Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (30 page)

Well, yes, I wanted to…but then the doctors brought me back. Did they understand where they were bringing me back from? I am, of course, an atheist, but in my old age, I’ve become an unreliable one. You’re face to face with…The thought that it’s time to go…somewhere else…It makes you look at things differently…yes…At earth and sand…I can’t look at regular sand anymore without being overcome with emotion. I’ve been old for a long time now. The cat and I sit by the window. [
The cat is on his lap. He’s petting it.
] Sometimes, we’ll turn on the TV…

And of course, I never thought I’d live to see the day when they’d start erecting monuments to the White generals. Who were the heroes in my day? Red commanders…Frunze, Shchors
^*1
…Now it’s Denikin and Kolchak…Even though there are people still alive today who remember how the Kolchakites would hang us from the lampposts. The Whites have finally won…Is that what it is? I fought and fought and fought. For what? I built and built…What did I build? If I were a writer, I would write a memoir myself. The other day I listened to a radio show about my factory. I was its first director. They were talking about me as though I were already dead. Except…I’m alive…It didn’t even occur to them that I could still possibly be here. Yes! Indeed…[
The three of us laugh. His grandson is with us, listening.
] I feel like a forgotten artifact in a museum vault. Some dusty pottery shard. We had a great empire—stretching from sea to sea, from beyond the Arctic to the subtropics. Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb. Without Hiroshima. It’s been conquered by Her Majesty Salami! The good chow won! Mercedes-Benz. The people don’t need anything else, don’t even offer it to them. They don’t need it. Only bread and circuses for them! And that truly is the most important discovery of the twentieth century. The response to all of the famous humanists and Kremlin dreamers. While we, my generation…We had great plans. We dreamt of worldwide revolution: “To the grief of all bourgeois / Through the world, we’ll spread the fire.” We wanted to build a new world where everyone would be happy. We thought that it was possible, I sincerely believed in it! Completely sincerely! [
He has a coughing fit and becomes short of breath.
] This asthma’s killing me. Hold on…[
He pauses.
] I’ve lived long enough…I’ve lived long enough to see the future we had dreamed of. The future we died and killed for. There was so much blood…Our own and other people’s…

Go and die without reproach!

Your death won’t be in vain,

When the blood runs from under him…

The heart tired of hate can’t learn to love…

[
He is surprised.
] I still remember…I haven’t forgotten! My senility hasn’t wiped it all out yet. Not entirely. We memorized poems in our political literacy classes. How many years has it been? I’m afraid to count…

What astonishes me? Destroys me? The ideals have been trampled underfoot! Communism has been anathematized! Everything was smashed to smithereens! I’m nothing but a doddering old fool. A bloodthirsty maniac, a serial killer…Is that how it is? I’ve been alive too long, it’s no good living this long. You shouldn’t…no, really, you shouldn’t…It’s dangerous living too long. My time was up before my life could end. You have to die along with your era. Like my comrades…They all died young, at twenty or thirty years old. And they died happy. With faith! With Revolution in their hearts, as we’d say in those days. I envy them. You wouldn’t understand this, but I envy them. “Our young drummer died…” He died gloriously! For a great cause! [
He falls into thought.
] I always lived side by side with death, but I never thought about it very much. Then, this summer, they took me out to our dacha and I kept staring at the ground…It seemed alive to me…

—“Death and killing—aren’t they one and the same? You lived among murderers.”

[
Irritably.
] For questions like that…They’d grind you into labor camp dust. It’d either be the North or execution—not much of a choice. In my day, people didn’t ask those kinds of questions. We didn’t have questions like that! We…imagined a just life without rich or poor. We died for the Revolution, and we died idealists.Wholly uninterested in money…My friends are long gone, I’m all alone. None of the people I used to talk to are around anymore. At night, I talk to the dead…And you? You don’t understand our feelings or our words: “grain confiscation campaign,” “foodgroups,” “disenfranchisee,” “committee of the poor”…“repeater”…“defeatist.” It’s Sanskrit to you! Hieroglyphics! Old age means, first and foremost, loneliness. The last old man I knew—he lived in the adjacent courtyard—died five years ago, or maybe it’s been even longer…seven years ago…I’m surrounded by strangers. People come from the museum, the archive, the encyclopedia…I’m like a reference book, a living library! But I have no one to talk to…Who would I like to talk to? Lazar Kaganovich
^*2
would be good…There aren’t many of us who are still around, and even fewer who aren’t completely senile. He’s even older than me, he’s already ninety. I read in the papers…[
He laughs.
] In the newspaper, it said that the old men in his courtyard refuse to play dominos with him. Or cards. They drive him away: “Fiend!” And he weeps from the hurt. Ages ago, he was a steel-hearted People’s Commissar. He’d sign the execution lists, he sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths. Spent thirty years by Stalin’s side. But in his old age, he doesn’t even have anyone to play dominoes with…[
After this, he speaks very quietly. I can’t tell what he’s saying, I only catch a few words.
] It’s scary…Living too long is scary.

…I’m no historian, I never even studied the humanities. Although for a time, I did run a theater, our city theater. Wherever the Party assigned me, I served. I was totally devoted to the Party. I don’t remember very much of my life, only work. The whole country was a construction site, a blast furnace, a forge! People don’t work that hard anymore. I would get three hours of sleep a night. Three hours…We were fifty or a hundred years behind the most developed countries. An entire century. Stalin’s plan was to catch up within fifteen or twenty years. Stalin’s famous Great Leap Forward. And we knew that we could do it! People don’t believe in anything anymore, but back then, we really did. People were prepared to believe in anything. Our mottos: “We’ll destroy industrial ruin with our Revolutionary dreams!” “The Bolsheviks must master technology!” “We’ll catch up with capitalism!” I didn’t live at home, I lived at the factory…at the construction site. You know…At two, three in the morning, the phone could ring. Stalin never slept, he went to bed late, so we didn’t sleep, either. The administrative cadres. From the top down to the bottom. My hard work earned me two medals and three heart attacks. I was the director of a tire factory, the head of a construction trust, and from there, I was transferred to a meatpacking plant. Put in charge of the Party Archive. After my third heart attack, they gave me the theater. Our era—my era—was a great era! Nobody lived for himself. That’s why it hurts…A charming young lady was interviewing me the other day. She started “enlightening” me about how terrifying the years I lived through had been. She’d read about them in books—but I lived through them! That’s where I come from. I’m a man of my era. And here she was telling me, “You were slaves. Stalin’s slaves.” You little snot! I was no slave! No way! Even today, when I am gnawed by doubt…I know that I was no slave. People’s heads are full of mush. Everything’s been mashed together: Kolchak and Chapayev,
^*3
Denikin and Frunze…Lenin and the Tsar…It’s a Red and White salad. Kasha. They’re tap dancing on their graves! It was a great time! We will never live in such a big and strong country again. I cried when the Soviet Union collapsed. They began cursing us immediately. Slandering. The consumer triumphed. The louse. The worm.

My homeland is October. Lenin, socialism…I loved the Revolution! There is nothing more precious to me than the Party! I was in the Party for seventy years. My Party membership card is my Bible. [
He begins declaiming the Internationale.
]

We will smash the world of violence

Down to its foundations, then

Build our new world over the ruins.

The former nobody shall rule…

We wanted to create Heaven on Earth. It’s a beautiful but impossible dream, man is not ready for it. He is not yet perfect enough. Well…From Pugachev
^*4
to the Decembrists, down to Lenin himself, everyone dreamt of equality and brotherhood. Without the idea of fairness, it’ll be a different Russia with different people. A completely different country. We aren’t over communism yet. Don’t get your hopes up. And the world isn’t over it, either. Man will always dream of the City of the Sun.
^*5
Even when he was still living in caves, walking around in animal skins, he was already hungry for justice. Remember our Soviet songs and films…the dream in them! The faith…A Mercedes is no kind of dream…

—

His grandson will remain silent the whole time we’re talking. In response to my questions, all he’ll contribute to the conversation are a handful of jokes.

A joke from his grandson

It’s 1937. Two Old Bolsheviks
^*6
are sitting in a jail cell. One says to the other, “It looks like we’re not going to live to see communism, but surely our children will!” The other: “Yes, our poor children!”

—

—I’ve been old for a long time…Old age is interesting, too. You come to realize that man is an animal…You suddenly see a lot of the animal in yourself…It’s that time in your life, as Ranevskaya
^*7
would say, when the candles on your birthday cake cost more than the cake itself, and half of your urine goes off to the lab. [
He laughs.
] Nothing can save you from old age—no medals, no decorations. There’s no escaping it…the refrigerator buzzes, the clock ticks. And nothing else happens. [
The conversation turns to his grandson, who is in the kitchen making tea.
] Kids these days…All they think about is the computer. When he was in ninth grade, this grandson, he’s the youngest one, told me, “I’ll read about Ivan the Terrible, but I don’t want to read about Stalin. I’m sick of your Stalin!” They don’t know anything, but they’re already sick of it all. Fed up with it! Everyone curses 1917. “Idiots!” they call us. “Why did they have to have a revolution?” But the things I remember…I remember people with fire in their eyes. Our hearts were on fire! No one believes me! But I still have my wits about me…I remember…Yes…Those people didn’t want anything for themselves, it wasn’t like today, when everyone puts himself first. A pot of cabbage soup…a little house, a little garden…It was about the collective “we”! We! We!!! Sometimes my son’s friend stops in to see me, he’s a university professor. He goes abroad, lectures out there. We argue until we’re hoarse. I tell him about Tukhachevsky,
^*8
and he responds that as a Red Army commander he gassed peasants in Tambov and hanged sailors in Kronstadt. “First,” he says, “you shot the aristocrats and priests. That was in 1917. And then, in 1937, you all shot each other…” They’ve even gotten to Lenin. I won’t let anyone have Lenin! I’ll die with Lenin in my heart! One moment…hold on…[
Has a severe coughing fit that makes it difficult to understand what he’s saying.
] We used to expand our fleet, conquer outer space, but today, it’s nothing but mansions and yachts…I have to admit that a lot of the time, I don’t think about anything at all. Are my bowels working or not? That’s what you need to know first thing in the morning. That’s what the end of your life is like.

…We were eighteen, twenty years old. What did we talk about? We talked about the Revolution and love. We were Revolution fanatics. But we also spent a lot of time arguing about Alexandra Kollontai’s
Love of Worker Bees,
which was very popular at that time. The author defended free love, that is, love without anything superfluous…“Like drinking a glass of water.”
^*9
Without the sighs and flowers, no jealousy or tears. Kissing and love letters were considered bourgeois prejudices. A true revolutionary was supposed to reject the urges to practice these rituals. We even held meetings about it. Our views were divided: some were for free love, but with “the wild cherries”—that is, with feelings, while others were against any “wild cherries” at all. I was for “the wild cherries,” or at least in favor of kissing. Yes! Really…[
He laughs.
] I’d fallen in love—I was courting my future wife. How did I court her? We’d read Gorky together: “A storm! A storm is coming! The dumb penguin meekly hides his fat body in the cliffs…” Were we naïve? Perhaps. But what we did was also beautiful. Beautiful, goddammit! [
He laughs like a young person. I notice how handsome he still is.
] Dances…regular dances…We considered them bourgeois. We would put dances on trial and punish the Komsomol members who danced or brought their girlfriends flowers. For a while, I even presided over an antidancing tribunal. Because of this “Marxist” conviction of mine, I never did learn how to dance. I later repented. I could never dance with a beautiful woman, I’m like a bear! We’d have Komsomol weddings. No candles, no wreaths. No priests. Instead of icons, portraits of Marx and Lenin. My bride had long hair, so she cut it all off before the wedding. We hated beauty. It wasn’t right, of course. You could say that we overdid it…[
Another coughing fit. He waves at me, signaling me not to turn off the tape recorder.
] It’s all right, it’s fine…I don’t have the time to put this off…Pretty soon, I’ll be decomposing into phosphorus, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that’s left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is…I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you firsthand: Paper lies even more than people do.