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October 22 - December 19, 2019
Those secret kitchen societies are long gone. And gone with them is our friendship, which we had thought was eternal. Yes…Our minds were tuned to the eternal…and there was nothing holier than friendship. That amazing glue was holding everything together…
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.
Twenty-four hours later, we ran through an empty city back to the train station; the public transit wasn’t even running yet. I remember the city that night, walking together with the book in my purse. We handled it like it was a secret weapon…That’s how ardently we believed that the word could change the world.
The Gorbachev years…Freedom and coupons. Ration cards, coupons for everything: from bread to grain to socks. We’d stand in line for five or six hours at a time…But you’re standing there with a book that you hadn’t been able to buy before. You’d know that in the evening, they were going to play a previously forbidden movie on TV that had been kept on the shelf for the past ten years. It was so cool! Or all day long, you’d think about how at ten, Vzglyad was going to come on TV…Its hosts, Alexander Lyubimov and Vladislav Listiev, became national heroes. We were learning the truth…that there
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Gorbachev years: ration cards and freedom of speech
All I really wanted was for them to let me read Dovlatov and Viktor Nekrasov*7 and listen to Galich. That would have been enough.
Guess! I always had The Gulag Archipelago under my arm, and I would immediately open it and start reading. In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn. Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world.
When we were kids, we used to all listen to the same tapes and read the same Soviet books. Ride the same bicycles…Everything was simpler in our old life: one pair of boots for all seasons, one coat, one pair of pants. We were raised like young warriors in ancient Sparta: If the Motherland called, we’d sit on a hedgehog for Her.
People dreamt that tons of salami would appear at the stores at Soviet prices and members of the Politburo would stand in line for it along with the rest of us. Salami is a benchmark of our existence.
Mexican soap operas were the perfect replacement for Soviet parades and live broadcasts of the First Congress of People’s Deputies. I stayed in college for two years and then dropped out. I feel sorry for my parents because they were told flat out that they were pathetic sovoks whose lives had been wasted for less than a sniff of tobacco, that everything was their fault, beginning with Noah’s Ark, and that now, no one needed them anymore.
You could become a millionaire overnight or get a bullet to the head.
Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb. Without Hiroshima. It’s been conquered by Her Majesty Salami! The good chow won! Mercedes-Benz. 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. While we, my generation…We had great plans. We dreamt of worldwide revolution: “To the grief of all bourgeois / Through the world, we’ll spread the fire.” We wanted to build a new world where
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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.
My grandchildren read the Dalai Lama. Instead of Capital, they have the Mahabharata. The Kabbalah…
There’s loads of salami at the store, but no happy people. I don’t see anyone with fire in their eyes.
There was a chauffeur who had been arrested because he looked like Stalin.
I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you. She’s died. But you can have your honor back…” And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy…
My favorite novel is Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Nobody reads it anymore. It’s boring. People only read the title, the eternal Russian question: What is to be done? For us, this book was like the catechism. The textbook for the Revolution. People would learn entire pages of it by heart. Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream…[He recites it like a poem.] “Houses made of crystal and aluminum…Crystal palaces! Lemon and orange groves in the cities.
There was no Tsarist “golden age” like the one that’s suddenly being remembered today. Fairy tales! Like the ones about how we fed America with our grain and decided the fate of Europe.
Even though Ust-Kut is thousands of kilometers away from Brest, Timeryan Zinatov would visit the fortress every year, bringing cakes to the museum staff. Everyone knew him. Why did he visit so often? Like his friends from his regiment who would meet him here, he only felt truly safe at the fortress. Here, nobody ever doubted that these veterans were our nation’s true—and not imaginary—heroes.
Those damn perestroikites! If they only understood that if their grandfathers had not been victorious, we would have been a country of housemaids and swineherds. Hitler wrote that Slavic children should only be taught to count to one hundred.
Sergio thinks that Russians love to suffer, that that’s the trick of the Russian soul. For us, suffering is “a personal struggle,” “the path to salvation.” Italians aren’t like that, they don’t want to suffer, they love life, which they believe is given to them to enjoy, not suffer through. We don’t think like that. We rarely talk about joy…about how happiness is an entire world. An amazing world!
“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—
A few days later, our whole street buried Akhrik…Akhrik was an Abkhazian boy I knew. He was nineteen. He’d gone to see his girlfriend one evening and gotten stabbed in the back. His mother walked behind his coffin. One moment she’d be weeping, the next, she was laughing. She’d lost her mind. Only a month ago, we’d all been Soviet, now we were a Georgian, an Abkhazian…an Abkhazian, a Georgian…a Russian…
Then, one night, the Georgians were chasing someone thinking it was an Abkhazian. They wounded him and heard him scream. Then the Abkhazians stumbled upon him and thought it was a Georgian. So they started chasing him and shot at him. Finally, when it started getting light out, they realized that all along, it had been a wounded monkey. So then all of them—the Georgians and the Abkhazians—declared a ceasefire and rushed over to save it. If it had been a human, they would have killed him…”
I’m afraid of anyone in military uniform…
All that’ll be left of us will be a couple of lines in a history textbook. A paragraph. Solzhenitsyn and history according to Solzhenitsyn are going out of style. People used to be put in jail for The Gulag Archipelago, they read it in secret, typed copies of it up on their typewriters, wrote it out by hand. I believed…I believed that if thousands of people read it, everything would change.
Even the streets I used to live on are gone. There used to be a Lenin Street. Everything is different now: the stuff, the people, the money. There are new names for it all. We used to be “comrades,” now we are “ladies and gentlemen,” except that we “ladies and gentlemen” seem to be struggling. Everyone is searching for their aristocratic roots. That’s what’s in fashion! Princes and counts are coming out of the woodwork.
I was into history, I read a lot, everyone read a lot back then. I read about the Chelyuskinites and Chkalov*6…Gagarin and Korolev*7…but it was a long time before I learned anything about 1937.
My favorite author was Aleksandr Kuprin.*8 An officer! In an elegant uniform…Dying a heroic death! Fraternal debauchery. Friendship. All of that seemed very attractive when I was young and impressionable.
I was totally Soviet—it’s shameful to love money, you have to love a dream. [He lights a cigarette and falls silent.] It’s too bad…You forget a lot…You forget because it all goes by too fast. Like a kaleidoscope. First, I fell in love with Gorbachev, then I was disillusioned. I went to demonstrations and shouted alongside everyone else, “Yeltsin—Yes! Gorbachev—No!” I screamed, “Down with Article 6!” I even put up flyers. We talked and read and read and talked. What did we want? Our parents wanted to say and read whatever they wanted. They dreamt of humane socialism…with a human face. And young
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Officers…we’d work the night shift, unloading train cars, or as security guards. Laying asphalt. The people working alongside me were PhDs, doctors, surgeons. I even remember a pianist from the symphony. I learned how to lay ceramic tile and install armored doors. And so on, and onwards…It was the dawning of the age of business…Some people imported computers, others “cooked” jeans…[He laughs.]
“Papa…There wasn’t a single literate interrogator, they misspelled every word. They couldn’t even spell ‘execution’ right…” He will never understand me or my mother because he didn’t spend a single day of his life in the Soviet Union. My mother—my son—me…we all live in different countries, even though they’re all Russia. The ties that bind us are ghastly. Ghastly! Everyone feels lied to…
I read somewhere that fear is also a form of love. I bet that’s a quote from Stalin…Today, the museums stand empty while the churches are full. It’s because all of us need therapists.
Do you think that Chumak and Kashpirovsky*10 heal people’s bodies? They heal souls. Hundreds of thousands of people sit in front of their televisions and listen to them like they’re hypnotized. It’s a drug! The terrifying loneliness…the sense of abandonment…From the taxi driver to the office clerk to the People’s Artist*11 and the scholar. Everyone is terribly lonely.
The world is now divided into new categories, no longer “White” and “Red,” or those who did time and the ones who threw them in jail, those who’ve read Solzhenitsyn and those wh...
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No, all Russians wanted was to live like other people…in France and Monaco…Because you never know what might happen! They gave us land, but they can take it away. They let us do business, but they might still put us in jail. They’ll take away the factory and the little grocery, too. That fear keeps drilling away at our brains. Boring holes into us. What history?! It’s time to hurry up and make some money.
We were the first ones in space…and manufactured the best tanks in the world. But there was no detergent or toilet paper.
A Russian can’t convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I’m
You need fear. Without fear, everything will fall apart in the blink of an eye.”
The worst was my index finger. We had a plan to fulfill, like at any other place. Like at a factory. At first, we couldn’t meet our quotas. We physically couldn’t do it. So they called some doctors in. Had a consultation. It was decided that two days a week, the troops would get massages. They’d massage our right hands and index fingers. They absolutely had to massage our index fingers because they’re under the greatest strain during shooting. My only work-related injury is that I’m deaf in my right ear from shooting from the right side… “…They would issue us certificates: ‘For performing
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The Soviet state cost us dearly. It needs to be guarded. Preserved! At night, we’d go back to the sea, and the barges would be empty. Dead silence. Everyone had the same thought: as soon as we set foot on the shore, they’ll…Shit…!!! For years, I kept a wooden suitcase ready under my bed: a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a razor. I slept with a gun under my pillow…always prepared to put a bullet through my forehead. Everyone lived like that in those days! Soldiers and marshals alike. In that, we were equals.
After all, a murderer is an interesting kind of person. No matter how you cut it, a murderer can’t be just a regular guy. You’re drawn to him. It pulls you in…Evil is mesmerizing. There are hundreds of books about Hitler and Stalin. What were they like as children, with their families, with the women they loved…? Their wine and their favorite cigarettes…We’re interested in every last detail. We want to understand…Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, who were they? Who?
Even Stalin…even he’d say, “I’m not the one who decides, it’s the Party.” He taught his son: You think that I’m Stalin—you’re wrong! That’s Stalin! And he’d point to the portrait of himself hanging on the wall. Not at himself, but at his portrait. Meanwhile, for decades, the death machine worked nonstop…Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the victims.
would like to leave this country or at least get my kids out of here. We’re going to leave. The axe will survive the master…I never forgot those words…
We believed that salami was spontaneously generated by freedom. We too are to blame for everything that happened afterward…Of course, Yeltsin is also responsible, but so are we…
The damned sovok. The Soviet regime refused to surrender. The “Red” parliament refused to be subordinate to the president. That’s how I saw it back then…My wife and I had helped the cleaning woman in our building—she was from somewhere around Tver—with money on more than one occasion, and we gave her all of our furniture after renovating our apartment. But on the morning when it all started, she noticed my Yeltsin pin, and instead of saying, “Good morning!” she told me, her voice full of malice, “Your time is running out, you bourgeois pig,” and turned away. I didn’t see that coming. Where had
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General Makashov*2 in a black beret screaming, “No more of your mayors or misters or monsters.” And hatred…hatred…It began to smell like civil war. Like blood. From the White House, General Rutskoy*3 outright called for war: “Pilots! Brothers! Get your planes in the air! Bomb the Kremlin!
That’s when Yegor Gaidar addressed “Muscovites and all Russians who hold democracy and freedom sacred,” asking them to come to the White House to stand up for Yeltsin. It was exactly like 1991…We went down there…I went…There were thousands of us…I remember running forward in a crowd of people. I tripped and fell onto a sign reading, “For a Bourgeois-Free Russia!” The image of what awaited us if General Makashov won flashed before my eyes…I saw a wounded young man; he couldn’t walk, so I carried him. “Which
still can’t wrap my mind around it: Were we defending freedom or participating in a military coup? I have my doubts…hundreds of people died…No one but their families remembers them. “Woe to him who is building a city by blood…”*4 [Silence.] And what if General Makashov had won? There would have been even more bloodshed. Russia would have collapsed. I don’t have the answers…Until 1993, I believed in Yeltsin…
Russian to start over from the smoking ruins. So once again, we’re drunk on seemingly new ideas. Forward, toward the triumph of capitalism!
