Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

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.

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.

There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin.

Most people were not anti-Soviet; they only wanted to live well. They really wanted blue jeans, VCRs, and most of all, cars. Nice clothes and good food.

wartime. The libraries and theaters stood empty. Markets and stores had taken their place.

All of you wanted capitalism. You dreamt of it! Don’t go crying now that you’ve been lied to…

lives. We grew up among victims and executioners. For us, living together is normal. There’s no line between peacetime and wartime, we’re always at war.

Turn on the TV, everyone’s speaking in prison camp slang: the politicians, the businessmen, even the president; kickbacks, bribes, siphoning…Human life—you can just spit and rub someone out. Just like in prison…

—I’m a drinking man. Why do I drink? I don’t like my life. I want to do an impossible somersault and, with the help of alcohol, transport myself to another place where everything is good and beautiful.

It’s surprising how fast being poor became shameful…

Moscow is the capital of some other nation, not the country beyond the ring road.*1 A tourist paradise. Don’t believe Moscow…

Socialism was dying in front of our very eyes. And those boys of iron had come to take its place.

Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.

Tsarist Russia, as you can read in the memoirs, slipped away in three days, and the same went for communism.

The only remedy we know for every kind of pain is patience.

People have started believing in God again because there is no other hope.

Siberia. To build communism! [She is silent.] And today…ah…well…Turns out it was all in vain…All of our suffering was in vain…

Love doesn’t count the years… We’ll all die…And everything will be all right.

I’ve read your books…You shouldn’t put so much stock in what people say, in human truth…History records the lives of ideas. People don’t write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.

pause.] Stalin created a state that was impossible to puncture from below; it was impenetrable. But from above, it was vulnerable and defenseless.

…It was a beautiful idea! But what are you going to do with human nature?

At the beginning of his presidency, Yeltsin swore that he would lie down on the train tracks if he allowed our quality of life to decline. Well, the quality of life here hasn’t simply declined, it has bottomed out. Nonetheless, Yeltsin is still with us. And the one who lay down on the tracks was the old soldier Timeryan Zinatov, who died in protest in the autumn of 1992…

We fought, we killed—and for whom? For Stalin? It was for you, you idiots!

pensions. On television, they show us the Germans. They’re doing pretty well for themselves! The defeated are living

There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.

—Stalin didn’t like our generation. He hated us. We’d tasted freedom. For us, the war meant freedom! We’d gone to Europe and seen how people lived there.

—No German women between the ages of ten and eighty were left unfucked! The generation born there in 1946 are “the Russian people.”

Again, of course, they don’t write about this kind of thing in books, but…our lives were better under German rule. The Germans reopened the churches, dissolved the collective farms, and redistributed the land—two hectares per person, one trailer for every two farmers.

I want my love to live on. I won’t be here anymore, but people will be able to read about it…

It’s not that I’m afraid of solitude, I just don’t know how to live without love. I need the pain…the pity…Without that, I’m lost, the way I get scared when I’ve swum out too far into the sea. Out there, I’m alone…It’s dark in those depths…I don’t know what’s down there…

words. I always expect to hear the words I’ve been waiting for, even from strangers, even more so from strangers. With strangers, you can harbor hopes.

We’re right here! But what’s left of our past? Only the story that Stalin drenched this soil in blood, Khrushchev planted corn in it, and everybody laughed at Brezhnev.

“That’s all myth. They’ve started crafting the mythology. Our entire tragedy lies in the fact that our victims and executioners are the same people.”

I still can’t understand it, why were there so many idealists back then? Now they’ve all vanished. What kind of idealism can the Pepsi Generation have? They’re pragmatics.

A joke: “Where do I sign up for the Communist Party?” “At the psychiatrist’s.”

The world is now divided into new categories, no longer “White” and “Red,” or those who did time and the ones who threw them in jail, those who’ve read Solzhenitsyn and those who haven’t. Now it’s just the haves and have-nots.

vodka…We were the first ones in space…and manufactured the best tanks in the world. But there was no detergent or toilet paper.

More curious than scared, to be perfectly honest. I wanted to…You always want to look down into the abyss. Why? That’s just the way we are.

The axe will survive the master…

And even today, my mother still believes that it is only terrible circumstances that make him terrible, but man is essentially good! That’s just not how it is. It’s not! No…Man vacillates between good and evil for his entire life.

“I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”

When you’re part of a mob, the mob is a monster. A person in a mob is nothing like the person you sit and chat with in the kitchen.

Men consider women game, war trophies, prey, and themselves hunters. Those are the rules that have been developed over the course of centuries.

We believed that art saved people. And then it turned out that it didn’t…”

It made me realize that even though I am a nurse, I know next to nothing about death. I’ve seen it many times, but only in passing. You put an IV in, listen for a pulse…Everyone thinks that medics know more about death than other people, but no.

We were raised on the grand fairy tales about fairness; on Soviet cartoons, where everything is clearly delineated: This is good and this is evil. A kind of corrected version of reality, a world where everything was in its right place.

The thing is, you can’t buy democracy with oil and gas; you can’t import it like bananas or Swiss chocolate. A presidential decree won’t institute it…You need free people, and we didn’t have them.

A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden.

—The people are a caravan of camels that must be herded with a whip…