ favourite drug was made: peeled, cooked up, and concentrated, they produced a tea called kuknar or a syrupy substance called simply mak (poppy), which was injected. There is a plethora of the same or similar symbolism in the notebooks and on loose sheets of paper. The writing at that time is mainly in English—there are fragments of famous songs, especially by the Rolling Stones, but mostly it seems to be streams of consciousness written by Azazello himself. The missing articles and the occasional odd turn of phrase give away the Slavic speaker, but overall Azazello’s English is impressive, given that he had little formal instruction in it. Again, Ofelia would have been an influence here. As the daughter of a former undercover spy deployed in Oxford, she was, according to testimony, a fluent English-speaker. Her mother, Tamara Aleksandrovna Barabash, was the author of several books on English usage and grammar.^[40] It is likely that Ofelia was also the source of a variety of bon mots scattered throughout the notebooks, which sound very much like the definitive pronouncements Ofelia was known for among her friends. A notebook from 1977 includes an artful depiction of the slogan “Ideology—that is a sickness of the brain,” and the words “Revolution without Ideas.” (AZ16-1977-27) In a notebook from around the same time, a young hippie whose head is just an ornamental ball made of rings, is about to hang onto a lifebelt cum clock that is hanging over a landscape so far down that it shows the curvature of the earth. The caption here reads (and this one sounds much more like Azazello): “Attention, those who remain in place, stop time.” (AZ04-1977-978 -04)

            Azazello returned to hippies (and hence collective self-definition) in a poem which might be dated a bit later, since it suggests that tough times have passed. It is certainly darker in tone than the playful scribblings from the mid-1970s. “The darkness fell sometimes—they uprooted us, stomped us out, beat us, mocked and maimed us, drove some of us to madness. I have seen broken flowers: empty eyes, frightened faces, helplessly dangling arms.” It is also more overtly pacifist nd makes no reference to drugs. It starts with “We are Hippies. There was a moment when I thought that only the sturdies remained.” It continues in this defiant tone, and asserts that hippies will be the ones who give the world a new spirit:

We, the hippies, are the makers and creators of the New Spirit, which we pass on through pictures and drawings, poems and prose, through music, through song and dance, through outfits and ornaments, through relationship among ourselves as well as with the society of Adults…. Just as before, we reject violence and intolerance, conformism, hypocrisy, dishonesty and other muck that the Adults use in an attempt to raise others to be like them. These are not for us. We choose smiles over stones, flowers over rifles, we choose Freedom, Love, and Peace. This is why we are always together.

 

slide 0344

 

            This poem might hint at the influence of another friend of that time, Iurii Popov, better known as Diversant. Like Ofelia, Diversant had been a hippie of the first hour. Unlike her, he was a relentless activist who saw his hippiedom very much as a political calling. Ofelia’s credo for political involvement seems to have been to maintain a low profile—a decision that is easily explainable when looking at the traumas she sustained every time she went near politics. According to Sasha Penannen, she was in tears when recounting the 1971 arrests to him and his wife, Sveta. Her first husband, Igor’ Dudinskii, was expelled from the university for involvement in a dissident demonstration. She had also experienced the clampdown on critical students after the Prague Spring was violently broken up. In his novel, Rovner has her saying that “in order to be able to do your own thing, you have to behave like everyone else.”^[41]

            Diversant had the opposite conviction. He was a long-time associate of Ofelia’s, even though it is not clear if they were ever close friends. He had been part of the Volosy collective and exhibited some of his miniature drawings at the 1975 exhibition, but he was not part of the inner circle that made Volosy a commune as well as an art collective. Diversant had also suffered extensively for his hippiedom, his political activism, and his drug-taking. But he was not deterred from sticking his neck out again and again, writing pamphlets, open letters, and petitions signed (or purportedly signed) by as many of his friends as possible. Both Azazello and Ofelia appear in his documents, albeit interestingly not on the same page and not in the same time period. Azazello signed a letter to the youth of America in the spring of 1983, giving his childhood home as his address. Sveta Barabash is absent from the eighty-nine signatures, which also include Kestner, their former travel companions Faif and Alla Tumanova, and Ofelia’s closest friend, Veronika Eganova, alias Ioko. Azazello signed as Tolik Azazello, which caused a reader in Radio Liberty’s information department to ask, “Is that really a surname?” In 1989, however, when Diversant created his own journal, Svoboda, to be the organ of his peace organization, Svobodnaia Initsiativa, he listed Sveta Barabash as one of only eleven members—and one of only two women. Azazello, who does not appear, was no longer Ofelia’s partner, but had fallen in love with a girl known by the moniker Irina Pianitsa—Irina the drinker. Nonetheless, it is clear that Diversant was in Azazello and Ofelia’s inner orbit throughout his hippie life, which ended in the same year as Ofelia’s (1991) when he was beaten up by homeless drunks and left to freeze in the snow.

            Azazello’s “We are Hippies” echoes the tone of Diversant’s many manifestos, for example, a manifesto that he dated to 1976 when he published it in Svoboda in 1989: “We stand for the abolition of stereotypical thinking, which is always directed towards violence, selfishness and power, and believe that we will win—sooner or later. We walk shoulder to shoulder, and, I think, bestow on each other uncompromising emotions. Don’t cry, remembering, when they broke your nose or arm—it will be painful and hard and humiliating, but our love will not become less than us—it will grow inevitably towards peace, until the last evil has vanished from the face of the earth.” The strands of thought and self-identity shared with Azazello’s manifesto are obvious: love and solidarity will triumph over the pain and persecution inflicted on the hippies. While in essence this was also a familiar narrative of Western hippies (not least a trope invoked by the legendary film Hair), the intensity with which humiliation and violence are conjured up indicates that these experiences were very real, shaping Azazello and his friend’s world to a much larger extent than would have been the case for most American hippies. At the same time, the invocation of love and friendship gained an additional intensity in this environment. It was virtually what kept people alive. A poem of Azazello’s, clearly written in a drug high, celebrates this hippie love, even if hippies are not mentioned as such:

 

We are the light,

light pours from our eyes into the world.

 

We have grown an enchanted garden in the dreary twilight

and in that garden, we’ve become rainbow flowers,

We rejoice when we see our reflection in the shadows cast by the light of the moon,

in bouncing sunbeams and on clouds,

we enter our own eyes,

in warm waves, we spread through our blood,

and burst from our hearts in explosions of Love,

we are amazed to see ourselves, we feel love,

i love you and we all love each other.

We are oceans of waves, we are our magical world.

we are delicate flowers,

and we are the light, pouring from our bright eyes into the world,

into our world, and nothing will change this world

your world and mine,

our world.

(slide 0343)

 

However, it is clear that deliberating on the state of Soviet hippiedom or his generation (a favourite theme of Diversant’s) was not his main preoccupation. Most often and most intensely, Azazello reflected on himself. This is already apparent from the fact that most of his drawings resemble him, and the protagonist of his fairy tale is an approximation of himself and Kestner. Really deep self-reflection is reserved for the diaries and his poems, a genre he adopted relatively late—probably in the mid to late 1980s, even though some poems date from earlier years (they appear in handwritten form in one of the notebooks). Azazello seems to have kept a diary intermittently. Longer texts are only available from the 1990s onward, when he reflects mostly on his love for his daughter Tania. His frequent invocation of song lyrics, the pictures accompanying them, and his endless return to the genre of the fantastic, the fairy tale, were a mediated form of self-reflection. These are only thinly disguised deliberations on his place in the wider world.

            Dating his poetry is almost impossible, because he typed up all his poems in the 1990s and assembled them into a collection called “Fear the Gorillas.” Part 1 was entitled “Observations from January to Holy Week of 1992” and part 2, “Times of Trouble: From the Autumn of 1992 Onward, Moscow 1992.” The meaning of the titles remains a bit obscure, yet they attest to some crucial parts of Azazello’s life. The main title, “Fear the Gorillas,” is an inversion of the usual assurance not to fear scary things: it is an in-your-face version of the soothing, educational tone adopted toward children in public discourse. The title of the first part gives chronological parameters but suggests hat at least part of Azazello’s life at this stage was lived according to religious ritual, while the title of the second part previews a trope that ironically is now commonplace in Russia: the 1990s as a wild and lawless period. The fact that Azazello did not number the pages and did not keep them in the order he intended, makes it impossible now to figure out which poems were meant for which collection or indeed, if the whole play with titles and subtitles is all a big game of steb: using official or official-sounding tropes to make fun of these very tropes. There is some evidence for the latter, because Azazello dated and located the poems that followed very precisely by day, time of day, and general location (e.g. in the subway) but failed to give crucial hints about the year and the specific place. He ordered and he obfuscated, and he did both very deliberately. The poems themselves give little help as to whether they belong to part 1 or part 2. Indeed, they hardly ever mention anything religious or political: “I” is at their center—Azazello’s “I,” mostly stoned and high, often melting into physical objects (a theme that is already apparent in his drawings). The appearance of this “I” convinced Azazello that his poems from about 1989 onward are good: “In 1989—in essence it can be explained like this: why do I think that they are good ones? Because I started to write ‘I,’ when before it was all ‘we, we, we.’ There is rarely something like ‘I walk towards the horizon, embraced by the flames of sunset.’”^[42] Azazello, however, had played with the notion of “I” and “we” and “he” before, stressing their interchangeability, while asserting his right to be perceived and to act as an individual. This paean to individualism is spelt out in a rare poem with a year—1981—attached to it but no title.

 

You, I, they—We,

all are together, all—so different,

but taken apart—when it’s night,

when it rains at night, when drops fall on your face—

tell me that I’m not you, and he’s not i.

I remember how ages ago a madman screamed: we are one family!

I am a family?!

Who feels like playing mommies and daughters?

Count me out. I’m no family,

I am you, and he is i.

 

(slide 321)

 

            It is not clear whether Azazello is taking a direct swipe at hippie rhetoric or at communist ideology here, but he is clearly asserting his self in the face of the demands of the collective, rejecting any kind of label that does not refer to one and one person only. That said, Azazello’s new, self-confident “I” is usually embedded in nature or the seasons to such an extent that the “I” becomes objectified, making it the plaything of forces beyond its control. In line with the oneness with nature induced by drug highs and reflecting Azazello’s particular view of himself as part of the universe, natural phenomena such as the weather, the seasons, and his surroundings play on and with his self-understanding.

 

Summer’s almost here

 

i’ve made it, i’ve pulled through, i’ve done it. Summer is only a few short steps away, spring is officially open for business and embraces everyone who pays it any heed, and this is why I keep my eyes fixed on the spring. In each other’s arms, we are marching towards the summer, which unfolds before us in its expanse. It beckons us and casts spells, spinning a kaleidoscope of colour, scent, sunshine, and warmth. Once again I step over the threshold of my own rebirth.

Morning of pril 6, five years from dozhdik’s death

 

(slide 0394)

 

The date is given this time with a reference to Dozhdik, the black cat he and Ofelia owned (picture), which we know died in 1985. Dozhdik was a much-loved member of the household, and Ofelia and Azazello took him to their various apartments on the Kutuzovskii and Mosfilmovsksaia Street, but ultimately, they and the cat returned to Ofelia’s parents’ home. Azazello recalls with some spite how, when Dozhdik died in 1985, Ofelia’s father ran to him in a panic to tell him that the cat was dying under the chair: “What do you want? He was somebody born in 1916 and I was born in 1956 and he runs to me.”[43] Azazello considered Ofelia’s father weak and unimaginative. Tensions also arose over the strong regimen of vitamins imposed by Ofelia’s health-conscious parents and their general concern about their health (one can assume that they were not happy about their daughter and son-in-law’s extensive drug use). But, as Azazello cheekily pointed out in an interview with Irina Gordeeva, at the time of the interview (2015) he and Ofelia’s Auntie Valia left were the only ones left—all the others were dead. At another point, however, Azazello admitted that he too was caught up in the hippie trend of eating healthily—and in an ethically responsible way. Despite Ofelia telling him that he needed to eat meat in order to have masculine strength, he steadfastly refused it. With regret he recalled how he reproached his mother because she put a piece of sausage into a salad: “Look what a son of a bitch I was. I would now fall on my knees and beg my mother: give me this piece of sausage. Not because of the sausage, but to ask forgiveness.”^[44]

            His arrest in 1987 was the beginning of three very dark years that he characterizes as predominantly lonely. During this time, he wrote a haunting poem imagining what he would do when he left the hospital. Inherent in the wishful tone is the fear that maybe he would never leave…

 

1

some day I’ll leave this place without turning back

erasing from my mind the “treatment of the patients”

erasing from my mind the doctor, more like the torturer,

erasing from my mind that here I wasn’t human

erasing from my mind the here

 

2

i’ll have the choice

to vanish into untamed forests

to hide out on the mountain peaks

to make my home among the densest fogs

to find my peace, be left in peace.

And, once winter comes,

to burrow underneath the snow for some healing sleep.

And after that, to roam, like adam

retreating from everyone

and finding joy in nature.

 

3

or, likelier, into the megapolis

where i’ll become invisible among the walls

where, among the alleyways, I’ll find the dead-end streets

and hide among the towertops

in the haze of city lights

from one job to the next every day

to hang suspended in a cell between the earth and the sky

between the 15^th and 20^th floor

to hug the space heater

more tightly and with more passion

and to wait endlessly for something

to wait

for what will never be or has already passed

both never and forever

 

slide 0525

 

            In interviews he returned to this fear of being committed for life to a psychiatric institution, echoing Chekhov’s short story “Ward No. 6,” which tells of a doctor who ends up being confined in his own hospital and being declared insane by his colleagues. “They make a robot of you, and I was afraid that I would remain like that. Can you imagine this life? You cannot even kill yourself. You understand your mortality, but you cannot do it.” The treatment he was forced to undergo he experienced as torture: “When I got to ward No. 12, they told me: three injections a day. For three weeks. After a week I went to the doctor, a woman of my age, a real beauty. I can hardly move my tongue. I am trying to tell her to prick me. And she is like, ‘ooh, you are doing great here, keep going. Another couple of weeks.’“ Azazello also recalled how his teeth started to hurt and fall out. “And they did not give me any painkillers, because I have been convicted of drug-related issues. They say: ‘What if you make a drug out of these pain killers [analgin]?’”

           Azazello was a very sensual man. The absence of sex in the hospital was hard for him to bear. Like the other inmates, he resorted to all kind of practices to compensate. He clearly was still attractive, because he got the nurses to sleep with him—for which he was punished, as relationships with the staff were not allowed. But most of his substitute practices were more DIY. And it clearly stuck in his mind enough to recount it many years later, when he handed over his archive, revealing a surprising amount of primness:

I did such obscene things then, things I didn’t do even in childhood. I touched myself in the —jerked off, can you imagine? And what the heck was one supposed to do? In general, disgusting. Dead end.… There were friends like Misha Ognev, he killed his grandmother when he was sixteen…. He killed his grandmother with an iron at sixteen, because she was a witch. When I came to Sychevka, Hospital No. 5, he had already spent seventeen or eighteen years there! He was so pumped up.… I played with him. Kulturist! Do you know, how we played? He does push-ups and I was sitting on his head like a cowboy. It was called the swing. He was that kind of guy who would come to breakfast and say, “Imagine, I twisted it 3,340 times last night.” And I would say, “Misha, really, you are still counting? Can you imagine this? But how to imagine this? Not only that you trash something like an idiot, you also sin! This isn’t natural, it’s indecent—and it does not give any kind of pleasure. Bah!”[45]

Despite various contacts with other patients, Azazello’s overriding memory of this time is loneliness. He devotes what he calls a hymn to it—a poem that presumably also was written in the three years of his confinement.

 

Loneliness is my realm

within it, I rule uncontested

loneliness is my shield

behind it, I hide in an instant

loneliness is my joy

we understand each other perfectly

loneliness is my woe

we break each other, together

loneliness is my sun

i’ll find nothing but ice

underneath it

loneliness is my moon

I walk, bathed in its rays

loneliness

is my truest friend

loneliness

is my most reliable foe

someday, I will realize

that I have died already

and therefore, I can no longer die

loneliness is my weapon

slide 0527

            In interviews Azazello later claims that Ofelia was not faithful to him in this period: “I understand—if you are a drug addict you cannot be alone.” But the only surviving letter from Ofelia to Azazello which dates from this period is full of love and tenderness. It recalls past adventures on the beach in Estonia and Ukraine and concludes with Robert Burns’s most famous poem, “Oh My Luve is like a Red, Red Rose.”

 

Azazello, love, Hi.

I sit near the window and see how the sun melts and flows gold in soft pink, apricot twilight and I remember one of the amazing Baltic sunsets in Klooga Rand: We gazed into the sunset sky, holding hands tightly and trying to capture the sun leaving for the night, an unexpectedly curved rainbow and clouds in the images of racing medieval . And I also remember the silk grass of Khortytsia and the damp darkness of the Ukrainian night and the driver, who looked like a monkey, attached to a huge steering wheel, obsessed with ideas of revenge. Like a Faulkner character…I feel your presence constantly. Sometimes it seems to me that it’s enough for you to pat me on the head and the rain will really end and the walls will collapse and we will walk along the road together…I love you my beautiful-haired, tall boy and I want to present you with a wonderful poem by R. Burns, my beloved.

 

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

       That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

       That’s sweetly played in tune.

 

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

       So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

       Till a’ the seas gang dry.

 

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

        And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

I will luve thee still, my dear,

       While the sands o’ life shall run.

 

And fare thee weel, my only Luve!

        And fare thee weel awhile!

And I will come again, my luve,

       Though it were ten thousand mile.

 

A very clear and telling poem, don’t you think so? By the way, I cut my hair like a boy. My hair was just awful. The cut is called the Raven.

 

Az26-1986-1987-1988-098.jpg

 

Az26-1986-1987-1988-097.jpg

 

This letter clearly meant something to Azazello because he kept it over the years, while others (and one can assume that it was not the only letter Ofelia sent him) have disappeared without a trace. And yet when Azazello finally left the hospital, their relationship was doomed, despite the fact that, since Azazello’s mother died while he was in confinement, for the first time they had a flat to live in that they could call their own. Yet Azazello and Ofelia, despite all their mutually inspired creativity, were not a harmonious couple—and probably never had been. Azazello’s notes are full of references to fights and disagreements with Ofelia. The charge on her side always seemed to be the same: Azazello was rude, ill-tempered, and moody. Azazello in turn was tired of Ofelia’s relentless drive to reform him.^[46] As his relationship with Ofelia soured, Azazello increasingly struggled with the gap between how he saw himself and how he was perceived by his peers, most of whom seem to have frequently castigated him for his rudeness and boorishness. His close friend Kestner went into prison in 1981 and was never to return to Moscow. Many other men from his milieu, such as Diversant and Sergei Troianskii, also found themselves locked up in the early 1980s. Ofelia’s best friend, Ioko, did not have a particularly favourable view of him, nor does it seem that many female hippies were overly impressed. There is also evidence that Azazello was indeed rude, and at times violent toward his female partners. After a fight, Ofelia’s successor, Irina, ended up in the hospital with a fractured rib, and it is likely that Ofelia, too, suffered from physical violence at the hands of Tolik, who was a great deal stronger and bigger than she was. Azazello was not without remorse and introspection, but he also reacted with defiance to what he perceived as multiple, constant demands that he change his character—his very self. In a poem entitled “I cannot,” he closes with the line “I can’t be different, someone other than myself, it goes against my very nature, I am who I am, neither blind nor clairvoyant.” (slide 0393) In an interview, he talked about how Ofelia reprimanded him for his rudeness and then he defiantly declared that he spits on people’s opinions, but that he can see when he is wrong, before trailing off. In reality he cared very much about both people’s opinions and his own goodness, which he struggled for, which he defended, and which he was convinced would at some point get the upper hand and be recognized by others too.

            There are many versions of how Ofelia and Azazello split up—most of them supplied by Azazello himself. But somehow, they all have to do with the fact that Azazello wanted to be a better person than he and others thought he was. His failure to be that better person angered him—sometimes he got angry at himself and sometimes at Ofelia. After a long, enforced spell in a psychiatric hospital, he returned to an Ofelia who was eager to make a true home with Azazello. She hoped for a child (she had difficulties conceiving, probably due to several abortions in her younger years) and, according to her friend Ioko, she was generally ready to leave some of the stresses of hippie life behind her. She decorated the flat Azazello had received from his mother with curtains and crockery, looking forward to a more permanent domesticity than she had enjoyed during the last ten years. Azazello, who had been suffering from depression, loneliness, and two overdoses in the hospital, one of which he thought he was not going to survive, was on a different trajectory. In one interview he said that he drank until Ofelia had to leave him: “To be precise…I did it. I could not just tell her let’s divorce. I simply started to drink heavily. And when I drink, I am an idiot. I am at fault. I just needed to apologize.”^[47] He just could not bear to have the life she had in mind. In another version, he blamed Ofelia and her family for his failure to quit alcohol. “Now see, …I was thrown into prison (Hospital No. 5) in May ’86 and Ofelia in November ’86. And she came out in ’87, and I did in ’89. And now imagine further: all my pictures, which I had painted. Do you know where they spent these three years? They were on the balcony—snow, rain, and so on. Then there was no glass [covering to protect them]. This is how they were destroyed. Before that I promised that I would not drink. But when I found them, I already knew that I could drink with a clean conscience.” His sense of being wronged was strengthened by the fact that when he was arrested he had tried to keep Ofelia clean, telling prosecutors that she had no knowledge of his drug-taking, that he had run into the Lenin Hills at night in order to shoot up.^[48] In another version, it is the fact that Ofelia did not wait for him, which finished off the relationship—even though he conceded that a narkomanka—a drug addict—could not be alone out there, but needed some sort of defender.^[49] And in another reflection, he said that he was tired of being criticized: “We split up after I came out, because I was tired of reform. I was tired of dancing to her tune. She called me ‘loghead.’ One gets offended. But I don’t want to speak in anger. Endless excuses.”^[50] All the versions end with Ofelia walking out one day to live with her parents again.

            Ioko recalls one of their last meetings—Ofelia’s birthday on October 22, 1990. Azazello was already with his new love, Irina. He had asked Ofelia for a divorce, which she had denied him. Yet he came to celebrate. Azazello behaved so badly towards her that she and Ioko went to the bathroom to have a heart-to heart talk in private. This made Azazello angry and he pushed lit matches under the bathroom door. When Ioko told him off, he became so abusive that Ioko’s ex-husband, Dzhuzi, and Ofelia’s new boyfriend told him to shut up. Less than six months later, Ofelia was dead from an overdose of vint (a kind of home-made speed), thrown into the River Moskva by her last boyfriend, and found only forty days later; her death became one of the hushed-up stories within the hippie community. Just before she died, she had finally agreed to give Azazello the divorce he had been asking her for since 1989. Two weeks before the court date, she died, still his wife. “What was so good about Ofelia?” he reflected when he handed over his archive to the Wende Museum. “Thanks to her, I came out [as a person]—she convinced me [of myself], and I started to write poems…and the whole time I was so jealous of her. But the devil, did I ever show her this. But she was so smart, and she probably knew it too.”^[51] The other thing that is clear though is that whatever version of the end of this partnership Azazello chose to tell, drugs were always central to the narrative. Drugs and Ofelia had been the propellers of his life for more than ten years, often intertwined in their effects and presence. Like their relationship, drugs had once heralded a new age, yet increasingly imprisoned and atomized them.

Living the Kaif

If Azazello lived his life through his poems and notebooks, his poems and notebooks owed their existence to no small extent to Azazello’s drug habit. Kaif—Russian slang for “high”—drove his creativity—and, to a significant degree, the structure of his life. Kaif, he mused, taught him how to draw. “It depended on the substance, how you drew the line,” he declared. Kaif enhanced music and music enhanced mood. And mood determined creativity. He claimed that he was always high when writing poetry: “And the funny thing is that I wrote either under the influence or drunk.” There is little doubt that the finely structured pictures he drew, which depict a kind of mixture of utopia, fairy tale, and real-life experience, were also inspired by what he saw during his drug trips. A number of them make direct reference to drug-taking by showing syringes, blood, or poppy flowers. Because it was mak (home-made opium) that propelled Azazello’s world, even though he also smoked pot and mixed medications for highs. Mak had the same exact function for Azazello, Ofelia, and his crowd that LSD did for Western hippies. It was considered a way to expand one’s consciousness or get to know oneself better: “The thing is that when I wrote…. I mean there was an escape. I think drugs helped us in that somehow…to go outside ourselves, higher. At the same time, they blew us apart.”^[52] In another instance he exclaims: “Yes, opium is God! And yes, I am God, too!”[53]

            Drugs thus helped Azazello to be what he wanted to be: an artist, a poet, a norm-breaker. But he also made drugs what he wanted them to be. It is clear that he was an absolute expert on absolutely everything the Soviet and Russian market had to offer. Until the very end, he mostly brewed his stuff himself. He was convinced that the quality of the drug had a direct impact on the quality of his creativity. He and his friend had learned how to cook mak (which was injected) and kuknar (a very strong tea cooked using poppy buds). They knew that any drug had a greater impact when followed by a hot drink. Hence, they drank tea in great quantities. They had sussed out the economics of their mini-drug trade. Sometimes they paid local peasants, sometimes they simply painted a postcard for them, which they could put on their wall, in order to get sacks of whatever grew in their garden. They knew where to get hashish, where the best poppy fields were, which ones to avoid, and when to retreat. Some people took great risks, for example plundering governmental fields used to grow hashish and opiates for medicinal purposes. Using their scientific education, others experimented with chemical substances. They knew the Soviet pharmacies better than trained pharmacists. They had access to medical grade morphine and cocaine. And they knew all the weak spots, the places where the official system leaked substances. Azazello claimed that he had access to LSD via a couple of friends, Misha Tamarin and Sasha Ivanov, who worked in a top-secret laboratory as lab assistants. Unsurprisingly, they stole the stuff––according to Azazello––in quite astonishing quantities.[54] When Azazello got his hands on some LSD, though, he and his friends were not entirely sure how to use it––the instructions were to dissolve all of it in a bathtub of water. But how much of the water should be drunk? In the end, however, Azazello seems to have had a very typical, good trip. He spoke to God––or, he muses, maybe it was the devil, because would God speak with a hippie high on drugs like him? LSD never quite became popular, not least because its acquisition required extraordinarily good connections. Yet, it soon became apparent that hippies did not just take drugs for fun. In an interview, Azazello immediately jumped from LSD to so-called Polish heroin, which was a very dirty form of opium. While LSD was for curiosity and pleasure, Polish heroin was simply for need. And with the years, one can detect more and more references to the “need” for drugs, even though they continued to be venerated as stimulants.

            Azazello started chasing kaif all over the Soviet Union early on. He remembers that in 1975 he, Sergei Troianskii, and Zhenia Ryzhii traveled to the Zaporozhe region because they had heard that there was a poppy field plantation on Khortytsia, an island in the River Dnieper. That turned out to be wrong. But they found poppies elsewhere. Azazello raved about a nightingale concert (“the best nightingales I heard were in the Zaporozhe region”) that probably resulted from their find. In 1975 Azazello could still take the drugs or leave them. The disappointment about the fact that there was no plantation was still limited. In the same year, he, Troianskii, and Kestner bought forty packages of codeine for New Year’s Eve. They moved around town high and happy by choice not necessity. In later years, the drugs get stronger, the references to them darker. Azazello tells a story dating from the same period which involved his friend Laimi, who was a very pretty boy. The hippies’ dealings in the centre brought them in contact with a number of people, including criminals and homosexuals, both of whom also hung out around Gorky Street. A big man who belonged to both communities once threatened Laimi with a knife, demanding physical services in exchange for the medical morphine he supplied, which he sold for seventy rubles a gram. Laimi’s friends rescued him from this particular situation, but it showcased the dangerous proximities drugs created. In 1981, when Azazello and Ofelia travelled to Central Asia, there were already references to  withdrawal symptoms that were so terrible that Azazello could not leave the house. Ofelia seems to have been less addicted at this point, since she was the one who fetched money from the post office. It is also around this time that Azazello recalled what life was like as drug addicts living with Ofelia’s parents. The small, 47-square-meter apartment on Universitetskii Prospekt did not offer much space for four adults of different generations. Ironically, Azazello complained not about interference, but the stony silence both parents maintained about their cohabitants’ obvious drug use. Azazello described how, when they cooked up mak, he went to the toilet to flush down the leftovers, with Azazello’s father coming in right after him. In the toilet the evidence of their activity was there for all to see, but Starikashka, as Azazello called his father-in-law, said nothing.^[55] Most likely, Ofelia’s parents, like so many other parents of hippies, found themselves in a bind. Ofelia’s mother worked for the KGB or some other top-secret security agency, teaching English. Her father was in aviation engineering. Both had a lot to lose because of their wayward children. This was apart from the fact that drug treatment in the Soviet Union was more punitive than therapeutic. Towards the end of Ofelia’s life, her mother seems to have begun intervening, not letting her go out alone––and yet she could not prevent her death. Azazello meanwhile mocked his father-in-law’s obsession with healthy living, but he himself was aware that drugs were ruining his body. With his own mother he was even more brutal, forcing her to confront his drug addiction: “My mother, you know, she used to say, ‘You were such a good little boy’ and ‘What did you promise me?’ and I said, ‘I already told you that I would drink only lemonade.’ And you know, then people simply did not know what drugs were. They thought it was something like vodka. But I once forced her to hold the tourniquet while I was shooting up. And then I told her cold-bloodedly that now she had become an accomplice. And she whined, ‘I will report you, I will report you…’“^[56]

            He also seems to have gone into a rehabilitation program run by the Orthodox Church on the island of Konevets in Lake Ladoga. This program, which was one of the first of its kind, had already established itself in the 1990s. We know very little about Azazello during his time there. Ultimately, it was not a successful stay. Azazello emerged neither clean nor Orthodox. Indeed, in later years he seems to have made little effort to free himself of drugs. Ever since his drinking bout after his release from the psychiatric hospital in 1989, he also drank.

            His artwork mirrors the trajectory from ecstatic consumption of consciousness-enhancing substances to desperate abuse of his body to staving off withdrawal. Early pictures in vibrant colours show hippies opening up new worlds, pushing walls apart. These are the classical visions well-known from other psychedelic art.

 

Az-green folder-004.jpg

 

The ubiquity of poppies and syringes demonstrates that Soviet hippies did not just pop LSD or magic mushrooms. In the early works, they appear as beautifully drawn creatures in colourful garb and with interesting features such as a devil’s tail or an extra eye. The double page of a notebook from 1977 is telling: we see two versions of a drugged-up Azazello and one image of Ofelia smoking. There is something very sensual about the naked Azazello sitting on a kitchen table covered by a tablecloth. Ofelia looks serene, even though the inscription “Tell your mother that you’ll die” is a bit ominous. The opposite page is unquestionably joyous. It is labeled “Return from the Hunt and Happy Return.” The poppy emerging from the hunter-knight-Azazello’s trouser pocket leaves no doubt about what was hunted. The hunter smiles and raises his fingers in a victory sign. There is a syringe spewing diamond blood.

 

Az04-1977-1978-05.jpg

 

A few years later, in a notebook that spans the eighties, the painted blood is replaced by real blood. The diamonds have become splashes of badly executed injections. Azazello is still playfully using the splashes to create fantasy shapes and makes a joke about “Summer, bloody Summer,” referencing the 1983 U2 song “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” yet there is something unquestionably sinister about this page. A decade later, in 1995, the artwork has become even coarser. All that is really left is the blood—testament to the needle’s relentless pricking into Azazello’s body. At this time, he is lovesick for a girl called Nastia. Although she is commemorated in blood with a heart and an “I love” inscription, she did not matter enough later to be mentioned in the interviews. The notebook in question is the last in Azazello’s collection. It goes up to 1997. After that, drugs and his fight for survival seem to have swallowed up his creativity.

 

Az21-1982-1983-1985-075.jpg

 

Az15-1995-42.jpg

 

The End and Yet Not the End

The end of the socialist regimes in Europe started for Azazello with a new relationship. While in his latter days, he was scathing about the “woman he hitched up with right after Ofelia,” this is clearly not how he felt at the time. He devoted one of the few pieces of prose he seems to have written to Irina. Deep down, Azazello was a romantic who loved the sensation of falling in love. It is apparent even in this piece, which Azazello titled “A Short Love Story,” that Azazello was in a bad way, barely in control of himself, drinking like a fish, and frequently harming himself. The day he met Irina, who would become the mother of his only surviving child, Tania, was June 1, 1989, the day the Moscow hippies had chosen as their holiday and which for some years they had celebrated on the great lawn in the park of Tsaritsyno, then an abandoned ruin and unkempt grounds on the outskirts of Moscow. This was Azazello’s first “First of June” after his long imprisonment. He anticipated it with curiosity, mindful that people kept telling him how things had changed—new hippies, fewer police but more hooligans from the town of Liubertsy planning to beat up long-haired guys. He immediately noticed a young, dreamy-looking girl with a guitar, but somehow never got to speak with her. Indeed, his lifestyle got into the way of any acquaintance that day:

Diversant (finally!) showed up; i hadn’t seen him since that meeting with some American anarchist chick on Novokuznetskaia. he was sprawled on the grass, looking quite relaxed; he had some downers on him, and that’s what got me really numb. there was other stuff, too, but i don’t remember much, some picture-taking and whatnot, God knows i’ve heard all kinds of bullshit about what happened next. some say a chick refused to kiss me, but others say that she did kiss me, and then i supposedly walked off, pulled out a knife and sliced my hand open. i have no idea what happened before that, but i vividly remember cutting myself, i must’ve been standing by a tree because i remember the scaliness of its bark. suddenly, to my surprise, the pipl started running around, there was commotion, someone wrestled away the knife, someone else pulled off a sock to use for bandaging, but what surprised me most was that someone had a sealed pack of medical gauze on them, and they used it to wrap my hand before dragging me, not without incident, to various hospitals and trauma centres. that was how i ended up losing touch with Irina that day without even realizing it, and then later i started asking around who this Irina-with-a-guitar was, but i didn’t get any additional details and failed to locate her.

 

            The next encounter was more promising, but Azazello was still in freefall, taking drugs, sleeping around, drinking heavily. Ten days later Ofelia left him. Azazello went on another bender. In the middle of it, Irina showed up at his door, brought along by some of his friends. She kind of participated in the orgy around her, but gradually Azazello came down with the help of some weed, which he smoked and smoked until “his soul [was] finally healing.” This was a very different relationship than the one with Ofelia. Azazello could finally be the teacher. He tried to show Irina how to inhale properly, which she never quite mastered. As her nickname—Irina Pianitsa, Irina, the drinker—suggests, it is not drugs that made Irina’s world go ‘round. (In real life she was Irina Morales thanks to a Cuban father.) Azazello was high—not from drugs, but from the excitement of being with this young girl in sweltering Moscow as summer was baking the city and their bodies:

 

We rarely went outside, maybe for walks once in a while—the hazy morning city with its smoke and fog, the blazing sun, our backs wet with sweat, the scorching asphalt, the stench of thousands of cars, the horror of horrors otherwise known as our city. a bright spot among my recollections of that sweltering chaos: i’m riding in a trolley bus next to Irina, who is completely baked, and she is leaning against me with her head and shoulders, and her touch alone makes me feel high to the point that it seems like i am being pricked by needles all over my body. we left the city a few times to run errands—to pick up Lucia [Irina’s daughter from a previous marriage] from camp, to send her with Irina’s mozer [mother] to stay somewhere near Mozhaisk, to collect her again, and i ended up skipping poppy-picking; there were some tempting offers, but i couldn’t stand to part with Irina even for a short time.

 

(slide 0396-0401)

 

            Irina was not the only young hippie who took a shine to Azazello in those days. At that time, he was thirty-five and counted among the hippie crowd as a venerated, experienced hand, possibly even as one of those legendary hippies whose roots went so far back, that nobody could remember anymore where they came from. Moscow was beaming with new alternative youths—not just hippies, but other so-called neformaly: punks, metalisty, skaters, and so on. Azazello was smart, interested, needy, charismatic. In a blog, a young hippie remembered her acquaintance with him, which filled her with pride but also fear: “I am a hippie chick…. I stand on the Arbat, a sketchbook with portrait types with me. He walks along the Arbat—exactly in the middle, like pearls on a string—the gait of a lover of psychodelia. He does not even move really—the background just moves behind him—a moment—and he leans over the sketchbook: —Yours? .... Half an hour later we are already sitting on the floor (and nothing more) in his apartment, our hands filled with paintings like cards, drawings: Mine with his, his with mine.”^[57]

            The hippie girl met Irina and her six-year-old daughter, Lucia. She got used to Azazello calling her in the middle of the night to discuss the death of his cat (Mun, a successor to Dozhdik). She went to him when she got kicked out of her flat. Then he scared her. He asked for the address of the landlord with a smile that made her think of his namesake: the malicious creature Azazello from Bulgakov’s famous novel. She sensed that he was capable of harming someone and did not disclose her former flatmates’ details. She probably misread the situation; there is no evidence that Azazello purposefully harmed anybody—with the important exception of his partners. But her little tale does show where Azazello sat at this point in the wider hippie world: a semi-old guy, capable of fascinating as well as being abhorrent, a sensitive, nurturing patron as well as a needy, irrational guy. These were his best years and his worst. He had stepped out of Ofelia’s shadow, he was free after years in prison, the Soviet Union had crumbled. But he was also busy self-destructing. The new freedom came with a heavy price tag, financially as well as health-wise. And drugs were still forbidden.

            While Azazello’s life was taking quick and drastic turns, so was the rest of the country. The Soviet Union, too, was living through its best years and its worst. Perestroika was mobilizing people, getting them back out onto the street for political reasons, bringing hope and excitement. But these were also years of extreme deficits, serious shortages, and increasing chaos and panic, as it became more and more clear that the stability of stagnation would be a thing of the past, gone forever. There are only hints in Azazello’s archive that betray the magnitude of the historical events that were taking place: in his love story about Irina, there are friends’ assurances that the police presence at Tsaritsyno does not pose a danger to them anymore, there is a mention of Diversant meeting an American anarchist girl—all that attests to the fact that the country was opening up, relaxing its control and that the hegemony of socialist ideology was losing its grip. In 1988 Azazello posted the following sarcastic poem/song into his notebook (in slightly faulty English):

 

Born into USSR—USSR Forever

Before and after

After and before

Streaming far away

Nowhere

And everywhere Forever

Because it is only USSR

Az-22 – 1988 - 07

 

In Russian the poem’s title is “Day of the Fatherland” and it is illustrated with a picture of a bare landscape of broken, destroyed trees. The whole page screams of the tristesse of Azazello’s Soviet life, which at that time he was spending in a dilapidated psychiatric hospital. Yet only three years later, the Soviet Union was no more. The “forever” of late socialism was a wrong impression which Azazello had shared with a great number of his compatriots. In December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. There is no notebook for this period. No poem commemorates this caesura. Like most Soviet citizens, Azazello experienced the initial phase of capitalist Russia as something not very different from the last phase of socialism. Yet we know from his words that in August 1991 he did go to the barricades erected in the streets and demonstrated against the putsch that imprisoned Gorbachev and aimed to return the country to hardliners.[58] Judging from his poetry-writing, it was clearly also a very creative time for him.

            In January 1991 Ofelia disappeared. Azazello knew what happened. Not right away. But after the funeral, people started confessing to him. Yet there is no trace of Ofelia’s tragic end in his writings. It is a glaring silence in his oeuvre. In interviews in the 2000s, he did want to speak about it, though. He wanted to express his outrage. His wonderment that her body surfaced in the river exactly forty days after it disappeared—the day Russians traditionally remember their recently deceased. His fury with those who did not call for help.[59] At the time, however, despite death featuring strongly in both the poems and the notebook texts, Azazello was only ever concerned with his own death. Azazello seems to have remained silent about both the loss of Ofelia and Diversant as well. The exception to the rule is a small note about the death of Iura Burakov alias Solntse on September 3, 1993, during the events that led to Boris Yeltsin storming the White House, the seat of Russia’s parliament. Azazello learned about it in March 1994, when he was keeping a regular diary: “I learned not long ago that Solntse died—Solnyshko (for the girls), San Sanych, of whom they say that he was the founder of the Sistema in Moscow. He was about 45. I saw him last in the passage between the Armenia [a wine shop] and the Pushka. He was begging for a bottle. That was about ten years ago. Of Misha Krasnoshtan they say that he died at the end of last year. Death fires like out of a machine gun, hitting the far and the close, the old and the young, infernal races on a vertical wall in hell.”

 

(link)

 

            In that fateful year of 1991, the officially organized Conference of the Defenders of Peace brought a glut of foreigners to Moscow, among them the Dutch peace activist Annemie Ummels. Despite the fact that Azazello had only fleeting contact with her for about a week, she left quite an impression on him—and vice versa. She seemed to have impressed on him the need to get rid of his drug addiction. But more importantly, in Ummels he encountered someone who argued as passionately about politics as he did. Most of his hippie friends had no interest in political activism or actively shunned it. Azazello was never in this category, even if he did not follow his friend Diversant in restless agitating or some of his hippie friends in joining up with dissidents. We can locate Azazello’s political mind a bit through Ummels’s testimony. In an interview in 2020, she remembered that he scolded her and her friends for being so naïve as to accept an invitation from Soviet officials. She in turn tried to make him understand that power structures and militarization in the East and the West were not so different. It is the classical gap between the seasoned Soviet nonconformist who has no love left for the Soviet state and the principled Western leftist who condemns Soviet oppression but cannot quite let go of the idea that somehow lived socialism must be better than lived capitalism. According to Ummels, at the time Azazello was periodically sleeping in a large house with Afghan veterans and other hippies, including Faif and Julia. This might be what later became the Bulgakov Museum on the Garden Ring in Moscow, which in the early 1990s was a well-known hippie squat, immortalized in Artur Aristakisian’s provocative film, Mesto na zemle (2001). Ummels describes the space as a very underground, very bohemian, and very arty place, where projectors painted images on the wall and people displayed their art. In her letter to Azazello, Ummels recalls that he gave her a squirrel as a gift, which she left in his possession—hence the letter is addressed to Azazello and the squirrel. She also recounts in detail how she perceived him, being very reflective about her own position as an old ‘68er in search of the authentic Soviet Union—the ordinary people who correspond to her own position vis-à-vis her own society.

 

 

clear sleeve-03.jpg

 

            Ummels also reports that Azazello was indeed actively involved in the Moscow events during the August putsch. She kept him informed by telephone, since her information from the Western press was better than his. They lost touch soon thereafter, possibly, because when Faif and Julia went to Amsterdam in an attempt to find a home in the Netherlands (planning to finance the endeavour by selling a kidney each), Ummels bought a painting from them. Her daughter, who picked up the picture in a Russian flophouse in Amsterdam, was horrified by the house, the people, and the drugs. Even Ummels thinks in retrospect that “these were not nice people.”[60][i] Azazello went off the radar for a few years and little was known about his whereabouts. Often, he seems simply to have lived nowhere.

            His thoughts when the notebooks resume in 1994 are dominated by family affairs, not politics, which is only a tiny murmur in the background. Yet in his writings, which also appear in diary form in these years, he writes about one thing only: his daughter Tania, born May 4, 1992, who is clearly the sunshine of his life, the object of his worries, and the reason for a lot of disagreement with Irina, from whom he was separating during this time. This was a conscious act. Azazello knows that he is not writing about Tania. He is writing for Tania: “I understand for whom I am writing these notes, which I try to keep regularly. Not to remember the past when old, but only so that I can be known and understood by one particular person, meaning one still little girl called Tania. In the hope that you will be heard, even if nothing is understood, it pays respect to her.”

            Azazello’s notes are indeed a declaration of love to his daughter, whom he could see only occasionally, in the face of resistance from Irina’s family. His relationship with Irina was very strained. He reveals himself as a loving father who emerges from his own chaotic life to give Tania the love that he (justifiably or not) feels she does not receive from Irina. On February 6, 1994, he wrote in his diary: “Tania is asleep. I went out with her in the afternoon, then she fell asleep in the metro in my arms and I struggled with the bag Ira had given me. She woke up when a door slammed in the hallway…. At home I fed my favourite girl, we watched cartoons and I read and showed Tania her book. In the end, satisfied, she fell asleep in her bed amidst her books. Somehow Ira and Lucia are out on her birthday. Every adult is caring for his child.”

 

Az10a-1993-1994-08

 

            Once in a while there is a glimpse in Azazello’s writing that things have changed around him. That the old structures are giving way to new rules. That new people are populating the world they inhabit. Azazello clearly had nowhere to live in this period, since he had rented his apartment to some Chinese people. He slept on friends’ sofas, often with no money in his pocket. At Irina’s he only seems to be welcome when she needs him to babysit. According to Azazello, his friend Shamil (Samuel Valiev, another hippie poet) compared his state of mind to suffering a heart attack in a foreign country.[61] There is also some evidence that Azazello’s physical decline has begun. His life, drugs, the Soviet and post-Soviet repressions, and his personal stresses are taking their toll. In passing Azazello reports severe damage to his left ear from frostbite when he had to walk to Shamil’s flat from the metro late at night. More seriously, his right hand and forearm were smashed by a police baton the year before, sending him to the hospital for weeks and leaving him with metal pins and a cast. He writes: “The little I managed to write through the pain gives evidence of the breakdown of my state of mind.” (AZ 10a – 1993-1994-06) Interspersed are the fights with Irina, whom he accuses of “extreme stupidities” every time she opens her mouth, while she rages about his unreliability and calls him a monkey and a disgrace to mankind. During this period (in 1992), he typed up his poems. A large number of them might also date from this period. Maybe because he saw his mortality for the first time. A surprisingly large number of the poems deal with death or imminent death. And while he does not comment much on politics, it is a fact that Azazello lived and was living through the death throes of an entire system—the system which he despised and from which he broke free, yet which nonetheless was the system that raised him and the one he knew best.

            Azazello’s notes from this era do not make for happy reading. Mostly it is his fighting with Irina, his snatched moments with Tania, which leave him with even more worries, the fact that he has no home, which gets him down. He seems to get beaten up by people—he speaks of a broken head at some point—but he also fails to walk away from the drugs, detailing a bewildering array of things he was consuming—or sometimes proudly refraining from (but never for long). While his penniless existence, his dependence on shady middlemen to rent his flat, and his decline into a world of violence speak volumes about what the 1990s did to most Russian citizens, he rarely, if ever, comments on politics. He thinks big. He reads Gumilev like many of his contemporaries. Or he thinks small. He muses on Moscow, observing how much the city of his youth has changed for him and, implicitly, for everybody.

 

I took a taxi in Moscow, at the new circus we turned right, the car drove and stopped, then jerked to a halt at a traffic light. I sat in the back and looked out of the window at a picture of snow, steam and dampness. A congregation of boxes, bursting with undesirables, the city where I spent most of my life has become the open city of Pandora. Oh, where are you, city of my youth, where are sunny days breathing tranquility, where is a clean and cool shadow at noon, where are we, wandering along these streets, through the sun, under the rare spots of lanterns? We dared to walk for hours.

 

Az10b-1993-1994-19

 

            But in 1994 Azazello’s life is not over yet. Even though he writes in 1994: “I’m a little tired of life. I lost a part of myself somewhere, I don’t remember what I knew, I’m tired of myself and of life.” Indeed, he finds another love and has another child. His next relationship was to be his longest, lasting for over twenty years. Yet, it was also the one that witnessed his greatest decline. In the mid-1990s he got together with Julia, the ex-girlfriend of his friend Faif, who had been Azazello’s travel companion to Central Asia in 1981. Swapping partners was no rarity in the hippie community—Ofelia’s last boyfriend was the ex-husband of her best friend, Ioko. This was due less to an understanding of free love and more to the fact that it was easier to remain in the small circle of the initiated than to introduce strangers to the world of Soviet and post-Soviet hippies. This was especially true for drug addicts, who lived a life that was completely incomprehensible to mainstream society, which tolerated extreme alcohol abuse, but, even in the 1990s, had little exposure to other intoxicating substances. The drug community was even more marginalized by the kind of drugs that were in circulation in the late 1980s and 1990s, especially the infamous vint, which killed Ofelia. Unlike mak, it made bodies degenerate in record time, killing a number of people in the 1990s, often in combination with alcohol, which was now used to bridge periods of abstinence. Azazello prided himself on the fact that one of the secrets of his longevity was that he brewed his own cocktail of drugs. Both he and Julia guarded the exact contents of this brew very carefully.

            In the late 1990s, Azazello and Julia had a child who was born with a severe health disorder. Tragically, the little girl died at the age of three from cancer of the eye. His relationship with Julia seems to have been as volatile as any of his previous relationships. According to Julia, it was no rarity that they resorted to their fists, yet she claimed she gave as good as she got. Most years Azazello attended the June 1 meetings at Tsaritsyno. Occasional get-togethers with old friends were more often fuelled by alcohol rather than drug binges. His life seemed to have calmed down into a low-key struggle for survival, punctuated by regular occurrences such as pension payments, drug highs and lows, and scrapes with the police and Julia. Most crucially, Azazello stopped chronicling his life in poetry, prose, or art. In interviews he talks about the anguish of losing his second daughter. But there is no reference in the poems or any more diaries comparable to the ones he wrote to Tania. The notebooks stop in 1994. (The poems do not seem to date too much later either). His living standards declined to absolute squalor. In the early 2000s he seems to have been on the run from the police and washed up in Kozel’sk in the Kaluzhskaia region, near the monastery of Optina Pustyn’, where several hippies had lived at various stages of their lives. But the church was never a refuge for Azazello. And yet, Azazello, unlike many of his closest friends, stubbornly refused to die. Indeed, in many respects he was more alive than many other hippie legends. When I met Azazello in 2011, he was lucid, interesting, charming, and funny. He did not patronize me. It was clear he loved stories. He was a good raconteur. His answers were couched in little narratives. There was a beginning, a cliff-hanger, and a point. He had views about Putin (not favourable), followed current events (upholding unfashionable liberal views), and was a keen follower of the British indie scene (Radiohead and Coldplay were new favourites in his repertoire). His self-destruction seems to have been limited to his body rather than his brain (which, for instance, was not true of some his hippie friends, who were mostly incoherent from intoxication). His body was taking a lot of punishment though. He and Julia, who came along to the interview, demolished a bottle of vodka under the table of the small cellar restaurant where we met. In this interview she was helpful, adding to his memories. In future dealings, she would be obstructive, hoping to extract money in exchange for information.

            At the end of the interview, Azazello showed me a little notebook he had brought along. It was a particularly fine example of his drawings from 1977. He told me that he had many more. I was intrigued, indeed excited, since written sources are few and far between in the Soviet hippie world. We agreed to meet again and look through the notebooks. Alas, this 2011 meeting was to be my only encounter with him in person. I got in touch with him the following year, when I spent some time in Moscow during the freezing, early days of 2013. Instead of him, I got Julia on the phone. She had decided that there might be money in the endeavour. I had no money to give. There is no funding for bribes in academic budgets. In the end, we decided to meet at the Dynamo metro station to exchange notebooks for a pair of boots. Julia screamed and was agitated on the phone. I waited at Dynamo for an hour and a bit. The wind piped through the station and it was minus 25 on the street. I was just about to give up when Julia emerged from a train. She had taken some uppers and was jittery and aggressive. I had to go to the other end of Moscow with her. She did not have any notebooks. She wanted to know where the boots were. I decided to abandon the deal. I was a bit scared of this hyper and hyped-up person yelling at me. I didn’t want to go to the other side of Moscow to some flat in a high-rise which might or might not contain notebooks. I went home and told myself that research is not everything. Half a year later, I was pregnant with my second daughter. Russia was far away, since we had moved to New York. One day I received a message with no words in it. It was from Azazello. I called him back. He answered, he was charming, he told me that he loved me, and that Julia was jealous because somebody with the same name had shown up. I told him that his notebooks were valuable, that he should save them, that I would like to put them into an archive. He agreed. In the following year, I started working with the Wende Museum, arranging the transfer, sale, and donation of hippie archives. Via Irina Gordeeva in Moscow, I got back in touch with Azazello. He trusted her schoolmistress-like manner and the miracle happened: despite his chaotic life, despite his failure to answer his phone most of the time, despite him blowing off meeting after meeting, in the summer of 2014 his archive made its way to California in another scholar’s luggage. It smelled of smoke and hash and the hippie life. I received it on a terrace in the LA neighbourhood of Venice. I started to read the poems. I leafed through the notebooks. I looked at the pictures and photos. I saw a life. A creative life. A really interesting piece of history. I decided then and there to apply for money to make something out of this archive. To let the Azazello’s world come out of the shadows and small dingy apartments where it had been hiding itself.

            We received a generous grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council two years later. Before we could tell Azazello, he died, on August 26, 2016. A film taken by Andrei Kiselev shows him walking through Moscow. He walks the way he lived. He does not pay any attention to anything but talks incessantly while he makes his way across streets, railway tracks, and abandoned garages. His feet are encased in ill-fitting shoes and one heel is wrapped in dirty bandages. Clearly, he has sustained one of the multiple injuries typical for drug addicts and alcoholics, who do not feel the pain in their delirium. But nonetheless, the shaky camera work still conveys the energy that was left in Azazello, a physical wreck, yet fully alert in his gaze and mind.[62] He talks throughout the film sequence, partly to Alkhimik, a fellow hippie who accompanies him. Partly to the filmmaker. Partly to posterity. He is funny, witty, complicated, and a bit tricky. He is Azazello.

            When I met him, he told me a short story summarizing his life: “You know, once a Canadian asked me what my profession was. He had fought in Vietnam. It was in the mid-90s. Profession...well, what is my profession? I told him that I was a hippie. But he did not understand me. He was from over there. And he did not understand. That was the problem.”