Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (18 page)

We loved our Motherland, our love for her was boundless, she was everything to us! The first Soviet car—hurrah! An illiterate worker unlocked the secret to making our own Soviet stainless steel—victory! The fact that everyone in the world had already known this secret for a long time is something we only found out later. Back then: We’re going to be the first to fly over the North Pole, we’re going to learn how to control the Northern Lights! We’ll change the course of the mightiest rivers…We’ll irrigate the endless deserts…Faith! Faith! Faith! Something higher than reason. I would wake up to the sound of the national anthem instead of an alarm clock: “Unbreakable Union of free republics, / For ages, united by Mighty Rus…” We sang a lot in school. I remember our songs…[
She sings.
]

Our fathers dreamt of joy and freedom.

For this, they battled more than once.

Braving war, Lenin and Stalin,

Built our Fatherland for us…

At home, we remembered how…When the anthem played on the radio the day after I was accepted into the Young Pioneers, I leapt up and stood on my bed at attention. The Pioneer oath: “I hereby am joining the ranks…in the presence of my comrades…I solemnly swear to passionately love my Motherland…” At home, we celebrated. The smell of the pies baked in my honor filled the air. I always wore my red Pioneers’ kerchief, I would wash it and iron it every morning so that it never had a single wrinkle. Even when I was already in college, I continued tying my scarves in a Pioneers’ knot. My Komsomol membership card…I still have it…I pretended to be a year older so that they would let me join sooner. I loved walking through the streets, you could always hear the radio…The radio was our life, it was everything. You’d open the window and music would pour in, the kind of music that made you want to get up and march around your apartment. Like a soldier…It might have been a prison, but I was warmer in that prison. That’s what we were used to…Even today, when we stand in line, we huddle close to one another and try to be together. Have you noticed that? [
Again, she starts to quietly sing.
]

Stalin is our warrior glory,

Stalin is the joy of youth,

Singing, battling, victorious

Our nation follows Stalin’s path…

And yes! Yes! Yes! My greatest dream was to die! To sacrifice myself. Give myself away. The Komsomol oath: “I am prepared to give up my life if my nation should need it.” These weren’t just words, that’s what we were really taught. If we saw a column of soldiers marching down the street, everyone would stop…After the Victory, the soldier became an extraordinary figure…When I was entering the Party, in my application, I wrote, “I know and accept the Party Program and Regulations. I am prepared to devote all of my energy, and, if necessary, to give my life to my Motherland.” [
She examines me carefully.
] And what do you think of me? That I’m an idiot? That I’m infantile…? Some of the people I know…they have outright laughed at me: emotional socialism, the ideals on paper…That’s what I look like to them. Stupid! Down syndrome! You’re “an engineer of human souls.” 
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You want to comfort me? Our writers are more than just writers. You’re teachers. Spiritual leaders. That’s how it used to be; it’s not like that anymore. Many people go to church these days. There are very few believers among them, the majority are just sufferers. Like me…traumatized…I’m not a believer in the canonical sense, but I do believe with my heart. I don’t know the prayers, but I pray…Our priest is a former officer, his sermons are always about the army, the atom bomb. The enemies of Russia and Masonic conspiracies. But I want to hear about something else, something totally different…Not that. But that’s all there is, everywhere you turn…So much hatred…There’s nowhere for the soul to hide from it. I turn on the TV, and it’s the same thing, nothing but denunciations. Everyone rejecting the past. Cursing it. My favorite director, Mark Zakharov, whom I don’t love and trust liked I used to…He burned his Party membership card and they showed it on TV…He did it in public. This isn’t theater! This is life! My life. How can you treat it like that? My life…I don’t need these spectacles…[
She weeps.
]

I’ve fallen behind…I’m one of the people who’s fallen behind…Everyone else transferred from the train that was hurtling toward socialism onto the train racing to capitalism. I’m late…People laugh at the
sovok:
He’s trash, he’s a dope. They laugh at me…Now the Reds are the monsters and the Whites are knights. My heart and mind rebel, I can’t accept it on a physiological level. I won’t allow the thought in. I can’t, I’m incapable…I embraced Gorbachev, even though I criticized him…He was…Now it’s clear to me that, like the rest of us, he was a dreamer. An ideas man. You could call him that. But I wasn’t prepared for Yeltsin…for Gaidar’s reforms. All our money disappeared at the snap of his fingers. Our money and our lives along with it…In the blink of an eye, everything became worthless. Instead of the bright future, they started telling us to get rich, love money…Bow down to this beast! The people were not prepared. No one had even dreamed of capitalism, I can tell you that about myself, I definitely had not…I liked socialism. The Brezhnev years…Vegetarian times…I wasn’t around for the cannibalism. Pakhmutova had a song: “Under the wing of the airplane, the green sea of the taiga sings…” I was prepared to make close friends with and build “blue cities.”
^*5
To dream! “I know, there’ll be a city…” “There’ll be a garden city here…” I loved Mayakovsky. Patriotic poems and songs. They were so important back then. They meant so much to us. No one can convince me that we were given life just to eat and sleep to our hearts’ content. That a hero is someone who buys something one place and sells it down the road for three kopecks more. That’s what they want us to believe now…It turns out that everyone who had given up their lives for others had been a fool. Everyone who’d died for lofty ideals. No! No! Yesterday, I was standing in line at the store…An old woman in front of me kept counting the change in her wallet. She ended up buying one hundred grams of the cheapest salami…“Dog salami”…and two eggs. I know her, too…Her whole life, she’d worked as a teacher.

I can’t get excited about this new life! I’m not going to do well, I’m never going to be happy on my own. Alone. And life keeps pulling and pulling me into this muck. Down to the earth. My children already live according to these new laws. They don’t need me anymore, I seem ridiculous. My whole life…I was going through papers and came across my teenage diary: my first love, my first kiss, and pages and pages about how much I loved Stalin, how I was prepared to die just to see him. Notes of a madwoman…I wanted to throw it away, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I hid it. I’m scared, I hope no one finds it. They’d mock me and laugh at me. I didn’t show it to anyone…[
She is silent.
] I remember many things that can’t be explained rationally. I’m a rare specimen! A therapist’s dream…isn’t that right? You’re very lucky to have found me…[
She laughs and cries at the same time.
]

Ask me…You have to ask how these things coexisted: our happiness and the fact that they came for some people at night and took them away. Some people disappeared, while others cried behind the door. For some reason, I don’t remember any of that. I don’t! I remember how the lilacs blossomed in the spring, and everyone outside, strolling; the wooden walkways warmed by the sun. The smell of the sun. The blinding mass demonstrations: athletes, the names of Lenin and Stalin woven from human bodies and flowers on Red Square. I would ask my mother this question, too…

What do we remember about Beria? About the Lubyanka? My mother was silent on this…She once told me the story of how one summer, after a vacation to Crimea with Papa, they were returning to Moscow through Ukraine. It was the 1930s, during collectivization…There was a huge famine in Ukraine, they call it Holodomor. Millions of people died…Entire villages…No one was left to bury anyone. Ukrainians were killed because they didn’t want to join collective farms. They were starved to death. Now I know about it…They used to have the Zaporozhian Sich,
^*6
the people remembered freedom…The soil there is so fertile you can stick a stake in and it’ll grow into a tree. And yet they were dying…dropping dead like cattle. They had everything taken away from them, down to the last poppy pod. They were surrounded by troops like in a concentration camp. Now I know…One of my friends at work is Ukrainian, she heard about it from her grandmother…How in their village, a mother killed one of her children with an axe, cooked him and fed him to the others. Her own child…All of this really happened. Parents were afraid to let their kids out of their yards because people hunted them like cats and dogs. They’d dig up earthworms in their gardens and eat them. Those who had the strength would crawl into town to the train tracks. Waiting for passengers to toss them bread crusts from passing trains…Soldiers would kick them, beat them with their gun butts…The trains rushed by at full speed. Conductors would shut the windows, batten down the blinds. No one asked anyone about anything. They’d go straight back to Moscow. Bearing wine and fruit, showing off their tans, talking about the sea. [
Silence.
] I loved Stalin…I loved him for a long time. I kept loving him even when they started writing that he was short, red-headed, and had a lame hand. That he shot his wife. After he was dethroned. Thrown out of the Mausoleum. I kept loving him all the same.

I was a Stalin girl for a long time, a very long time. Yes…that’s how it was! With me…with us…With that life gone, I’m left empty-handed. I have nothing…a pauper! I was proud of our neighbor Vanya, he was a real hero! He returned from the war without any legs. He pushed himself around in a homemade wooden wheelchair. Called me “my Margaritka” and fixed everyone’s boots and felt boots. When he was drunk, he’d sing, “My dearest brothers and sisters / I heroically did battle…” A few days after Stalin died, I saw him, and he went, “What do you know, Margaritka, that you-know-what finally croaked…” That’s what he said—about my Stalin! I tore my felt boots out of his hands: “How dare you? You’re a hero! With a medal.” For two days, I deliberated: I’m a Young Pioneer, so it’s my duty to go to the NKVD and tell them about what Vanya said. I have to file a report. This was a very serious matter—it really was! Like Pavlik Morozov,
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I was capable of informing on my own father…my mother…I could have done it. Really, I was ready! Then, coming home from school, I found Vanya lying on the ground, drunk in the building entrance. He’d tumbled off his wheelchair and couldn’t get up. I took pity on him.

That’s how I am…I would sit there with my ear pressed to the radio listening to the hourly updates on Comrade Stalin’s health. Crying. With my whole heart. That happened! That’s how it was! These were Stalin’s times…and we were Stalin’s people…My mother is from the gentry. A few months before the Revolution, she’d married an officer who ended up fighting in the White Guard. They parted ways in Odessa: He emigrated with the remains of Denikin’s shattered troops, but she couldn’t leave her paralyzed mother behind, so she stayed. The Cheka
^*8
arrested her as the wife of a White Guard soldier. The investigator in charge of her case fell in love with her. Somehow he managed to save her, but in return, he forced her to marry him. He’d come home drunk after work and beat her over the head with a pistol. Eventually, he disappeared somewhere. That’s my mother…She was a true beauty, she adored music, spoke several languages, and was crazy for Stalin. Whenever he was unsatisfied with anything, she would threaten my father: “I’ll go to the district Party committee and tell them what kind of communist you really are.” And my father…my father took part in the Revolution…In 1937, he was repressed
^*9
…But they soon let him out because a prominent Bolshevik who knew him personally intervened on his behalf. Vouched for him. But they wouldn’t let him back into the Party. It was a blow he would never recover from. In jail, they’d knocked his teeth out and crushed his skull. Still, my father didn’t change his stripes, he remained a communist to the end of his life. Explain that to me…Do you think that these people are idiots? Simpletons? They’re not—they were smart, educated people. My mother read Shakespeare and Goethe in the originals, my father graduated from the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. And what about Blok…Mayakovsky…Inessa Armand?
^*10
My idols…My heroes…the ones I grew up with…[
She falls into thought.
]

At a certain point, I learned how to fly a plane. The plane we learned to fly would shock you: How did we manage to stay alive? Instead of wings, it had these handmade wooden planks wrapped in burlap. You flew it with a gear stick and a pedal. But it was so amazing to fly—seeing the birds, the earth from above. It makes you feel like you have wings! The sky changes you…the heights transform you…Do you understand what I’m getting at? I’m talking about our old life. I don’t feel sorry for myself, I feel bad for everything we used to love…