Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (14 page)

Many people were, like us, headed down to the Metro…While others were standing in line for ice cream or buying flowers. We walked past a group of friends laughing…I overheard someone say, “If I can’t go to the concert tomorrow because of the tanks, I’ll never forgive them.” A man in his underwear came running toward us with a shopping bag full of empty bottles. He caught up with us: “Can you show me the way to Stroitelnaya Street?” I told him where he should turn right, then head straight. He said thanks. The only thing he cared about was getting those bottles down to the recycling center. Were things any different in 1917? Some people were shooting while others were dancing at balls. Lenin on the armored train…

ELENA YURIEVNA

A farce! They played out a farce! If the GKChP had won, we’d be living in a different country. If Gorbachev hadn’t been too much of a coward…If they hadn’t been paying people in tires and dolls. Shampoo. If a factory made nails, they’d pay the workers in nails. If it was soap, then it was soap. I tell everyone: look at the Chinese…They have their own path. They’re not dependent on anyone, they don’t try to imitate anyone. Today, the whole world is afraid of China…[
She turns to me with a question again.
] I’m sure you’re just going to get rid of everything I’m saying.

—

I promise her that there will be two stories. I want to be a cold-blooded historian, not one who is holding a blazing torch. Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.

ANNA ILINICHNA

You could laugh at the way we were and call it a musical comedy. Mockery is in style these days. But everything that happened was in earnest. Sincere. It was all real and we were all real. Unarmed men and women stood in front of the tanks, prepared to die. I sat on those barricades and saw those people. They’d come from all over the country. There were some old Muscovite ladies, God’s dandelions, they’d bring meat patties, warm potatoes wrapped in towels. They gave everyone something to eat…including the men in the tanks. “Eat your fill, boys. Just don’t shoot. Are you really going to shoot at us?” The soldiers had no idea what was going on…When they opened up the hatches and climbed out of their tanks, they were shocked. All of Moscow was there! Girls would climb on top of the tanks and hug and kiss them. Feed them rolls. Soldiers’ mothers whose sons had died in Afghanistan wept, begging them, “Our children died on foreign soil, are you planning on dying here in your own country?” Some major…When the women surrounded him, he couldn’t handle it any more, he screamed, “I have kids, too! I’m not going to shoot anyone! I swear, I won’t! We’re not going to go against our own people!” So many funny and touching things happened, things that reduced us to tears. Suddenly, shouts swept the crowd: “Does anyone have any Validol? Someone is ill!” The pills materialized instantly. A woman had come with her child in a stroller (what would my mother-in-law think!) and she got out a diaper in order to draw a red cross on it. But with what? “Who has lipstick?” People started tossing their lipsticks at her—cheap stuff and Lancôme, Dior, Chanel…No one was filming it, no one recorded these details, and it’s too bad. Really, too bad. The elegance, the beauty of the event…All of that comes later, with the banners and the music…That’s what gets cast in bronze…In real life, everything is broken down, filthy, and lilac: people spending the night around the fire, sitting directly on the ground, on newspapers and flyers. Hungry and angry. They swore and drank, but there were no drunks. Some people came by with salami, cheese, and bread. Coffee. They said that these were cooperative owners…businessmen…I even glimpsed a couple of jars of red caviar. Those disappeared into people’s pockets. Others were handing out free cigarettes. A guy sitting next to me was covered in prison tattoos—a real tiger! Rockers, punks, students with guitars. And professors. Everyone all together. The people! Those were my people! I ran into my friends from college who I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, if not more. Some of them lived in Vologda, others in Yaroslavl…But they’d all gotten on the train to come to Moscow! To defend something that was sacred to all of us. In the morning, we took them home with us. We washed, ate breakfast, and then we all went back out there. At the Metro exit, people were handing out metal rods and rocks. “Paving stones are the weapons of the proletariat,” we laughed. We built barricades, overturned trolleybuses, cut down trees.

There was already a tribune. They hung posters over it: “No to the Junta!” “The People Aren’t Dirt Under Your Feet.” Speakers addressed the crowd through a megaphone. Simple people and famous politicians alike would begin their speeches with regular words. Then, a few minutes in, those words would no longer be enough and they would all start swearing. “We’re going to take these shitheads and…” Obscenities! Good old Russian obscenities. “Their time is up…” And then the great and mighty Russian language! Obscenities like war cries. A language everyone could understand. That was the spirit of the moment. Those minutes of pure exaltation! So powerful! The old words weren’t enough and we didn’t yet know new ones…The whole time, we were waiting to storm the White House. The silence, especially at night, was unfathomable. Everyone was unbearably tense. Thousands of people—and silence. I remember the smell of gasoline being poured into bottles. It smelled like war…

The people there were good people! Excellent people! Today, they write about the vodka and the drugs, as though there were no revolution to speak of, just some drunks and druggies going off to the barricades. Lies! Everyone had come to die honorably. We were all well aware that this machine had been grinding people into sand for seventy years…Nobody thought that it would break down so easily…Without major bloodshed. There were rumors that they’d mined the bridge, that any moment now they were going to gas us. A medical school student instructed us on what to do in case they gassed us. Every half hour, the situation changed. We got some terrifying news: Three people had been run over by a tank and died…But nobody flinched, no one left the square. It was incredibly important to be there, no matter how things turned out. No matter how much disappointment awaited us. We lived through it…That’s who we were! [
She cries.
] In the morning, there were shouts of “Hurrah! Hurrah!” echoing through the square. Then cursing again…tears, shouting…Through the grapevine, we learned that the army had gone over to the side of the people, the special forces from the Alpha division had refused to participate in an assault. The tanks were leaving the capital…When they announced that the putschists had been arrested, people began embracing—there was so much joy! We’d won! We’d defended our freedom. Together, we’d done it. We could do anything! Dirty, wet from the rain, we lingered, not wanting to go home. We wrote down each other’s addresses. Swore to remember each other, to become friends. The policemen in the Metro were extremely polite—never before or since have I seen such polite policemen.

We won…Gorbachev returned from Foros
^*19
to an entirely different country. People were walking around the city smiling at one another. We won! That feeling stayed with me for a long time…I walked around, going over everything in my mind, scenes flashing in front of my eyes…How someone had shouted, “Tanks! The tanks are coming!” and everyone took one another’s hands and made a human chain. It had been two or three in the morning. The man next to me took out a packet of cookies: “Anyone want a cookie?” and everyone took one. For some reason, we were all laughing. We wanted cookies—we wanted to live! But I…Still, to this very day…I’m glad I was there. With my husband and my friends. Everyone was very sincere back then. I feel sorry for us…Sad that we’re not like that anymore. I used to think about it all the time.

—

Parting ways, I ask them how they’ve managed to remain friends, which, as it turned out, they had been since college.

—

—We agreed never to talk about these things. We have no interest in hurting each other’s feelings. We used to get into fights, stop talking. Sometimes, we wouldn’t speak to each other for years on end. But all that has passed.

—Now we only ever talk about our children and grandchildren. What we’re growing at our dachas.

—When our friends get together…Not a word about politics. Everyone came to this by their own path. We all live together: the gentlemen and the comrades. Reds and Whites. But no one wants any more shooting. There’s been enough blood.

*1
The ring road is a major freeway encircling Moscow which served as Moscow’s administrative boundary until the 1980s.

*2
After Stalin’s death in 1953, former political prisoners—or their families, if the prisoners were deceased—could apply for “rehabilitation” in order to be officially absolved of their crimes. Those who were not formally rehabilitated faced difficulties with employment and education, as did the members of their family.

*3
The shock worker movement, which originated in the 1920s, pushed workers in all Soviet industries to strive to dramatically overfulfill production quotas, surpassing norms and pushing Soviet industrialization forward at the fastest pace possible. Especially productive shock workers were rewarded with certificates and held up as examples to others in order to spur “socialist emulation.”

*4
Anatoly Chubais (1955–) was responsible for directing privatization in Russia under the Yeltsin administration and introducing the voucher privatization system. He is one of the richest businessmen in Russia.

*5
Yuri Andropov (1914–1984) ran the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party from November 1982 until his death in February 1984. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985), lasted only a year. He was replaced after his death by Gorbachev.

*6
The White Sea Canal or Belamorkanal project endeavored to join the White Sea to the Baltic. It was the first major Soviet construction project that employed forced labor. A total of 126,000 prisoners worked on the canal from 1931 to 1933, an estimated 25,000 of whom died during its construction. Although it was touted as a great Stalinist achievement, the canal is too shallow for most seagoing vessels.

*7
Gleb Uspensky (1843–1902) was a writer close to the People’s Will Movement. Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) was a Ukrainian writer and journalist who opposed Tsarism and defended the oppressed. Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) wrote the celebrated novel
And Quiet Flows the Don
.

*8
Vladimir Potanin (1961–) is a Russian businessman, banker, and former vice president of the Russian Federation (1996–1997). In 2011, his fortune was estimated by
Forbes
to be $17.8 billion. Fazil Iskander (1929–) is a poet and writer of Abkhazian origin.

*9
Pavel “Pavka” Korchagin is the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s socialist realist novel
How the Steel Was Tempered
about a young Bolshevik fighting in the Civil War of 1918–1921. His name is synonymous with the idealized Soviet war hero.

*10
Vladimir Bukovsky (1942–) is a famous dissident who spent many years in prison, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals before being exchanged for a Chilean communist in 1976. Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) was a Russian nuclear physicist best known as a Soviet dissident and human rights activist. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

*11
Valentin Rasputin (1937–2015) and Vasily Belov (1932–2012) were novelists closely associated with the so-called Village Prose movement, which espoused an idealized version of rural Russian village life and became increasingly associated with Russian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

*12
Anatoly Sobchak (1937–2000) was a university professor, coauthor of the constitution of the Russian Federation, and the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg (1991–1996). A mentor to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, he was forced into exile in Paris to escape legal proceedings initiated against him by his successor.

*13
Dmitry Likhachev (1906–1999) was a Russian intellectual, literary historian, and author of more than a thousand scholarly works who devoted his life to defending his country’s Christian and cultural heritage; having survived four years in the camps, Likhachev was rehabilitated and appointed to the staff of the Institute of Russian Literature in Leningrad, where he became known as the doyen of Russian medieval literature. He was revered as a guardian of national culture and a moral authority. General Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) was the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1981 to 1989, and as such, he was the final leader of the People’s Republic of Poland.

*14
Instituted by the 1988 Law on Cooperatives, these were the first Soviet privately owned businesses since the abolition of the New Economic Policy in 1928. Though they were heavily taxed and regulated, many people took advantage of them to start their own businesses in the service sector, manufacturing, and foreign trade.

*15
This was a colloquial name for those who enriched themselves during the New Economic Policy established by Lenin in the early 1920s in order to repair the USSR’s economy.

*16
The Twentieth Party Congress, held on February 14–25, 1956, is famous for Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing the dictatorship of Stalin, which rocked the
nomenklatura
and eventually the entire Soviet Union. The meeting was classified, but in the subsequent months and years, transcripts of it were released to district and regional Party committees to be discussed at closed meetings and eventually made the rounds as forbidden
samizdat
.