Ken Saunders’s Reviews > Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets > Status Update

"They paid us in milk and meat whenever a cow accidentally suffocated or drowned in the muck."

"When we got to the bazaar, we saw a mob of people running toward us all panicked. Chicken feathers flying, rabbits underfoot... no one ever remembers the animals ... how they suffer, but I remember ... Not just one person screaming, but a whole mob of people, and all of them screaming. Armed men, in civilian clothes but holding machine guns, chasing down women snatching their handbags taking whatever they had ..."

"You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous! 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?"

"How did we survive ? 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."
(on life in Russia after the meltdown of USSR)

"(Gorbachev) was nothing like any of the general secretaries who had come before him. He loved his wife in a tender, entirely un-Soviet manner. They'd take walks together, holding hands. Yeltsin, on the other hand, needed a pickle and a shot of vodka first thing in the morning. Now that's Russian."

"
Spring came, the ice melted ... it all broke apart ... and the whole river behind our village was choked with corpses. Naked, blackened, only their belts shining. Belts with little red stars. There's no sea without water and no war without blood.
"

"The setting of his war was winter: the forests and meter-deep snows. The Finns fought on skis, in white camouflage uniforms; they'd always appear out of nowhere, like angels. "Like angels"- those are my father's words. They could take down a detachment, an entire squadron, overnight. The dead ... my father recalled how the dead always lay in pools of blood; a lot of blood seeps out of people killed in their sleep."