Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (50 page)

My sons were little boys back then, they’ve grown up since. One of them is even married. Several times, I tried…I wanted to tell them about 1991…1993…but they’re not interested. Their eyes would glaze over. The only question they have for me is, “Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?” As though the only people who didn’t get rich were the armless and dumb. Your cretin ancestors…kitchen impotents…We were too busy running around to protests. Sniffing the air of freedom while the smart ones divvied up the oil and gas…

—Russians are the kind of people who get swept up in things. For a while, they were swept up in communism, furiously working to manifest it in real life with a religious fanaticism. Eventually, they got tired of it, and grew disillusioned. They decided to reject the old world, shaking its ashes off of their feet. It’s very Russian to start over from the smoking ruins. So once again, we’re drunk on seemingly new ideas. Forward, toward the triumph of capitalism! Soon, we’ll be living as well as they do in the West! Rose-colored dreams…

—The living is better.

—And for some people, it’s gotten a thousand times better.

—I’m fifty years old…I try not to be a
sovok,
but I’m not very good at it. I work at a private company and hate the owner. The way they split up the big pie of the USSR, their pirate privatization, just doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t like the rich. They’re always showing off their palaces on TV, their wine cellars…They can bathe in breast milk in gold bathtubs for all I care! What do I need to see that for? I don’t know how to live with them. It hurts. It’s humiliating. And I’m not going to change. I lived under socialism for too long. Life is better now, but it’s also more revolting.

—I’m amazed at how many people are still rooting for the Soviet regime.

—What’s there to talk about with
sovoks
? We just have to sit tight until they all die out and then remake everything the way we think it ought to be. The first order of business is getting that mummy Lenin out of the mausoleum. What Asiatic nonsense! It lies there like a hex…that rotting carcass…

—Calm down, comrade. You know that people speak much more kindly about the USSR these days than they did twenty years ago. I recently visited Stalin’s grave, and there were mountains of flowers there. Red carnations.

—The devil knows how many people were murdered, but it was our era of greatness.

—I don’t like the way things are today, I’m not thrilled about it. But I don’t want to return to the
sovok,
either. I’m not champing at the bit to go back in time. Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything ever being good.

—I would like to go back. I don’t need Soviet salami, I need a country where people are treated like human beings. We used to say “simple people” and now they say “the simplefolk.” Can you feel the difference?

—I grew up in a dissident family…in a dissident kitchen…My parents knew Sakharov, they distributed
samizdat
. Along with them, I read Vasily Grossman, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Dovlatov, listened to Radio Liberty. In 1991, I was, of course, in front of the White House, in a human chain, prepared to sacrifice my life to prevent the return of communism. Not a single one of my friends was a communist. For us, communism was inextricably linked with the Terror, the gulag. A cage. We thought it was dead. Gone forever. Twenty years have passed…I go into my son’s room, and what do I see but a copy of Marx’s
Das Kapital
on his desk, and Trotsky’s
My Life
on his bookshelf…I can’t believe my eyes! Is Marx making a comeback? Is this a nightmare? Am I awake or am I dreaming? My son goes to the university, he has a lot of friends, and I’ve started eavesdropping on their conversations. They drink tea in our kitchen and argue about
The Communist Manifesto…
Marxism is legal again, on trend, a brand. They wear T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara and Lenin on them. [
Despairingly.
] Nothing has taken root. It was all for naught.

—Here’s a joke to lighten the mood…It’s the Revolution. In one corner of a church, Red Army men are drinking and partying; in another, their horses are eating oats and pissing on the floor. The psalmist runs over to the hegumen: “Father, how dare they do this in our holy temple!” “It’s not so bad. They’ll stick around for a while and then they’ll move on. When their grandchildren grow up, that’s when it’ll really get bad.” And here they are, fully grown…

—There’s only one way out for us—we have to return to socialism, only it has to be Russian Orthodox socialism. Russia cannot live without Christ. The Russian people’s happiness has never had anything to do with money. That’s the difference between the “Russian idea” and the American Dream.

—Russia doesn’t need democracy, it needs a monarchy. A strong and fair Tsar. The first rightful heir to the throne is the Head of the Russian Imperial House, the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, and then her heirs.

—Berezovsky suggested Prince Harry…

—Monarchy is madness! Doddering antiquity!

—The unbelieving heart is weak and unfortified before sin. The Russian people will renew themselves through the search for God’s truth.

—I only liked perestroika when it first started. If someone had told us back then that a KGB lieutenant-colonel would end up as president…

—We weren’t prepared for freedom…

—Liberty, equality, and fraternity are words that have spilled an ocean of blood.

—Democracy! That’s a funny word in Russia. “Putin the Democrat” is our shortest joke.

—Over the course of these past twenty years, we’ve found out a lot about ourselves. Made a lot of discoveries. We learned that Stalin is secretly our hero. Dozens of books and movies have been made about him, which people avidly read and watch. And debate. Half of the country dreams of Stalin—and if half of the country is dreaming of Stalin, he’s bound to materialize, you can be sure of it. They’ve dragged all of the evil dead back out of hell: Beria, Yezhov…They’ve started writing that Beria was a talented administrator, they want to rehabilitate him, because under his leadership, the Russian atom bomb was built…

—Down with the Chekists!

—What’s next, a new Gorbachev or the next Stalin? Maybe it’ll be the swastika?
Sieg Heil!
Russia has gotten up off her knees. Now is a dangerous time because Russia should have never been humiliated for so long.

ON THE PRESENT

—The Putinist 2000s…What are they like? Overcast…gray…brutal…Chekist…glamorous…stable…sovereign…Russian Orthodox…

—Russia is, has always been, and will always be an empire. We’re not just a big country, we’re the Russian civilization. We have our own path.

—Even today, the West fears Russia…

—Everyone needs our natural resources, especially Europe. Open up any encyclopedia: we’re seventh in the world for oil reserves, and in Europe, in first place for natural gas. We have some of the largest reserves of iron ore, uranium ore, tin, copper, nickel, cobalt…and diamonds and gold, silver and platinum—Mendeleev’s entire table of elements! One Frenchman even said to me, “Why do you say everything belongs to you, doesn’t the world belong to everyone?”

—At the end of the day, I’m an imperialist, yes. I want to live in an empire. Putin is my president! Today, it’s shameful to call yourself a liberal, just like it used to be shameful to call yourself a communist. The men by the beer stand could break your face in for that.

—I hate Yeltsin! We believed in him, and he led us in a totally strange direction. This is no democratic paradise. We ended up in a place that’s even more terrifying than the one we came from.

—Our problem isn’t Yeltsin or Putin, the problem is that we’re slaves. Our slavish little souls! Our slave blood! Take a look at the New Russian…He climbs out of his Bentley, money spilling out of his pockets, but he’s still a slave. A big boss runs the whole operation, “Everyone back to the stable!” And everyone goes.

—I was watching a talk show…“Are you worth a billion?” asked Mr. Polonsky.
^*5
“No?! Then go fuck yourself!” I’m one of the people whom the honorable oligarch told to go fuck himself. I come from a normal family: My father’s an alcoholic, my mother breaks her back for kopecks at a nursery school. To them, we’re just shit; we’re nothing but manure. I go to various political meetings. I sit in with the patriots, the nationalists…I listen to their speeches. The day will come when somebody will hand me a rifle. And I’ll take it.

—Capitalism isn’t taking root here. The spirit of capitalism is foreign to us. It never made it out of Moscow. We don’t have the proper climate for it in the rest of the country. And we’re not the right people. The Russian man isn’t rational or mercantile, he’ll give you the shirt off his back, but sometimes he’ll steal. He’s elemental, more of a watcher than a doer. He can get by on very little. Accumulating money isn’t for him, saving bores him. He has a very acute sense of fairness. We’re a Bolshevik people. And finally, Russians don’t want to just live, they want to live for something. They want to participate in some great undertaking. You’ll sooner find a saint here than an honest and successful man. Read the Russian classics…

—Why is it that when our people go abroad, they have a fine time assimilating into the capitalist way of life? But when they’re at home, they like to talk about “sovereign democracy,” a separate Russian civilization, and how “there’s no foundation for capitalism in the Russian way of life”?

—Our capitalism is all wrong…

—Abandon all hope for any other kind of capitalism…

—It’s like Russia has capitalism but no capitalists. There are no new Demidovs or Morozovs
^*6
…The Russian oligarchs aren’t capitalists, they’re just thieves. What kind of capitalists can you fashion out of former communists and Komsomol members? I don’t feel sorry for Khodorkovsky.
^*7
Let him rot on his prison bunk. I’m only sorry that he’s the only one doing time. Someone ought to be held responsible for what I lived through in the nineties. I was robbed blind. My job was taken away. The capitalist revolutionaries: Gaidar, a.k.a. the Iron Winnie the Pooh, Ginger Chubais…They ran experiments on living people like they were some kind of mad scientists…

—I went out to the country to visit my mother. The neighbors told me that the night before, someone had burned the farmer’s house down. The people had made it out alive, but the livestock were all killed. The village drank for two days straight in celebration. And you call this capitalism…What we have is a socialist people living under capitalism…

—Under socialism, I was promised that there was a place in the sun for everyone. Now they’re singing a different tune: If we live according to Darwin’s laws, we will enjoy abundance. Abundance for the fittest. But I’m one of the weak. I’m not a fighter…There was a plan for me and I was used to living according to plan: school, college, family. My husband and I will save up for an apartment in a cooperative, and after the apartment, we’ll save up for a car…Then they canceled that plan. Threw us to the wolves of capitalism…I have a degree in engineering, I worked at the design institute that everyone called the “women’s institute” because it was all women. You sit there and stack papers all day. I liked to keep things neat, in tidy little piles. I would have sat there my whole life, but then they started downsizing…They didn’t touch the men, there weren’t that many of them, or single mothers, or women who only had one or two years left before retirement. They posted lists, and I saw my last name on one of them…What was I going to do now? I was completely lost. I’d never been taught how to live by Darwin’s laws.

For a long time, I continued to harbor hopes of finding a job in my field. I was an idealist in the sense that I didn’t know my place in the world, my true worth. I still miss the girls from my department—the girls in particular, our chatter. Work came second; socializing, our banter, came first. We’d have tea about three times a day, and everyone would talk about what was going on in their lives. We celebrated all the holidays, all our birthdays…and now…I go to the employment office. No results. Nothing but jobs for painters and plasterers…My friend, she and I went to college together, she’s a housekeeper for this businesswoman, she walks her dog…essentially, she’s a servant. She used to cry from the humiliation, but now she’s used to it. I couldn’t do it.

—Vote for the communists, it’s cool.

—In the end, a sane person can’t understand Stalinists. A hundred years of flushing Russia down the drain, and now they’re crying “Glory to the Soviet Cannibals!”

—Russian communists haven’t been real communists for a long time now. Private property, which they have indeed recognized, is irreconcilable with the communist Idea. I can say the same thing about them that Marx said about his disciples: “All I know is that I’m not a Marxist.” Heine put it even better: “I have sown dragon’s teeth and reaped only fleas.”

—Communism is the future of mankind. There is no alternative.

—On the gates of the Solovki prison camp there was a Bolshevik motto: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Chase Humanity into Happiness.” That’s one recipe for saving humanity.

—I have no desire to go out into the street and try to accomplish anything. It’s better to do nothing. No good, no evil. What’s good today will turn out to have been evil tomorrow.

—There’s nothing more terrifying than an idealist…

—I love my Motherland, but I am not going to stay here. I could never be as happy as I would like here.

—I might be an idiot, but I don’t want to leave, even though I can.

—I’m not going anywhere, either. It’s more fun to live in Russia. Europe doesn’t have this kind of pulse.

—It’s better to love our Motherland from afar…

—Today, it’s embarrassing to be Russian…

—Our parents lived in the country of victors, we live in the country that lost the Cold War. We have nothing to be proud of!

—I’m not about to take off…I have a business here. I can tell you with certainty that it’s possible to live well in Russia as long as you stay out of politics. All of these rallies for freedom of speech, against homophobia—I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of that…