Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

Loneliness is a kind of happiness…

We did whatever we could to shelter them from life’s harsh realities. We believed that art saved people.

grew up in a deeply Soviet time. Totally Soviet. Born in the USSR. But the new Russia…I don’t understand it yet. I can’t say what’s worse, what we have today or the history of the Communist Party. My mind still functions according to the Soviet scheme, in the Soviet mold; after all, I spent half of my life under socialism. All of that is ingrained in me. You couldn’t beat it out. And I don’t think that I’d want to. Life used to be bad, now it’s outright frightening.

I was brought up on Soviet books, the things they taught us were totally different. Just an example, for comparison…In those books, the first Russian terrorists are depicted as heroes. Martyrs. Sophia Perovskaya, Kibalchich*1…They died for the people, they were on a holy mission. They threw a bomb at the Tsar. Those young people often came from the aristocracy, good families…Why are we surprised that people like them still exist today? [She falls silent.] In history classes, when they taught us about the Great Patriotic War, the teacher would tell us about the heroism of Belarusian partisan Yelena Mazanik, who killed the Nazi Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube by planting a bomb in the bed where he slept with his pregnant wife. While their children were sleeping in the next room, just on the other side of the wall…Stalin personally awarded her the Hero’s Star.

Young people today inhabit a world that’s much crueler than the Soviet Union…[She is silent.] It’s like life’s not for us anymore, it’s not intended for people like us; it’s somewhere else. Somewhere…things are happening, but they have nothing to do with us…I

And the theater is a luxury now, too, even though there used to be a time when I didn’t miss a single premiere. It hurts…It hurts a lot. We lead this gray existence, and all because we’re not allowed into the new world.

A lot of people glorify perestroika…Everyone had very high hopes for the future. I have no reason to love Gorbachev. I remember the conversations we’d have in the staff room: “Socialism is ending—what’s next?” “Bad socialism is over, now we’re going to have good socialism.” We waited…pored over the newspapers…Pretty soon, my husband lost his job and they shut down the institute. There was a sea of unemployed people, all of them with college degrees. The kiosks appeared, then the supermarkets where they had everything, like in a fairy tale, only there was no money to buy any of it.

God forbid you were born in the USSR but live in Russia. [She is silent.] Not a single one of my dreams ever came true…

It’s as though I’ve renounced my body and all that is left of me is my soul…

Here’s a question: Who made Stalin Stalin? There’s the problem of responsibility… Should you only put people on trial if they actually murdered and tortured people or: should it also be the informants… the people who took the children of “enemies of the people” away from their relatives and sent them to orphanages… the drivers who transported the arrested… the cleaning women who washed the floors after people were tortured… the director of the railways that conveyed political prisoners to the north in cattle cars… the tailors who sewed camp guards’ coats. The doctors who did their dental work, took their cardiograms, all so that they could better withstand the stresses of their jobs… those who stood silent at assemblies while others screamed, “Let the dogs die like dogs!”

—A Russian stands on three legs: “perhaps,” “perchance,” and “sometime maybe.”

On weekends, he would put on his records with army songs, and my brother and I were forced to sit there and listen as a “modest manly tear” made its way down our father’s cheek.

I’d gone to my friend’s house, he was having people over. As I was taking my coat off in the foyer, I heard someone coming toward me from the kitchen. I had to let them through, I turned around and—it was her! For a moment, I short-circuited, like they’d suddenly switched off the electricity in the apartment. And that was it. I’m not usually one to be tongue-tied, but with her there, I just sat and stared, I couldn’t even see her, like, it’s not that I didn’t look at her, but for a long, long time, it felt like I was looking through her. Like in a Tarkovsky film: Someone is pouring water from a pitcher, and it’s flowing down just past the rim of a cup, and then, very slowly, it turns along the cup’s contour. The way I’m telling it, it sounds like this went on for longer than it really did. It happened in a flash! That day, I learned something that made everything else seem insignificant. I won’t even attempt to dissect it—really, what’s the point? It happened and that’s enough.

The next morning, I woke up convinced that I had to find her. I didn’t know her name or address or phone number, but the important thing had already taken place, this major life event had already happened.

stopped…I can pinpoint the moments in my life that feel like they never happened. Even though they did. For instance, I was in love several times before that…or at least I thought I was…There are lots of photos to prove it. But all of it has spilled out of my memory and washed away. There are things that never spill out of you, that you have to carry around with you forever. As for the rest…Do people really remember everything that happens to them?

While the mystery is happening, it’s like you’re not there. Do you understand what I’m talking about? You don’t have to be a cosmonaut, an oligarch, or a hero, you can just be happy and experience everything there is to experience in a regular two-bedroom apartment—fifty-eight square meters, a full bathroom—surrounded by old Soviet junk.

coming back to me. I reconnected. Something like that…I think it’s like…what a person experiences after spending many days in a monk’s cell. The world suddenly appears to you in all of its infinite detail. All of its contours. Its secret becomes as accessible as any other object—say, a vase—but in order to understand this, it has to be painful. How can you understand something unless it hurts? It has to come with a great deal of pain…

You get up in the morning, and you don’t have to run off anywhere because you remember that she exists, you’ve found her. Sorrow loses its hold on you…You’re not alone anymore. You suddenly become aware of your body…your hands, your lips…You start paying attention to the sky and the trees outside your window.

people… —We’re from Kharkov…From over there, America seemed like paradise. The land of opportunity. My first impression when we got here was that back home, we’d been trying to build communism, but here the Americans had actually succeeded.

“We won the war, but you Russians did well, too. You helped us.” That’s what they teach them in school. I nearly fell off my chair! What do they know about Russia? That Russians drink vodka by the glassful and there’s a lot of snow there… —We came for the salami, but, as it turns out, the salami is not as cheap as we’d imagined… —We leave Russia as brains and arrive here as hands…Migrant workers…My mother writes that the Tajik janitor back home has already managed to bring all of his relatives to Moscow.

Every homeless person and migrant worker he comes across ends up crippled.” I thought that he’d be horrified or at least get scared and start defending the honor of the uniform. But he just looked at me with a smile: “Tell me his last name. Good man! We’ll promote him, reward him. We need to take good care of such members of our staff. I’ll personally make sure that he gets an award.” I went numb. He went on: “To tell you the truth…We intentionally create impossible conditions for you people so that you’ll leave as soon as possible. There are two million migrant workers in Moscow, the city can’t digest this many of you suddenly descending on us. There are just too many of your kind here.” [Silence.]

Laws don’t mean anything—around here, it’s all about money and muscle. The little man is the most vulnerable creature on earth, even an animal in the forest is more protected than he is. For you, the forest protects the animals; for us, it’s the mountains…[She falls silent.]

The Russian people are not at all kind. That’s just a widespread misconception. They’re maudlin, sentimental, but they’re not kind. Someone killed a stray dog and made a video of it. The whole Internet blew up. People were ready to lynch the guy who did it. But when seventeen migrant workers were burnt alive at a market—their boss would lock them up in a metal wagon at night along with his goods—the only people who stood up for them were human rights advocates. People whose occupation it is to stand up for everyone. The general feeling was, “These people died, others will come to replace them.” Faceless, voiceless…strangers… —

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived together like one big family…That’s what they taught us in political literacy classes…Back then, they were “guests in the capital,” now they’re “churkas” and “khaches.” My grandfather would tell me about how he defended Stalingrad alongside Uzbeks. They all believed that they were brothers forever!

—I hate skinheads! All they know how to do is beat innocent Tajik street cleaners to death with hammers or baseball bats. At rallies, they shout, “Russia for Russians, Moscow for Muscovites.” Well, my mother is Ukrainian and my father’s Moldovan—only my maternal grandmother is Russian. So what does that make me? What criteria are they planning on using to “cleanse” Russia of non-Russians?

Allah teaches us that you shouldn’t open a door that you won’t be able to close…

Moscow’s underground world is divided between the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. We’ve found ourselves among Tajiks. Seventeen to twenty people live in each room. It’s a commune. Someone recognizes my guide—it’s not his first time down here

Everyone has a big Motherland and their little homeland. That’s my personal homeland. The

Russians, I want to ask you: What kind of war is this? You kill us, disfigure us, and then you treat our wounds in your hospitals. You bomb and loot our homes, then you rebuild them. You try to tell us that Russia is our home, but every day, I have to bribe the police not to beat me to death for the way I look. Pay them not to rob me. I have to convince them that I haven’t come here to kill them and that I don’t want to blow up their houses. They could have killed me in Grozny…But they might also kill me here…”

Russia has loved its prisoners since the dawn of the ages—they’re sinners, but they’re martyrs, too. They need comfort and consolation. There’s a whole culture of pity, and its traditions are carefully preserved, especially in the small towns and villages.

complicated…I can tell you that some men seem to have a nose for this kind of woman. Most often, it’s women who come from bad situations, who haven’t been able to realize their dreams. They’re lonely. Suddenly, somebody needs them, they have someone to take care of. It’s one way to change your life. A kind of medicine…

You won’t refashion Russia in a Moscow kitchen. They brought back the Tsarist seal but left the Stalinist anthem. Moscow is Russian…a capitalist city…but Russia itself was and remains Soviet.

Why are you smiling? Everyone laughs at me, I know…If you live the way your heart tells you to, people will think you’re crazy. You tell them the truth and people don’t believe you, but when you lie, they eat up every word.

It’s that Russian type…the kind of Russian person that Dostoevsky wrote about, who is as bountiful as the Russian land itself. Socialism didn’t change him, and capitalism won’t, either. Neither riches nor poverty…

That evening, tens of thousands of people went out onto October Square, the main square in Minsk, to protest the fraudulent election. Demonstrators demanded the annulment of the announced results, and that new elections be held without Lukashenko as a candidate. This peaceful protest was brutally suppressed by special operations forces and riot police. The forests surrounding the capital were filled with troops prepared for battle… A total of seven hundred demonstrators were arrested—including seven former presidential candidates who technically still had the right to immunity…

Out here, we live the same way we’ve always lived. Whether it’s socialism or capitalism. Who’s Red, who’s White—it makes no difference. The important thing is to make it to spring. Plant potatoes…[A

Have you seen my lilacs? I go out at night to look at them—they glow. I’ll just stand there admiring them. Here, let me cut you a bouquet…