Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

What greatness do you have in your life? You have nothing. Just comfort. Anything for a full belly…Those stomachs of yours…Stuff your face and fill your house with tchotchkes. But I…my generation…We built everything you have. The factories, the dams, the electric power stations. What have you ever built?

A peaked felt hat that became an essential part of the Red Army uniform during the Russian Civil War, named after Semyon Budyonny, a close ally of Stalin’s responsible for organizing the powerful Red Cavalry.

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.

don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.

War and prison are the two most important words in the Russian language. Truly Russian words!

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.”

My son’s place is out there. It’s so, you know, unpleasant…In the spring, the snows and rains leave bones sticking out of their potato patches. No one is squeamish about that sort of thing around here because they’re so used to it. There are as many bones as stones in this soil.

For them, the camps were work! A job! And here you are talking about crimes against humanity. Sin and the soul. It wasn’t just anyone doing time, it was the people.

Our entire tragedy lies in the fact that our victims and executioners are the same people.”

The big-time executioners can’t do without the little ones, you need a lot of people who are willing to do the dirty work.

What was the point of all that? So twenty, fifty more years will go by…and all of it will be stamped into dust, as though we never even existed.

While they—our parents, my mother—want to feel like they led important, not worthless lives, believing in the things that are worth believing in. But what do they have instead? From all sides, they hear that their lives were total shit, that they never had anything but their terrible missiles and tanks. They were prepared to defeat any enemy. And they could have done it! But without a war, it all collapsed. No one can understand why. That’s something we need to think about…but no one ever taught us how to think.

That’s the price we paid. The price for all those missiles and spaceships. For great history!

Uncle Vanya would be carried back to his cell on a stretcher, drenched in blood and piss. Covered in his own shit. I don’t know when a person stops being human. Do you?

Don’t make things up about what our people are like, saying that Russians are so good at heart. No one is prepared to repent. It’s a great feat, repentance. Even when I go to church, I don’t have it in me to confess.

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.

October 1993…“Bloody October,” “Black October,” “The Second Coup”*1

Now is a dangerous time because Russia should have never been humiliated for so long.

We’re an oriental nation…feudal…with clergy instead of intellectuals…

Money knows no pity or shame…

It was the same as ever: the bottle of vodka on the table, the game of cards. Only the topics had changed…

And you could have it all! You could be anyone you liked: a broker, a hitman, gay…Ah, the nineties!

They promised: “With an iron fist, we’ll chase humanity into happiness…” All the way to heaven on Earth.