Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (13 page)

“Fear forced me to join the Party…Leninist Bolsheviks executed my grandfather, then Stalin’s communists massacred my parents in the Mordovian camps…”

“On behalf of myself and my deceased husband I hereby resign from the Party…”

You had to live through this…and not drop dead from the horror. People stood in line outside the district Party headquarters like it was a store. They were queuing up to return their Party membership cards. A woman got in to see me, she was a dairywoman. In tears, she entreated me, “What do I do? What am I supposed to do? In the newspapers, it says that we’re supposed to throw out our Party membership cards.” She justified herself, saying that she had three children, she had to think of them. Someone was spreading rumors that the Communists were going to be put on trial. Exiled. That they were already fixing up the old barracks in Siberia…A new shipment of handcuffs had come into the police headquarters…Someone saw them being unloaded out of covered trucks. Dreadful stuff! And then there were the real communists. The ones still devoted to the Idea. A young teacher…Not long before the putsch, he’d been accepted into the Party, but he hadn’t been issued a membership card yet. “You’re going to get shut down soon,” he said. “Issue me a membership card. Otherwise, I’ll never get one.” In that moment, people showed their true colors. A man who had fought at the front came to the offices covered in war medals with an icon hanging around his neck! He returned his Party membership card, which he had gotten at the front, saying, “I don’t want to be in the same party as that traitor Gorbachev!” Truly, truly…people’s characters were revealed. Friends and strangers alike. Even relatives. Before, when I’d run into them, it’d be, “Oh hello, Elena Yurievna!” “How’s your health, Elena Yurievna?” Suddenly, if one of them saw me, they’d cross the street to avoid me. The principal of the best school in the district…Not long before all of this happened, we’d held an academic Party conference at his school on Brezhnev’s novels,
Malaya Zemlya
and
Rebirth.
He’d read an excellent paper on the leading role of the Communist Party during the Great Patriotic War…and on the leadership of Comrade Brezhnev in particular…I had presented him with a certificate from the district Party committee. A loyal communist! A Leninist! My God, it hadn’t even been a month…He saw me on the street and started in on me: “Your time is up! You’ll have to answer for all of it! First of all, for Stalin!” I couldn’t breathe, I was so hurt…He was saying that to me? To me! Me, whose father had been in the camps…[
It takes her a few minutes to calm down.
] I never liked Stalin. My father forgave him, but I didn’t. I could never forgive him…[
Silence.
]

The rehabilitation of so-called politicals began after the Twentieth Party Congress.
^*16
After Khrushchev’s speech…while all of this…All this was happening during Gorbachev’s time…I was appointed the director of the district committee on the rehabilitation of the victims of political repressions. I know the position was initially offered to our public prosecutor and then to the second secretary, but both of them had turned it down. Why? Probably out of fear. People are still scared of anything having to do with the KGB. But I didn’t even think twice, I said yes right away. My father had been a victim. What did I have to be afraid of? The first time, they took me down to some basement…Tens of thousands of folders…One “case” is two sheets long, another one’s an entire thick volume. I learned of how, in 1937, there had been a plan…quotas…for “exposing and rooting out enemies of the people,” just as in the eighties, they were lowering the quotas for people who could be rehabilitated district- and region-wide. The plan needed to be fulfilled and exceeded. It was all in Stalin’s style: the meetings, the pressure, the admonishments. More, more…[
She shakes her head.
] At night, I would sit there and read them, going through volumes of these documents. To be perfectly honest…Honestly…It made my hair stand on end. Brother informed on brother, neighbor on neighbor…because they’d gotten into an argument about their vegetable patch, or over a room in the communal apartment. Someone sang a rhyme at a wedding, “We should thank Stalin, our brother, he put all our feet in rubber.” That was enough. On one hand, the system was butchering people, but on the other hand, the people didn’t show one another much mercy, either. The people were ready…

A regular communal apartment…Five families live there—twenty-seven people in total. Sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. Two of the neighbors are friends: One of them has a five-year-old daughter and the other one is single with no kids. In communal apartments, people were always spying on one another, listening in on each other’s conversations. The people with ten-square-meter rooms envied the ones with twenty-five. Life…that’s just how it is…And then, one night, a Black Maria—a police van—shows up…They arrest the woman with the five-year-old daughter. Before they take her away, she has a chance to cry out to her friend, “If I don’t come back, please look after my little girl. Don’t let them take her to an orphanage.” So that’s what happened. The neighbor took the child in, and the building administration gave her a second room…The girl started calling her Mama…Mama Anya…Seventeen years went by…And seventeen years later, the real mother returned. She kissed her friend’s hands and feet in gratitude. If this were a fairy tale, this is where the story would end, but in real life, the ending was very different. Without a “happily ever after.” When Gorbachev came to power, after they unsealed the archives, they asked the former camp inmate whether she wanted to see her file. She did. So she went down to look at it, opened the folder…and the very first page was an informant’s report. Familiar handwriting…It was her neighbor’s, Mama Anya’s…She’d been the one who’d informed on her…Do you understand any of this? I don’t. And that woman couldn’t, either. She went home and hanged herself. [
Silence.
] I’m an atheist. I have a lot of questions for God…I remember…I remember my father’s words: “It’s possible to survive the camps, but you can’t survive other people.” He’d also say, “You die today, I’ll die tomorrow—the first time I heard these words wasn’t in the camps, it was from our neighbor Kaprusha…” Kaprusha spent his whole life arguing with my parents over our chickens; he hated that they walked all over his vegetable patch. He’d run around in front of our windows waving a hunting rifle…[
She is silent.
]

On August 23, they arrested the members of the GKChP. Minister of Internal Affairs Pugo shot himself…after shooting his wife…The people celebrated: “Pugo shot himself!” Marshal Akhromeyev hanged himself in his Kremlin office. There were a handful of other ghastly deaths…The head administrator of Central Committee Affairs, Nikolay Kruchina, fell out of a fifth-floor window…Were these suicides or murders? To this day, we don’t know. [
Silence.
] How do we go on? How can we go out? If you leave the house, you might run into someone. In those days…I had already been living alone for several years. My daughter had married an officer and moved to Vladivostok. My husband died of cancer. At night, I would come home to an empty apartment. I’m not a weak person…but I would have all sorts of thoughts…dark thoughts…They’d float up. I’ll be honest with you…it occurred to me…[
Silence.
] For a while, we continued showing up to work. We’d lock ourselves in our offices and watch the news on TV. Waiting. Hoping for something to happen. Where was our party? Lenin’s invincible party! The world had collapsed…We got a phone call from a collective farm: men with whips and pitchforks, hunting rifles—whatever they could find—had gathered in front of the farm’s administrative offices in order to defend the Soviet state. The first secretary told them, “Send everyone home.” We got scared…We were all scared…While the people were resolute. I know a handful of stories like that. But we were too scared to do anything…

And then finally the day came…We got a phone call from the district executive committee, “We have to shut you down. You have two hours to gather your things and leave.” [
She is too upset to speak.
] Two hours…two…A special commission showed up to seal the doors…Democrats! Some locksmith, a young journalist, and that mother of five…I recognized her from the demonstrations. From her letters to the district committee…to our newspaper…She lived in a barracks house
^*17
with a large family. She gave speeches everywhere she could demanding a real apartment. She cursed the Communists. I’d remembered her face…This was her moment of triumph…When they got to the first secretary’s office, he threw a chair at them. In my office, one of the members of the commission went up to the window and demonstratively ripped off the blinds. So that I wouldn’t take them home? My god! They made me open my handbag…A few years later, I ran into that mother of five on the street, I even remembered her name just now, Galina Avdey. I asked her, “So did you ever get your apartment?” She shook her fist in the direction of the regional administration offices: “Those bastards lied to me, too.” And so on…What else? A crowd was waiting for us outside of the building. “Put the communists on trial! Send them off to Siberia!” “If only we had a machine gun to shoot through all these windows!” I turned around and saw two tipsy men standing behind me—they were the ones who’d been talking about a machine gun…I said, “Just remember that I’ll shoot back.” A policeman stood by pretending that he didn’t hear anything. I knew that policeman personally.

The whole time I felt like…I felt like I could hear ominous noises following me. I wasn’t the only one living that way…The daughter of our Party instructor was approached by two girls from her class in school, who told her, “We’re not going to be friends with you. Your father worked in the district Party headquarters.” “My father is a good man.” “A good father wouldn’t have worked there. We were at a demonstration yesterday…” Fifth graders
^*18
…children…and already they’re Gavroches, prepared to hand soldiers ammunition. The first secretary had a heart attack. He died in the ambulance, he didn’t even make it to the hospital. I thought that it would be like the old days, lots of wreaths, an orchestra, but instead—nothing and no one. A handful of people walked behind the coffin, a small group of his comrades. His widow had a hammer and sickle carved on his tombstone along with the opening lines of the Soviet anthem: “The unbreakable Union of free republics…” People laughed at her. All the while, I kept hearing those ominous noises…I thought I was going to lose my mind…A woman I didn’t know accosted me at the store, getting into my face: “Are you happy now, commies, you squandered the country to shit!”

What saved me? Phone calls…phone calls from my friends. “If they ship you off to Siberia, don’t be scared. It’s pretty there.” [
She laughs.
] She’d been on a tour and liked it. My cousin from Kiev called: “Come stay with us. I’ll give you your own keys. You can hide out at our dacha. No one will find you there.” “I’m not a criminal,” I told her. “I’m not about to go into hiding.” My parents called me every day: “What are you doing?” “Pickling cucumbers.” I spent my days boiling jars. Pickling and pickling. Not reading the papers or watching TV. I read detective novels, I’d finish one book and immediately start the next one. Television was terrifying, and so were the newspapers.

For a long time, no one would give me a job…Everyone thought that we’d divvied up the Party money and that each of us had ended up with a chunk of an oil pipeline or, at the very least, a small gas station. I have no gas station, no store, not even a kiosk. They call the privately owned kiosks “
komki
” now.
Komki,
shuttle traders…The great Russian language has grown unrecognizable: “voucher,” “exchange rate corridor,” “IMF tranche”…It’s like we speak a foreign language now.

I went back to teaching. I reread my beloved Tolstoy and Chekhov with my students. How are the others? My comrades met various fates…One of our Party instructors killed himself…The director of the Party bureau had a nervous breakdown and spent a long time in the hospital recovering. Some went into business…The second secretary runs a movie theater. One district committee instructor became a priest. I met up with him recently and we talked for a long time. He’s living a second life. It made me jealous. I remembered…I was at an art gallery. One of the paintings had all this light in it and a woman standing on a bridge. Gazing off into the distance…There was so much light…I couldn’t look away. I’d leave and come back, I was so drawn to it. Maybe I too could have had another life. I just don’t know what it would have been like.

ANNA ILINICHNA

I woke up from the clamor…I opened the window: They’d come into Moscow! The capital was filled with tanks and armored vehicles full of troops! The radio! Quick—turn on the radio! The radio was broadcasting an address to the Soviet people: “A deadly danger looms over our Motherland…The country is plunging into a maelstrom of violence and lawlessness…We must wipe the streets clean of criminal elements…Put an end to this time of troubles…” It was not clear whether Gorbachev had stepped down from office for health reasons or if he’d been arrested. I called my husband, who was at the dacha: “There’s been a coup d’état. The power is in the hands of…” “You idiot! Hang up the phone, they’re going to come for you!” I turned on the TV. All of the channels were playing
Swan Lake
. But I was seeing flashes of very different images—we’re all the children of Soviet propaganda: Santiago in Chile…the presidential palace burning…Salvador Allende’s voice…The phone calls began: The city was full of military equipment, tanks standing on Pushkin Square, in Theater Square…My mother-in-law was visiting. She got terribly scared: “Don’t go outside. I’ve lived through a dictatorship, I know what this means.” But I didn’t want to live under a dictatorship!

After lunch, my husband came back from the dacha. We sat in our kitchen, smoking like chimneys. We were afraid that our phone was tapped, so we put a pillow on top of it. [
She laughs.
] We’d read our fill of dissident literature. We’d heard enough stories. It had all finally come in handy…They’d given us a little air, now everything was going to go on lockdown again. They’d chase us back into the cage, rub us into the asphalt…We’d be like butterflies crushed against the pavement…We’d just been discussing Tiananmen Square, talking about the recent developments in Tbilisi, how they’d dispersed a demonstration with shovels. The storming of the television tower in Vilnius…“While we were sitting around, reading Shalamov and Platonov,” my husband said, “civil war has broken out. People used to argue in their kitchens and go to demonstrations, now we’re going to start shooting each other.” That was the mood…It felt like catastrophe was at hand…We never turned off the radio, we kept turning the dial, but every station was just playing music, classical music. Then, suddenly, a miracle! Radio Russia started working again: “The legally elected President has been forced to resign…There has been a cynical attempt at a putsch…” That’s how we found out that thousands of people were already out in the streets. Gorbachev was in danger…To go or not to go—there was no question. We had to go! My mother-in-law tried to talk me out of it at first, like, “Think of your child, are you crazy, where are you running off to?” I didn’t say anything. She saw we were getting ready to go: “Since you’re such huge idiots, at least bring some baking soda solution with you so you can wet cloths and put them over your faces if they start gassing you.” I made a three-liter jar of baking soda solution and ripped up one of our sheets. We took all the food we had in the house, I dug all of the cans out of the pantry.