Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

Nails and food and clothes, all side by side. People speaking Ukrainian, Belarusian, Moldavian…“We came from Vinnytsia…” “We’re from Brest…”

On the Old Arbat, my beloved Arbat, I found peddlers selling matryoshka dolls, samovars, icons, and portraits of the Tsar and the royal family. Portraits of White Guard generals—Kolchak and Denikin,*3 next to busts of Lenin…There were all sorts of matryoshkas: Gorbachev matryoshkas, Yeltsin matryoshkas. I didn’t recognize my Moscow. What city was this? Right there on the asphalt, on top of some bricks, an old man sat playing the accordion.

Next to all the matryoshkas and samovars, there was a mountain of red flags and pennants, Party and Komsomol membership cards.

“These are relics of the totalitarian era…We only arrest people for drugs or pornography…” But isn’t a Party membership card for ten dollars pornography?

We believed that tomorrow would be better than today and the day after tomorrow better than yesterday. We had a future. And a past. We had it all!

late…People laugh at the sovok: He’s trash, he’s a dope. They laugh at me…Now the Reds are the monsters and the Whites are knights.

Parents were afraid to let their kids out of their yards because people hunted them like cats and dogs. They’d dig up earthworms in their gardens and eat them. Those who had the strength would crawl into town to the train tracks.

Veterans from the Spanish Civil War would come to our school. We sang “Grenada” with them: “I left my home, I went to fight, / To win Grenada for the peasants…” I had a photo of Dolores Ibárruri*11 hanging over my desk. Yes…we dreamed of Grenada…and then of Cuba…Some decades later, a new generation of boys spoke in those same fervent tones, only now it was about Afghanistan.

of them were like me, they were Soviets…completely Soviet people. One hundred percent! And proud of it. Then suddenly, it had all been taken out from underneath them. Gone! They woke up one morning, looked out the window, and there was a new flag. Suddenly finding themselves in another country. They became foreigners overnight.

“…I used to think that Tajiks were like little kids, totally harmless. In a matter of just six months, maybe even less than that, Dushanbe became unrecognizable, and so did the people. The morgues were filled to capacity. In the mornings, before they were absorbed into the asphalt, there’d be puddles of coagulated blood…like gelatin…”

We’d been studying at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University. People from all over the world studied there, many of them had come to the USSR expecting the land of balalaikas and atom bombs. We were offended. We wanted to live in a different country…

I remember what my grandfather used to say: “Our lives used to be shitty, really shitty, and then shit got worse and worse.” Before and after the war, people out there lived without any passports. They didn’t issue them to people in the country because they didn’t want them in the cities. They were slaves. Under house arrest. They came back from the war covered in medals, they’d conquered half of Europe! But they wouldn’t even give them passports.

I will never get used to the Russian tricolor flag, I will always see the red banner in front of my eyes. The banner of a great nation! Of the great Victory! What had to have happened to us…the Soviet people…to make us close our eyes and run to this motherfucking capitalist paradise? They bought us with candy wrappers, display cases full of salami, colorful packaging.

Don’t tell me any fairy tales…about how the CIA took down the Soviet Union or Zbigniew Brzezinski’s*3 machinations…Why didn’t the KGB take down America?

I’m a communist…I supported the putschists, or rather, the USSR. I was a fervent supporter because I liked living in an empire. As the famous song goes, “My beloved land is vast…” In 1989, I was sent to Vilnius on a business trip. Before I left, the chief engineer of the factory, who had recently been there, called me into his office and warned me, “Don’t speak Russian to them. They won’t even sell you a box of matches if you ask for them in Russian.

I still believed in the Friendship of the Peoples*4 and all of that other stuff. The Soviet brotherhood. I didn’t believe him until I got to the station in Vilnius. I stepped out onto the platform…and from the very first moment, I was given to understand that when they heard me speaking Russian, I was in a foreign country. As an occupier. From filthy, backward Russia. Russian Ivan, the barbarian.

In the 1970s, the USSR produced twenty times more tanks than the United States. A question from G. Shakhnazarov, aide to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR M. Gorbachev (in the 1980s): Why do we need to manufacture so many weapons? Answer from the Chief of General Staff S. Akhromeyev: Because, at the cost of great sacrifices, we’ve built first class factories, just as good as the ones the American’s have. Would you have them stop their work to start manufacturing pots and pans instead? Yegor

We feared that the whole Islamic world would rise up against the USSR. That we would lose face in Europe.

Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.

…You have to begin with Gorbachev. Without him, we’d still be living in the USSR. Yeltsin would have been the first secretary of the regional Party committee in Sverdlovsk, and Yegor Gaidar would be editing economics articles in Pravda and believing in socialism. Sobchak would still be lecturing at the University of Leningrad…[A pause.] The USSR would have lasted a long time yet. A colossus with feet of clay? Total nonsense! We were an Almighty Superpower that called the shots in many countries. Even America was afraid of us. There weren’t enough pantyhose and blue jeans?

Stalin created a state that was impossible to puncture from below; it was impenetrable. But from above, it was vulnerable and defenseless.

No, Gorbachev is no pygmy; he’s no toy in the hands of circumstances, and he’s not a CIA agent…But who is he? “Communism’s undertaker,” “traitor of the Motherland,” “Nobel Laureate,” and “bankrupter of the Soviet Union”; the “sixties dissident-in-chief,” “the perfect German,” “the prophet,” and “little Judas”; “the great reformer,” “the great actor,” “the great Gorby,” and “Gorbach”; “the man of the century,” “Herostratus”*9…All that rolled up into one.

We were a military nation, 70 or so percent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it…physicists, mathematicians…All of them helped develop tanks and bombs. And our ideology was also militarized. But Gorbachev was profoundly civilian. Previous general secretaries had all seen combat, while his background was the Philosophy Department of Moscow State University. “Are you preparing to fight?” he would ask the top brass. “I’m not. And there are more generals and admirals in Moscow alone than there are in the whole world combined.”

For America, we were the “Evil Empire,” they were threatening us with Crusades, “Star Wars”…Meanwhile, our chief of state was playing the Buddhist monk, “the world is a common home for humanity,” “change without violence or bloodshed,” “war is no longer a continuation of politics,” and so on. Akhromeyev fought for a long time, but eventually, he got tired. At first, he thought that people were giving false reports to the higher-ups, deceiving them, but then it dawned on him that this was treason. So he made a statement. Gorbachev accepted his resignation, but he would not let him go. He made him his advisor on military affairs.

The people want simple things. A surplus of ginger-snaps. And a Tsar! Gorbachev didn’t want to be Tsar. He refused. Compare him to Yeltsin…When, in 1993, he felt the presidential seat begin to rock underneath him, he kept his wits about him and gave orders to fire on the parliament. The Communists had been too sheepish to shoot in ’91…Gorbachev ceded power without any bloodshed. But Yeltsin fired from the tanks. He went into battle. So that’s that…and the people supported him. 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 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 to be a Tsar. [A long pause.]

When the Central Committee and the government passed the decree on the compulsory relinquishment of any foreign gifts worth over five hundred rubles to the government (the war on special privileges had begun), he was the first and one of the only people to actually comply.

Do you have a Vertushka?*10 What about a telephone labeled “President,” a direct line to “Himself”? Did they give you a car from the special garage?

…He was born in a remote Mordovian village and lost his parents when he was very young. He went to war while still a naval cadet. As a volunteer. On Victory Day, he was in the hospital with total nervous exhaustion, weighing thirty-eight kilograms. [A pause.] A tortured, sick, and dead tired army had triumphed. Emaciated, coughing. With spinal injuries and arthritis, gastric ulcers…That’s how I remember the victory…He and I are from the same generation, we’re the people who lived through the war. [A pause.] He rose from cadet to the very peak of the military pyramid. The Soviet state gave him everything: the highest military rank of Marshal, the Hero’s Star, the Lenin Prize…All that bestowed on a boy from a simple peasant family, and not some crown prince. From the middle of nowhere. The USSR gave thousands of people like him a chance. Poor, simple people…And he loved the Soviet state back.

For that, the world was grateful to us. For decades, everyone had been terrified of nuclear war, even children. We got used to watching one another from the trenches.

The last time I’d seen people like that, with faces like that, was when Gagarin went into space…Gorbachev had a lot of ideological allies, but very few among the nomenklatura.

…Gorbachev became more and more like an evangelist instead of a general secretary. He was a TV star. Soon enough, everyone got sick of his sermons: “back to Lenin,” “a leap into developed socialism”…It made you wonder: What have we been building, then, “underdeveloped socialism”? What did we have…[A pause.] I remember that abroad, we saw a different Gorbachev who barely resembled the Gorbachev we knew at home. Over there, he felt free. His jokes landed, he articulated his thoughts clearly. At home, he played the game, walked the line. And these things made him appear to be weak. And a windbag. But he was not weak. And he wasn’t a coward, either. None of that is true. He was a shrewd, calculating politician. Why were there two Gorbachevs? If he’d been as open at home as he was abroad, the elders would have instantly torn him to pieces and eaten him alive.

he was a student at Moscow State University with Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring, and his comrade-in-arms Zdeněk Mlynář.

In his memoirs, Mlynář wrote that when they were read Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress at a closed Party meeting at the university, they were so shocked, they spent the whole night wandering Moscow. In the morning, on Lenin Hills, like Herzen and Ogarev before them, they swore to devote their lives to fighting Stalinism.*13 [A pause.] Those are the roots of perestroika…It came out of Khrushchev’s thaw…

They were disturbed by his talk of “building a nuclear-weapon-free world”—goodbye, postwar doctrine of the “balance of fear.” He said that “there can be no victors in nuclear war,” so we started cutting back on defense, reducing the size of the military.

Even Chancellor Kohl was taken aback by Gorbachev’s lack of calculation: We were offered huge sums of money to exit Europe and he refused them.

During the Soviet-American disarmament talks, Americans always got exactly what they wanted. In his book, Through the Eyes of a Marshal and Diplomat, Akhromeyev describes the debates about the Oka missile (known in the West as the SS-23). It was a new missile, no one else had anything like it, and the American side intended to destroy it. However, it didn’t fall under the terms of their agreement, which dictated the destruction of medium-range missiles with a radius of 1000–5500km, and smaller ones, with a range of 500–1000km. The Oka’s range was 400km. The Soviet General Staff made an offer to the Americans: All right, let’s play fair and ban all missiles starting with a 400km range instead of 500km. But then the Americans would have had to sacrifice their modernized Lance-2 missiles, which had a range of 450–470km. A drawn-out behind-the-scenes battle…Behind the backs of the military, Gorbachev personally decided to destroy the Oka. That was when Akhromeyev made his famous statement: “And while we’re at it, maybe we should ask for political asylum in Switzerland and never come home?” He couldn’t participate in the annihilation of something he’d devoted his life to…[A pause.] 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…

he was surprised “to see Marshal Akhromeyev, in full uniform, standing modestly in the crowd.”

Gorbachev’s dacha made Stalin’s Crimean dacha look like a dormitory. The general secretaries changed with the times…and so did their wives…

Investigators are confident that Marshal Akhromeyev’s grave was not desecrated for political reasons but for financial gain. The uniforms of high-ranking military officials are in especially high demand among antiques dealers. A Marshal’s uniform is bound to go like hotcakes…

Our salvation is in the soil, the only thing it depends on is the potatoes.” Grandpa was a wise man. In the evening, our neighbor came by. I brought up Stalin. Our neighbor: “He was a good man, but he lived too long.” My grandfather: “And I outlived that bastard.” And there I was, still walking around with my little radio. Trembling with excitement. The worst part of the day was when the deputies would take their lunch break. The action stopped.

“Damn intelligentsia…You don’t even have a decent fur coat…” He ended up slamming the door and leaving. She had nothing for him to steal. That’s our intelligentsia for you. Their legacy. Meanwhile, people are building themselves villas, buying expensive cars. My whole life, I’ve never seen a single diamond… Life in Russia is like fiction.

The Dulles plan…I don’t want to hear it—don’t tell me it’s a hoax! Silence! CIA director Allen Dulles’s plan…“After sowing chaos, we will imperceptibly substitute their values for false ones. We will find like-minded individuals, our allies within Russia…We will turn the youth into cynics, vulgarians, cosmopolitans. That’s how we’ll get our way…” Do you understand? The Jews and the Yanks are our enemies. Dumb Yankees. President Clinton’s speech at a secret meeting of the American political elite: “We have achieved what President Truman set out to do with the atom bomb…We have bloodlessly eliminated the country that was America’s greatest competitor for world domination…”

The Russian dream: a suitcase in your hand, and get the fuck out of Russia! Go to America! But I don’t want to move there just to spend my whole life as a waiter. I need to think.

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!

The most important thing is spiritual labor…Books…

We often had family dinners. Naturally, the conversation would revolve around books. We’d read samizdat together. Doctor Zhivago, Mandelstam’s poems…I

I’d recite my beloved Lermontov: “I love the Fatherland, but with a strange love.” And Esenin: “I love you, my meek homeland…” I was overjoyed after I bought a copy of Blok’s letters.

My mother listened to the forbidden Galich…and I listened to Galich, too…