Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

What history?! It’s time to hurry up and make some money. No one thinks about anything great…or sublime…We’ve had it up to here with greatness! We want something on the human scale. Normal. Mundane…you know, everyday stuff! It’s enough to remember the great stuff occasionally, after a little vodka…We were the first ones in space…and manufactured the best tanks in the world. But there was no detergent or toilet paper. Those goddamn toilets always leaked! People would wash plastic bags and hang them out to dry on their balconies. Having a VCR was tantamount to having your own personal helicopter. A guy in jeans didn’t inspire envy, just aesthetic interest—what an exotic novelty! That’s the price we paid. The price for all those missiles and spaceships. For great history!

We were always covered in blood, we’d have to wipe our hands on our hair. Sometimes, they gave us leather aprons. That’s what work was like. The job. You’re young…Perestroika! Perestroika! You believe the babblers…They can shout, ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ all they like. Run around the squares…The axe is right where it always was. The axe will survive the master…Don’t forget that! Shit…!!!

It’s not me, it’s the system. Even Stalin…even he’d say, “I’m not the one who decides, it’s the Party.” He taught his son: You think that I’m Stalin—you’re wrong! That’s Stalin! And he’d point to the portrait of himself hanging on the wall. Not at himself, but at his portrait.

I lived under socialism for too long. Life is better now, but it’s also more revolting.

The devil knows how many people were murdered, but it was our era of greatness.

On the gates of the Solovki prison camp there was a Bolshevik motto: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Chase Humanity into Happiness.” That’s one recipe for saving humanity.

My friend’s husband was an artist. I love his work, he painted portraits of women and still lifes. I remember how he’d go up to the bookshelves and rap on the spines: “We have to burn them all! Burn them to hell! I don’t believe in books anymore! We thought that good would triumph over evil—nothing of the kind! We’d argue about Dostoevsky…Yes, those are the characters who are always with us! Walking among us. They’re right here!”

My mother had so many friends, but none of them had anything but books at home. Half of them were already jobless…The phone went dead. Everyone transformed the moment communism fell. We all lived behind closed doors now…[

In Moscow, you would hear gunshots and even explosions at night. Kiosks, kiosks…kiosks everywhere…Mama started working for an Azerbaijani, he owned two kiosks, one selling fruit and the other fish. “It’s a job, and you don’t get any days off. Not a single one.” But here’s the rub—Mama was too embarrassed to sell things. Who would have guessed! The first day was the worst: She arranged the fruit then hid, peeking out from behind a tree. She pulled her hat way down over her face so that no one could recognize her. The next day, she gave a little gypsy boy a plum…The owner noticed and yelled at her. Money knows no pity or shame…She couldn’t hold down that job for long, she was no good at sales…

McDonald’s on Pushkin Square…Polish makeup, the creepy rumor that it was intended for corpses. The first commercial on TV, for Turkish tea. Everything used to be gray, but here came the bright colors, the eye-catching billboards. You wanted it all! And you could have it all! You could be anyone you liked: a broker, a hitman, gay…Ah, the nineties! To me, they came as a blessing…an unforgettable time…The era of technocrats, bandits, and venture capitalists!

Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov…They weren’t my idols—they were my mother’s. The people who read books and dreamed of flying, like Chekhov’s seagull, were replaced by those who didn’t read but knew how to fly.

Instead of your samizdat poems, show me a diamond ring, expensive labels…It was a revolution of desires! Wants!! I liked…and still prefer bureaucrats and businessmen. Their vocabulary inspires me: offshore accounts, kickbacks, barters. Internet marketing, creative strategies…

We had gotten used to the idea that Russians don’t want to be rich, they’re even afraid of it. So what do they want then? The answer is always the same: They don’t want anyone else to get rich. That is, richer than they are.

The people I met had steely logic and an iron grip on reality. They were systematic thinkers. All of them were learning English. Management. The academics and postgraduates were leaving the country…the physicists and lyricists too…But the new heroes, they didn’t want to go anywhere, they liked living in Russia. This was their time to shine! Their big chance! They wanted to be rich, they wanted it all. Everything!

Now I see that love is also a kind of business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk.

cigarettes…I am filled with horror when I consider how hard you have to work to keep someone in your life. It’s like breaking rocks at a quarry! You have to forget about yourself, reject yourself, liberate yourself from yourself. There is no freedom in love. Even if you find your ideal partner, he’ll wear the wrong cologne, he’ll like fried meat and mock you for your little salads, leave his socks and pants all over the place. And you always have to suffer. Suffer?! For love…for that harmony…I don’t want to do that work anymore, it’s easier for me to rely on myself. It’s better to just be friends with men, have men as business partners. I rarely even feel like flirting, I’m too lazy to put on a mask and start playing a game.

I’ll never be able to fall in love with a man from a dormitory town who doesn’t have any money. From a prefab ghetto, from Harlem. I hate people who grew up in poverty, their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them. I don’t like the poor, the insulted and the humiliated. All those Bashmachkins and Opiskins*3…the heroes of great Russian literature…I don’t trust them!

breaking mirrors, lying facedown in black caviar, bathing babes in champagne…But then they get sick of all that, it starts to bore them. Moscow travel agencies offer these kinds of clients special entertainments. For example, two days in prison. The advertisement even says, “Would you like to be Khodorkovsky for two days?” They pick them up in a police van with the bars in it and drive them to the city of Vladimir, to the most terrifying prison, Vladimir Central. Then they dress them up in prisoners’ uniforms, chase them around the yard with the dogs and beat them with rubber clubs. Real ones! Pack them like sardines into a filthy, reeking jail cell complete with a shit bucket. That’s what makes them happy—new sensations!

“Mama, put your soul away,” my girls will say. They’re always educating me. Young people today inhabit a world that’s much crueler than the Soviet Union…[

We lead this gray existence, and all because we’re not allowed into the new world. My husband brings home library books by the bagful, that’s the one thing we can still afford. We still have our strolls around old Moscow, through our favorite places, Yakimanka, Kitai-Gorod, Varvarka. That’s our shell; these days, everyone has to grow armor. [She is silent.] We were taught…Marx wrote that “Capital is theft.” And I still agree with him.

How about cleaning the soldiers’ bathroom with nothing but a toothbrush or a razor blade? “Make it shine like a cat’s balls.” Shit! There are two kinds of people: those who are incapable of being just meat and those who can’t be anything else. Human pancakes.

You don’t have to be a cosmonaut, an oligarch, or a hero, you can just be happy and experience everything there is to experience in a regular two-bedroom apartment—fifty-eight square meters, a full bathroom—surrounded by old Soviet junk. It

The time is coming when the people will descend on Rublevka. With axes… —They’re not going to go after Rublevka, they’re going to attack the cardboard boxes at the markets, the ones that the migrant workers live in. They’ll start murdering Tajiks and Moldovans…

Time was moving at a clip, it simply bolted by. Moscow was filthy—what capital city sheen?! There were heaps of garbage everywhere. The dregs of freedom: beer cans, brightly colored wrappers, orange peels…everyone was munching on bananas. It’s not like that anymore. They’ve all had their fill now.

We leave Russia as brains and arrive here as hands…Migrant workers…

I spent most of my life under socialism. I remember how much we idealized man, I too used to hold human beings in high regard.

In Dushanbe, I worked at the Academy of Sciences. I was an art historian. I thought that books…that what men had written about themselves was the truth…But actually, it’s only a tiny sliver of the truth. I haven’t been an idealist for a long time now, I know too much.

I remember it was a beautiful morning. For a moment, I forgot about the war. It seemed like everything would go back to the way it was before. The apple trees were in bloom and the apricots…No signs of war anywhere. I opened the window wide. Immediately, I saw this roving, dark mob headed in my direction. They walked in silence. Suddenly, one of them turned toward me and we locked eyes…I could tell he was a poor man, the look in his eyes said, “I could come into your beautiful home right now and do whatever I want, this is my time…” That’s what his eyes told me…I was completely horrified…I leapt away from the window, shut the blinds, one set, then another, locked the doors, bolted all the locks, and hid in the innermost room. There was fervor in his eyes…There’s something satanic about a mob. I’m scared of even remembering it…[She cries.]

If you’re the one with one hundred sheep, you’re right. You’re always right.

On Paratroopers Day, his friends all get together…all of them in their striped shirts, just like him…They get completely trashed! Piss all over my bathroom. They’re all messed up in the head…Delusions of grandeur: We fought in a war! We’re tough! The first toast is always: “The world is shit, all people are whores, and the sun is just a fucking streetlight.”

Everyone dreamed of winning big in this new life, but few have won anything at all, and almost no one has ended up with the golden ticket…Nobody was prepared to tumble all the way down to the bottom.

years down the line, it finally dawned on us: Where was this new Russia supposed to have come from? It never existed, and it still doesn’t today. Someone put it very accurately: In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing.

It’s always the same scenario…Things keep going in circles. The people are a herd. A herd of antelopes. And the government is a lioness. The lioness picks out a victim from the herd and kills it. The rest keep chewing their cud, watching the lioness out of the corner of their eyes as she’s picking out her next victim. Once she’s bagged her prey, they all sigh in relief: ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I can keep living…’

Do you really think the only thing holding all this together is fear? The police with their clubs? You’re wrong. The victim and the executioner have an arrangement. That’s something left over from communist times—there’s a silent pact. A contract. The great unspoken agreement. The people understand everything, but they keep quiet. In exchange, they want decent salaries, the ability to buy at least a used Audi, to go on vacation to Turkey. Try talking to them about democracy or human rights—it’s like you’re speaking ancient Greek! Those who lived through Soviet times instantly start saying things like, ‘Our children thought that bananas grew in Moscow. Take a look around…There’s one hundred different kinds of salami! What more freedom do we need?’ Even today, many people want to go back to the Soviet Union, except with tons of salami.”

My interrogator was an educated man, he’d graduated from the same university as me. It turned out that we even liked the same books: Akunin, Umberto Eco…‘Why,’ he said, ‘did you have to become one of my problems? I’m used to dealing with corrupt officials. It’s nice! You know exactly where you stand with them. But you guys…’ He was doing his job reluctantly, he was ashamed, but still, it didn’t stop him. There are thousands of people like him—officials, detectives, judges. Some do the beating, others spread lies in the press. Others arrest people, pass sentences. You need so little to start up the Stalinist machine.”