Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (49 page)

“…They would issue us certificates: ‘For performing special Party and government missions,’ ‘For dedication to the mission of the Party of Lenin and Stalin.’ I have a whole cupboard full of these awards, all printed on excellent paper. Once a year, they would send me and my family to a good sanatorium. Great food…lots of meat, medical treatment…My wife didn’t know anything about what I did. It was top secret, important work—that’s all she knew. I married for love.

“…During the war, we were trying to save ammunition. If we were by the sea, we’d pack a barge tight as a can of sardines. It wouldn’t be screaming coming from the hold, but a beastly roar…‘Our proud Varangian never surrenders / No one seeks mercy here…’ The hands of each of the condemned were bound with wire, and a stone would be tied to their feet. If it was calm weather, a calm sea, you could watch them sinking for hours…What are you looking at me for? You little punk! What are you looking at? Shit…!!! Pour me another! That was our job. Work…I’m telling you this so that you understand: The Soviet state cost us dearly. It needs to be guarded. Preserved! At night, we’d go back to the sea, and the barges would be empty. Dead silence. Everyone had the same thought: as soon as we set foot on the shore, they’ll…Shit…!!! For years, I kept a wooden suitcase ready under my bed: a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a razor. I slept with a gun under my pillow…always prepared to put a bullet through my forehead. Everyone lived like that in those days! Soldiers and marshals alike. In that, we were equals.

“When war broke out, I immediately asked to be sent to the front. It’s not that frightening to die in battle. At least you know that you’re dying for the Motherland. It’s all very straightforward. I liberated Poland and Czechoslovakia…Shit…!!! I finished my tour of duty in Berlin. I have two decorations and medals. Victory! Then…what happened was, after the Victory, I was arrested. The special service agents had the lists prepared ahead of time. For Chekists, there are only two ways out of the service: Either you die by the enemy’s hand or at the hands of the NKVD. They gave me seven years. And I did all seven. To this day, I still wake up like I did at the camps, at six on the dot. What was I in for? They never told me. What was I in for?! Shit…!!!”

[
He nervously crumples the empty pack of cigarettes.
]

Maybe he was lying. But no, of course he wasn’t lying…It didn’t seem like it…I don’t think so. In the morning, I made up some excuse, some nonsense, and left. I ran! Called off the wedding. Uh-huh, yep…How could I marry her? I couldn’t go back to that house. I couldn’t! I went to my regiment. My fiancée…she didn’t understand what had happened. She wrote me letters…suffered…and I did, too. But that’s not what we’re talking about right now. This isn’t about love—that’s another story. I want to understand—and you want to understand, as well—what kind of people they were. Right? After all, a murderer is an interesting kind of person. No matter how you cut it, a murderer can’t be just a regular guy. You’re drawn to him. It pulls you in…Evil is mesmerizing. There are hundreds of books about Hitler and Stalin. What were they like as children, with their families, with the women they loved…? Their wine and their favorite cigarettes…We’re interested in every last detail. We want to understand…Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, who were they? Who? And the millions of people like them…miniature copies…They also committed atrocities and only handfuls of them lost their minds. While the rest led normal lives: kissing girls and playing chess…Buying toys for their kids…Each one of them thinking, “That isn’t me.” I wasn’t the one putting those people on the rack or blowing their brains out, that wasn’t me back there putting sharpened pencils through women’s nipples. It’s not me, it’s the system. Even Stalin…even he’d say, “I’m not the one who decides, it’s the Party.” He taught his son: You think that I’m Stalin—you’re wrong! That’s Stalin! And he’d point to the portrait of himself hanging on the wall. Not at himself, but at his portrait. Meanwhile, for decades, the death machine worked nonstop…Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the victims. As though it wasn’t just people running it…Things are only that perfect in nature. The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame. No one! Everyone wants to be pitied. Everyone is a victim. Everyone is at the bottom of the food chain. There! I was young, I got scared, I was bewildered. Today, I would have asked him more questions…I need to know these things…Why? I’m afraid. Knowing what I know about people, I’m afraid of myself. Scared. I’m an ordinary man…weak…I’m black and white and yellow…I’m all sorts of things. In Soviet school, they taught us that by himself, man is good, he’s great. And even today, my mother still believes that it is only terrible circumstances that make him terrible, but man is essentially good! That’s just not how it is. It’s not! No…Man vacillates between good and evil for his entire life. Either you’re stabbing someone in the nipples with a pencil, or you’re getting stabbed…Take your pick! Go ahead! It’s been so many years, but I still can’t forget it…He shouted, “I watch TV, I listen to the radio. It’s the rich and poor all over again. Some people gorge themselves on caviar, buy islands and private jets, while others can’t afford a loaf of white bread. This won’t last long around here! People will once again acknowledge Stalin’s greatness. The axe is right where it always was…The axe will survive the master. Mark my words…You asked how long a man is a man, how long can he hang on? I’ll tell you: The leg of a Viennese chair in the anus or a nail to the scrotum, and he’s gone. Ha ha…no longer a man…just some crap on the floor!”

[
Taking his leave.
]

They’ve shaken up our entire history…Thousands of revelations, tons of truth. For some, the past is a trunk of flesh and a barrel of blood. For others, it’s a great era. We butt heads in our kitchens every day. But soon enough, the next generation is going to come of age…the young wolves, as Stalin called them. They’ll be grown soon…

[
He attempts to leave, but suddenly resumes talking.
]

I recently saw these old snapshots online—just these regular-looking war-era photos, if you don’t know who they are of. It’s an SS brigade from Auschwitz, officers and privates. Lots of girls. They took pictures at parties, while they were out strolling. Young people having fun. [
A pause.
] And how about the photos of our own Chekists that you see at museums? Take a close look at them sometime: You’ll see their handsome and inspired faces. For a long time, we were taught that these people were saints…

I would like to leave this country or at least get my kids out of here. We’re going to leave. The axe will survive the master…I never forgot those words…

—

A few days later, he called me and forbade me to publish his story. Why? He refused to explain. Later, I found out that he and his family had emigrated to Canada. When, after another ten years, I reconnected with him, he finally agreed to let me publish it. He said, “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”

*1
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (1923–1941) was a Soviet partisan murdered by Nazis during World War II after setting fire to a number of horse stables and houses occupied by a German calvary regiment. She became a martyr and Hero of the Soviet Union. Alexander Matrosov (1924–1943) was a Soviet infantry soldier who threw himself onto a German machine gun.

*2
Dziękuję bardzo
and
wszystko jedno:
“Thank you very much” and “Doesn’t matter.”

*3
Prison slang for “prostitute…slut…snitches…”

*4
Burial mounds of “glory” and “immortality” were erected in the 1960s across the Soviet Union to commemorate the fatalities of World War II.

*5
Magnitka was the name given to the famous Magnitogorsk steel factory built by camp inmates. Vorkuta was an infamous forced labor camp.

*6
The Chelyuskinites were the polar explorers aboard the SS
Chelyuskin,
a Soviet steamship tasked with testing the possibility of traveling the Northern Maritime Route through the Arctic without an icebreaker. The failed 1933 expedition resulted in the unlikely survival of its crew. Famed Russian aviator Valery Chkalov (1904–1938) was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

*7
Sergei Korolev (1907–1966) was a Soviet rocket scientist and rocket designer who oversaw the Sputnik project and Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. He was the leading figure behind the Soviet space project.

*8
Aleksandr Kuprin (1870–1938) was a novelist best known for
The Duel,
a 1905 realist novel on life as a soldier in the Tsar’s army. After the Revolution, Kuprin emigrated to France, but returned to the Soviet Union in 1936.

*9
Viktor Tsoi (1962–1990) was a Soviet musician, leader of the underground postpunk band Kino.

*10
Alan Chumak and Anatoly Kashpirovsky were rival television faith healers who enjoyed widespread popularity at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, during the years of the Soviet collapse.

*11
An honorary title awarded to outstanding performers in the arts.

*12
Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974), Marshal of the Soviet Union, was the most important Soviet military commander during World War II. Konstantin Rokossovsky (1896–1968) was among the most prominent Red Army commanders during World War II, a Marshal of Poland and of the Soviet Union.

*13
Nikolai Vavilov was a prominent Russian and Soviet botanist and geneticist. Although he was a brilliant scientist, because his beliefs ran counter to Stalin’s anti-genetics campaign, he was arrested in 1940 and died of starvation in 1943. In the 1960s, he was rehabilitated and hailed as a hero of Soviet science. A star and a moon crater were named after him and his brother, Sergei Vavilov, a physicist who went on to win the Nobel Prize.

ABOUT THE PAST

—Yeltsin’s nineties…how do we remember them? They were a happy time…a crazy decade…terrifying years…the age of fantastical democracy…the fatal nineties…hands down, a golden age…the age of self-denunciation…mean and hard times…a bright dawn…aggressive…turbulent…That was my time…It wasn’t for me!!

—We pissed away the nineties! We’re not going to have an opportunity like that again, at least not anytime soon. Everything started out so well in ’91! I’ll never forget the faces of the people I stood with in front of the White House. We were triumphant, we were powerful. We wanted to live. We were intoxicated by freedom. But now…now I see it all in a different light…We were so naïve, it’s disgusting! Brave, honest, and naïve. We believed that salami was spontaneously generated by freedom. We too are to blame for everything that happened afterward…Of course, Yeltsin is also responsible, but so are we…

I think that it all started that October. October 1993…“Bloody October,” “Black October,” “The Second Coup”
^*1
…That’s what they call it…Half of Russia was pulling forward, while the other half was pulling back. Back toward dreary socialism. The damned
sovok
. The Soviet regime refused to surrender. The “Red” parliament refused to be subordinate to the president. That’s how I saw it back then…My wife and I had helped the cleaning woman in our building—she was from somewhere around Tver—with money on more than one occasion, and we gave her all of our furniture after renovating our apartment. But on the morning when it all started, she noticed my Yeltsin pin, and instead of saying, “Good morning!” she told me, her voice full of malice, “Your time is running out, you bourgeois pig,” and turned away. I didn’t see that coming. Where had this hatred come from? What did she hate me for? The situation was the same as it had been in ’91…On TV, I saw the White House burning, the tanks firing…tracer bullets in the sky…the storming of the Ostankino Television Tower…General Makashov
^*2
in a black beret screaming, “No more of your mayors or misters or monsters.” And hatred…hatred…It began to smell like civil war. Like blood. From the White House, General Rutskoy
^*3
outright called for war: “Pilots! Brothers! Get your planes in the air! Bomb the Kremlin! There’s a gang of criminals in there!” Seemingly overnight, the city filled with military vehicles. Mysterious men in camouflage. That’s when Yegor Gaidar addressed “Muscovites and all Russians who hold democracy and freedom sacred,” asking them to come to the White House to stand up for Yeltsin. It was exactly like 1991…We went down there…I went…There were thousands of us…I remember running forward in a crowd of people. I tripped and fell onto a sign reading, “For a Bourgeois-Free Russia!” The image of what awaited us if General Makashov won flashed before my eyes…I saw a wounded young man; he couldn’t walk, so I carried him. “Which side are you on?” he asked me. “Are you for Yeltsin or Makashov?” He supported Makashov, which meant we were enemies. “Go to hell!” I swore at him. What else? We split off into Reds and Whites again with an alarming speed. There were dozens of wounded lying by the side of the ambulance. All of them—for some reason, I remember this very clearly—had worn-out boots; all of them were simple people. Poor people. I was questioned there as well: “Who did you drag here—is he one of us or one of them?” People who weren’t “one of us” were put to the back of the line; they lay bleeding on the asphalt…“What’s wrong with you? You’re insane!” “But aren’t these our enemies?” Something had happened to everyone in the course of those two days…something in the air was off. The people around me were totally different, they had very little in common with the people with whom I’d stood in front of the White House two years before. They were carrying spikes made of sharpened plumbing fixtures…real machine guns, which people were handing out from the back of a truck…War! It was real this time. They were piling up the dead next to a phone booth…The corpses were also in worn-out boots…Meanwhile, not far from the White House, the cafés were still open, and people were still drinking beer as though nothing was happening. Gawkers hung out on their balconies watching it all like it was a play. And suddenly, right in front of me, I saw two men carrying a TV out of the White House. With telephone receivers hanging out of their coat pockets…The looters were cheerfully being shot at from above. Probably by snipers. Sometimes they would hit them, other times they would hit the TVs…There was the constant sound of gunfire in the streets…[
He falls silent.
] After it was all over, when I got home, I found out that our neighbor’s son had been killed. The kid was twenty. He had been on the other side of the barricades…It had been one thing when we argued with them in our kitchen, but shooting…How did it happen? I never wanted that…When you’re part of a mob, the mob is a monster. A person in a mob is nothing like the person you sit and chat with in the kitchen. Drinking vodka, drinking tea. I’m never demonstrating again, and I won’t let my sons do it, either…[
He is silent.
] I still can’t wrap my mind around it: Were we defending freedom or participating in a military coup? I have my doubts…hundreds of people died…No one but their families remembers them. “Woe to him who is building a city by blood…”
^*4
[
Silence.
] And what if General Makashov had won? There would have been even more bloodshed. Russia would have collapsed. I don’t have the answers…Until 1993, I believed in Yeltsin…