Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (4 page)

Russia was changing and hating itself for changing. “The immobile Mongol,” Marx wrote of Russia.

—

The Soviet civilization…I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is. There is an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.

—

My father is no longer living, so we won’t get to finish one of our conversations…He claimed that it was easier to die in the war in his day than it is for the untried boys to die in Chechnya now. In the 1940s, they went from one hell to another. Before the war, my father had been studying at the Minsk Institute of Journalism. He would recall how often, on returning to college after vacations, students wouldn’t find a single one of their old professors because they had all been arrested. They didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever it was, it was terrifying. Just as terrifying as war.

I didn’t have many honest, open conversations with my father. He felt sorry for me. Did I feel sorry for him? It’s hard to answer that question…We were merciless toward our parents. We thought that freedom was a very simple thing. A little time went by, and soon, we too bowed under its yoke. No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries…Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living. Today, there’s no longer any use for our experience in war; in fact, it’d be best to forget it. There are thousands of newly available feelings, moods, and responses. Everything around us has been transformed: the billboards, the clothing, the money, the flag…And the people themselves. They’re more colorful now, more individualized; the monolith has been shattered and life has splintered into a million little fragments, cells and atoms. It’s like in Dal’s dictionary:
^*9
free will…free rein…wide-open spaces. The grand old evil is nothing but a distant saga, some political detective story. After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore—instead, it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they “made” it or “scored” it. Is this all here to stay? “The fact that money is a fiction is ineradicable from the Russian soul,” wrote Marina Tsvetaeva.
^*10
But it’s as though Ostrovsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin
^*11
characters have come to life and are promenading down our streets.

I asked everyone I met what “freedom” meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience—it’s like they’re from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch
.
A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: Freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you’re not afraid of your own desires; having lots of money so that you’ll have everything; it’s when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

—

I’m searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There’s the one they use with children, another one for love. There’s the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling—everywhere you go, you’ll hear something different, and it’s not just the words, there’s something else, too. There’s even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night. What happens between two people at night vanishes from history without a trace. We’re accustomed to looking at the history of people by day, while suicide is a nighttime state, when a person wavers on the edge between being and non-being. Waking and sleep. I want to understand suicide with the rigor of a person in daytime. Someone once asked me: “Are you worried that you’re going to like it?”

—

We were driving through the Smolensk region when we stopped in front of a store in one of the villages. What familiar faces (I grew up in a village), how beautiful, how good—and what a humiliating, impoverished life they lead! We struck up a conversation. “You want to know about freedom? Have a look around our general store. There’s vodka, any kind you like: Standard, Gorbachev, Putinka; heaps of cold cuts and cheese and fish. We even have bananas. What more freedom could you ask for? It’s enough for us.”

“Did they give you any land?”

“Who’s gonna break their back working the land? You want it, you take it. The only guy who took it was Tough Vasya. His youngest kid is eight years old and he’s already out there next to his father at the plowtail. If he hires you for a job, watch out—you can’t steal, you can’t nap. He’s a total fascist!”

In “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky stages a debate about freedom. Namely, about the struggle, torment, and tragedy of freedom: “What’s the point of delving into that damn good and evil when the cost is so high?” People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.

The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, who has returned to Earth:

Why have You come here to interfere with our affairs? For You have come to interfere with us, and You know it.

For all of Your respect for man, You’ve acted as though You have ceased to have any compassion for him because You have asked too much of him…If You respected him less, You would have asked for less, and this would have been closer to love, for it would have lightened his burden. He is weak and base…Is a weak soul to blame for not having the strength to accept such terrible gifts?

There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born…

—

In the nineties…yes, we were ecstatic; there’s no way back to that naïveté. We thought that the choice had been made and that communism had been defeated forever. But it was only the beginning…

Twenty years have gone by…“Don’t try to scare us with your socialism,” children tell their parents.

From a conversation with a university professor: “At the end of the nineties, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were sure that a new future awaited them. Now it’s a different story…Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.”

There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an “unrivaled political figure.” A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. “Soviet-style cafés” with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. “Soviet” candy and “Soviet” salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, “Soviet” vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps—Solovki, Magadan—as a tourist. The advertisements promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterward, there will be fishing…

—

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the Great Empire, the “iron hand,” the “special Russian path.” They brought back the Soviet national anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi;
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there’s a ruling party, and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the general secretary used to be, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

—

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, “And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.” Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us secondhand.

—

The barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. They’re a trap. They ruin your vision, narrow your pupils, drain the world of its true colors. On the barricades, everything is black and white. You can’t see individuals, all you see are black dots: targets. I’ve spent my entire life on the barricades, and I would like to walk away from them. I want to learn how to enjoy life. To get back my normal vision. But today, tens of thousands of people are once again taking to the streets. They’re taking each other by the hand and tying white ribbons onto their jackets—a symbol of rebirth and light. I’m with them.

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?

*1
This is a widely used pejorative term for one who adheres to Soviet values, attitudes, and behaviors. The word can also refer to the Soviet Union itself. It is a pun on the word for “dustpan.”—
Trans.

*2
“Ten years without the right of correspondence” is a clause that appeared in official form letters addressed to relatives of political prisoners regarding the status of the arrested, especially during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. It often meant that the person had been executed.

*3
The Stalin-initiated campaign of “liquidating of the kulak class” lasted from 1929 to 1932, entailing the arrest, deportation, and execution of better-off peasants (“kulaks”) and their families for the purposes of seizing their property and incorporating it into collective enterprises (“collectivization”).

*4
The Virgin Lands Campaign was an agricultural reform strategy initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, the purpose of which was to increase crop yields rapidly by bringing a vast swath of land under cultivation. The Virgin Lands Campaign is also known for the severe food, housing, and machinery shortages faced by its workers.

*5
Little Octobrists, Young Pioneers, and the Komsomol were Soviet youth organizations that most children joined in school. Children were Little Octobrists from age seven to nine, when they would join the Young Pioneers. At fourteen, children could elect to join the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party.

*6
Obsolete Russian unit of length, equal to approximately 1.07 kilometers or 0.67 miles.

*7
Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) was a Soviet writer and gulag survivor whose
Kolyma Tales,
which circulated in samizdat editions beginning in the middle of the 1960s, is considered a classic of twentieth-century Russian literature.

*8
Russian and Soviet modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) coined the term “the vegetarian years” to describe a period when her work was merely suppressed and not published, as opposed to the “cannibalism” of Stalin’s purges, when Soviets, including many of her fellow poets, were murdered by the millions. It is used colloquially to denote the contrast between Stalinism and what followed.

*9
Vladimir Dal (1801–1872) wrote the most influential Russian dictionary collecting sayings, proverbs, and bywords compiled during his extensive travels through Russia.

*10
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet.

*11
Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–1886) was a prominent nineteenth-century Russian realist playwright whose plays depicting the petite bourgeoisie are still among the most performed in Russia today. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) was a satirist, novelist, and playwright whose works criticized Russian officialdom and the prevailing social order of his day.