Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

…I ended up in a group cell with fifty people. They would take us out to use the toilet twice a day. And what about the rest of the time? How can you explain this to a lady? There was a big pail by the entrance…[Angry.] Try taking a shit in front of a cell full of people! They’d feed us herring and wouldn’t give us any water. Fifty people…all English and Japanese spies…an illiterate old man from the country…He was in there for starting a fire in a stable. 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...