Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

She’s one of the people whose eyes sparkled with tears whenever the Internationale played. She lived through the war and never forgot how a Soviet soldier had hung a red flag on the Reichstag. “Our country was victorious in such a horrible war!” Ten, twenty, forty years passed…and she would still repeat those words to us like an incantation. Like a prayer…It was her prayer. “We had nothing, but we were happy!” My mother’s conviction in this was absolute. There was no arguing with her. She loved Leo Tolstoy, “the mirror of the Russian Revolution,”*1 for War and Peace, and because the Count wanted to give everything he owned to the poor in order to save his soul. My mother wasn’t alone, all of her friends were like this, too—the first generation of Soviet intelligentsia who had grown up on Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov*2…on Marxism…Could you imagine my mother sitting down and embroidering something or going out of her way to decorate our house with porcelain vases or little elephant figurines…Never!