A Train to Moscow

by Elena Gorokhova

But they feel good, these hands, so she stops crying and for the first time looks into his face, unshaved and ravaged, into his colorless, unsmiling, frozen eyes. It seems strange, the difference between his hands, warm and alive, and his dead eyes, but it isn’t stranger than the eternally dead, birdlike Lenin lying under glass or Stalin, their leader and revolutionary glory, who turned out to be an ant.

“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.”