Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (8 page)

—The last great event in our lives was perestroika.

—Russia can either be great or not exist at all. We need a strong army.

—What do I need a great country for? I want to live in a small one like Denmark. No nuclear weapons, no oil, no gas. So no one would ever hit me over the head with their pistol. Maybe then even we would learn to shampoo our sidewalks…

—Communism is too great an undertaking…We’re always either demanding a constitution or Sevruga caviar with a side of horseradish…

—I am so envious of the people who had an ideal to live up to! Today, we are living without one. I want a great Russia! I don’t remember it, but I know it existed.

—We used to live in a great country where we stood in line for toilet paper…I remember the smell of Soviet cafeterias and grocery stores all too well.

—Russia will save the world! That’s how it will save itself!

—My father lived to the age of ninety. He said that not a single good thing happened in his entire life; he was always at war. That’s all we’re capable of.

—God is the infinite within us…We are created in His likeness and image…

ON EVERYTHING

—I was 90 percent Soviet…I couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember seeing Gaidar on TV saying, “Learn how to sell…The market will save us…” You buy a bottle of mineral water on one corner and sell it on another—that’s business. The people listened, bewildered. I would come home, lock the door, and weep. All of it scared my mother so much, she ended up having a stroke. Maybe they wanted to do something good, but they didn’t have enough compassion for their own people. I’ll never forget the rows of elderly begging along the road. Their worn-out little hats, their jackets that had been mended too many times…I would run to and from work with my eyes down, afraid of looking at them. I worked at a perfume factory. Instead of money, they paid us in perfume…makeup…

—There was a poor girl in our class whose parents had died in a car crash. She lived with her grandmother. All year long, she wore the same dress to school every day. No one felt sorry for her. It’s surprising how fast being poor became shameful…

—I don’t have any regrets about the nineties. It was an exciting, tumultuous time. Even though I’d never been interested in politics or even read the papers, I ended up running for deputy. Who were the foremen of perestroika? Writers, artists…poets…You could have collected autographs at the First Congress of the People’s Deputies of the USSR. My husband is an economist, and it would drive him up the wall: “Poets are capable of setting people’s hearts on fire with words. You’re going to end up with a revolution on your hands—and then what? How are you going to build democracy? Who’s going to do it? I can already see what your efforts are leading to.” He laughed at me. We ended up getting divorced because of it…But as it turned out, he was right…

—Things got scary, so the people turned to the Church. Back when I still believed in communism, I didn’t need church. My wife goes to services with me because in church, the priest will call her “little dove.”

—My father was an honest communist. I don’t blame the Communists, I blame communism. I still can’t decide how to feel about Gorbachev…or that Yeltsin…You forget about the long lines and empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.

—We triumphed. But over whom? And for what? You turn on the TV, and they’re playing a movie about the Reds beating the Whites. You flip the channel, and it’s the Whites beating the Reds. Sheer schizophrenia!

—We’re always talking about suffering…That’s our path to wisdom. People in the West seem naïve to us because they don’t suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We’re the ones who went to the camps, who piled up the corpses during the war, who dug through the nuclear waste in Chernobyl with our bare hands. We sit atop the ruins of socialism like it’s the aftermath of war. We’re run down and defeated. Our language is the language of suffering.

I tried to talk about this with my students…They laughed in my face: “We don’t want to suffer. That’s not what our lives are about.” We haven’t understood a thing about the world we’d only recently been living in and yet we’re already living in a new one. An entire civilization lies rotting on the trash heap…

*1
The Russian stove is a large masonry stove that, to this day, serves as the central and most important feature of rural Russian houses. Stoves are used not only for cooking and heating, they are large enough to accommodate people sleeping on top of them—and they are always the warmest place in the house.

*2
Hero of the eponymous novel written by Ivan Goncharov published in 1859, Oblomov is an idle aristocrat whose extreme laziness and apathy gave rise to the expression “oblomovism.” Stoltz, his friend, is an active and energetic young man.

*3
Khrushchyovkas are cheap, prefabricated concrete panel or brick apartment blocks that started being built in the 1950s, during the administration of their namesake, Nikita Khrushchev. Though they are cramped and shoddy, they provided many families with their first-ever private apartments.

*4
Alexander Galich (1918–1977), Bulat Okudzhava (1924–1997), and Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1990) were singer-songwriters who rose to popularity in the 1960s, primarily among the Soviet intelligentsia. Their songs were known for being anti-Soviet.

*5
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet and essayist who died in the gulag.

*6
Anatoly Rybakov (1911–1998) was a Soviet writer most famous for his anti-Stalinist
Children of the Arbat
tetralogy.

*7
Between 1936 and 1953, over twenty thousand political prisoners were executed on the Butovo Firing Range as victims of Stalin’s purges. It is located just outside of Moscow.

*8
As the minister of foreign affairs from 1985 to 1991, Eduard Shevardnadze (1928–2014) was responsible for many important foreign policy decisions in Gorbachev’s administration. He was the president of Georgia from 1992 to 2003. Alexander Yakovlev (1923–2005) was a Soviet politician and historian, sometimes called the “godfather of glasnost.” He was one of the main theoreticians behind perestroika.

*9
Sergey Averintsev (1937–2004) was a philologist, cultural historian, translator, poet, and specialist on antiquity and Byzantine culture. He lectured on Russian spiritual traditions.

*10
Yegor Gaidar (1956–2009) was an economist and the author of a series of controversial “shock therapy” reforms that defined the early post-Soviet Russian economy. As a result of these reforms, which entailed the privatization of all major Soviet industries, most of the largest formerly Soviet enterprises ended up in the hands of a small group of Russian executives who would come to be known as the Russian oligarchs. At the same time, due to reform-related hyperinflation, most Russians’ assets and savings were devalued wholesale, landing a large percentage of the population in poverty overnight. Many Russians blame the ensuing high crime rates and low quality of life on Gaidar’s reforms.

*11
Mikhail Shatrov (1932–2010) was a Soviet dissident playwright.

*12
The
nomenklatura
refers to the Soviet government elite.

*13
The Russian White House, originally known as the House of the Soviets, is the primary Russian government office and serves as the official office of the Russian prime minister. In 1991 and 1993, it was a locus of protest: first during the 1991 coup d’état and then, in 1993, during the Russian constitutional crisis, when the building was stormed.

*14
Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), also known as Iron Felix, was responsible for creating and developing the Soviet secret police. The “Iron Felix” also refers to a gargantuan statue of Dzerzhinsky that stood on Lubyanka Square in Moscow from 1958 to 1991, when it was removed following the failed coup. Many statues of Dzerzhinsky remain standing throughout the former Soviet Union, where towns and streets and squares continue to bear his name.

*15
The Lubyanka is an infamous Moscow prison that also served as the KGB headquarters in Soviet times. Its name is synonymous with the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet secret police, especially during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Today, it houses the directorate of the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation, the FSB.

*16
Viktor Astafiev (1924–2001) and Vasil Bykov (1924–2003) were both prominent Soviet novelists who wrote candidly about social realities and war.

*17
Sergey Kirov (1886–1934) was an early Bolshevik leader whose assassination, believed by many to have been ordered by Stalin, served as one of the pretexts for the Great Purge that followed. Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary who worked closely with Lenin and Trotsky. He was executed by Stalin, who saw him as a rival, as part of the Great Purge.

*18
Boris Berezovsky (1946–2013) was one of the first Russian oligarchs.

*19
The NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, was the central Soviet law enforcement agency from 1934 to 1946. It contained both the public police force and the secret police. The NKVD was responsible for carrying out Stalin’s Terror, including mass executions, arrest and torture of political prisoners, and running the gulag system. It was also responsible for foreign espionage. Its predecessor was the Chekha secret police force formed in 1917 by Lenin’s decree.

*20
Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953), the chief of the NKVD from 1938 to 1946, was responsible for significantly expanding the gulag system, overseeing the exile of many ethnic minorities from their native lands, and supervising the Soviet atom bomb project. He was arrested and executed shortly after Stalin’s death.

There were two of them waiting for me: Elena Yurievna, with whom I’d arranged to meet, and her friend Anna Ilinichna M., who was visiting from Moscow. She immediately joined the conversation. “I’ve been waiting for someone to explain what’s going on to me for a long time.” Their stories had nothing in common except for the significant proper nouns: Gorbachev, Yeltsin. But each of them had her own Gorbachev and her own Yeltsin. And her own version of the nineties.

ELENA YURIEVNA

Is it really already time to tell the story of socialism? To whom? Everyone around is still a witness. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that you’ve come all this way just to see me. I’m a communist, part of the
nomenklatura
…No one wants to listen to us anymore…everyone wants to shut us up. Lenin was a gangster, and don’t even mention Stalin…We’re all criminals, even though there isn’t a single drop of blood on my hands. Still, we’ve been branded, every last one of us…

Perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now they’ll be able to write objectively about the way of life we called socialism. Without all the tears and obscenities. They’ll unearth it like ancient Troy. Until recently, you weren’t allowed to say anything good about socialism. In the West, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they realized that Marxism wasn’t really over, it still needed to be developed. Without being worshiped. Over there, he wasn’t an idol like he’d been for us. A saint! First we worshiped him, then we anathematized him. Crossed it all out. But science has also caused immeasurable suffering—should we eliminate scientists? Curse the fathers of the atom bomb, or better yet, start with the ones who invented gunpowder? Yes, start with them…Am I wrong? [
She doesn’t give me a chance to answer her question.
] You’re on the right track, leaving Moscow. You could say that you’ve come to the real Russia. Walking around Moscow, you might get the impression that we’re a European country: the luxury cars, the restaurants…those golden cupolas gleaming! But listen to what the people talk about in the provinces…Russia isn’t Moscow, Russia is Samara, Tolyatti, Chelyabinsk—some Bumblepinsk…How much can you really learn about Russia from sitting around in a Moscow kitchen? Going to parties. Blah, blah, blah…Moscow is the capital of some other nation, not the country beyond the ring road.
^*1
A tourist paradise. Don’t believe Moscow…