Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

I’m searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There’s the one they use with children, another one for love. There’s the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling—everywhere you go, you’ll hear something different, and it’s not just the words, there’s something else, too. There’s even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night. What happens between two people at night vanishes from history without a trace. We’re accustomed to looking at the history of people by day, while suicide is a nighttime state, when a person wavers on the edge between being and non-being. Waking and sleep. I want to understand suicide with the rigor of a person in daytime. Someone once asked me: “Are you worried that you’re going to like it?”

Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. We’re a nation of slaves. Slaves! Under communism, in the words of Lenin, the cook ran the state; workers, dairymaids, and weavers were in charge. Now our parliament is lousy with criminals. Dollar-rich millionaires. They should all be in prison, not parliament. They really duped us with their perestroika!

For a long time, a large portrait of Stalin continued to hang in our home. A very long time…I remember it well…My father didn’t hold a grudge, he considered it all to be a product of his era. Those were cruel times. A powerful nation was being built. And they really did build it, plus they defeated Hitler! That’s what my father would say…

It wasn’t freedom they were after, it was blue jeans, supermarkets…They were fooled by the shiny wrappers…Now our stores are filled with all sorts of stuff. An abundance. But heaps of salami have nothing to do with happiness. Or glory. We used to be a great nation! Now we’re nothing but peddlers and looters…grain merchants and managers…

Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car—so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not one bit! They weren’t building themselves yachts with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs…Is this freedom? The little man, the nobody, is a zero—you’ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel.

They arrest the woman with the five-year-old daughter. Before they take her away, she has a chance to cry out to her friend, “If I don’t come back, please look after my little girl. Don’t let them take her to an orphanage.” So that’s what happened. The neighbor took the child in, and the building administration gave her a second room…The girl started calling her Mama…Mama Anya…Seventeen years went by…And seventeen years later, the real mother returned. She kissed her friend’s hands and feet in gratitude. If this were a fairy tale, this is where the story would end, but in real life, the ending was very different. Without a “happily ever after.” When Gorbachev came to power, after they unsealed the archives, they asked the former camp inmate whether she wanted to see her file. She did. So she went down to look at it, opened the folder…and the very first page was an informant’s report. Familiar handwriting…It was her neighbor’s, Mama Anya’s…She’d been the one who’d informed on her…Do you understand any of this? I don’t. And that woman couldn’t, either. She went home and hanged herself. [Silence.]

We were half-famished, half-naked, but we went to subbotniks*10 all year round, even in the winter. It was freezing! All my wife had was a light jacket, plus she was pregnant. We were at the depot, loading coal and timber, pushing it in wheelbarrows, and a young woman we didn’t know was working alongside us. She turned to my wife: “Your jacket is so thin. Do you own anything warmer?” “No.” “You know what, I have two. I had a good coat and then I also got a new one from the Red Cross. Give me your address, I’ll come by with it this evening.” That evening, she brought us a coat, but it wasn’t her old one—she had brought us her new one.

At the most recent citywide Party conference, they read a salutation to Comrade Stalin, and the whole auditorium had stood up. A storm of applause: “Glory to Comrade Stalin—the organizer and inspiration behind our victories!” “Glory to Stalin!” “Glory to our Leader!” Fifteen minutes…Half an hour…Everyone kept turning and looking at one another, but no one wanted to be the first to sit down. So we all just stood. And then, for some reason, I sat down. It was mechanical. Two plainclothes officers went up to me: “Comrade, why are you sitting?” I jumped up! I jumped like I’d been scalded. During the break, I kept looking around. Waiting for them to come up and arrest me on the spot. [A pause.]

A student was in for telling a joke: “A portrait of Stalin hangs on the wall. The lector reads a report on Stalin, then the choir sings a song about Stalin, and finally, an actor declaims a poem about Stalin. What’s the occasion? An evening commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.” [I laugh, he doesn’t.] The student got ten years in the camps without the right of correspondence. There was a chauffeur who had been arrested because he looked like Stalin. And he really did. The director of a laundry, a non-Party member barber, a lapidary…More uneducated people than anyone else. But there was also a folklore scholar. At night, he’d tell us all fairy tales…children’s fairy tales…Everyone would listen. The folklore specialist had been informed on by his own mother. She was an Old Bolshevik. She brought him cigarettes just once before they transferred him to the camps, and that was that. Yes…An old Socialist Revolutionary*16 was in there with us, and he was openly happy: “I’m so glad that you Communists are in here with me and you can’t understand a thing, either.”

I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you. She’s died. But you can have your honor back…” And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy…

“The Red Army is starving. Lenin is starving. While the kulaks are hiding their grain. Burning it.” I knew that my mother’s brother, Uncle Semyon, had taken sacks of grain into the woods and buried them. I was a Komsomol youth, I’d taken the oath. That night, I went to the troops and led them to where he’d buried the grain. They got a whole cartload. The Commander shook my hand: “Hurry up and grow up, brother.” In the morning, I woke up to my mother screaming, “Semyon’s house is on fire!” They found Uncle Semyon in the woods, the soldiers had cut him to pieces with their sabers…I was fifteen. The Red Army was starving…and Lenin…I was afraid to go outside, I sat in the house, weeping. My mother figured out what had happened. That night, she handed me a feedbag and told me, “Leave, son! Let God forgive your miserable soul.” [He covered his eyes with his hand. But I could still see he was crying.] I want to die a communist. That’s my final wish.

In the nineties, I published a part of this confession. My protagonist let someone read it, consulted with somebody else, and they convinced him that the publication of this story in its entirety would “show the Party in a negative light,” which was his greatest fear. After he died, they found his will. His large, three-bedroom apartment in the center of the city was not bequeathed to his grandsons but to “serve the needs of my beloved Communist Party, to which I owe everything.” They even wrote about it in the evening paper. No one could understand it anymore. Everyone laughed at the crazy old man. They never did put a monument on his grave. Now I have decided to publish his story in full. It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual.

“If I had died from my wounds during the war, I would have known that I’d died for my Motherland. Today, I’m dying from leading a dog’s life. Have them write that on my tombstone…And please don’t consider me insane… “I’d rather die standing up than on my knees, begging for my pauper’s pittance, only to extend my old age and go to my grave with an outstretched palm! Thus, my esteemed friends, do not judge me too harshly, put yourselves in my shoes. I am leaving behind the means, if I am not robbed, that will, I hope, suffice for my burial…I don’t need a coffin. Bury me in what I’m wearing, that will be good enough. Just don’t forget to put the certificate of my status as a defender of the Brest fortress in my pocket for posterity. We were heroes and now, we’re dying in poverty! Farewell. Do not mourn a lone Tatar who singlehandedly protests on behalf of everyone: ‘I die, but I do not surrender! So long, my Motherland!’ ”

Some kids fainted. I cried…I had already come to terms with living without my mother, but how could I go on without Stalin?

When the Communists were in power, I was an engineer—now I’m a cabbie. We chased out one group of bastards, and another group of bastards took their place. Black, gray, or orange, they’re all the same. In our country, power will corrupt anyone. I’m a realist. The only things I believe in are myself and my family.