SOVIET UNION ON THE BRINK: Here is a personal eyewitness account of life in a provincial Russian city during a remarkable period in world history just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and before the names Putin and Russia became inseparable.

• Author: Zwack, Peter B.
• Position: THE WORLD YESTERDAY - Vladimir Putin

IGOR lay in a single hospital bed with a blood drip attached and a used bedpan sitting on a chair next to him. Around him, jammed into the small room, were eight other patients, some with bloody bandages wrapped around their torsos, lying mostly on top of their beds in the summer heat. The smell of sweat and lye permeated the room. Hospital #1 clearly worked hard to be clean, but had little of the technology and sanitation we are accustomed to in our own country. I wondered how the patients survived at night in the heat with the screenless windows open. They appeared to be ripe meat for Tver's voracious mosquitoes.

Looking wan, Igor was surprised, happy, and seemingly embarrassed to see me. He was missing a tooth since I last saw him. We talked for a few minutes about old times, and then he asked that I leave. He did not want me to see him in this condition, in these circumstances. I gave him a hug and some photos I had taken of us together and left.

Igor had a bleeding ulcer and had been admitted to the hospital for the second time in six months. Told to stop drinking vodka, he did not listen and had fallen unconscious in the nightclub where he worked. He was hauled off by ambulance just a day before I was to meet him. I literally learned Igor's sorry story from the club's door-woman after arriving in Tver the night after the episode.

The club itself has an interesting story. It was converted from the former Kalinin Soviet Officer's Club, a revealing sign of how far the stature of the military has fallen. In 1996, it even was used for a "congress" of Chechen deputies as well as being a nightclub.

Igor is my closest friend in Tver. Considered a ne'er-do-well by many, he nonetheless provided me an absolutely unique, fascinating, and at times downright hilarious view of Tver and Russian life. In spite of being very welleducated, Igor drifted from job to job, mostly linked to the entertainment business. In the 10 years I have known him, he has worked as a DJ; a T-shirt silk-screen printer; a manager for his friend who ran ice cream kiosks and commodities; gym manager for the Proletarka martial arts center; a DJ again; and finally, an assistant manager at the Officer's Nightclub. He knew everybody and everything in Tver and took me all over the place.

We met through the university in 1989 when my group was invited to see the Kalinin branch of the Central Red Army hockey team. He was the team's marketer and befriended several of us students...