Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves.

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

Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living. Today, there’s no longer any use for our experience in war; in fact, it’d be best to forget it.

I asked everyone I met what “freedom” meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience—it’s like they’re from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: Freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you’re not afraid of your own desires; having lots of money so that you’ll have everything; it’s when you can live wi...

The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, who has returned to Earth: Why have You come here to interfere with our affairs? For You have come to interfere with us, and You know it. For all of Your respect for man, You’ve acted as though You have ceased to have any compassion for him because You have asked too much of him…If You respected him less, You would have asked for less, and this would have been closer to love, for it would have lightened his burden. He is weak and base…Is a weak soul to blame for not having the strength to accept such terrible gifts? There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born…

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, “And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.” Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us secondhand.

The mysterious Russian soul…Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul.

Our country is full of Oblomovs,*2 lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles. There are no Stoltzes. The industrious, savvy Stoltzes are despised for chopping down the beloved birch grove, the cherry orchard. They build their factories, make money…They’re foreign to us…

We made jokes—it was a golden age for jokes! “A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”

Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

There’s no way our people are going to trade in their faded foreign currency and passports with Schengen visas for Soviet socialism. But that’s not what I believe in, anyway. I think humanity is headed toward socialism. Toward justice. There is no other way. Look at Germany, France…There’s the Swedish model. What values does Russian capitalism espouse? Hating the underdogs, the people who haven’t made millions and don’t drive Mercedes. Instead of the red flag, it’s Christ is risen! And the cult of consumerism…People don’t fall asleep thinking of anything lofty, instead they mull over how they didn’t buy this or get that. 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! Today, the shops resemble

museums. Theaters. And people want me to believe that rags from Versace and Armani are all that a person needs. That they’re enough. That life is nothing but pyramid schemes and promissory notes. That freedom is money and money is freedom. While our lives aren’t worth a kopeck. Well, and…well, and…you know…I can’t even find the words…I feel sorry for my little granddaughters. I pity them. That’s what gets beaten into their heads every day on TV. I don’t agree with it. I was and remain a communist.

Did I believe in communism? I’ll be honest with you, I’m not going to lie: I believed in the possibility of life being governed fairly.

I’m an atheist. I have a lot of questions for God…I

We grew up poor and naïve, but we never knew it and didn’t envy anyone.

Many people today have lost their faith. I would say that the chief one among them is Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. The Russian president had, after all, once been the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a candidate for the Politburo. Now, he openly says that he doesn’t believe in socialism and communism, that he believes that everything the Communists did was wrong. He’s turned into a militant anticommunist.

pause.] I read an essay by a so-called democrat who said that the war generation…which is to say, us…was in power too long. We won the war, rebuilt the country, and after that, we should have left because we had no conception of how to live in peacetime. And that was the reason why we fell behind in the world…[He snarls.]

…Gorbachev became more and more like an evangelist instead of a general secretary.

In the morning, on Lenin Hills, like Herzen and Ogarev before them, they swore to devote their lives to fighting Stalinism.*13 [A pause.] Those are the roots of perestroika…It came out of Khrushchev’s thaw…

…We’ve already broached this topic…From Stalin to Brezhnev, our country’s leaders had all seen battle. Lived through the Terror. Their psychological makeup was forged under conditions of violence. In constant fear. They couldn’t forget 1941…the Soviet Army’s humiliating retreat to Moscow.

How soldiers were sent into battle empty-handed and told that they’d win their weapons in combat. They didn’t count the people, but they did count the rounds of ammunition. It’s understandable…It makes sense that people with these kinds of memories believed that in order to defeat the enemy, we needed to keep pumping out tanks and fighter jets. The more the better. There ended up being enough weapons for the USSR and America to destroy one another a thousand times over. And yet they kept making more. Then a new generation came to power. Gorbachev’s entire team was made up of the children of the war years…The joy of peace had been impressed on them…Marshal Zhukov overseeing the Victory Parade on a white steed…It was a new generation and a different world. While the older generation didn’t trust the West and saw it as an enemy, the younger one yearned for the Western way of life. Of course Gorbac...

on defense, reducing the size of the military. The first-rate ammunitions plants were slated to start putting out pots and juicers…Was that how it was going to be? There was a moment when the top brass generals were practically at war wi...

I taught him the same things that I had been taught. The right things. “That horrible Soviet upbringing…” That “horrible Soviet upbringing” taught me to think about people other than myself.

Life in Russia is like fiction. But I want to live here, among Soviet people…And watch Soviet films. They might be full of lies and made-to-order for the government, but I love them. [Laughs.] God forbid my husband sees me on TV…

The cult of martyrdom and death is in our blood.

5…“Oh, those Russians, they don’t like to die their own deaths!”

We dreamed…and meanwhile, we lived our Soviet lives by a unified set of rules that applied to everyone. Someone stands at the podium. He lies, everyone applauds, but everyone knows that he’s lying, and he knows that they know that he’s lying. Still, he says all that stuff and enjoys the applause.

We had no doubts that our generation would go on living that way, so all we ever sought were sanctuaries.

In reality, none of us lived in the USSR, we each lived in our own social circle. The hikers clique, the climbers group…

I’m just a twit, freedom of speech would have been enough because, as it soon turned out, at heart, I’m a Soviet girl. Everything Soviet went deeper in us than we’d ever imagined. All I really wanted was for them to let me read Dovlatov and Viktor Nekrasov*7 and listen to Galich. That would have been enough. I didn’t even dream of going to Paris and strolling through Montmartre…Or seeing Gaudí’s Sagrada Família…Just let us read and talk. Read!

In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn. Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world.

All in all, it was a revolution…But this time, with worldly ends: a vacation home and a car for everyone. Isn’t that a little petty?

The first thing to go was friendship…Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn’t need money at all…that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills—these were no Soviet rubles, they weren’t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants…We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this.

Everything was simpler in our old life: one pair of boots for all seasons, one coat, one pair of pants. We were raised like young warriors in ancient Sparta: If the Motherland called, we’d sit on a hedgehog for Her.

…During perestroika…Those same teachers told us to forget everything they’d ever taught us and start reading the papers. We started studying newspapers in class. The graduation test for history was canceled, we didn’t have to memorize all those Party Congresses after all. For the last October demonstration, they still handed out posters and portraits of the leaders, but for us, it just felt like Carnival in Brazil.

People dreamt that tons of salami would appear at the stores at Soviet prices and members of the Politburo would stand in line for it along with the rest of us. Salami is a benchmark of our existence. Our

When they talk about it today, they try to frighten you: There could have been a civil war, we were teetering on the edge of ruin! It didn’t feel like that to me.

When I made my first “big bucks,” I took my friends out to a restaurant. We ordered Martini vermouth and Grand Piano vodka—the crème de la crème! I wanted to feel the weight of the glass in my hand, imagine that I was one of the beautiful people. We lit up our Marlboros. Everything was just like we’d read about in Remarque. For a long time, we modeled ourselves after those images. New stores, new restaurants…They were like stage sets from a different life…

We had a great empire—stretching from sea to sea, from beyond the Arctic to the subtropics. Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb. Without Hiroshima. It’s been conquered by Her Majesty Salami! The good chow won! Mercedes-Benz.

We wanted to build a new world where everyone would be happy. We thought that it was possible, I sincerely believed in it! Completely sincerely!

A charming young lady was interviewing me the other day. She started “enlightening” me about how terrifying the years I lived through

had been. She’d read about them in books—but I lived through them! That’s where I come from. I’m a man of my era. And here she was telling me, “You were slaves. Stalin’s slaves.” You little snot! I was no slave! No way! Even today, when I am gnawed by doubt…I know that I was no slave.

I cried when the Soviet Union collapsed. They began cursing us immediately. Slandering. The consumer triumphed. The louse. The worm.

My homeland is October. Lenin, socialism…I loved the Revolution! There is nothing more precious to me than the Party! I was in the Party for seventy years. My Party membership card is my Bible. [He begins declaiming the Internationale.] We will smash the world of violence Down to its foundations, then Build our new world over the ruins. The former nobody shall rule…

We wanted to create Heaven on Earth. It’s a beautiful but impossible dream, man is not ready for it. He is not yet perfect enough. Well…From Pugachev*4 to the Decembrists, down to Lenin himself, everyone dreamt of equality and brotherhood. Without the idea of fairness, it’ll be a different Russia with different people. A completely different country. We aren’t over communism yet. Don’t get your hopes up. And the world isn’t over it, either. Man will always dream of the City of the Sun.*5 Even when he was still living in caves, walking around in animal skins, he was already hungry for justice. Remember our Soviet songs and films…the dream in them! The faith…A Mercedes is no kind of dream…

We considered them bourgeois. We would put dances on trial and punish the Komsomol members who danced or brought their girlfriends flowers. For a while, I even presided over an antidancing tribunal. Because of this “Marxist” conviction of mine, I never did learn how to dance. I later repented. I could never dance with a beautiful woman, I’m like a bear! We’d have Komsomol weddings. No candles, no wreaths. No priests. Instead of icons, portraits of Marx and Lenin. My bride had long hair, so she cut it all off before the wedding. We hated beauty. It wasn’t right, of course. You could say that we overdid it…[

My wife wrote out all of her favorite girls’ names: Marxana, Stalina, Engelsina, Iskra…Those were the most fashionable names of the day. That piece of paper just sat there on the table…

“Today, some people go around in leather boots, while others only have bast shoes. When the Bolsheviks come to power, everyone will be equal.” The men shouted at him, “How?” “A wonderful time will come when your wives wear silk dresses and high-heeled shoes. There will no longer be rich and poor. Everyone will be happy.” My mother would get to wear a silk dress, my sister would be in heels. I’d go to school…