meaning of " ochered' "

[Will Ryan]

Great and evocative pictures, but relatively recent - no valenki in 
sight! And for the full experience you need the smell of cabbage soup, 
disinfectant, Belomorkanal, Krasnaia Moskva, and Russian gasoline, and 
the non-existence of deodorants.

The first picture, with the bottles and schety, reminds me of how 
valuable Soviet queues (French word meaning queue, as Eeyore might have 
said) were for observers of linguistic and social curiosities.

I was standing in just such a queue in just such a shop in Leningrad,
in 1962-3, when an unshaven old man came up, tapped me on the arm
and said: 'Vy ne Shepilov?'. Puzzled, I said 'No, I am not from round 
here'. The others in the queue started laughing, and the old man spat 
and walked away. Russian friends later explained that this was a formula 
for getting a fourth person to share the price of a bottle of vodka with 
three others. Shepilov was the fourth member of the  so-called 
'Anti-Party Group' in 1957 who had joined Molotov, Malenkov and 
Kaganovich at the last moment in their plot to remove Khrushchev - he 
was expelled from the party in 1962. The phrase was a good example of 
the sometimes aesopic Russian topical humour of the period. I still 
wonder what it was about my appearance that made the whiskery old man 
choose me as a potential bottle sharer - at that time westerners were 
rare in Leningrad and very conspicuous.

Will Ryan

Alina Israeli wrote:
> Nostalgic photos, particularly for those who were not born yet: 
> http://drugoi.livejournal.com/2465663.html#cutid1

> 

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