Second-hand Time

by Svetlana Alexievich

In the 1940s, they went from one hell to another. Before the war, my father had been studying at the Minsk Institute of Journalism. He would recall how often, on returning to university after the holidays, students wouldn’t find a single one of their old professors because they had all been arrested in the interim.

asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience – it’s like they’re from different planets.

My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant.

Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism... That’s not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind… That’s what I was standing up for! Or at least that’s what I thought. It’s what we all thought... Three days later, when the tanks were rolling out of Moscow, they were different, kinder tanks. Victory! And we kissed and kissed…

Everyone in our family is a communist. Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. ‘Are you nuts?’ I ask her. She replies, ‘I don’t know any other songs.’

Our old Soviet stuff was grey, ascetic, and looked as if it had been manufactured in wartime.

For over seventy years, they’d told us that money wasn’t happiness, that the best things in life were free. Like love, for example. But the minute someone from the podium said ‘Sell and prosper!’ all of that went out the window. Everyone forgot the Soviet books.

My father fought in the Russo-Finnish War, he never understood what he’d been fighting for, but they told him to go, so he went. They never talked about that war, they called it the ‘Finnish campaign’, not a war.

Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes… Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. ‘Brothers! Friends!’ they threw themselves on their comrades. ‘Halt! Another step and we’ll shoot!’

The way we swore was ‘Pioneer’s honour,’ or we gave ‘Lenin’s word.’ The most sacred oath was ‘Stalin’s word.’ My parents knew that if I gave them Stalin’s word, I couldn’t possibly be lying.

Those boys would get everyone in line. I don’t mean to repeat clichés, but Genghis Khan ruined our gene pool… And serfdom played its part, as well… We’re used to the idea that everyone needs a good whipping, that you won’t get anything done without flogging people.

The Party isn’t an army squadron, it’s an apparatus. A machine. A bureaucratic machine. They rarely hired people who’d studied the humanities, the Party hadn’t trusted them since Lenin’s times. Of the intellectual class, Lenin wrote, ‘It’s not the brains of the nation – it’s the shit.’

They’re passing judgment on Marx… blaming the idea… A murderous idea! I, for one, blame the executors. What we had was Stalinism, not communism. And now it’s neither socialism nor capitalism. Neither the Eastern model nor the Western. Neither empire nor a republic. We’re dangling like… I won’t say it…

Stalin-era practices included, for instance: the heads of Central Committee sectors would be served tea and sandwiches, while the lecturers were only served tea. Then they introduced the position of deputy sector administrator. What to do? They decided to serve them tea without sandwiches but on a white napkin. So they’d be distinguished

None of us be-lieved that the Soviet state would ever fall apart, that salami would magically appear in the shops, that you wouldn’t have to stand in a kilometre-long line to buy a foreign-made bra any more.

Their technique couldn’t have been simpler (necessity is the mother of invention): they’d toss regular, boring jeans into a solution of bleach or chlorine, add broken-up bricks, and boil them for a couple of hours. The jeans end up covered in all sorts of stripes, designs, patterns – abstract art!

Some die in the cradle, others live until their hair goes grey. Happy people don’t want to die… and those who are loved don’t want to die, either. They beg to stay on longer.

In our village, all of the best families were subjected to dekulakization; if they had two cows and two horses, that was already enough to make them kulaks. They’d ship them off to Siberia and abandon them in the barren taiga forest… Women smothered their children to spare them the suffering.

After ’53, they stopped punishing lateness like that. After Stalin died, people started smiling again; before that, they lived carefully. Without smiles.

In 1989, I was sent to Vilnius on a business trip. Before I left, the chief engineer of the factory, who had recently been there, called me into his office and warned me, ‘Don’t speak Russian to them. They won’t even sell you a box of matches if you ask for them in Russian. Do you remember Ukrainian? Speak Ukrainian.’

I didn’t believe him until I got to the station in Vilnius. I stepped out onto the platform… and from the very first moment, I was given to understand that when they heard me speaking Russian, I was in a foreign country. As an occupier. From filthy, backward Russia. Russian Ivan, the barbarian.

Who has the real truth? As far as I understand, the truth is something that’s sought out by specially trained experts: judges, scholars, priests. Everyone else is ruled by their ambition and their emotions. [A

At the same time, he’d started butting heads with Gorbachev. Just like Khrushchev, who only ever referred to the generals as ‘spongers’, Gorbachev didn’t like the army. We were a military nation, 70 or so per cent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it… physicists, mathematicians… All of them helped develop tanks and bombs.

Stalinist, Soviet, call it what you will… our state has always been in a state of mobilization. From its inception. It was not built for peacetime.

Gorbachev became more and more like an evangelist instead of a general secretary. He was a TV star. Soon enough, everyone got sick of his sermons: ‘back to Lenin’, ‘a leap into developed socialism’… It made you wonder: what have we been building, then, ‘underdeveloped socialism’?

Some of our friends had promised to get us a bottle of champagne – there wasn’t much you could buy at the shop in those days, you had to procure everything by other means. Through connections. Through friends and friends of friends. We managed to find some smoked salami, chocolates… You were very lucky if you somehow got your hands on a kilo of tangerines in time for New Year’s Eve!

‘Look, children,’ our teacher said. ‘This young hero blew himself up with a hand grenade and took a whole lot of fascists down with him. When you grow up, you have to be just like him.’ You mean we have to blow ourselves up with grenades?

shipped vodka to Turkmenistan… I spent a whole week in a sealed freight car with my business partner. We had our axes ready, plus a crowbar. If they found out what we were bringing into the country they would have killed us! On the way back, we carted a shipment of terrycloth towels…

I have this good friend… His wife slaves away at two jobs, while he has too much pride to work: ‘I’m a poet. I am not about to go out and sell pots and pans. It’s gross.’

Do you know how horses die? Horses don’t hide like other animals: dog, cats, and even cows will run off somewhere, while horses just stand around waiting to be killed. It’s hard to watch…

My aunt and uncle lived in a storage shed. Their house had burned down in the war so they’d built themselves a shed to live in, thinking that it would be temporary, but it ended up staying there for good.

Next to their daggers, they hang their drinking horns. Abkhazians drink wine out of horns like they’re glasses. You can’t put your horn down until you’ve drunk everything in it, down to the last drop.

I didn’t know what a cat was. The cat had come from the outside, there were no cats in the colony, they couldn’t survive in there because there were no leftovers for them to eat, we would pick up every last crumb.

We’re right here! But what’s left of our past? Only the story that Stalin drenched this soil in blood, Khrushchev planted corn in it, and everybody laughed at Brezhnev.

The day Stalin died… the whole orphanage was marched into the courtyard carrying a red banner. For the entire duration of the funeral, we stood outside ‘at attention’; it went on for six or eight hours. Some kids fainted. I cried… I had already come to terms with living without my mother, but how could I go on without Stalin?

Everyone had to sign confidentiality agreements on the non-disclosure of state secrets – both the people who did time and the ones who kept them in. The guards. No one was allowed to leave, they all knew too much.

stuff occasionally, after a little vodka… We were the first ones in space… and manufactured the best tanks in the world. But there was no washing powder or toilet paper. Those goddamn toilets always leaked!

Their eyes would glaze over. The only question they have for me is, ‘Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?’

The most beautiful holiday, everyone’s favourite, was Navruz. Navruz Bayram is the celebration of the arrival of spring.

In Azerbaijan

We had got used to the idea that Russians don’t want to be rich, they’re even afraid of it. So what do they want then? The answer is always the same: they don’t want anyone else to get rich.

It’s still a mystery to me, the workings of this inner mechanism: nobody has a kopeck to spare, but if somebody dies they’ll instantly raise the necessary amount, people will give the last of whatever they have to help the person get buried at home and rest in their native soil. So that they won’t have to remain on foreign soil.

The sea is completely different, it draws you in like a magnet, but the mountains make you feel protected, they stand guard over you. Like a second set of walls for your home. Tajiks aren’t warriors: when enemies invaded our land, our people would hide up in the mountains…

all Tajik boys dream of going to Russia to make money… They’ll borrow from everyone in their village to buy their tickets. At the border, Russian customs officers ask them, ‘Who are you going to visit?’ And they all answer ‘Nina.’… For them, all Russian women are Nina… They don’t teach Russian in school any more. All of them bring their prayer rugs…

I’m a Soviet, and so is my mother. We were building socialism and communism. Children were taught that selling was shameful and money couldn’t buy happiness.

They promised: ‘The current generation of Soviets shall live to see communism.’ That meant me… I was going to get to live under real communism?!

They say that in order to understand this, you have to read Solzhenitsyn. When I was in school, I took The Gulag Archipelago out from the library, but I couldn’t get into it. It was this fat, boring book. I read about fifty pages and stopped… It seemed as distant from my reality as the Trojan War. Stalin was a played-out topic. My friends and I weren’t all that interested in him…