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The upper end of the noose was attached to a handle on the window frame with scotch tape.
WTF?
The bureaucratic apparatus is a machine capable of major maneuvering…anything for the sake of survival. Principles? Bureaucrats have no convictions, principles, or any of those muddled metaphysical ideals. The most important thing is holding on to your seat, keeping your palms greased. Bureaucracy is our hobby horse. Lenin himself considered bureaucracy a greater threat than Denikin. The only thing that’s valued is personal loyalty—never forget who owns you, whose hand is feeding you.
They blame the times…Our era is evil. Empty. We’re drowning in flashy rags and VCRs. Where is our great country? The way we are now, we’d never triumph over anyone. Gagarin wouldn’t have even gotten off the ground.
Our country has a tsarist mentality, it’s subconsciously tsarist. Genetically. Everyone needs a Tsar. Ivan the Terrible, as they call him in Europe, who drowned Russian cities in blood and lost the Livonian War, is remembered with fear and awe. The same goes for Peter the Great and Stalin. While Alexander II, the Liberator…the Tsar who gave Russia freedom, who abolished serfdom…he was murdered. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel, but we don’t need a Sakharov in charge here, we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president, it has
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No, Akhromeyev wasn’t murdered…Let’s ditch the conspiracy theories. His suicide was like a parting shot, a bold statement of the most essential fact: We were hurtling into an abyss. We had a great nation, it was victorious in a terrifying war, and it was collapsing. China didn’t fall. And neither did North Korea, where the people were starving to death. While little socialist Cuba stood, we were falling. And we weren’t defeated by tanks and missiles, we were destroyed by our own greatest strength: our spirit. The system and the Party rotted from the inside. And maybe, that’s why…that may have
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…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.
The world became unipolar; now, it belongs to America. We became weak, we were pushed to the sidelines. Turned into a third-rate defeated country. We won World War II, but we lost World War III. [A pause.] For him…this was unbearable…
—I’m a construction worker… Before August 1991, we lived in one country, and afterward, we lived in another. Before that August, my country was called the USSR.
The question: What did we want? Gentle socialism, humane socialism…And what did we get? On the streets, it’s bloodthirsty capitalism.
The Friendship of the Peoples was a cultural policy introduced by Stalin in 1935 in order to consolidate the national identities of Russian and non-Russian groups within the USSR. Its image of an international socialist brotherhood lived on in Soviet propaganda to the very end, which compounded the trauma of the reemergence of nationalism in soon-to-be former Soviet republics at the fissure of the Soviet empire.
We never talked about life…No, hardly…Hero! Hero! Hero! Life consisted of heroes…victims and executioners…There were no other kinds of people. [She screams. She cries.]
We were prepared to listen to our favorite poets and singer-songwriters on our knees. Poets attracted entire stadiums full of people. They had to police them with mounted officers. The word was the deed. Standing up at a meeting and telling the truth was so dangerous, it was as good as a deed. Going out onto the square…It was all such a rush, so much adrenaline, we were so earnest. The word was everything…It’s difficult to believe it now. These days, you have to do something, not just say it. You can say absolutely whatever you want, but the word has no power at all. We’d like to have faith in
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Then something happened…We came down to earth. The happiness and euphoria suddenly broke. Into a million little pieces. I quickly realized that the new world wasn’t mine, it wasn’t for me. It required another breed of person. Kick the weak in the eyes!
It’s been so many years, but I still wonder why. What made him decide to do it? We were friends, but the decision was totally his…his alone…What can you say to somebody standing on the ledge? What? When I was that age, I thought about suicide too. Why? I don’t know. I loved my mother and father…my brother…Everything was all right at home. But still, I was drawn to it. Somewhere out there, there’s something else. What? Something…just over there…Like a whole world that’s brighter, more meaningful than the one that you live in, like something more important is happening just over our horizon. Out
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The people don’t need anything else, don’t even offer it to them. They don’t need it. Only bread and circuses for them! And that truly is the most important discovery of the twentieth century. The response to all of the famous humanists and Kremlin dreamers.
What astonishes me? Destroys me? The ideals have been trampled underfoot! Communism has been anathematized! Everything was smashed to smithereens! I’m nothing but a doddering old fool. A bloodthirsty maniac, a serial killer…Is that how it is? I’ve been alive too long, it’s no good living this long. You shouldn’t…no, really, you shouldn’t…It’s dangerous living too long. My time was up before my life could end. You have to die along with your era.
Great Leap Forward.
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.
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—I’ve been old for a long time…Old age is interesting, too. You come to realize that man is an animal…You suddenly see a lot of the animal in yourself…
Like drinking a glass of water.”*9 Without the sighs and flowers, no jealousy or tears. Kissing and love letters were considered bourgeois prejudices.
Reminds me of 1984
Paper lies even more than people do.
“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…everyone would live like brothers and sisters, everyone would be equal. How can you not fall in love with a dream like that!
It's the Kingdom of Heaven, only you don't have to die (and Jesus doesn't have to come again or even exist) for it to be real. This is a distinctive feature of Communism as religious faith. And, make no mistake about it, Communism is a religious faith as much as—if not more than—it's an economic or political system.
Anyway…Marxism became our religion.
And who among you can say you’ve ever read the later works of Lenin? That you know all of Marx? There’s early Marx…and Marx at the end of his life…What people today disparage as socialism has no relation to the socialist idea. The Idea is not to blame. [His coughing once again makes it difficult to understand him.] The people have lost their history…They’ve been left without faith…No matter what you ask them, they answer with blank stares. The bosses have learned how to cross themselves and balance candles in their right hands like they’re glasses of vodka. They brought back the moth-eaten
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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. The oldest law in the world…[
Now everyone believes in something different. Yep…that’s how it is…People always want to believe in something. In God or in technological progress. In chemistry, polymers, a cosmic consciousness. Today it’s the market.
…It was a beautiful idea! But what are you going to do with human nature?
You can’t judge us according to logic. You accountants! You have to understand! You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous!
Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?
I remember so much…and for what? Huh? For what? What am I supposed to do with all of this? We loved the future. The people of the future. We’d argue about when the future was going to come. Definitely in a hundred years, we thought. But it seemed too far away for us…[He catches his breath.]
I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.
War and prison are the two most important words in the Russian language. Truly Russian words!
Russian women have never had normal men. They keep healing and healing them. Treating them like heroes and children at the same time. Saving them. To this very day. Women still take on that same role. The Soviet Union has fallen…and now we have the victims of the fall of the empire. Of the collapse.
“Trial by beauty,” he called it. His favorite saying was, “His trees and flowers turned out much better than His people did.”
“My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can’t live without—the blood curdles, the heart stops.
His one request: “Write that I was a happy man on my tombstone. That I was loved. The most terrible torment is not being loved.” [Silence.] Our lives are so short…just a flash! I remember how in her old age, my mother would look out at the garden in the evenings…Her eyes… [We spend a long time sitting in silence.]
When there’s still some self-pity left, it means that you haven’t gone so far that you’ve left humanity behind. But once you have, you don’t need people anymore, you’re self-sufficient. I went too far…It’s difficult to hurt my feelings. I hardly ever cry.
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 can never get enough love, even when somebody loves me, I don’t believe it, I need constant proof. Signs. I need them every day. Every minute. I’m hard to love, I know…[She is silent for a long time.]
And in the temporary foster center, when they were washing and disinfecting me…I was sitting on a high bench…all covered in foam. I could have slipped and broken my bones on the cement floor. I started slipping…sliding down…and a woman I didn’t know…a nanny…caught me in her arms and embraced me: “My little chickadee.” I saw God.
If the water catches fire, how do you put it out? That’s what Abkhazians say about war…
That’s everything, everything…everything…Every story I can remember about myself is about how I kept dying and surviving…and then dying again.
Our entire tragedy lies in the fact that our victims and executioners are the same people.”
The big-time executioners can’t do without the little ones, you need a lot of people who are willing to do the dirty work.
I was raised on Soviet books: “Man is higher,” “Mankind! That has a proud sound.” They wrote about a man that didn’t exist…who doesn’t exist in nature. I still can’t understand it, why were there so many idealists back then? Now they’ve all vanished. What kind of idealism can the Pepsi Generation have? They’re pragmatics.
I was totally Soviet—it’s shameful to love money, you have to love a dream.
We get drunk and by morning, we’re putting our arms around each other and belting out Komsomol songs at the top of our lungs: “Komsomol youth, volunteers…/ Our mighty friendship is our strength…” We remember the trips we took “digging potatoes” and funny anecdotes from army life. In short, we reminisce about the Soviet era. Do you understand? Our conversations always end the same way: “It’s a mess out there. We need a Stalin.” Even though all of us, as I’ve already told you, have made it. What’s that about?
—The devil knows how many people were murdered, but it was our era of greatness.
—Democracy! That’s a funny word in Russia. “Putin the Democrat” is our shortest joke.
—Over the course of these past twenty years, we’ve found out a lot about ourselves. Made a lot of discoveries. We learned that Stalin is secretly our hero. Dozens of books and movies have been made about him, which people avidly read and watch. And debate. Half of the country dreams of Stalin—and if half of the country is dreaming of Stalin, he’s bound to materialize, you can be sure of it. They’ve dragged all of the evil dead back out of hell: Beria, Yezhov…They’ve started writing that Beria was a talented administrator, they want to rehabilitate him, because under his leadership, the Russian
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—What’s next, a new Gorbachev or the next Stalin? Maybe it’ll be the swastika? Sieg Heil! Russia has gotten up off her knees. Now is a dangerous time because Russia should have never been humiliated for so long.
