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October 22 - December 19, 2019
—I grew up in a dissident family…in a dissident kitchen…My parents knew Sakharov, they distributed samizdat. Along with them, I read Vasily Grossman, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Dovlatov, listened to Radio Liberty. In 1991, I was, of course, in front of the White House, in a human chain, prepared to sacrifice my life to prevent the return of communism. Not a single one of my friends was a communist. For us, communism was inextricably linked with the Terror, the gulag. A cage. We thought it was dead. Gone forever.
I see but a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital on his desk, and Trotsky’s My Life on his bookshelf…I can’t believe my eyes! Is Marx making a comeback? Is this a nightmare? Am I awake or am I dreaming? My son goes to the university, he has a lot of friends, and I’ve started eavesdropping on their conversations. They drink tea in our kitchen and argue about The Communist Manifesto…Marxism is legal again, on trend, a brand. They wear T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara and Lenin on them.
I hate Yeltsin! We believed in him, and he led us in a totally strange direction. This is no democratic paradise. We ended up in a place that’s even more terrifying than the one we came from.
Our slavish little souls! Our slave blood! Take a look at the New Russian…He climbs out of his Bentley, money spilling out of his pockets, but he’s still a slave. A big boss runs the whole operation, “Everyone back to the stable!” And everyone goes.
Accumulating money isn’t for him, saving bores him. He has a very acute sense of fairness. We’re a Bolshevik people. 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…
…The Russian oligarchs aren’t capitalists, they’re just thieves. What kind of capitalists can you fashion out of former communists and Komsomol members?
What we have is a socialist people living under capitalism… —Under socialism, I was promised that there was a place in the sun for everyone. Now they’re singing a different tune: If we live according to Darwin’s laws, we will enjoy abundance.
There’s nothing more terrifying than an idealist…
I’m a Soviet person, afraid of everything. Even ten years ago, I would have never gone out onto the square. Today, I don’t miss a single rally. I went to the demonstrations on Sakharov Prospekt and Novy Arbat. I was part of the White Ring.*9 I’m learning how to be a free person. I don’t want to die the way I am now, all Soviet. I’m dredging the Sovietness out of myself by the bucketful…
I’m against the anti-Putin demonstrations. It’s a lot of hullabaloo in the capital. Moscow and Petersburg support the opposition, but everywhere else, the people stand with Putin. Do we really live so poorly? Aren’t things better than they were before? It’s scary to risk losing what we have. The suffering we endured in the nineties is still fresh in everyone’s minds. No one is eager to smash it to pieces all over again, spilling a lot of blood along the way.
—I am not a huge fan of the Putin regime. We’re sick of the little Tsar, we want rotating leaders. Change, of course, is necessary, but not a revolution. And when people fling asphalt at the police, I don’t like that, either… —The State Department is behind it all. The Western puppetmasters. We already cooked up one perestroika according to their recipes, do you remember how that turned out? We ended up totally stuck in the mire! I don’t go to those demonstrations, I go to Putin rallies! Rallies for a strong Russia!
So what if Putin leaves? Some new autocrat will come take the throne in his place. People will go on stealing, same as before. We’ll still have the filthy entranceways, the abandoned elderly, the cynical bureaucrats, and the brazen traffic cops…Bribing officials will still be considered a matter of course…What’s the point of changing governments if we don’t change ourselves? I don’t believe in the possibility of any kind of democracy here. We’re an oriental nation…feudal…with clergy instead of intellectuals…
People and everything else disappointed me, the sea is the only thing I still love.
We were from the same village, the same town…everyone had the same nationality—we were all Soviet, everyone spoke Russian.
The most beautiful holiday, everyone’s favorite, was Navruz. Navruz Bayram is the celebration of the arrival of spring. People waited for it all year long, it’s celebrated for seven days. During Navruz, people didn’t close their gates or doors…no lock and keys day or night.
We would all carry our tables into the courtyard and make one long, long table. This table would be covered in Georgian khinkali, Armenian boraki and basturma, Russian bliny, Tatar echpochmak, Ukrainian vareniki, meat and chestnuts Azeri-style…Miss Klava would bring her signature “herring under a fur coat” and Miss Sarah her stuffed fish. We drank wine and Armenian cognac. And Azerbaijani cognac. We sang Armenian and Azerbaijani songs. And the Russian “Katyusha”: “The apple and pear trees were in bloom…The mists swam over the river…” Finally, it would be time for dessert: bakhlava,
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At lunchtime, we’d usually drink tea together, and then, one day, the Azerbaijani girls suddenly started sitting at one table and the Armenian girls at another. It all happened in the blink of an eye, do you understand?
“Mama, did you notice that the boys in the courtyard have stopped playing war and started playing killing Armenians?
“I want to ask for your hand.” “But why are you here alone without your groomsmen? Where are your relatives?” “They’re all against it, but I don’t need anyone but you.” And I…I didn’t need anyone else, either. What could we do with our love? The things happening all around us were very different from what was happening inside of us…radically different.
Sumgait…it’s only thirty kilometers outside of Baku…The first pogrom happened there. One of the girls we worked with was from there.
“They took my mother out into the courtyard, stripped her naked, and threw her on the fire! And then they forced my pregnant sister to dance around the fire…Then, after they killed her, they dug the baby out of her with metal rods…” “Shut up! Shut up!” “My father was hacked to pieces with an ax…My relatives only recognized him by his shoes…” “Stop! I’m begging you!” “Men, young and old, in groups of twenty or thirty, got together and started breaking into the houses where Armenian families lived. They killed and raped daughters in front of their fathers, wives in front of husbands…” “Stop it!
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I don’t believe in books anymore! We thought that good would triumph over evil—nothing of the kind!
Now I have my doubts: so what if those old mummies ruled over us, pinning medal after medal onto one another, and we couldn’t go abroad, read forbidden books, or eat pizza, the food of the gods? That little girl…she would have still been alive, no one would have been shooting at her…like she was a bird…You wouldn’t have had to hide in the attic like a mouse…”
was 1991…The fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh was in full swing…Our fellow passengers confessed: “We don’t want to lie down under a tank. We’re not ready.”
We got so scared: We had to call a doctor, but how? We weren’t registered to live in Moscow, we didn’t have insurance. We were refugees! As we were trying to figure out what to do, my mother burst into tears. My daughter was in the corner, staring with wild eyes…We’d waited for Papa for so long, and now, here he was, dying. Finally, he opened his eyes: “I don’t need a doctor, don’t worry. It’s over! I’m home.” I’m going to cry now…Now I’m going to cry…[For the first time in our entire conversation, she breaks down in tears.]
…I was a cleaning woman in the Metro, I scrubbed toilets. I dragged bricks and sacks of concrete at a construction site. Right now, I clean at a restaurant. Abulfaz renovates apartments for rich people. Nice people pay him, bad people cheat him. “Get the hell out of here, churka!*2 Or we’ll call the police.” We’re not legally registered to live here…we have no rights…There are as many of us here as there are grains of sand in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes: Tajiks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens…They escaped to Moscow, the capital of the USSR, only
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…We never leave the house at night! If my daughter or husband are late, I take valerian. I beg my daughter not to wear too much makeup or flashy dresses. They killed an Armenian boy, they stabbed a Tajik girl to death…they stabbed an Azerbaijani. We used to all be Soviet, but now we have a new nationality: “person of Caucasian descent.” In the morning, I run to work. I never look young men in the eye because I have dark eyes and black hair. On Sundays, if we leave the house, we’ll stroll through our own neighborhood, not straying far from our house. “Mama, I want to go to the Arbat. I want to
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…My little girl…Since childhood, she’s heard the words “churka,” “darkie”…When she was very little, she didn’t understand. When she’d come home from school, I’d kiss her and kiss her so she would forget those awful words.
But Grandma was unshakable: “They’ve swapped socialism for bananas. Chewing gum…” Their debates began in the morning, then Mama would go to work, and they would resume in the evening. Whenever
“If it weren’t for Stalin, we’d be licking the German’s asses.” She could swear like a sailor when she wanted. My mother didn’t like Stalin, she called him a fiend and a butcher…I would be lying if I said that I gave any of this very much thought at the time…I was just living my life, enjoying myself. My first love…
to pay for a death certificate and wouldn’t take Grandma down to the morgue. “What do you expect? It’s ‘the market economy’!” We didn’t have any money at home…My mother had just been laid off from her job, she’d been looking for work for two months already, but no matter where she went, there was already a long line of applicants. Mama had graduated with honors from a technology institute. But there was no question of her getting a job in her field. People with university diplomas were working behind counters, as dishwashers.
We’d been living off Grandma’s pension. All we had to eat were the cheapest noodles…Her whole life, Grandma had saved up five thousand rubles.
The doctor saw that we didn’t have any money, so they turned around and left. Leaving us to deal with Grandma on our own…
One of them had fought in Afghanistan, and for some reason, this comforted Mama. She thought that if someone had fought in a war or done time in Stalin’s camps, they couldn’t possibly be a bad person. “How
They did all that for about a month, we got used to them, and then they made my mother an offer: “Let’s sell your three-bedroom apartment and buy you a one-bedroom. That way, you’ll have money.” My mother agreed…She was working at a café, washing dishes, bussing tables, but we were still catastrophically short on cash. We had already begun discussing where we were going to move, what neighborhood. I didn’t want to change schools. We were looking for something nearby.
saw an ad on a fence: “Seeking a cleaning woman with a higher education.” Mama went to the designated address and they hired
One day, I left my mother sitting on a bench…When I came back, she was no longer alone, there was a man with her. A pleasant man. “Meet Vitya,” Mama said. “He likes Brodsky, too.” The writing was on the wall. We know full well that if someone likes Brodsky, for Mama, it’s like a code word, it means he’s one of us. “He’s never read Children of the Arbat? What a savage! Straight out of the forest! That’s a stranger, not our kind.” That’s how she’d always categorized people, and that hadn’t changed, even then.
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…”
Now I want to live with every fiber of my being, all because of my Zhenya…I even dream of us having a baby some day…The doctors are against it, but that’s my dream. I want us to have a home together; my whole life, I’ve wanted a home. I found out they recently passed a new law…According to the law, I could get our old apartment back. I filled out an application…They told me that there are thousands of people like me, they’re able to help many of them, but my case is complicated because ownership of our apartment has already changed hands three times. As for those gangsters that robbed us, they
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They’d spend their nights reciting Pasternak—they knew it all by heart! “Anywhere is heaven with the one you love!” “Until the first frosts,” I’d laugh. “You have no imagination,” my mother would reply, hurt. We were your typical Soviet family: For breakfast, it was always buckwheat or noodles with butter; we only had oranges once a year, on New Year’s Eve. I can still remember how they smelled. Not now, but back then…it was the smell of a different life, a beautiful life…Summer vacation meant a trip to the Black Sea. We’d go to Sochi as “savages”—without reservations—and all share a single
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They called my parents in to the principal’s office, told me off at the general class assembly, then at the council meeting of the school druzhina.*1 They wanted to kick me out of the Young Pioneers.
Western novels better because of the bitches in them, the beautiful bitches that men would shoot themselves over and suffer for.
My mother consoled me with poems by Pasternak…I still remember, “Being a woman is a mighty feat, / To drive men mad—heroic.”
At home, they kept playing the same Okudzhava tapes: “Let’s take each other’s hands, friends…” Not me! That’s no dream of mine.
The mighty dollar! Now I’ll reveal my secret: For me, capitalism, I mean modern capitalism, not Dreiser, is more interesting to read about than the gulag or Soviet shortages. The informants. Oh! Oh! Gosh, I’ve trod on the sacred. I wouldn’t dare breathe a word of this to my parents. My lips are sealed. How could I! My father remains a Soviet romantic. August 1991…The putsch! They started playing Swan Lake on TV that morning…Tanks filled Moscow like it was Africa. So my father and around seven other people, all of his friends, took off from work, heading straight to the capital. To support the
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Men are such cowards! Whether they’re bums or oligarchs—makes no difference. They’ll go to war, start a revolution, but when it comes to love, they’re traitors. Women are stronger. “She’ll stop a galloping horse in its tracks, run into a burning building.”*2 According to the clichés of the genre…“But horses keep galloping and galloping. And buildings keep burning and burning….”
Not that he did this intentionally, it just happened on its own. From observing him, listening to him. Even when I thought we were going to stay together, it wasn’t that I was planning on permanently moving into someone’s abundant shadow and settling into a well-fed and glamorous life.
It’s a gruesome story, but probably typical for its time: At a mining enterprise, the best miners had been awarded stereos, they were given them as holiday presents. That night, the entire family of one of those miners was murdered. The killer didn’t take anything else—just the stereo. A plastic Panasonic! A box! In Moscow, there were luxury cars and supermarkets, but just beyond the Garden Ring, people marveled at the most basic stereo. The local “capitalists” that my editor had dreamed of walked around surrounded by men with machine guns. They wouldn’t even go to the bathroom without a
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My mother is not going to help raise my daughter…I won’t let her. If she had her way, my child would only watch Soviet cartoons because they’re “humane.” But when the cartoon is over, you have to go out on the street, into a completely different world.
He likes being alone in his three-story house. He always says, “Sleep next to someone, but live alone.”
