Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (3 page)

On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus secretly meet in western Belarus and sign the Belavezha Accords, declaring the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. On the night of December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag is lowered for the last time and the Russian tricolor is raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigns. In a period of great tumult, Yeltsin takes on both the prime ministerial and presidential roles.

The newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are created and immediately succumb to violent ethnic conflicts. Armenia and Azerbaijan fight over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave; Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjara fight to secede from Georgia. Dzhokhar Dudayev takes power in Chechnya and proclaims independence.

JANUARY 1992:
The liberalization of prices leads to massive, destabilizing inflation, from 200 percent initially to a high of 2600 percent.

AUTUMN 1993:
In response to President Yeltsin’s attempt to dissolve the parliament, the parliament impeaches Yeltsin and proclaims vice president Alexander Rustkoy president. In events reminiscent of the 1991 putsch, demonstrators congregate at the White House and attempt to storm the Ostankino television tower. On Yeltsin’s orders, the army storms the White House and arrests members of the parliament who oppose Yeltsin.

The ten-day standoff between protesters supporting the parliament and army-backed Yeltsin supporters leads to the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since 1917. Estimates place the death toll as high as two thousand casualties.

1994–1995:
First Chechen War.

1998:
Economic difficulties, which dramatically lowered the quality of life of the population throughout the 1990s, lead to a financial crisis and a brutal devaluation of the ruble.

1999–2000:
Second Chechen War. On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigns and Vladimir Putin becomes president of the Russian Federation. In 2000, Putin wins his first presidential election against Communist opponent Gennady Zyuganov, firmly establishing his power.

OCTOBER 2003:
Oil magnate and prominent liberal Mikhail Khodorkovsky is arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud, an early casualty of Putin’s campaign to drive Yeltsin-era oligarchs out of politics. The imprisonment of Khodorovsky and seizure of his assets marks the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to transfer control of all major Russian industries to his political party, United Russia. This economic takeover, necessitating a great deal of corrupt maneuvering, also leads to the necessity of silencing criticism and dissent in the press. By 2010, most formerly privately owned media enterprises are under government control, including nearly all major television networks. Independent media outlets are almost exclusively relegated to the Internet.

2008:
War breaks out between Georgia and South Ossetia. Dmitri Medvedev of United Russia is elected president of the Russian Federation and names Putin prime minister.

DECEMBER 2010:
Alexander Lukashenko is reelected for a fourth term as president of Belarus. This leads to protests, which are brutally repressed.

DECEMBER 2011:
Prime Minister Putin declares that he will once again run for president in 2012, with Dmitri Medvedev as prime minister; effectively Putin and Medvedev will switch places. This sparks the first major antigovernment protests since the early 1990s. While these are tacitly tolerated, individual activists begin to be arrested and penalized in larger numbers than previously, and the parliament begins to seriously curtail the rights of activist groups and nongovernmental organizations that work in opposition to government policies.

FEBRUARY 2012:
Putin is reelected president of Russia with 63 percent of the vote and names Medvedev prime minister. Oppositionists again take to the streets of several major cities to protest; the police arrest hundreds. Putin’s government harshly punishes a handful of protesters, intensifying its efforts to repress political dissent in the Russian Federation.

FEBRUARY–MAY 2014:
The Maidan protests in Kiev, Ukraine, lead to armed conflict between Ukrainians supporting a pro–European Union political orientation and those who wish to remain under the Russian sphere of influence. After the flight from Ukraine of pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych, Russian forces take over Crimea, which then votes to join Russia in a referendum. At the same time, Russia denies that its forces have entered Ukraine and are providing financial and military support to pro-Russian groups, effectively fueling a civil war in Ukraine. These events spark the biggest East-West showdown since the Cold War, with the United States and its European allies imposing harsh sanctions on Russia.

We’re paying our respects to the Soviet era. Cutting ties with our old life. I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama…

Communism had an insane plan: to remake the “old breed of man,” ancient Adam. And it really worked…Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement. Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man:
Homo sovieticus.
Some see him as a tragic figure, others call him a
sovok.
^*1
I feel like I know this person; we’re very familiar, we’ve lived side by side for a long time. I am this person. And so are my acquaintances, my closest friends, my parents. For a number of years, I traveled throughout the former Soviet Union—
Homo sovieticus
isn’t just Russian, he’s Belarusian, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Kazakh. Although we now live in separate countries and speak different languages, you couldn’t mistake us for anyone else. We’re easy to spot! People who’ve come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity—we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: “shoot,” “execute,” “liquidate,” “eliminate,” or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as “arrest,” “ten years without the right of correspondence,”
^*2
and “emigration.” How much can we value human life when we know that not long ago people had died by the millions? We’re full of hatred and superstitions. All of us come from the land of the gulag and harrowing war. Collectivization, dekulakization,
^*3
mass deportations of various nationalities…

This was socialism, but it was also just everyday life. Back then, we didn’t talk about it very much. Now that the world has transformed irreversibly, everyone is suddenly interested in that old life of ours—whatever it may have been like, it was our life. In writing, I’m piecing together the history of “domestic,” “interior” socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.

—

Why does this book contain so many stories of suicides instead of more typical Soviets with typically Soviet life stories? When it comes down to it, people end their lives for love, from fear of old age, or just out of curiosity, from a desire to come face to face with the mystery of death. I sought out people who had been permanently bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply that there was no separating them: The state had become their entire cosmos, blocking out everything else, even their own lives. They couldn’t just walk away from History, leaving it all behind and learning to live without it—diving headfirst into the new way of life and dissolving into private existence, like so many others who now allowed what used to be minor details to become their big picture. Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: After we finished school, we’d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands,
^*4
and we’d look down on the students who didn’t want to come. We were bitterly disappointed that the Revolution and Civil War had all happened before our time. Now you wonder: Was that really us? Was that me? I reminisced alongside my protagonists. One of them said, “Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.” We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.

—

My father would say that he personally started believing in communism after Gagarin went into space. We’re the first! We can do anything! That’s how he and my mother raised us. I was a Little Octobrist, I sported the pin with the curly-headed boy; I was a Young Pioneer, then a member of the Komsomol.
^*5
Disillusionment came later.

After perestroika
,
we were all impatient for the archives to be unsealed. Finally, it happened. We learned the history that they had been hiding from us…

We need to attract ninety million out of the hundred that populate Soviet Russia. It’s impossible to talk to the rest of them—they must be eliminated. (Zinoviev, 1918)

We must hang (and it has to be hanging, so that the people will see) no fewer than 1,000 inveterate kulaks
,
the rich ones…seize their grain, take hostages…Make sure that people hear about it one hundred versts
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around and tremble from fear…(Lenin, 1918)

Moscow is literally dying of hunger. (N. G. Kuznetsov to Trotsky)

That’s not hunger. When Titus was taking Jerusalem, Jewish mothers ate their children. When I have your mothers eating their young, then you can tell me you’re starving. (Trotsky, 1919)

People read newspapers and magazines and sat in stunned silence. They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well. “We don’t know our own nation. We don’t understand what the majority of people think about; we see them, we interact with them every day, but what’s on their minds? What do they want? We have no idea. But we will courageously take it upon ourselves to educate them. Soon, we will learn the whole truth and be horrified,” my friend would say in my kitchen, where we often sat talking. I’d argue with him. It was 1991…What an incredibly happy time! We believed that tomorrow, the very next day, would usher in freedom. That it would materialize out of nowhere, from the sheer force of our wishing.

From Varlam Shalamov’s
Notebooks:
^*7
“I participated in the great lost battle for the true reinvention of life.” The man who wrote these words spent seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. He continued to yearn for the ideals…I would divide the Soviets into four generations: the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these. It was easier for my generation to accept the defeat of the communist Idea because we hadn’t been born yet when it was still young, strong, and brimming with the magic of fatal romanticism and utopian aspirations. We grew up with the Kremlin ancients, in Lenten, vegetarian times.
^*8
The great bloodshed of communism had already been lost to the ages. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was already ingrained in us.

This was during the first Chechen war…At a train station in Moscow, I met a woman from the Tambov area. She was headed to Chechnya to take her son home. “I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to kill.” The government no longer owned her soul, this was a free person. There were not many of them. More often, people were irritated with freedom. “I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read
Pravda,
and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.” People were slow to come out from under the narcosis of old ideas. If I brought up repentance, the response would be, “What do I have to repent for?” Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One person would say, “I did time, too”; another, “I fought in the war”; a third, “I built my city up from the ruins, hauling bricks day and night.” Freedom had materialized out of thin air: Everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had really been prepared. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables, where out of habit people continued to badmouth the government. They reviled Yeltsin and Gorbachev: Yeltsin for changing Russia, and Gorbachev for changing everything. The entire twentieth century. Now we would live no worse than anyone else. We’d be just like everyone else. We thought that this time, we’d finally get it right.