I first had the idea of this blog post on the New Year Day – 14 January 2019. No, I haven’t lost my marbles, not yet: 14 January is the day when the New Year is celebrated all over the Orthodox world, still sticking to the so-called Julian Calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in year 46 BC. The calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian one used in most Western countries, including Britain. Likewise, if Christmas Day in the West falls on 25 December, in Russia, Greece and Ukraine, say, it is marked on 7 January by those who are religious – and on both dates by those who are not!

In the USSR, where I was born and grew up, we were mostly officially non-religious and were not allowed to believe in anything but communism. We were allowed, however, to celebrate the New Year – the only non-political holiday we had, but most people somehow managed to be aware not just of the official 1 January New Year, but also of the unofficial, Julian, on 14 January, which we lovingly called ‘the Old New Year’.

The Old New Year was a welcome antidote to the countless professional Soviet ‘holidays’ (all of them falling on a Sunday, no doubt), like Tank Driver’s Day, Meat and Dairy Industry Worker’s Day, Artillery and Rocket Troops Soldier’s Day, and, of course, Soviet Engineer’s  Day. In Britain, I always get a reminder of those ridiculous ‘holidays’ when I hear over the radio about the forthcoming ‘Bring a Child (or a Dog) to the Office Day’, or its American equivalent ‘Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day’, and other similar ‘festive occasions’, which do not cost employers a penny (or a cent) to observe.   

Celebrating 14 January in the USSR was… well, if not openly forbidden, then definitely frowned upon, mostly because of its religious connotations, for the Soviet rulers used to rightly believe that one could not be simultaneously a communist and a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew (albeit the latter, for some obscure reason, was to be mentioned in the internal passports of all Soviet citizens of Jewish ethnicity). Because of that, the Old New Year was usually much more quiet and laidback that the “proper” ‘Noviy  God’, with its wild boozy gluttony, when it was possible and even permissible to get so drunk that you could end up at someone else’s place and in a wrong city – in Leningrad, instead of Moscow, like in the plot of the cult 1970s Soviet comedy ‘The Irony of Fate’, which is repeated invariably each New Year.

In that movie, the adventures begin when a group of Moscow friends decide to visit a public bath on a New Year Eve – not so much to wash as to get plastered. They succeed enormously and one of them ends up accidentally boarding a plane to Leningrad, still in a drunken stupor. On arrival, thinking he is still in Moscow, he hails a cab, gives the driver his Moscow street address – street names in all Soviet cities and towns were mostly the same – and finds himself sleeping the booze off in a flat, laid out exactly as his Moscow apartment in a similar housing block. His standard Moscow key happened to fit the standard Leningrad door lock, so he got inside the empty flat, thinking it was his own, and slept peacefully on a mass-produced sofa, very similar to his own, until he got woken up by the flat’s true owner – a beautiful single woman (played by the Polish film star Barbara Brylska) … you can probably guess how the plot develops from there.

Such was the popularity of ‘The Irony of Fate’ that with time it has become the most common and valid apology for not just getting headless, but also for going to the baths with friends on a New Year Eve. Gradually, however, the latter tradition had somehow shifted from 31 December to 12, 13 or 14 January, that is towards the Old New Year.

To put the citizens off celebrating the Orthodox (read: religious) New Year or Easter, Soviet authorities resorted to all kinds of gimmicks: from allowing some second-rate Western rock bands on TV screens in the evening (to stop people going to the few remaining churches) to unleashing popular stand-up comedians and raconteurs in impromptu concerts. I have to confess that as a satirical writer who was often invited to read his poems and stories from the stage, I used to experience very busy times around Easter and the Old New Year, and I knew a number of stand-up comedians who – for reasons purely materialistic – were openly looking forward to those religious holidays, for the latter would inevitably bring some improvement to their notoriously mediocre incomes.

And yet we would still find time for the baths, of course!

The ‘technology’ of our Old New Year ‘bathing’ was simple. First, a bundle  of freshly cut birch-tree twigs (to whip each other in the steam room “to open up the body pores”) would be acquired at a market – one bunch for each bather – several days prior to the event. Then the bathers’ wives would be mobilised to prepare plentiful snacks (pies, dumplings, poor man’s caviar – aka aubergine spread) to be enjoyed by their husbands in the intervals between steam-room visits. Thirdly, significant amounts of vodka would be purchased for reasons that do not require explanation. In 1982-84, during the brief rule of Yuri Andropov – who started enforcing “work discipline” with the dictatorial stubbornness of the ex-KGB Chairman so it was not unusual for the armed militia patrols to burst into a cinema or, indeed, a bath house during working hours to see why the patrons were not at their factories and offices – it was handy to have some kind of a certificate confirming that you were officially exempt from working on that particular day because of holidays or illness. Such ‘certificates’ could be easily forged, of course. 

The ‘bathing’ would carry on for the best part of the day, with plenty of sweating, splashing, whipping, boozing and stuffing our bellies (not necessarily in that order), until we – despite all the food and booze consumed – would feel almost weightless and would (almost) glide in the air above the snow when we finally emerged from the bath house…

There was one episode (I forget if it happened in the Sunduni or the Rzhevskiye bath house), when in the middle of one of our steam room visits the electricity went off. Dozens of scared naked men were dashing around in pitch darkness in search of an exit, bumping into each other but also into the red-hot iron (!) railings leading to the room’s upper tiers, squealing in pain and frustration. Then the steam room door was suddenly flung open and in came a buxom old woman (!) in a tattered fur coat and a large hat with ear flaps, probably the bath house’s caretaker, who shouted: “Don’t panic, muzhiki (a colloquial word for “men” – VV). The light will be restored soon!” With that, she slammed the door shut and we were left in complete and utter darkness. But now we had an idea of where the exit was! Pushing, hitting and cursing, we all rushed towards the door stepping over (and at times trampling upon) our less lucky comrades whose naked bodies ended up prostrated on the wet steam room floor, covered with soaked birch-tree leaves like with some slimy warm carpet. Once out in the street, we could not stop running all the way to the nearest Metro station…  

Why do I recall that Moscow bathing experience with such clarity now, you may ask. The answer is simple: a group of my Russophile English friends invited me to mark the last Old New Year by … going to a London bath house; just like in Moscow all those years ago!

In the absence of both the Sunduni or the Rzhevskiye, we went to the Paddington Central Baths, also known as Porchester Spa. I had never been there before and was very impressed by the establishment’s authentic features and technologies: a beautiful 1929 boiler, which generates all Porchester steam; a basement Turkish bath; a 30-metre swimming pool (no such thing in Moscow!) with barrel-vaulted ceiling; a swirl-shaped plunge pool; an Art Deco recreational area upstairs, with numerous wooden loungers, and countless other nooks and crannies full of sweating and relaxing men (it was the men’s bathing day) – not naked like in Moscow but in their swimming trunks!

My friends told me that the old spa had been recently targeted for redevelopment, which, among other changes, would have replaced the famous boiler with modern individual steam generators, with the same intensity of steam, but these proposals were strenuously opposed by the Porchester old-timers, among whom were Orthodox Jews, Russian oligarchs and East End gangsters. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to spot any of the above among the patrons: no wonder – even oligarchs are bound to look unremarkable with their wardrobe reduced to just swimming trunks, be the latter from Armani, Yves Saint Laurent or Lidl supermarket.

But I was lucky to see one of the last living anachronisms of the London public bathing scene – the so-called schmeisser (not to be confused with the eponymous machine pistol – the Schmeisser – from Nazi Germany) at work.

How can I explain what ‘schmeisser’ means? The concept was brought  to London by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. The word schmeiss means ‘whip’ in Yiddish, but the schmeisser I saw was ‘processing’ a naked man – spread-eagled on a bench – with raffia branches, soap and a loofah.

The man on the bench was probably enjoying himself: his eyes were shut. Or maybe he was dead, it was hard to say. That was probably why I staunchly refused to try the ‘schmeissing experience’ myself. At least in Moscow’s Sunduni we used to whip each other, so you were under control to an extent, whereas the burly ‘banshchiki’ (bath-house attendants), all originating from a couple of remote Tartar villages, limited themselves to massaging you in the recreational area and to pouring vodka.

According to the refurbishment proposals, schmeissing would no longer be permitted in Porchester, some of  whose regulars refer to its potential disappearance as “social vandalism”. Having watched the solitary schmeisser at work for several minutes, I had to conclude that schmeissing itself was a kind of vandalism – yet a seemingly healthy and blissful one for those whose bodies were getting “vandalised”.

Like everything else in life, my London bathing experience came to an end. Here I have to say that, unlike in Moscow, we did not drink while in the spa. I mean we drank, of course, for steam bathing causes dehydration, but only water and tea… so it was all but natural that we decided to visit a pub afterwards. An experienced friend recommended the nearby Daniel Gooch, named after the eponymous English railway engineer and an MP, so the correct name of the pub, which the engineer had also himself, allegedly, designed, should have been ‘The Sir Daniel Gooch’. It turned out, however, that the once famous engineering pub was no more: permanently closed since 2016! So we ended up in the nearest Persian restaurant instead. It was excellent – the fact that, philosophically speaking, is a reflection of life itself: you lose something only to find something else instead.

At least one good old schmeisser was still in existence, bless him and his hard-working loofah! 

I first had the idea of this blog post on the New Year Day – 14 January 2019. No, I haven’t lost my marbles, not yet: 14 January is the day when the New Year is celebrated all over the Orthodox world, still sticking to the so-called Julian Calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in year 46 BC. The calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian one used in most Western countries, including Britain. Likewise, if Christmas Day in the West falls on 25 December, in Russia, Greece and Ukraine, say, it is marked on 7 January by those who are religious – and on both dates by those who are not!

In the USSR, where I was born and grew up, we were mostly officially non-religious and were not allowed to believe in anything but communism. We were allowed, however, to celebrate the New Year – the only non-political holiday we had, but most people somehow managed to be aware not just of the official 1 January New Year, but also of the unofficial, Julian, on 14 January, which we lovingly called ‘the Old New Year’.

The Old New Year was a welcome antidote to the countless professional Soviet ‘holidays’ (all of them falling on a Sunday, no doubt), like Tank Driver’s Day, Meat and Dairy Industry Worker’s Day, Artillery and Rocket Troops Soldier’s Day, and, of course, Soviet Engineer’s  Day. In Britain, I always get a reminder of those ridiculous ‘holidays’ when I hear over the radio about the forthcoming ‘Bring a Child (or a Dog) to the Office Day’, or its American equivalent ‘Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day’, and other similar ‘festive occasions’, which do not cost employers a penny (or a cent) to observe.   

Celebrating 14 January in the USSR was… well, if not openly forbidden, then definitely frowned upon, mostly because of its religious connotations, for the Soviet rulers used to rightly believe that one could not be simultaneously a communist and a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew (albeit the latter, for some obscure reason, was to be mentioned in the internal passports of all Soviet citizens of Jewish ethnicity). Because of that, the Old New Year was usually much more quiet and laidback that the “proper” ‘Noviy  God’, with its wild boozy gluttony, when it was possible and even permissible to get so drunk that you could end up at someone else’s place and in a wrong city – in Leningrad, instead of Moscow, like in the plot of the cult 1970s Soviet comedy ‘The Irony of Fate’, which is repeated invariably each New Year.

In that movie, the adventures begin when a group of Moscow friends decide to visit a public bath on a New Year Eve – not so much to wash as to get plastered. They succeed enormously and one of them ends up accidentally boarding a plane to Leningrad, still in a drunken stupor. On arrival, thinking he is still in Moscow, he hails a cab, gives the driver his Moscow street address – street names in all Soviet cities and towns were mostly the same – and finds himself sleeping the booze off in a flat, laid out exactly as his Moscow apartment in a similar housing block. His standard Moscow key happened to fit the standard Leningrad door lock, so he got inside the empty flat, thinking it was his own, and slept peacefully on a mass-produced sofa, very similar to his own, until he got woken up by the flat’s true owner – a beautiful single woman (played by the Polish film star Barbara Brylska) … you can probably guess how the plot develops from there.

Such was the popularity of ‘The Irony of Fate’ that with time it has become the most common and valid apology for not just getting headless, but also for going to the baths with friends on a New Year Eve. Gradually, however, the latter tradition had somehow shifted from 31 December to 12, 13 or 14 January, that is towards the Old New Year.

To put the citizens off celebrating the Orthodox (read: religious) New Year or Easter, Soviet authorities resorted to all kinds of gimmicks: from allowing some second-rate Western rock bands on TV screens in the evening (to stop people going to the few remaining churches) to unleashing popular stand-up comedians and raconteurs in impromptu concerts. I have to confess that as a satirical writer who was often invited to read his poems and stories from the stage, I used to experience very busy times around Easter and the Old New Year, and I knew a number of stand-up comedians who – for reasons purely materialistic – were openly looking forward to those religious holidays, for the latter would inevitably bring some improvement to their notoriously mediocre incomes.

And yet we would still find time for the baths, of course!

The ‘technology’ of our Old New Year ‘bathing’ was simple. First, a bundle  of freshly cut birch-tree twigs (to whip each other in the steam room “to open up the body pores”) would be acquired at a market – one bunch for each bather – several days prior to the event. Then the bathers’ wives would be mobilised to prepare plentiful snacks (pies, dumplings, poor man’s caviar – aka aubergine spread) to be enjoyed by their husbands in the intervals between steam-room visits. Thirdly, significant amounts of vodka would be purchased for reasons that do not require explanation. In 1982-84, during the brief rule of Yuri Andropov – who started enforcing “work discipline” with the dictatorial stubbornness of the ex-KGB Chairman so it was not unusual for the armed militia patrols to burst into a cinema or, indeed, a bath house during working hours to see why the patrons were not at their factories and offices – it was handy to have some kind of a certificate confirming that you were officially exempt from working on that particular day because of holidays or illness. Such ‘certificates’ could be easily forged, of course. 

The ‘bathing’ would carry on for the best part of the day, with plenty of sweating, splashing, whipping, boozing and stuffing our bellies (not necessarily in that order), until we – despite all the food and booze consumed – would feel almost weightless and would (almost) glide in the air above the snow when we finally emerged from the bath house…

There was one episode (I forget if it happened in the Sunduni or the Rzhevskiye bath house), when in the middle of one of our steam room visits the electricity went off. Dozens of scared naked men were dashing around in pitch darkness in search of an exit, bumping into each other but also into the red-hot iron (!) railings leading to the room’s upper tiers, squealing in pain and frustration. Then the steam room door was suddenly flung open and in came a buxom old woman (!) in a tattered fur coat and a large hat with ear flaps, probably the bath house’s caretaker, who shouted: “Don’t panic, muzhiki (a colloquial word for “men” – VV). The light will be restored soon!” With that, she slammed the door shut and we were left in complete and utter darkness. But now we had an idea of where the exit was! Pushing, hitting and cursing, we all rushed towards the door stepping over (and at times trampling upon) our less lucky comrades whose naked bodies ended up prostrated on the wet steam room floor, covered with soaked birch-tree leaves like with some slimy warm carpet. Once out in the street, we could not stop running all the way to the nearest Metro station…  

Why do I recall that Moscow bathing experience with such clarity now, you may ask. The answer is simple: a group of my Russophile English friends invited me to mark the last Old New Year by … going to a London bath house; just like in Moscow all those years ago!

In the absence of both the Sunduni or the Rzhevskiye, we went to the Paddington Central Baths, also known as Porchester Spa. I had never been there before and was very impressed by the establishment’s authentic features and technologies: a beautiful 1929 boiler, which generates all Porchester steam; a basement Turkish bath; a 30-metre swimming pool (no such thing in Moscow!) with barrel-vaulted ceiling; a swirl-shaped plunge pool; an Art Deco recreational area upstairs, with numerous wooden loungers, and countless other nooks and crannies full of sweating and relaxing men (it was the men’s bathing day) – not naked like in Moscow but in their swimming trunks!

My friends told me that the old spa had been recently targeted for redevelopment, which, among other changes, would have replaced the famous boiler with modern individual steam generators, with the same intensity of steam, but these proposals were strenuously opposed by the Porchester old-timers, among whom were Orthodox Jews, Russian oligarchs and East End gangsters. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to spot any of the above among the patrons: no wonder – even oligarchs are bound to look unremarkable with their wardrobe reduced to just swimming trunks, be the latter from Armani, Yves Saint Laurent or Lidl supermarket.

But I was lucky to see one of the last living anachronisms of the London public bathing scene – the so-called schmeisser (not to be confused with the eponymous machine pistol – the Schmeisser – from Nazi Germany) at work.

How can I explain what ‘schmeisser’ means? The concept was brought  to London by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. The word schmeiss means ‘whip’ in Yiddish, but the schmeisser I saw was ‘processing’ a naked man – spread-eagled on a bench – with raffia branches, soap and a loofah.

The man on the bench was probably enjoying himself: his eyes were shut. Or maybe he was dead, it was hard to say. That was probably why I staunchly refused to try the ‘schmeissing experience’ myself. At least in Moscow’s Sunduni we used to whip each other, so you were under control to an extent, whereas the burly ‘banshchiki’ (bath-house attendants), all originating from a couple of remote Tartar villages, limited themselves to massaging you in the recreational area and to pouring vodka.

According to the refurbishment proposals, schmeissing would no longer be permitted in Porchester, some of  whose regulars refer to its potential disappearance as “social vandalism”. Having watched the solitary schmeisser at work for several minutes, I had to conclude that schmeissing itself was a kind of vandalism – yet a seemingly healthy and blissful one for those whose bodies were getting “vandalised”.

Like everything else in life, my London bathing experience came to an end. Here I have to say that, unlike in Moscow, we did not drink while in the spa. I mean we drank, of course, for steam bathing causes dehydration, but only water and tea… so it was all but natural that we decided to visit a pub afterwards. An experienced friend recommended the nearby Daniel Gooch, named after the eponymous English railway engineer and an MP, so the correct name of the pub, which the engineer had also himself, allegedly, designed, should have been ‘The Sir Daniel Gooch’. It turned out, however, that the once famous engineering pub was no more: permanently closed since 2016! So we ended up in the nearest Persian restaurant instead. It was excellent – the fact that, philosophically speaking, is a reflection of life itself: you lose something only to find something else instead.

At least one good old schmeisser was still in existence, bless him and his hard-working loofah!