Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

“I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.”

“A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”

You want to talk about the nineties . . . I wouldn’t call it a beautiful time, I’d say it was revolting. People’s minds flipped 180 degrees. Some couldn’t handle it, they went crazy, the psych wards were overflowing. I visited a friend of mine in one of them. One guy was screaming, “I’m Stalin! I’m Stalin!” while another one screamed, “I’m Berezovsky! I’m Berezovsky!” The whole ward was filled with these Stalins and Berezovskys.

What do I need a great country for? I want to live in a small one like Denmark. No nuclear weapons, no oil, no gas. So no one would ever hit me over the head with their pistol. Maybe then even we would learn to shampoo our sidewalks . . .

Perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now they’ll be able to write objectively about the way of life we called socialism. Without all the tears and obscenities. They’ll unearth it like ancient Troy.

We’d teach one another the tricks, so that the KGB agents who tapped our phones wouldn’t be able to make anything out. You turn the dial to the end—old telephones had little holes for numbers that you could turn—and then you stick a pencil in it so that it locks . . . You can hold it down with your finger, too, but your finger gets tired . . . You probably know that one? Do you remember it? If you needed to say something “secret,” you had to get two or three meters away from the phone, from the receiver.

Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others.

Right now, there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs . . . Is this freedom?

The little man, the nobody, is a zero—you’ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel. He used to be able to write a letter to the editor, go and complain at the district Party headquarters about his boss or poor building maintenance . . . About an unfaithful husband . . . A lot of things about the system were stupid, I don’t deny it, but who will even listen to the man in the street today?

He left five thousand rubles . . . That used to be good money! He took it out of his savings account and left it next to his note. His life savings. Before perestroika, that kind of money could buy you a car, a Volga. The most expensive model! But today? It was only enough for a new pair of boots and a funeral wreath.

That a hero is someone who buys something one place and sells it down the road for three kopecks more.

We were hurtling into an abyss. We had a great nation, it was victorious in a terrifying war, and it was collapsing. China didn’t fall. And neither did North Korea, where the people were starving to death. While little socialist Cuba stood, we were falling. And we weren’t defeated by tanks and missiles, we were destroyed by our own greatest strength: our spirit. The system and the Party rotted from the inside.

How did we survive? First, we took all of our valuables to the market. The crystal, the Soviet gold, and our most precious possessions, our books. For weeks on end, we’d eat nothing but mashed potatoes. Then I went into “business.” I started selling cigarette butts. A liter jar of butts . . . or a three-liter jar of butts . . . My wife’s parents (college professors) collected them off the street, and I would sell them. And people would buy them! Smoke them. I smoked them myself.

And my mother’s, too; she had a PhD in chemistry, I have her books and her collection of rare minerals. A burglar broke into her house once . . . She woke up in the middle of the night to see a young thug standing in the middle of her apartment (it was a one-room apartment). He opened the closet and started throwing everything out of it. Hurling things on the floor, cursing: “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.

French comedy. Why is it that we have so little comedy? “Advance, for the Motherland!” “The Motherland or Death!” I taught my students: Lighting the way for others, I am “consumed in the service of others.” I taught them about the feat of Danko,95 who ripped his heart out of his chest and lit the way for others. We never talked about life . . . No, hardly . . . Hero! Hero! Hero! Life consisted of heroes . . . victims and executioners . . . There were no other kinds of people.

Who would I like to talk to? Lazar Kaganovich100 would be good . . . There aren’t many of us who are still around, and even fewer who aren’t completely senile. He’s even older than me, he’s already ninety. I read in the papers . . . [He laughs.] In the newspaper, it said that the old men in his courtyard refuse to play dominos with him. Or cards. They drive him away: “Fiend!” And he weeps from the hurt. Ages ago, he was a steel-hearted People’s Commissar. He’d sign the execution lists, he sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths. Spent thirty years by Stalin’s side. But in his old age, he doesn’t even have anyone to play dominoes with .

It’s 1937. Two Old Bolsheviks104 are sitting in a jail cell. One says to the other, “It looks like we’re not going to live to see communism, but surely our children will!” The other: “Yes, our poor children!”

At the most recent citywide Party conference, they read a salutation to Comrade Stalin, and the whole auditorium had stood up. A storm of applause: “Glory to Comrade Stalin—the organizer and inspiration behind our victories!” “Glory to Stalin!” “Glory to our Leader!” Fifteen minutes . . . Half an hour . . . Everyone kept turning and looking at one another, but no one wanted to be the first to sit down. So we all just stood. And then, for some reason, I sat down. It was mechanical. Two plainclothes officers went up to me: “Comrade, why are you sitting?” I jumped up! I jumped like I’d been scalded.

They’d argue about whether someone who quoted Pushkin could be capable of shooting unarmed people. Someone who listened to Bach . . .

My grandmother was in love with someone, but her parents were marrying her off to somebody else. She really didn’t like the guy, she didn’t want to be with him in the least! Lord! She’d decided that when the priest in the church would ask her whether she was marrying him of her own free will, she would say no. But the priest had gotten drunk beforehand, so instead of asking her like he was supposed to, he just said, “Be nice to him, he froze his feet off in the war.” After that, she had no choice but to marry him. That’s how my grandmother ended up spending the rest of her life with my grandfather, even though she never loved him. It’s a great caption, summing up our whole lives . . . “Be nice to him, he froze his feet off in the war.” Was my mother happy?

I saw him so happy: “I lived to see the total victory of anticommunism.” His most important dream had come true: Communism collapsed. Now they’ll take down the Bolshevik monuments and get Lenin’s sarcophagus off Red Square; the streets won’t be named after murderers and executioners anymore . . . It was a time of great hope!

I wanted them to beat me so hard there’d be holes in my body, and they would have to stop beating me. I never got any holes, but I was covered in infected wounds. I was so happy when that happened . . . My friend Olechka had metal clamps in her spine so they weren’t allowed to beat her. Everyone was jealous of her . . .

It used to be that when people came over, we’d talk about books, plays . . . Now it’s who bought what? What’s the exchange rate?

A joke: “Where do I sign up for the Communist Party?” “At the psychiatrist’s.”

We’ve had it up to here with greatness! We want something on the human scale. Normal. Mundane . . . you know, everyday stuff! It’s enough to remember the great stuff occasionally, after a little vodka . . .

For Chekists, there are only two ways out of the service: Either you die by the enemy’s hand or at the hands of the NKVD.

Democracy! That’s a funny word in Russia. “Putin the Democrat” is our shortest joke.

The Russian man isn’t rational or mercantile, he’ll give you the shirt off his back, but sometimes he’ll steal. He’s elemental, more of a watcher than a doer. He can get by on very little. Accumulating money isn’t for him, saving bores him. He has a very acute sense of fairness. We’re a Bolshevik people.

I was eight months pregnant. My due date was coming up. On nights when I was in pain, we’d call an ambulance, but as soon as they heard my Armenian last name, they’d hang up on us. They wouldn’t accept us into any maternity clinics, not the neighborhood one . . . not anywhere.

They spoke about Khodjali, where there had been a pogrom on Azerbaijanis. About how the Armenians had murdered them, throwing women out of windows . . . cutting people’s heads off . . . pissing on the dead . . . No horror film can scare me now!

We had to call an ambulance . . . They came fairly quickly, but the doctor wanted my mother to pay for a death certificate and wouldn’t take Grandma down to the morgue. “What do you expect? It’s ‘the market economy’!”

Her whole life, Grandma had saved up five thousand rubles. The money was in the bank. It should have been enough, as she said, to provide for her up to the end, for “a rainy day,” and to cover her funeral expenses. But now, all that would buy you was a trolleybus ticket . . . a box of matches . . . Everyone’s money had simply evaporated.

The old kitchen tap broke, we called the plumbers, and they turned out to have PhDs. Everyone laughed. As Grandma used to say, you won’t get by on tears . . .

The theater! The eternal topic of conversation in decent company . . . Today, they write about the Soviet Union being one big penal colony, a communist ghetto. A world ruled by cannibalism. I don’t remember anything scary . . . I remember that it was naïve, that world, very naïve and clumsy.

You could be anyone you liked: a broker, a hitman, gay . . . Ah, the nineties!

How shameful that our tanks had entered Prague! But look: Today, they’re in Moscow!

Papa’s life’s purpose was to complete any mission assigned to him by the government and the Party. His life was worth less than a hunk of metal.