Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (33 page)

…Near Kursk, I ran into my one-time interrogator, the former school principal. I had the thought, “Well, you bastard, you’re mine now. I’ll kill you during battle, and no one will ever know.” I wanted to…yes, I did. But I never got the chance. We even had an exchange. “We share a Motherland.” Those were his words. He was a brave man. A hero. He died at Königsberg. What can I say…I’m not going to lie…I thought that God had done my job for me.

I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you. She’s died. But you can have your honor back…” And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy…

[
I tell him that I will never understand that—never. He loses his temper.
]

You can’t judge us according to logic. You accountants! You have to understand! You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous! What greatness do you have in your life? You have nothing. Just comfort. Anything for a full belly…Those stomachs of yours…Stuff your face and fill your house with tchotchkes. But I…my generation…We built everything you have. The factories, the dams, the electric power stations. What have you ever built? And we were the ones who defeated Hitler. After the war, whenever anyone had a baby, it was such a great joy! A different kind of happiness than what we’d felt before the war. I could have wept…[
He closes his eyes. He’s tired.
] Ahhh, we were believers. And now, they’ve passed the verdict on us: You believed in utopia…We did! My favorite novel is Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?
Nobody reads it anymore. It’s boring. People only read the title, the eternal Russian question: What is to be done? For us, this book was like the catechism. The textbook for the Revolution. People would learn entire pages of it by heart. Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream…[
He recites it like a poem.
] “Houses made of crystal and aluminum…Crystal palaces! Lemon and orange groves in the cities. There are almost no elderly, people get old very late in life because life is so wonderful. Machines do all the work, people just drive and control them. The machines sow seeds and knit…The fields are thick with verdure and bounty. Flowers as tall as trees. Everyone is happy. Joyful. Everyone goes around in fine clothes, men and women alike, leading free lives of labor and pleasure. There’s enough space and work for everyone. Is this really us? Can this really be our Earth? And everyone will live this way? The future is bright and wonderful…” Get out of here…[
He gestures in the direction of his grandson.
] He giggles at me…To him, I’m a little old fool. That’s how we live now.

—Dostoevsky had a response to Chernyshevsky: “Go on and build your crystal palace, but I will throw a stone at it. Not because I’m hungry and living in a cellar, but just because—out of my own free will…”

[
He gets angry.
]

—You think that communism was like an infectious disease, as they write in today’s newspapers? That it was brought over in a sealed train car from Germany?
^*17
Nonsense! The people revolted. There was no Tsarist “golden age” like the one that’s suddenly being remembered today. Fairy tales! Like the ones about how we fed America with our grain and decided the fate of Europe. The Russian soldier died for everyone—that’s the truth. But the way people lived…In my family, there was one pair of snow boots for five children. We ate potatoes with bread and, in the winter, without bread. Just potatoes…And you ask me where communists came from.

I remember so much…and for what? Huh? For what? What am I supposed to do with all of this? We loved the future. The people of the future. We’d argue about when the future was going to come. Definitely in a hundred years, we thought. But it seemed too far away for us…[
He catches his breath.
]

[
I turn off the tape recorder.
]

Good. It’s better without the tape recorder…I need to tell someone this story…

I was fifteen. Red Army troops had come to our village. On horseback. Drunk. A subdivision. They slept until evening, and then they rounded up all the Komsomol members. The Commander addressed us, “The Red Army is starving. Lenin is starving. While the kulaks are hiding their grain. Burning it.” I knew that my mother’s brother, Uncle Semyon, had taken sacks of grain into the woods and buried them. I was a Komsomol youth, I’d taken the oath. That night, I went to the troops and led them to where he’d buried the grain. They got a whole cartload. The Commander shook my hand: “Hurry up and grow up, brother.” In the morning, I woke up to my mother screaming, “Semyon’s house is on fire!” They found Uncle Semyon in the woods, the soldiers had cut him to pieces with their sabers…I was fifteen. The Red Army was starving…and Lenin…I was afraid to go outside, I sat in the house, weeping. My mother figured out what had happened. That night, she handed me a feedbag and told me, “Leave, son! Let God forgive your miserable soul.” [
He covered his eyes with his hand. But I could still see he was crying.
]

I want to die a communist. That’s my final wish.

—

In the nineties, I published a part of this confession. My protagonist let someone read it, consulted with somebody else, and they convinced him that the publication of this story in its entirety would “show the Party in a negative light,” which was his greatest fear. After he died, they found his will. His large, three-bedroom apartment in the center of the city was not bequeathed to his grandsons but to “serve the needs of my beloved Communist Party, to which I owe everything.” They even wrote about it in the evening paper. No one could understand it anymore. Everyone laughed at the crazy old man. They never did put a monument on his grave.

Now I have decided to publish his story in full. It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual.

*1
Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925) was a Soviet army officer and military theorist. He is regarded as one of the fathers of the Red Army. Nikolay Shchors (1895–1919) was a Red Army Commander renowned for his courage during the post-Revolution civil war.

*2
Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991) worked closely with Stalin and was one of the leading political figures behind collectivization and the purges. After occupying several high-ranking posts, he fell into relative disfavor after 1957.

*3
Vasily Chapayev (1887–1919) was a celebrated Red Army Commander whose exploits were later novelized and, in 1934, adapted into a wildly popular film. Chapayev and his aide-de-camp Petka would later become recurring characters in Soviet jokes.

*4
Yemilyan Pugachev (1742–1775) was a pretender to the throne who led a Cossack insurrection against Catherine the Great.

*5
The City of the Sun
is a work of utopian fiction by philosopher Tommaso Campanella, written in 1602 describing a theocratic society where goods, women, and children are all shared.

*6
Party members who had joined before the 1917 Revolution came to be known as “Old Bolsheviks.” Many of them were tried and executed during Stalin’s purges.

*7
Faina Ranevskaya (1896–1984) was a famous actress known for her strong character and propensity to speak her mind. Some of her expressions have become proverbial.

*8
Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) was a second lieutenant in the Tsarist army during World War I and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. He commanded the Red Army offensive against Poland in 1920 and put down the Kronstadt uprising in 1921. Named a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935, he was a victim of the purges and was executed in 1937.

*9
Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was a Russian revolutionary who went on to become the most prominent woman in early Soviet politics. She is best known for her work for women’s emancipation. “Like drinking a glass of water” is a famous expression from Kollontai’s book on communist morality in sexual relations.

*10
Subbotniks
were officially designated days for volunteer work, typically Saturdays, that were first instituted in 1919. Citizens would work together to clean streets, fix public amenities, collect recyclables, and other such activities. In some places, the tradition is carried on to this day.

*11
A peaked felt hat that became an essential part of the Red Army uniform during the Russian Civil War, named after Semyon Budyonny, a close ally of Stalin’s responsible for organizing the powerful Red Cavalry.

*12
A popular Soviet satirical magazine.

*13
A White Guard song that saw a resurgence in popularity in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

*14
Vasily Blyukher (1889–1938) was a high-ranking officer in the Red Army who presided over the tribunal that condemned Tukhachevsky before he himself was arrested and executed as a spy in 1938.

*15
Genrikh Yagoda (1891–1938) served as the director of the NKVD from 1934 to 1936 and oversaw the show trials of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, which heralded the Great Purge. He was demoted in 1936, arrested in 1937, and executed in 1938 after being found guilty of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism, and conspiracy. His successor, Nikolai Yezhov (1895–1940), ran the NKVD until 1938, presiding over mass arrests and executions during the Great Purge, before he too was arrested, tried, and executed.

*16
The Socialist Revolutionary Party played an active role in the fall of Tsarism but was systematically destroyed by the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution, with many of its members executed or deported.

*17
An allusion to Lenin’s pivotal journey from Germany to Russia in 1917 in a sealed train car.

EXCERPTS FROM THE COMMUNIST NEWSPAPERS

Timeryan Khabulovich Zinatov was one of the heroic defenders of the Brest fortress, which bore the initial brunt of the Nazi incursion on the morning of June 22, 1941.

He is of Tatar nationality. Before the war, he was a cadet (42nd sniper unit of the 44th rifle division). In the first days of defending the fortress, he was taken prisoner after being wounded. Twice, he attempted escape from German concentration camps, and his second attempt was successful. He finished the war as he started it, in the field forces as a private. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War (Second Level) for defending the Brest Fortress. After the war, he traveled the entire country working for construction projects in the far north as well as on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway. After retiring, he remained in Siberia, in Ust-Kut.

Even though Ust-Kut is thousands of kilometers away from Brest, Timeryan Zinatov would visit the fortress every year, bringing cakes to the museum staff. Everyone knew him. Why did he visit so often? Like his friends from his regiment who would meet him here, he only felt truly safe at the fortress. Here, nobody ever doubted that these veterans were our nation’s true—and not imaginary—heroes. At the fortress, no one dared to say anything like, “If you hadn’t won, we’d be drinking Bavarian beer and living in Europe.” Those damn perestroikites! If they only understood that if their grandfathers had not been victorious, we would have been a country of housemaids and swineherds. Hitler wrote that Slavic children should only be taught to count to one hundred.

The last time Zinatov came to Brest was in September 1992. Everything was the same as ever: He met with his friends with whom he’d fought at the front, and they strolled through the fortress grounds. Naturally, he noticed that the stream of visitors had grown appreciably thinner. It had become fashionable to slander our Soviet past and its heroes…

Finally, the time came for them to go their separate ways. On Friday, he said goodbye to everyone, telling them that he was going home over the weekend. None of them even suspected that this time, he had come to the fortress to stay forever.

When the museum staff arrived on Monday morning, they received a phone call from the transportation police office: The defender of the Brest fortress, survivor of the bloody battle of 1941, had thrown himself under a train.

Someone will be sure to recall how the neatly dressed old man with the suitcase had spent a long time standing on the platform. Among his possessions, investigators found seven thousand rubles he had brought from home in order to cover his funeral expenses and a suicide note cursing the Yeltsin-Gaidar administration for the humiliating and impoverished way of life they’d brought about. And for their betrayal of the Great Victory. He asked to be buried in the fortress.