Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

Why does this book contain so many stories of suicides instead of more typical Soviets with typically Soviet life stories? When it comes down to it, people end their lives for love, from fear of old age, or just out of curiosity, from a desire to come face to face with the mystery of death. I sought out people who had been permanently bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply that there was no separating them: The state had become their entire cosmos, blocking out everything else, even their own lives. They couldn’t just walk away from History, leaving it all behind and learning to live without it—diving headfirst into the new way of life and dissolving into private existence, like so many others who now allowed what used to be minor details to become their big picture.

Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice.

We were merciless toward our parents. We thought that freedom was a very simple thing. A little time went by, and soon, we too bowed under its yoke. No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom. So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries…Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living. Today, there’s no longer any use for our experience in war; in fact, it’d be best to forget it. There are thousands of newly available feelings, moods, and responses. Everything around us has been transformed: the billboards, the clothing, the money, the flag…And the people themselves. They’re more colorful now, more individualized; the monolith has been shattered and life has splintered into a million little fragments, cells and atoms.

People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.

The mysterious Russian soul…Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. “Reader” is our primary occupation. “Viewer.” All the while, we consider ourselves a special, exceptional people even though there are no grounds for this besides our oil and natural gas. On one hand, this is what stands in the way of progress; on the other hand, it provides something like meaning. Russia always seems to be on the verge of giving rise to something important, demonstrating something completely extraordinary to the world. The chosen people. The special Russian path. Our country is full of Oblomovs,*2 lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles. There are no Stoltzes. The industrious, savvy Stoltzes are despised for chopping down the beloved birch grove, the cherry orchard. They build their factories, make money…They’re foreign to us…

“A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”

Sakharov died. I went to pay my respects. A hundred thousand people gathered at his funeral…Everybody was weeping, and I wept, too. The other day, I read about him in the paper, “a great Russian holy fool died,” and I thought to myself that he probably died just in time. Solzhenitsyn came back from America, and everyone fell at his feet. But he didn’t understand us, and we didn’t understand him. He was a foreigner. He’d returned to Russia but found Chicago in its place…

I’m a self-made man. I started out with three hundred dollars in my pocket…If you saw what my first business partners looked like, you’d pass out from fear. Gorillas! With ferocious stares! They’re not around anymore, those guys went extinct like the dinosaurs. I used wear a bulletproof vest; I’ve been shot at. If someone eats worse salami than I do, I don’t care. All of you wanted capitalism. You dreamt of it! Don’t go crying now that you’ve been lied to…

“Aunt Olga, why did you do it?” “Show me an honest person who survived Stalin’s time.” [He is silent.] Then there was Uncle Pavel who served in the NKVD in Siberia…When it comes down to it, there is no such thing as chemically pure evil. It’s not just Stalin and Beria,*20 it’s also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga…”

People don’t fall asleep thinking of anything lofty, instead they mull over how they didn’t buy this or get that. Do you really think that this country fell apart because people learned the truth about the gulag? That’s what people who write books think. People…Regular people don’t care about history, they’re concerned with simpler things: falling in love, getting married, having kids. Building a house. Our country fell apart from the deficit of women’s boots and toilet paper, because of the fact that there were no oranges. It was those goddamn blue jeans! Today, the shops resemble museums. Theaters. And people want me to believe that rags from Versace and Armani are all that a person needs. That they’re enough. That life is nothing but pyramid schemes and promissory notes. That freedom is money and money is freedom. While our lives aren’t worth a kopeck. Well, and…well, and…you know…I can’t even find the words…I feel sorry for my little granddaughters. I pity them. That’s what gets beaten into their heads every day on TV. I don’t agree with it. I was and remain a communist.

A mysterious new life awaited us, and everyone was eager to see it. We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner… But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…

had a chilling realization: If nothing changes, then pretty soon, these jeans-mongers will be the ones running our government. NEP men!*15 And although it seems absurd, they will be the ones to feed us and dress us, too. They’ll build their factories up from the basements…And that’s what actually ended up happening. It all came true! Today, that guy is a millionaire or a billionaire (for me, a million and a billion are equally crazy figures) and a deputy in the Duma to boot. He has a house on the Canary Islands…and another one in London…In Tsarist times, Herzen and Ogarev were the ones living in London. Today it’s them…our “new Russians”…Jeans, furniture, and chocolate moguls. Oil magnates.

Mountains of goods materialized out of God knows where. “I have a Bosch washing machine.” “I bought a Siemens TV.” Every conversation was sprinkled with words like “Panasonic,” “Sony,” “Philips”…I ran into my neighbor: “I’m embarrassed that I’m so excited because of a German coffee grinder…but I’m just so happy!” It had only been moments ago—just a moment ago—that she’d spent the night waiting in line to get her hands on a volume of Akhmatova. Now she was head over heels for a coffee grinder.

One “case” is two sheets long, another one’s an entire thick volume. I learned of how, in 1937, there had been a plan…quotas…for “exposing and rooting out enemies of the people,” just as in the eighties, they were lowering the quotas for people who could be rehabilitated district- and region-wide. The plan needed to be fulfilled and exceeded. It was all in Stalin’s style: the meetings, the pressure, the admonishments. More, more…[She shakes her head.] At night, I would sit there and read them, going through volumes of these documents. To be perfectly honest…Honestly…It made my hair stand on end. Brother informed on brother, neighbor on neighbor…because they’d gotten into an argument about their vegetable patch, or over a room in the communal apartment. Someone sang a rhyme at a wedding, “We should thank Stalin, our brother, he put all our feet in rubber.” That was enough. On one hand, the system was butchering people, but on the other hand, the people didn’t show one another much mercy, either. The people were ready… A regular communal apartment…Five families live there—twenty-seven people in total. Sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. Two of the neighbors are friends: One of them has a five-year-old daughter and the other one is single with no kids. In communal apartments, people were always spying on one another, listening in on each other’s conversations. The people with ten-square-meter rooms envied the ones with twenty-five. Life…that’s just how it is…And then, one n...

I promise her that there will be two stories. I want to be a cold-blooded historian, not one who is holding a blazing torch. Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.

When you sleep alone, not even the blanket can warm you. Even heaven will make you sick if you’re alone.

We spent our whole lives shuttling between bunkers, dormitories, and barracks.

Right there on the asphalt, on top of some bricks, an old man sat playing the accordion. He was wearing his medals, singing war songs, with a hat full of change at his feet. Our favorite songs: “The fire burns bright in the little stove, / Sap drips down the logs, like tears…” I wanted to go up to him…but he was already surrounded by foreigners…They started snapping pictures of each other in front of him. Shouting things at him in Italian, French, and German. Clapping him on the shoulder: “Davai! Davai!” They were in high spirits, clearly having a lot of fun. Why wouldn’t they be? People used to be so scared of us…and now…Here you go! Nothing but piles of junk, an empire gone up in smoke! Next to all the matryoshkas and samovars, there was a mountain of red flags and pennants, Party and Komsomol membership cards. And Soviet war medals! Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner. Medals! “For Valor” and “For Military Service.” I touched them…caressed them…I couldn’t believe my eyes! I simply couldn’t! “For defending Sebastopol,” and “For Defending the Caucasus.” All of them were real. Precious. Soviet army uniforms, jackets, and greatcoats…peaked caps with red stars…being sold for dollars…“How much?” my husband asked, pointing at the “For Valor” medal. “Twenty dollars. Or, for you, I’ll do a grand—one thousand rubles.” “And the Order of Lenin?” “One hundred dollars.” “And your conscience?” My husband was prepared to fight him. “Are you nuts? What rock have you been living under? Th...

—I’m a patriot…Let me have my say. [A man in an open shearling coat with a massive cross around his neck approaches us.] We’re living in the most shameful era of our entire history. Ours is the generation of cowards and traitors. That’s how our children will remember us. “Our parents sold out a great country for jeans, Marlboros, and chewing gum,” they’ll say. We failed to defend the USSR, our Motherland. An unspeakable crime. We betrayed everything! I will never get used to the Russian tricolor flag, I will always see the red banner in front of my eyes. The banner of a great nation! Of the great Victory! What had to have happened to us…the Soviet people…to make us close our eyes and run to this motherfucking capitalist paradise? They bought us with candy wrappers, display cases full of salami, colorful packaging. They dazzled and sweet-talked us. We traded everything we had for cars and rags. Don’t tell me any fairy tales…about how the CIA took down the Soviet Union or Zbigniew Brzezinski’s*3 machinations…Why didn’t the KGB take down America? It wasn’t the stupid Bolsheviks that fucked up the country, and not even the bastard intelligentsia that destroyed it so that they could go on trips abroad and read The Gulag Archipelago…Don’t go looking for a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. We did it ourselves. With our own hands. We dreamed of having a McDonald’s with hot hamburgers, we wanted everyone to be able to buy themselves a Mercedes, a plastic VCR. We wanted pornos in the kiosks...