Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

NOVEMBER 1982: Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, dies of a heart attack. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, succeeds him. FEBRUARY 1984: Andropov dies of renal failure. Konstantin Chernenko replaces him. MARCH 1985: Chernenko dies of emphysema. Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party and takes steps toward reform, marking the beginning of perestroika. Novy Mir commences serialization of Doctor Zhivago three years later.

Important reforms undertaken by Gorbachev between 1985 and 1991 under the umbrella of perestroika and glasnost: restitution of land to peasants after sixty years of collectivized agriculture; progressive restoration of political pluralism and freedom of speech, liberation of political prisoners, publication of banned literature; withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan; creation of a new legislative assembly, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Congress elects Gorbachev to the presidency of the Soviet Union for five years and institutes constitutional reforms in March 1990. Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) agreements are signed with the United States in 1991. FEBRUARY 1986: Boris Yeltsin becomes a member of the Politburo a few months after being named First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee (effectively making him the mayor of Moscow). He is removed from the Politburo in 1988.

NOVEMBER 1989: East Berlin permits passage to West Berlin, marking the effective end of the Cold War and the beginning of the reunification of Germany. DECEMBER 1989: Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush announce the end of the Cold War in Malta.

AUGUST 1991: A group of eight high-ranking officials led by Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev, form the General Committee on the State Emergency, the GKChP, and stage an attempted coup of the government. It becomes known as “the putsch.” The GKChP issues an emergency decree suspending all political activity, banning most newspapers, and putting Gorbachev, who is on holiday in Foros, Crimea, under house arrest. Thousands of protesters come out to stand against the putsch in front of the White House, the Russian Federation’s parliament building and office of Boris Yeltsin, building barricades to protect their positions. Yeltsin famously addresses the crowd from atop a tank. The Army forces dispatched by the GKChP ultimately refuse to storm the barricades and side with the protesters. After three days, the putsch collapses. Gorbachev returns from Foros, and members of the GKChP are arrested. On August 24, Gorbachev dissolves the Central Committee of the Communist Party of

On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus secretly meet in western Belarus and sign the Belavezha Accords, declaring the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. On the night of December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag is lowered for the last time and the Russian tricolor is raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigns. In a period of great tumult, Yeltsin takes on both the prime ministerial and presidential roles.

On Yeltsin’s orders, the army storms the White House and arrests members of the parliament who oppose Yeltsin.

The ten-day standoff between protesters supporting the parliament and army-backed Yeltsin supporters leads to the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since 1917. Estimates place the death toll as high as two thousand casualties.

In 2000, Putin wins his first presidential election against Communist opponent Gennady Zyuganov, firmly establishing his power.

OCTOBER 2003: Oil magnate and prominent liberal Mikhail Khodorkovsky is arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud, an early casualty of Putin’s campaign to drive Yeltsin-era oligarchs out of politics. The imprisonment of Khodorovsky and seizure of his assets marks the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to transfer control of all major Russian industries to his political party, United Russia. This economic takeover, necessitating a great deal of corrupt maneuvering, also leads to the necessity of silencing criticism and dissent in the press. By 2010, most formerly privately owned media enterprises are under government control, including nearly all major television networks. Independent media outlets are almost exclusively relegated to the Internet.

While these are tacitly tolerated, individual activists begin to be arrested and penalized in larger numbers than previously, and the parliament begins to seriously curtail the rights of activist groups and nongovernmental organizations that work in opposition to government policies.

FEBRUARY–MAY 2014: The Maidan protests in Kiev, Ukraine, lead to armed conflict between Ukrainians supporting a pro–European Union political orientation and those who wish to remain under the Russian sphere of influence. After the flight from Ukraine of pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych, Russian forces take over Crimea, which then votes to join Russia in a referendum. At the same time, Russia denies that its forces have entered Ukraine and are providing financial and military support to pro-Russian groups, effectively fueling a civil war in Ukraine. These events spark the biggest East-West showdown since the Cold War, with the United States and its European allies imposing harsh sanctions on Russia.

Communism had an insane plan: to remake the “old breed of man,” ancient Adam. And it really worked…Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement. Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus.

For a number of years, I traveled throughout the former Soviet Union—Homo sovieticus isn’t just Russian, he’s Belarusian, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Kazakh.

We’re easy to spot! People who’ve come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity—we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death.

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves.

the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these. It was easier for my generation to accept the defeat of the communist Idea because we hadn’t been born yet when it was still young, strong, and brimming with the magic of fatal romanticism and utopian aspirations. We grew up with the Kremlin ancients, in Lenten, vegetarian times.*8 The great bloodshed of communism had already been lost to the ages. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was already ingrained in us.

There were not many of them. More often, people were irritated with freedom. “I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.”

The Soviet civilization…I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is. There is an endless number of human truths.

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.

“The fact that money is a fiction is ineradicable from the Russian soul,” wrote Marina Tsvetaeva.*10

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 without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.”

and thirty consider Stalin an “unrivaled political figure.” A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. “Soviet-style cafés” with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. “Soviet” candy and “Soviet” salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, “Soviet” vodka.

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the Great Empire, the “iron hand,” the “special Russian path.” They brought back the Soviet national anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi;*12 there’s a ruling party, and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the general secretary used to be, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

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. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book.

Russia always seems to be on the verge of giving rise to something important, demonstrating something completely extraordinary to the world. The chosen people. The special Russian path. Our country is full of Oblomovs,*2 lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles.

For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, it’s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions. In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. That’s where perestroika really took place.

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.”

We played Vysotsky,*4 tuned in to illegal BBC broadcasts.

In the seventies, we had Cuban rum. Everyone was in love with Fidel! With the Cuban revolution. Che in his beret.

A tiny handful of people resisted openly, but many more of us were “kitchen dissidents,” going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs…

We made everything up, and, as it later turned out, everything we thought we knew was nothing but figments of our imaginations: the West. Capitalism. The Russian people. We lived in a world of mirages. The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.

We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadn’t had any ideas after all—that whole time, we’d just been talking. Completely

There were new rules: If you have money, you count—no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease. “All you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam.”

There was a time when I’d often reminisce about our kitchen days…There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

Anatoly Rybakov’s forbidden Children of the Arbat*6 and other good books; finally, we’d all become democrats. How

When I came home with a copy of The Gulag Archipelago, my mother was horrified. “If you don’t get that book out of my house immediately, I’m kicking you out.”

Gorbachev is an American secret agent…a freemason…He betrayed communism.

Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland.

Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. We’re a nation of slaves. Slaves! Under communism, in the words of Lenin, the cook ran the state; workers, dairymaids, and weavers were in charge. Now our parliament is lousy with criminals. Dollar-rich millionaires.

I hate them all: gorbachev, shevardnadze, yakovlev*8—don’t capitalize their names, that’s how much I hate them all. I don’t want to live in America, I want to live in the USSR…

People were carrying around portraits of Brezhnev covered in medals next to Gorbachev covered in ration cards.

What would have happened if they’d pulled off the putsch? Well, when you think about it, they did! They may have taken down the Iron Felix,*14 but the Lubyanka*15 is right where it always was. We’re building capitalism under the leadership of the KGB.

In Soviet times, you were allowed to have a lot of books but not an expensive car or house.

Before, I had hated money, I didn’t know what it was. My family never talked about it—it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist. Like everyone else, I would get my 120 rubles a month and that had been enough. Money appeared with perestroika.

We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn’t really enough to go around…

In Soviet times, the word had a holy, magical significance. Out of inertia, the intelligentsia still sat in their kitchens discussing Pasternak, making soup without putting down their Astafiev and Bykov,

Words no longer meant anything.

One guy was screaming, “I’m Stalin! I’m Stalin!” while another one screamed, “I’m Berezovsky! I’m Berezovsky!” The whole ward was filled with these Stalins and Berezovskys.