A Train to Moscow

by Elena Gorokhova

Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.

“They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”

It is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and magical, not at all like the everyday make-believe they all have to live by.

“You have to have patience,” her mother says, her usual refrain. “This is what Russia has survived on, century after century—patience and perseverance. We work, we wait, and we hope. And we believe. We have to believe in something. Before the Revolution, there was God. Now it’s our better future.”

“How am I supposed to live in a country where everything is based on lies? Our national game isn’t hockey. It is lying and pretending.”

“In this life It’s not difficult to die. To make life Is more difficult by far.”

“I often think about how we itch to run away from home and then keep searching for it for the rest of our lives.”

“Isn’t it ironic,” says Andrei, “that the executioner becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the executioner? Our system, if you think of it, is pure genius: executioners and victims are the same people. The engine of death has been in motion for decades, and no one is guilty, because everyone is guilty.”

“But there is one thing my father-in-law told me about choices that has always stayed with me: you either pull the trigger, or you kneel on the floor.”

“You were born in the wrong country, Sashenka. You’re naive and uncompromising. You don’t bend, and sooner or later, our motherland will break you. It breaks everyone.”