Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

everyone would live like brothers and sisters, everyone would be equal. How can you not fall in love with a dream like that! Poor people, those who had nothing, believed the Bolsheviks.

The only thing we knew about God was that there was no God.

Have I told you all this already? Senility…I’m old…I’ve been old for a long time…Anyway…Marxism became our religion. I felt lucky to be alive at the same time as Lenin.

I’m not afraid of death. At my age, it’s just unpleasant…And it’s only unpleasant to me because someone is going to have to deal with my body.

The future…It was supposed to be beautiful…It will be beautiful later…I believed that! [He’s practically screaming.] We believed in a beautiful life. Utopia…it was utopia…And how about you? You have your own utopia: the market. Market heaven. The market will make everyone happy! Pure fantasy! The streets are filled with gangsters in magenta blazers, gold chains hanging down to their bellies. Caricatures of capitalism, like the cartoons in Krokodil.*12 A farce! Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it’s the law of the jungle: Devour the ones weaker than you, and bow down to the ones who are stronger.

People always want to believe in something. In God or in technological progress. In chemistry, polymers, a cosmic consciousness. Today it’s the market. So all right, we’ll eat our fill, and then what?

There’s loads of salami at the store, but no happy people. I don’t see anyone with fire in their eyes.

“Something strange is going on,” she’d told me. “They’ve taken all my friends. For some kind of treason…” “You and I are innocent, so no one is coming for us.” I was sure of it. Absolutely positive…Sincerely! I was a Leninist, then a Stalinist. Until 1937, I was a Stalinist. I believed everything Stalin said and did. Yes…The greatest, the most brilliant leader of all eras and peoples. Even after Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, and Blyukher*14 were all pronounced enemies of the people, I still believed him. It seems stupid now, but I thought that Stalin was being deceived, that traitors had made their way to the top. The Party would sort it all out. But then they arrested my wife, an honest and dedicated Party warrior.

Three days later, they came for me…The first thing they did was sniff inside the oven: Did it smell like smoke, had I burnt anything in there recently? There were three of them. One walked around the apartment picking things out for himself: “You won’t be needing this anymore.” He took down the clock from the wall. I was shocked…I hadn’t expected that…At the same time, there was something human about it that gave me hope. This human nastiness…yes…So these people have feelings, too. The search lasted from 2 A.M. until morning. There were lots of books in the house and they flicked through each and every one of them. Rifled through all of our clothes. Cut the pillows open…It gave me a lot of time to think. Trying to remember, feverishly…By then, there was a mass incarceration going on. People were being taken away every day. It was pretty frightening. They’d take someone away, and everyone would be silent about it. It was useless asking what had happened. At the first interrogation, the investigator explained, “You’re automatically guilty because you failed to inform on your wife.” She was already in jail…During the search, I racked my brains, scrutinizing every last detail…I only remembered one thing…At the most recent citywide Party conference, they read a salutation to Comrade Stalin, and the whole auditorium had stood up. A storm of applause: “Glory to Comrade Stalin—the organizer and inspiration behind our victories!” “Glory to Stalin!” “Glory to our Leader!” Fifteen mi...

People often ask me, “Why did you keep silent?” “It was the times.” I thought that the traitors were to blame—Yagoda, Yezhov*15—not the Party. It’s easy to judge us fifty years later. To laugh…mock us old fools…but in those days, I marched in step with everyone else. And now, there’s nobody left…

…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...

Sign this.” I read the protocol. “I never said that.” They beat me. They really put their hearts into those beatings. And in the end, all of them ended up getting shot themselves. Or sent to the camps.

…Have you ever read Aleksander Belyayev’s The Amphibian Man? In an attempt to make him happy, a brilliant scientist turns his son into an amphibian man. But his son is lonely under the sea. He wants to be like everyone else, to live on land, fall in love with a regular girl—but it’s too late. And so he dies. But the father had thought that he’d solved a great mystery…That he was God! That’s the response to all the great utopians! …It was a beautiful idea! But what are you going to do with human nature? Man hasn’t changed since the days of ancient Rome…

I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you. She’s died. But you can have your honor back…” And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy… [I tell him that I will never understand that—never. He loses his temper.]

You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous! What greatness do you have in your life? You have nothing. Just comfort. Anything for a full belly…Those stomachs of yours…Stuff your face and fill your house with tchotchkes. But I…my generation…We built everything you have. The factories, the dams, the electric power stations. What have you ever built? And we were the ones who defeated Hitler.

I was fifteen. Red Army troops had come to our village. On horseback. Drunk. A subdivision. They slept until evening, and then they rounded up all the Komsomol members. The Commander addressed us, “The Red Army is starving. Lenin is starving. While the kulaks are hiding their grain. Burning it.” I knew that my mother’s brother, Uncle Semyon, had taken sacks of grain into the woods and buried them. I was a Komsomol youth, I’d taken the oath. That night, I went to the troops and led them to where he’d buried the grain. They got a whole cartload. The Commander shook my hand: “Hurry up and grow up, brother.” In the morning, I woke up to my mother screaming, “Semyon’s house is on fire!” They found Uncle Semyon in the woods, the soldiers had cut him to pieces with their sabers…I was fifteen. The Red Army was starving…and Lenin…I was afraid to go outside, I sat in the house, weeping. My mother figured out what had happened. That night, she handed me a feedbag and told me, “Leave, son! Let God forgive your miserable soul.” [He covered his eyes with his hand. But I could still see he was crying.] I want to die a communist. That’s my final wish. — In the nineties, I published a part of this confession. My protagonist let someone read it, consulted with somebody else, and they convinced him that the publication of this story in its entirety would “show the Party in a negative light,” which was his greatest fear. After he died, they found his will. His large, three-bedroom apartment i...

—Russian people need the kind of idea that gives them goose bumps and makes their spines tingle.

—At the front, we were afraid of speaking openly with one another. A lot of people had been arrested before the war…and during the war…My mother worked at a bread factory, and one day, during an inspection, they found breadcrumbs on her gloves. That was enough to constitute sabotage. They sentenced her to ten years in prison. I was at the front, my father was at the front, so my younger brothers and sisters had to go live with my grandmother. They’d beg her, “Granny, don’t die before Papa and Sashka (that’s me) come back from the war.” My father went missing in action.

Even hell is something that people will try to understand.

I was a punishment! A curse! No one had the strength to love me. My mother didn’t have it, either. It’s built into my cells: her despair, her pain…The lack of love…I

In the evenings, I’d roam the grocery stores. I was always hungry; one time, a woman bought me a meat pie. I didn’t ask her to…She had been eating and she saw me watching her eat. She took pity on me. Just that one time…but I will remember that “one time” for the rest of my life. She was an old, old woman. Poor.

They gave my husband and me a two-bedroom apartment, our children were already grown up. I would run over to the neighbors’ out of sheer habit, like I had in the dormitory, to borrow bread, salt, or matches. People didn’t like me because of that. But I had never lived alone before, I couldn’t get used to it…

She wants to know how things are over here, what life is like after socialism…What is our life like? You walk down a familiar street and see a French boutique, German, Polish—all of the stores’ names are in foreign languages. Foreign socks, shirts, boots…cookies and salami…You can’t find anything that’s our own, Soviet, anywhere. All I hear is that life is a battle, the strong defeat the weak, and this is the law of nature.

You have to grow some horns and hooves, a thick skin, no one needs weaklings anymore. Everywhere you go it’s elbows, elbows, and more elbows. This is fascism, this is the swastika! I’m in shock…and despair. This is not my world! It’s not for me!

In Soviet school, they taught us that by himself, man is good, he’s great. 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. Either you’re stabbing someone in the nipples with a pencil, or you’re getting stabbed…Take your pick!

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

Twenty years have passed…I go into my son’s room, and what do I see but a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital on his desk, and Trotsky’s My Life on his bookshelf…I can’t believe my eyes! Is Marx making a comeback? Is this a nightmare? Am I awake or am I dreaming? My son goes to the university, he has a lot of friends, and I’ve started eavesdropping on their conversations. They drink tea in our kitchen and argue about The Communist Manifesto…Marxism is legal again, on trend, a brand. They wear T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara and Lenin on them. [Despairingly.] Nothing has taken root. It was all for naught.

There’s only one way out for us—we have to return to socialism, only it has to be Russian Orthodox socialism. Russia cannot live without Christ. The Russian people’s happiness has never had anything to do with money. That’s the difference between the “Russian idea” and the American Dream.

—Capitalism isn’t taking root here. The spirit of capitalism is foreign to us. It never made it out of Moscow. We don’t have the proper climate for it in the rest of the country. And we’re not the right people. The Russian man isn’t rational or mercantile, he’ll give you the shirt off his back, but sometimes he’ll steal. He’s elemental, more of a watcher than a doer. He can get by on very little. Accumulating money isn’t for him, saving bores him. He has a very acute sense of fairness. We’re a Bolshevik people. And finally, Russians don’t want to just live, they want to live for something. They want to participate in some great undertaking. You’ll sooner find a saint here than an honest and successful man. Read the Russian classics…

And you call this capitalism…What we have is a socialist people living under capitalism…

Suffering is a dance; there’s bitterness, weeping, then acceptance.

I hate people who grew up in poverty, their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them.

Maybe some people consider them heroes? They have this idea, they’re happy to die for it, they think that they’re going to heaven. It makes them unafraid of death. I don’t know anything about them: “We’ve created a composite sketch of the alleged terrorist…” and that’s it. For them, we’re targets—no one explained to them that my little girl is no target, that she has a Mama who can’t live without her, that there’s a boy who’s in love with her. How can you kill someone who is loved? I think that’s a crime twice over. Go to war, go up to the mountains and shoot each other, what are you shooting at me for? Why are you shooting at my daughter? They kill us in the midst of our civilian lives…[Silence.] Now I’m afraid of myself, frightened of my own thoughts. Sometimes you want to kill them all and then it horrifies you that you wanted that.

We lived on the border between life and death; between faith in miracles and utter injustice.

I grew up in a deeply Soviet time. Totally Soviet. Born in the USSR. But the new Russia…I don’t understand it yet. I can’t say what’s worse, what we have today or the history of the Communist Party. My mind still functions according to the Soviet scheme, in the Soviet mold; after all, I spent half of my life under socialism. All of that is ingrained in me. You couldn’t beat it out. And I don’t think that I’d want to. Life used to be bad, now it’s outright frightening. In the morning, we scatter: My husband and I go to work, the girls go to school, and then we spend the whole day bugging each other: “How’s it going over there? What time do you think you’ll be heading home? How are you getting there?” Only when all of us are together again in the evening do I begin to feel some relief, only then can I take a break from worrying. I’m scared of everything. I simply tremble with fear. The girls admonish me: You exaggerate, Mama…I’m perfectly sane, but I need that protection, that extra layer, my home. Maybe I’m fragile because my father died when I was little—

—Stalin used to kill people, and now the gangsters do. Is that freedom?

How Papa dreamed of throwing us under a tank…He wanted us to hurry up and grow up so we could volunteer to fight in a war. He was incapable of imagining a world without war. He needed us to be heroes! And you can only become a hero at war. If one of us had lost our legs like that Alexey Maresyev of his, he would have only been happy. It would have meant that his life had not been in vain…Success! Everything had fallen into place! And he…I think he would have carried out the verdict with his own bare hands if I had broken my oath, if I had

dared to waver in battle. A regular Taras Bulba! “I begat you, and I shall be the one to kill you!” Papa belonged to the Idea, he wasn’t really a human. You must love the Motherland with your entire being. Unconditionally! That was all I ever heard, my entire childhood. The only reason we were alive was so that we could defend the Motherland…But despite all this, I simply could not be programmed for war, instilled with a puppy-like readiness to stick myself in a hole or a dike or throw myself on a landmine. I just never liked death…I’d crush ladybugs—on Sakhalin, in the summer, there are more ladybugs than sand—and I’d crush them like everyone else did. Then, one day, I had this terrifying realization: Why have I made all these little red corpses? Another time, Muska had had kittens, but they were premature…I brought them water, tended to them. My mother saw what I was up to and asked: “Are they dead?” And after she said that, they died. But no tears allowed! “Men don’t cry.” Papa gave us army caps as presents. On weekends, he would put on his records with army songs, and my brother and I were forced to sit there and listen as a “modest manly tear” made its way

down our father’s cheek. Whenever he got drunk, he’d tell us the same story: The enemy had surrounded “the hero,” he valiantly defended himself, shooting at them until he was down to his last bullet, which he’d saved for shooting himself in the heart…At that point in the story, my father would fall over cinematically, catching the leg of the stool with his foot, which made it topple down with him. That was always rea...

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. And they still don’t have them there.

The uprising I witnessed terrified me for the rest of my life; I know what it looks like when freedom falls into inexperienced hands. Idle chatter always ends in blood. War is a wolf that can come to your door as well…[Silence.]

All of them were boys from good families. Today they’re murdering Tajiks, tomorrow it will be the rich or those who pray to a different God. War is a wolf…It’s already here…

When Gorbachev came to power, we ran around mad with glee. We lived in our dreams, our illusions. Baring our souls to one another in our kitchens. We wanted a new Russia…Twenty 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. Boundless open spaces and yet, a slave mentality…

They brought back the Tsarist seal but left the Stalinist anthem. Moscow is Russian…a capitalist city…but Russia itself was and remains Soviet. They’ve never even set eyes on a democrat out there, and if they had, they would have ripped him to shreds. The majority of the people want equal shares

and a l...

It’s that Russian type…the kind of Russian person that Dostoevsky wrote about, who is as bountiful as the Russian land itself. Socialism didn’t change him, and capitalism won’t, either. Neither riches nor poverty…

The only thing they remember about Stalin is that back when he was in charge, they were victors…

Every life story out there is like a Hollywood epic! A screenplay ready to go.

You should hear what those women talk about—you wouldn’t believe your ears! It’s mostly love. You can survive without bread, but without love, you’re dead…That’s it…

Things weren’t too good with money, but money is money and happiness is something else.