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Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice.
No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.
Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.”
We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas. We dreamt of revolution, but we were scared we’d never live to see it. In reality, we were completely sheltered, we didn’t know a thing about what was actually going on in the world. We were like houseplants. We made everything up, and, as it later turned out, everything we thought we knew was nothing but figments of our imaginations: the West. Capitalism. The Russian people. We lived in a world of mirages. The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.
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.
—Why didn’t we put Stalin on trial? I’ll tell you why…In order to condemn Stalin, you’d have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you.
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!
A crowd was waiting for us outside of the building. “Put the communists on trial! Send them off to Siberia!” “If only we had a machine gun to shoot through all these windows!” I turned around and saw two tipsy men standing behind me—they were the ones who’d been talking about a machine gun…I said, “Just remember that I’ll shoot back.” A policeman stood by pretending that he didn’t hear anything. I knew that policeman personally.
People have started believing in God again because there is no other hope. In school, they used to teach us that Lenin was God and Karl Marx was God. The churches were used to store grain and stockpile beets. That’s how it was until the war came. War broke out…Stalin reopened the churches so prayers would be said for the victory of Russian arms.
The policeman confirmed it, “These are relics of the totalitarian era…We only arrest people for drugs or pornography…” But isn’t a Party membership card for ten dollars pornography? The Order of Glory…or this: a red flag with a portrait of Lenin being sold for dollars. It felt like we were on some kind of film set. Like we were being pranked. We’d come to the wrong place. I stood there and wept.
Many people go to church these days. There are very few believers among them, the majority are just sufferers. Like me…traumatized…I’m not a believer in the canonical sense, but I do believe with my heart. I don’t know the prayers, but I pray…
