Greetings from Afar

The Old Soviet Man

First of all, let me say that I am an American, living in Moscow. I am an executive with a major U.S./Multinational company, dealing with imaging technology. I hold a PhD in European History, and am a decorated veteran (officer), and active in my religion. I have lived in the Russian Federation for over ten years, and have lived in my current appartment for that entire time. I am married, and have four children, one of whom is currently “at home”. My wife is Russian, as are our two youngest kids. I say this to establish the fact that I am not prone to exageration, or flights of fancy.

The building that we live in has a “guardian”. Everyone in the building has seen him. He manifests himself as an old man, wearing “workers” clothes, the kind that were worn in the very early days of the century (collarles, belted tunic that pulls over his head and has only three buttons and baggy pants tucked into the tops of his boots, which are the large, heavy looking felt boots that are still common to older, working class people. He has a little visored cap… we’d call it a car cap that he usually carries stuffed in his hip pocket along with a large rag, and he sometimes is seen with a toolbox, broom, mop or some other “implament of destruction”. He looks to be about seventy years old, and his features are quite distinct, even though he is transparent, or almost so. He’s bald on top of his head, and has a van dyke beard and moustashe. His movements are slow and deliberate, just like those of an old person, and he always has a somewhat concerned look on his face. He usually has a home-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, and is followed by the smell of the old-fashioned, cheap, black Mikorka tobacco… the kind that hasn’t been sold, in most places, in fifty years or more.  He looks, as my wife says, like the typical “Old Soviet Man”… a phrase that is usually used to describe someone who is “slightly” behind the times… a “lovable eccentric”.

Our building was built in the early 1900’s, around 1905, and it is interesting to note that when it was built, it only had five stories… two upper stories were added in the 1940’s. Our “guardian” is never seen above the fifth floor. It is as though he does not know that the other two stories are there. Ours was one of the first private buildings in the city to have an electric lift, wihch is ome of the most common places to run into our “guardian”. The “Old” lift, which is still working, is one of the open cage variety… a steel cage with an accordion like door, and it is, to say the least, a bit tempermental. Now, getting out of it, when it stops, is easy. You just open the door from the inside and climb or drop to the next floor. It is not wired for a phone or alarm. Still, when it stops, the alarms go off on whichever floor it’s on, in the new lift, which is across the hall. At one time or another, everyone in the building has seen the old man walking away from the lift (the working one) just as the alarm goes off.

Usually, when he is seen, he is “fixing something”, or making an “inspection tour” of the building. It happens both at night and in the daytime. He does not seem to notice people around him, as if he does not see them. Most of us now believe that he was once “Nachalnik”, which is a Russian word for a cross between a building superintendet and maintaince man, and that he is still trying to carry out his job.

Even though he ignores us most of the time, he DOES know that there are people in the building, The old man is truly our “guardian”. On several occassions, the building has been in danger, twice by fire and once with a gas leak, and the alarms went off, well before the danger was noticible to the automatic system, with no one around to trigger them, manually. On one of these occassions, it happened three times before anyone noticed a smoldering fire in our garbage chute, on another, a fire in a nearby dumpster was climbing up a tree which overhung several of our balconies. Gas had filled the sub-basement, and was working it’s way toward the, basement level, furnace, but was still unnoticible to those of us in the ground level, and above floors, when the alarms sounded, and an inspection found the problem.

Children seem to see him more often than adults, although every adult in the building HAS seen him, at least once. Once, a group of us followed him, to see where he was going. He led us to a little room in the basement, near the furnace. The room is now used for storeage, but when the building was originally constructed, it was an appartment for the Nachalnik.

Over the years (I’ve lived in this building since I came to Russia in the mid-eighties) we have all taken to greeting him when we see him and calling him “Tavarich Nachalnik”, which means, “Comarade Building Superintendent”. He seems to appreciate it., and when something happens that no one can explain, or there is a noise that seems to have no detectable source… like banging on pipes in the middle of the night, or an unexpected power surge that doesn’t effect the other buildings in our block, the common comment is “it must be the Tovarich Nachalnik at work”. While I bacame aware of him about ten years ago, many of the residents of our building have lived here their entire lives, and cannot remember a time when he was not present.

On one occassion, about six months ago, I was wakened at three in the morning by someone shaking me (I was alone in the flat) and got up to find a broken water pipe flooding my kitchen. On another occassion, my neighbor, Savanov, was wakened the same way to find his stove still burning… he had forgotten to turn it off, and the wallpaper behind it was hot to the touch. Like I said, everyone in the building has had some sort of experience with him, and he has, in one way or another, helped us all out. Every kid in the building will tell you about seeing him at the door, watching them come in from school. They say he counts them to see that they are all there, and if one is not on time, he stays “on patrol” until the missing kid shows up, or until it’s obvious that they won’t. Anyone who is badly ill can count on several silent, unobtrusive visits a night until the illness passes. Everyone in the building has some story relating to the “Toverich Nachalnik”. The Fabrishnikov children’s missing cat was found locked in the coal bunker when someone pounded on the door… from the inside the densly packed sub-cellar… wifh a hammer or some other kind of heavy object.

We have all tried to find out exactly who the old man is. So far, we have two possibillties. One was a man named Petrov who was Nachalnik of our building in the early 1920’s. He died fighting a fire in the basement. The other is another former Nachalnik named Fabrishnikov (no relationship to the current occupants. It’s a common name, here… He died in 1919, during the great Spanish Influenza epidemic while tending to sick tennants.

Whichever one of them it is, we’re proud of him. We wouldn’t trade our “haunted” building for any other building in Moscow. Our “Nachalnik” is the best. Whether it is a sense of duty of some kind that keeps him on the job, or just the fact that he doesn’t realize he’s dead (which some of us suspect), we’re glad to have him with us. There is much to be said about the “Old Soviet Man”… not all of it is bad.

© 2000/2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless  granted specifically by the author in writing.