Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (12 page)

An indescribable passion for newspapers and magazines took hold of us—circulation numbers skyrocketed into the millions. Periodicals became more popular than books. In the morning, in the Metro, day in and day out you’d find entire subway cars reading. Even the people standing up. Passengers would swap newspapers. Total strangers. My husband and I had twenty subscriptions between us—an entire one of our monthly salaries went exclusively toward that. After work, I would rush home to get into my house clothes and start reading. My mother died recently, but when she was still alive, she would lament, “I’m dying like a rat at the dump.” Her one-bedroom apartment was like a reading room: Magazines and newspapers lay piled on the shelves, in the closet, on the floor, in the hallway. The precious
Novy Mir
and
Znamya…Daugava…
Boxes of clippings everywhere. Really big boxes. I ended up taking them all to the dacha. I feel bad throwing them out, but who would I give them all to? They’re nothing but pulp paper now! But all of them had been read and reread. Underlined in red and yellow pencil. The most important things in red. I think I have like a half-ton of those periodicals. Our whole dacha is crammed with that stuff.

Our faith was sincere…Naïve…We thought that any minute now…there were buses idling outside waiting to take us away to democracy. We’d finally leave behind these run-down Khrushchyovkas and move into beautiful houses, build autobahns to replace these broken-down roads, and we’d all turn into respectable people. No one searched for rational proof that any of this would really happen. There was none. What did we need it for? We believed in it with our hearts, not our reason. At the district polling stations, we voted with our hearts, as well. No one told us what exactly we were supposed to do: We were free now and that was that. When you’re stuck in an elevator, the only thing you think about are the doors opening—you’re ecstatic when they finally open. Pure euphoria! You don’t think about how you’re supposed to be doing something…You’re breathing it in with your whole chest…You’re already happy! My friend married a Frenchman who worked at the Moscow consulate. She’d always be telling him to look at all the energy we Russians have. “All right, but can you tell me exactly what all this energy is for?” he’d ask her. And neither she nor I could answer him. I’d say, “The energy is pulsing, and that’s it.” I was seeing living people, living faces all around me. Everyone was so beautiful in those days! Where had all these people come from? Only yesterday you couldn’t find them anywhere.

At home, our TV was always on…We watched the news every hour. I had just had my son, and I’d always bring the radio whenever I went outside with him. People would walk their dogs clutching their radios. We laugh at our son now, saying he’s been into politics since he was a baby, but really, he has no interest in any of that. He listens to music, studies languages. Wants to see the world. Other things are important to him. Our children aren’t like us. What are they like? Their own time, each other. Back then, we were so excited, “Hurry! Sobchak
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is speaking at the Congress!” And everyone would immediately drop whatever they were doing and run over to the TV. I liked seeing Sobchak in some beautiful, probably velvet jacket, his tie in a “European” knot. Sakharov up on the podium…So socialism can have a “human face”? There it is…For me, it was the face of the scholar Dmitry Likhachev, not General Jaruzelski.
^*13
If I said “Gorbachev,” my husband would add, “Gorbachev…and Raisa Maximovna, too.” It was the first time we’d ever seen the wife of a general secretary we didn’t have to be embarrassed of. She had a beautiful figure and dressed well. They loved each other. Someone brought over a Polish magazine that said that Raisa was chic. We were so proud! Endless rallies…The streets were drowning in flyers. When one rally ended, another one began. People kept going and going, all of us truly believing that all we had to do was show up at the right place, and we would finally hear some truth. We thought that the right people were searching for the right answers…A mysterious new life awaited us, and everyone was eager to see it. We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner…

But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…

ELENA YURIEVNA

August 19, 1991…I got to the district Party office. As I walked down the corridor, I could hear how in all of the offices, on all of the floors, all of the radios were on. The receptionist told me that the first secretary wanted to see me. I went into his office. His TV was on at full volume, his face dark; he was sitting by the radio, switching between Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle, the BBC…whatever he could get. On his desk, there was a list of the members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency—the GKChP…the Gang of Eight, as they would later be called. “The only respectable one is Varennikov,” he told me. “He’s a General, he’s seen action. He fought in Afghanistan.” The second secretary came in…then the head of the Organizational Department…We started talking: “How awful! There will be blood. We’re going to be drowning in blood.” “Not everyone, just the ones who deserve it.” “It’s high time to rescue the Soviet Union.” “There’ll be a pile of bodies.” “There you have it, Gorby is finished. Finally, sane people, generals, are going to take power. The chaos will come to an end.” The first secretary announced that the morning planning meeting was canceled—what was there to report on? There were no orders from above. In front of us, he called the police headquarters: “Have you heard anything?” “Nope.” We talked some more about Gorbachev—either he’s sick or he’s been arrested. All of us were more inclined to believe a third version, that he’d run off to America with his family. Where else could he have gone?

That’s how we spent the rest of the day, shackled to our phones and our televisions. It was unnerving: Who was going to end up running the country? We waited. I’ll be honest with you, we did nothing but wait. It was like Khrushchev’s removal. We’d read the memoirs…Naturally, our conversations all revolved around the same things…What freedom? Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it. All these stalls and kiosks…they don’t sit well with us. I just remembered how a few days ago, I ran into my former driver. Through some major connections, he’d ended up with a job at the district committee after the army. For a while, he was terribly happy. But then the times changed, cooperatives became legal,
^*14
and he left us. Went into business. When I saw him again, I barely recognized him: He had a buzz cut, a leather jacket, a tracksuit. I take it that that’s their uniform. He bragged about making more money in one day than the first secretary of the district Party committee made in a month. His was a no-fail enterprise: blue jeans. He and a friend rented out a launderette and turned it into an acid-washed jeans factory. Their technique couldn’t have been simpler (necessity is the mother of invention): They’d toss regular, boring jeans into a solution of bleach or chlorine, add broken-up bricks, and boil them for a couple hours. The jeans end up covered in all sorts of stripes, designs, patterns—abstract art! Then they’d dry them and stick on a label that said “Montana.” I had a chilling realization: If nothing changes, then pretty soon, these jeans-mongers will be the ones running our government. NEP men!
^*15
And although it seems absurd, they will be the ones to feed us and dress us, too. They’ll build their factories up from the basements…And that’s what actually ended up happening. It all came true! Today, that guy is a millionaire or a billionaire (for me, a million and a billion are equally crazy figures) and a deputy in the Duma to boot. He has a house on the Canary Islands…and another one in London…In Tsarist times, Herzen and Ogarev were the ones living in London. Today it’s them…our “new Russians”…Jeans, furniture, and chocolate moguls. Oil magnates.

At nine
P.M.
, the first secretary gathered us all in his office again. The head of the district KGB briefed us. He told us about the mood among the people. According to him, the people supported the GKChP. They weren’t outraged by the putsch. Everyone was fed up with Gorbachev…Ration cards for everything but salt…No vodka…The KGB boys had gone around town recording people’s conversations. The arguments in queues.

“…It’s a coup! What’s going to happen with our country?”

“…There’s been no uprising at my house—bed’s in the same place it was last night. The vodka’s no different.”

“…So that’s it for freedom.”

“…Uh-huh. The freedom to stand in line for socks.”

“…Someone must have really wanted some gum to chew and some Marlboros to smoke.”

“…It’s high time! The country’s on the verge of ruin.”

“…Gorbachev is a Judas. He wanted to sell out the Motherland for dollars.”

“…The blood’s about to flow…”

“…We can’t do anything around here without bloodshed…”

“…In order to save the country…the Party…we need jeans. Nice lingerie and salami—not tanks.”

“…So you want the good life? Good luck! Forget about it!”

[
She is silent.
] In a word, the people were waiting. Just like we were. By the end of the day, there were no detective novels left in the Party bureau library. [
She laughs.
] What we should have been reading is Lenin, not detective novels. Lenin and Marx. Our apostles.

I remember the GKChP press conference…Yanaev’s trembling hands. He stood there making excuses: “Gorbachev deserves all due respect…He’s my friend…” Looking around with his eyes full of terror…my heart sank. These weren’t the people who could set things right…They weren’t the ones we’d been waiting for. They were just little cogs…Your run-of-the-mill party
apparatchiks
…Save the country! Save communism! There was no one to do it…On TV: a sea of people on the streets of Moscow. An ocean! Storming the Moscow-bound trains and commuter rails. Yeltsin on the tank. Handing out leaflets…Chanting “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” Triumph! [
She nervously fingers the edge of the tablecloth.
] This tablecloth is made in China…The world is chock-full of Chinese goods. China is where the GKChP triumphed…As for us? We’re a third world country. Where are the people who cried “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” now? They thought that they’d be living like people in the U.S. and Germany, but they ended up living like the people in Colombia. We lost…we lost our country…Back then, there were fifteen million of us communists! The Party could have…It was sold out…Out of fifteen million people, not a single leader emerged. Not one! While the other side had its leader—Yeltsin! We stupidly let it all slip through our fingers! Half of the country was waiting for us to win. We were no longer one nation, we had already split into two.

The people who’d called themselves communists suddenly started confessing that they’d hated communism from the day they were born. They returned their Party membership cards. Some showed up and handed in their Party cards in silence, others slammed the door behind themselves. People would toss them in front of the district Party headquarters at night, stealing away like thieves. If you’re going to do it, at least give up communism with a clean conscience! But no, they did it in secret. Every morning, the yardsmen would collect the discarded Party membership cards and Komsomol certificates from around the courtyard and bring them all to us. They’d gather them by the bag full, in big, plastic bags…What were we supposed to do with all that stuff? Where were we supposed to take it? There were no orders. No signals from above. Instead, there was dead silence. [
Falls deep in thought.
] Those were the times…when people started changing everything…absolutely everything. Starting over from scratch. Some left, changing homelands. Some changed their convictions and principles. Others changed their possessions, buying all new stuff for their homes. Throwing out everything old and Soviet, and replacing it with everything new and imported…The shuttle traders had already brought it all over: electric kettles, telephones, furniture…refrigerators…Mountains of goods materialized out of God knows where. “I have a Bosch washing machine.” “I bought a Siemens TV.” Every conversation was sprinkled with words like “Panasonic,” “Sony,” “Philips”…I ran into my neighbor: “I’m embarrassed that I’m so excited because of a German coffee grinder…but I’m just so happy!” It had only been moments ago—just a moment ago—that she’d spent the night waiting in line to get her hands on a volume of Akhmatova. Now she was head over heels for a coffee grinder. Some piece of junk…People threw away their Party membership cards like they were just trash. It was hard to believe…The whole world had transformed in a matter of days. Tsarist Russia, as you can read in the memoirs, slipped away in three days, and the same went for communism. A matter of days. It boggles the mind…There were also the kind of people who hid their membership cards, stashing them away just in case. I was recently at a house where they took down a bust of Lenin from the storage cabinet to show me. They’re holding on to it for a rainy day…The communists will come back, and they’ll be the first ones to pin the red bow on once more. [
She is silent for a long time.
] I had hundreds of declarations of resignation from the Party piled on my desk…Soon enough, they were all rounded up and taken out to the trash. To rot at the dump. [
She looks for something in the folders on the table.
] I saved a few…One day, a museum will ask me for them. They’ll come looking…[
She begins reading from them.
]

“I was a devoted Komsomol member…I joined the Party with a sincere heart. Today, I wish to say that the Party no longer has any power over me…”

“The times have led me into confusion…I used to believe in the Great October Revolution. After reading Solzhenitsyn, I realized that the ‘beautiful ideals of communism’ were all drenched in blood. It was all a lie…”