Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (34 page)

—

Here’s an excerpt from his suicide note:

“If I had died from my wounds during the war, I would have known that I’d died for my Motherland. Today, I’m dying from leading a dog’s life. Have them write that on my tombstone…And please don’t consider me insane…

“I’d rather die standing up than on my knees, begging for my pauper’s pittance, only to extend my old age and go to my grave with an outstretched palm! Thus, my esteemed friends, do not judge me too harshly, put yourselves in my shoes. I am leaving behind the means, if I am not robbed, that will, I hope, suffice for my burial…I don’t need a coffin. Bury me in what I’m wearing, that will be good enough. Just don’t forget to put the certificate of my status as a defender of the Brest fortress in my pocket for posterity. We were heroes and now, we’re dying in poverty! Farewell. Do not mourn a lone Tatar who singlehandedly protests on behalf of everyone: ‘I die, but I do not surrender! So long, my Motherland!’ ”

—

After the war, in the underground passages of the Brest fortress, an inscription was found scratched into the walls: “I die, but I do not surrender. So long, my Motherland! 22. VII. 41.” The Central Committee declared this line an emblem of the courage of the Soviet people and their devotion to the mission of the CPSU. Surviving defenders of the Brest fortress maintained that the author of this inscription was none other than Timeryan Zinatov, a cadet and non-Party member, but communist ideologues preferred to have it attributed to the fallen Unknown Soldier.

The Brest municipal administration has decided to cover the costs of the funeral. The budget for the hero’s burial was provided for by the clause for “the ongoing maintenance of public amenities…”

—Communist Party of the Russian Federation, The System Perspective, No. 5

—

Why did Timeryan Zinatov, an old soldier, throw himself under a train? I’ll begin from afar…with a letter to
Pravda
written by Victor Yakovlevich Yakovlev, a veteran from Leningrad village in Krasnodar Krai. Yakovlev had fought in the Great Patriotic War, defending Moscow in 1941, and participated in the Moscow parade in honor of the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Victory. He had been moved to write by a serious grievance.

Recently, he and a friend—a former colonel and fellow war veteran—had gone to Moscow. For the occasion, they had worn their parade jackets, decorated with medal ribbons. After a long, tiring day in the noisy capital, they returned to Leningrad Station, where they searched for a place to sit while waiting for their train. Not finding any free seats, they went into a mostly empty hall where they saw a café with soft chairs. As soon as they sat down, a young woman who had been serving drinks ran up to them and rudely pointed to the exit. “You’re not allowed to be in here. This room is business class only!” I quote from Yakovlev’s letter: “Enraged, I replied, ‘So speculators and thieves can be in here but we can’t? Is it like how it used to be in America, “Entrance Forbidden to Negroes and Dogs”?’ ” What else was there to say when everything was already crystal clear? We turned around and left. But I still managed to catch a glimpse of a few of these so-called businessmen—thieves and swindlers—sitting there munching, chomping, drinking…The fact that we spilled blood here has already been forgotten. These bastards, those Chubaises, Vekselbergs, and Grefs
^*1
have robbed us of everything—our money, our honor. Our past and our present. Everything! And now they shave our grandsons’ heads, turn them into soldiers, and send them off to defend their billions. I want to know: What were we fighting for? We sat in the trenches, up to our knees in water in the autumn; in brutal winter frosts, up to our knees in snow; without changing our clothes or getting any real sleep for months on end. That’s how it was at Kalinin, Yakhroma, Moscow…We weren’t divided into rich and poor back then…”

Of course, you could say that the veteran is mistaken, that not all businessmen are “thieves and speculators.” But let’s take a look at our postcommunist nation through his eyes, at the condescension of the new masters, their disgust with “the men of yesterday,” who, as they write in their glossy magazines, “reek of poverty.” According to the authors of these publications, this is how the celebratory gatherings in great halls smell on Victory Day, where, once a year, veterans are invited to hear hypocritical panegyrics in their honor. In reality, nobody needs them anymore. Their ideas of fairness are naïve. Along with their devotion to the Soviet way of life…

At the beginning of his presidency, Yeltsin swore that he would lie down on the train tracks if he allowed our quality of life to decline. Well, the quality of life here hasn’t simply declined, it has bottomed out. Nonetheless, Yeltsin is still with us. And the one who lay down on the tracks was the old soldier Timeryan Zinatov, who died in protest in the autumn of 1992…

—Website of the newspaper
Pravda,
1997

CONVERSATIONS FROM AROUND THE TABLE AT THE WAKE

According to our customs, the dead go into the ground and the living, to the table. Many people had come, some from afar: from Moscow, Kiev, Smolensk…All of them wore their decorations and medals like they would have on Victory Day. They spoke about death the same way they spoke about life.

—

—To our fallen comrade! A bitter gulp. [
All rise.
]

—May he rest in peace…

—Oh Timeryan, Timeryan Khabulovich…He was hurt. All of us are deeply hurt. We were used to socialism. To our Soviet Motherland, the USSR. Now we all live in different countries, under new regimes. With different flags. Not our victorious red calico. I ran away from home to fight at the front when I was seventeen…

—Our grandchildren would have lost the Great Patriotic War. They have no ideals and no great dream.

—They read different books and watch different movies.

—You tell them about it, but to them it sounds like a fairy tale. They ask you, “Why would soldiers die to save the regiment banner? Couldn’t they just sew a new one?” We fought, we killed—and for whom? For Stalin? It was for you, you idiots!

—Maybe we should have surrendered and licked the Hun’s boots…

—As soon as they brought us my father’s death notice, I asked to be sent to the front.

—They’re robbing our Soviet Motherland blind, selling it off piecemeal…If we had known that this was how the wind would blow, we might have thought twice…

—My mother died in the war, and my father died before that, from tuberculosis. I’ve been working since I was fifteen. At the factory, they’d give us half a loaf of bread a day and that was it. The bread was made of cellulose and glue. One day, I fainted from hunger. And then it happened again. I went down to the conscription office: “Please don’t let me die like this. Send me to the front.” They approved my request. The people leaving and the ones sending them off had wild eyes! There was a whole freight car full of us girls. We sang, “Girls, the war has reached the Urals, / Girls, is our youth really gone?” At the stations, the lilacs were blooming. Some girls laughed while others wept…

—All of us supported perestroika. And Gorbachev. But not what came out of all that…

—Gorbach is an enemy agent…

—I didn’t understand what Gorbachev was talking about…All those words I’d never heard before…What kind of candy was he promising us? But I liked listening to him…The problem is that he turned out to be weak, he gave up our nuclear suitcase without a fight. And our Communist Party along with it.

—Russian people need the kind of idea that gives them goose bumps and makes their spines tingle.

—We were a great country…

—To our Motherland! To Victory! Cheers! [
They clink glasses.
]

—Now they put stars on veterans’ memorials, but I remember how we used to bury our boys during the war…We’d throw whatever was left of them into shallow graves, sprinkle some dirt over them, and immediately, the orders would come: “Forward! Forward!” And we’d advance. Toward the next battle. And the next pit full of corpses. We retreated and advanced from grave pit to grave pit. They’d bring in reinforcements and two or three days later, they were already corpses. Only handfuls of people survived. The lucky ones! Toward the end of ’43, we finally learned how to fight. Started doing it right. After that, fewer people would die. That’s when I finally made friends…

—I spent the whole war on the front lines and came out without a single scratch—nothing! And I’m an atheist at that. I walked to Berlin…I saw inside the lion’s den…

—We’d go into battle with one rifle for every four men. When they kill the first one, the second one grabs the rifle, after the second one, the next one. Meanwhile, the Germans all had brand-new machine guns.

—At first, the Germans were condescending. They’d already conquered Europe. Marched into Paris. They thought that they’d take care of the USSR in a matter of two months. When their wounded were taken prisoner, they’d spit in our nurses’ faces. Rip off their bandages. Scream “Heil Hitler!” But by the end of the war, it was “Russian, don’t shoot! Hitler kaput!”

—Most of all, I was afraid of a shameful death. If someone turned coward and ran, the Commander would shoot them on the spot. It happened all the time…

—What can I say…We had a Stalinist upbringing: We’ll go off to fight on foreign soil, and “From the taiga to the British seas / There’s none mightier than the Red Army…” There will be no mercy for the enemy! The first days of the war…I remember them as a total nightmare…We were surrounded. Everyone had the same question: What’s happening? Where’s Stalin? Not a single one of our planes was in the sky…People buried their Party and Komsomol membership cards and took to wandering the forest paths…All right, that’s enough, you shouldn’t write about this…[
He pushes away the tape recorder.
] The Germans disseminated their propaganda, their loudspeakers worked around the clock: “Surrender, Russian Ivan! The German army will guarantee you life and bread.” I was prepared to shoot myself. But what if there’s no ammo to do it with…Well…We were kids, little soldiers, all of us eighteen, nineteen years old…Commanders were hanging themselves left and right. Some used their belts, others used whatever they could find…Their bodies swung from the pine trees. It was the end of the world, dammit!

—The Motherland or death!

—Stalin had a plan—the families of those who surrendered would be sent to Siberia. But there were three and a half million prisoners of war! You couldn’t send them all into exile! That whiskered cannibal!

—That cursed year, 1941…

—Tell the whole truth. You’re allowed to now…

—I’m not accustomed to doing that sort of thing…

—At the front, we were afraid of speaking openly with one another. A lot of people had been arrested before the war…and during the war…My mother worked at a bread factory, and one day, during an inspection, they found breadcrumbs on her gloves. That was enough to constitute sabotage. They sentenced her to ten years in prison. I was at the front, my father was at the front, so my younger brothers and sisters had to go live with my grandmother. They’d beg her, “Granny, don’t die before Papa and Sashka (that’s me) come back from the war.” My father went missing in action.

—What kind of heroes are we? No one ever treated us like heroes. My wife and I raised our kids in barracks and after that, all we got was a room in a communal apartment. Today, it’s kopecks…Tears instead of pensions. On television, they show us the Germans. They’re doing pretty well for themselves! The defeated are living one hundred times better than the victors.

—The Lord doesn’t know what it’s like for the little man.

—I was, I am and will remain a communist! Without Stalin and Stalin’s Party, we would have never triumphed. To hell with you, democrats! I am afraid of wearing my war medals out. “You senile old fool, where did you serve? At the front or in the prisons and the camps?” That’s what I hear from the young people. They guzzle beer and jeer at us.

—I propose we return the monuments to our leader, the great Stalin, to their former places. They hide them in the back alleys like they’re garbage.

—So put one up at your dacha…

—They want to rewrite the history of the war. They’re just waiting for all of us to croak so they can do it.

—All in all, we’re nothing but
Sovieticus cretinus
now…

—Russia was saved by its size. The Urals, Siberia…

—The most terrifying part was going into combat. The first five, ten minutes…Those who went in first had no chance of making it out alive. The bullet will find its hole. Forward, communists!

—To the military might of our Motherland! [
They clink glasses.
]

—Nobody wanted to kill anyone. It’s unpleasant. But you get used to it, you learn…

—I joined the Party at Stalingrad. I wrote a notice: “I want to be in the first line of our Motherland’s defenders…I will not spare my young life…” They rarely gave foot soldiers medals. I have one, though, “For Valor.”

—My war wounds have made themselves felt…I became an invalid, but I’m still holding on.

—I remember how we captured two Vlasovites
^*2
…One of them said, “I was avenging my father…” His father had been shot by the NKVD. The other one: “I didn’t want to die in a German concentration camp.” They were young, the same age as us. After you’ve talked to someone, looked them in the eye, it’s hard to kill them…The next day, we were all interrogated by agents from the secret police division, “Why were you talking to traitors? Why didn’t you shoot them right away?” I started making excuses…The special agent slammed his revolver on the desk: “You motherfucker, who do you think you are? One more word out of you and…” No one had any pity for the Vlasovites. The tank drivers would tie them to their tanks, start them up and go in opposite directions, tearing the men to pieces…Traitors! But were all of them really traitors?