Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

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…

—Communism is the future of mankind. There is no alternative.

—On the gates of the Solovki prison camp there was a Bolshevik motto: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Chase Humanity into Happiness.” That’s one recipe for saving humanity.

—I have no desire to go out into the street and try to accomplish anything. It’s better to do nothing. No good, no evil. What’s good today wi...

—There’s nothing more terrifying than...

—Our parents lived in the country of victors, we live in the country that lost the Cold War. We have nothing to be proud of!

More than a century ago, Dostoevsky finished writing The Brothers Karamazov. He wrote of the eternal “Russian boys” who will always debate “the big questions, nothing less: Is there a God, is there immortal life? As for those who don’t believe in God, they take up the subjects of socialism and anarchism, remaking humanity according to a new model. Don’t they see that all they’ll end up with is the devil? It’s always the same questions, no matter how they are posed.”

“…Russian life is supposed to be evil and base, that’s what elevates the soul, and forces it to recognize that it doesn’t belong in this world…The cruder and bloodier life is, the more space there is for the soul…”

“…The only way we know how to modernize is with criminal syndicates and executions…”

“…The Communists…What can they do about it? Bring back ration cards and fix up the ...

“…Today, normal people are the ones who seem insane…This new way of life made short work of pe...

“…In the West, capitalism is old, an established fact; here, it’s fresh, with brand-new fangs…While the gover...

You can always turn to a person like that…If somebody understands what love is, you can always turn to them…

“It’s all right, child,” she put her arms around me. “Where there is love, there is God.” [Silence.]

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.

What have we done to deserve this? My whole life, I’ve made my daughters read good books, tried to convince them that good is more powerful than evil, that good always wins in the end. But life is nothing like books. Will a mother’s prayer be heard from the bottom of the sea? It’s all lies! I’m a traitor, I couldn’t protect them like I could when they were little, and they were depending on me. If my love alone was enough to protect them, they would be invulnerable to all harm and disappointment.

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

they’d allowed it, I would have slept at the hospital and been a mother to everyone. Some people wept in the stairwell…some needed hugs and for someone to sit with them. A girl from Perm cried because her mother was far away. Another girl’s leg had been crushed…There’s nothing more precious than a leg! There’s nothing more precious than your child’s leg! Who can blame me for wanting to be there?

Everyone is used to it now. They turn on the TV, hear a little bit about it, then go drink their coffee…

After the war, people with consciences are ashamed of remembering what they were forced to do in battle. Papa struggled with this…

How many "people with consciences" do we have left?

We were taught…Marx wrote that “Capital is theft.” And I still agree with him.

God forbid you were born in the USSR but live in Russia. [She is silent.] Not a single one of my dreams ever came true…

When someone drowns, their body becomes completely saturated with water. That’s how I am, but with pain. It’s as though I’ve renounced my body and all that is left of me is my soul…

I started going to church…Do I believe in God? I don’t know. But I do always want to talk to someone. One day, the priest was reading a sermon about how great suffering either brings you closer to God or pushes you further away, and if someone turns away from God, you shouldn’t judge them, because it comes from anger and pain. I felt like he was talking about me.

I observe people from the outside, I don’t feel like I’m one of them anymore…I look at them as though I am no longer a person myself…You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you. Before, I was rarely in touch with what was happening inside me. Now, it’s like I live down in the mines…I get upset, I fall into thought…I’m always chewing something over in my head. “Mama, put your soul away!” No, my darling girls, I don’t want all my feelings and tears to simply evaporate. To disappear without a trace, without leaving a mark. This is what upsets me more than anything else. Everything that I’ve been through—I don’t just want to leave it to my children. I want to share it with other people, I want it to be somewhere so that anyone who wants to can pick it up and see it for themselves.

Terrorist attacks took place in Moscow in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2010, and 2011.

I don't even remember this!

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

—A Russian stands on three legs: “perhaps,” “perchance,” and “sometime maybe.”

People can be programmed…Some of them want to be. One-two! One-two! In step!!!

Do you understand what I’m talking about? People aren’t prepared for happiness, they’re ready for war, for ice and hail. I don’t know any happy people other than my three-month-old daughter…I’ve never met anyone else who’s happy…Russian people don’t expect to ever be happy.

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.

A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden.

I spent most of my life under socialism. I remember how much we idealized man, I too used to hold human beings in high regard. In Dushanbe, I worked at the Academy of Sciences. I was an art historian. I thought that books…that what men had written about themselves was the truth…But actually, it’s only a tiny sliver of the truth. I haven’t been an idealist for a long time now, I know too much.

God-bearing

?

—This is my hometown. My capital. And they’ve showed up here with their Sharia law.

Some Americans and some Russians are not so different. Could we possibility do some sort of population swap? Our racist nationalist right-wingers for their compassionate, idealistic left-wingers?

—What do people hate them for? Their brown eyes, the shape of their noses. For no reason at all. Everyone has to hate someone: their neighbors, the cops, oligarchs, the damn Yankees…It doesn’t matter! There’s so much hatred in the air…You can’t get through to people…

There’s something satanic about a mob.

Everyone was waiting for a revolution which was expected to come at any moment. I don’t like these disappointed people in their kitchens. I’m not one of them. 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.]

War is a wolf…It’s already here…

—If you’re the one with one hundred sheep, you’re right. You’re always right.

—I’ve lived in Moscow for five years, and not once has anyone said hello to me on the street. Russians need “blacks” so they can feel “white.” So they have someone to look down on.

A familiar cultural evil...

We ascend from the underground. I look at Moscow with new eyes—its beauty now seems cold and uneasy. Moscow, do you care whether people like you or not?

No one understands a stranger’s tragedy, God willing you might understand your own.

I’ve started going to church…I’ll light a candle…One day, I approached the priest: “Can it really be that the Lord only loves perfect souls? If that’s true, then why do we need Him at all?”

And on the radio—it’s like subversive propaganda or something to incite the masses—they try to tell us to love the rich! That the rich are going to save us! That they’ll give us jobs. They show us how they vacation, what they eat…their houses with their swimming pools…personal gardeners, personal chefs…like the gentry used to have in Tsarist times. In the evening you’ll turn on the TV, and it’s so gross you’ll go straight to bed instead.

Then everyone realized that the democrats had their eyes on the good life, too. They’d forgotten all about us. People are nothing but dust, specks of dust…Now the people have once again turned to the Communists. There were no billionaires back when they were in charge, everyone had a little bit, and that was enough for us all. We all felt like human beings. I was like everyone else. I’m a Soviet, and so is my mother. We were building socialism and communism. Children were taught that selling was shameful and money couldn’t buy happiness. Live honestly and give your life to your Motherland—the most precious thing we have. My whole life, I had been proud of being Soviet, but now I’m somewhat embarrassed about it, like I was dumb for believing in it. We used to have communist ideals, now the ideals are capitalist: “No mercy for anyone, because no one has any mercy for you.”

Someone put it very accurately: In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing.

—In the Bible…God isn’t called goodness or justice…God is love…

There are always more people sitting in front of their TVs and drinking beer. That’s how the majority of people are…And as long as it’s only us educated romantics out in the streets, it’s not a real revolution…”