Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

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...