Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (6 page)

The more they shouted and wrote, “Freedom! Freedom!” the faster not only the cheese and salami but also the salt and sugar disappeared from the shelves. Stores stood empty. It was very scary. You could only buy things with ration cards, as though we were at war. Grandma was the one who saved us, she’d spend her days running around the city making sure we got our ration cards’ worth. Our whole balcony was covered in detergent, the bedroom was full of sacks of sugar and grain. When they distributed vouchers for socks, my father broke down in tears: “This is the end of the USSR.” He felt it coming…My father worked in the construction bureau of a munitions factory, he’d worked on missiles; he was crazy about his job. He had two graduate degrees. Then suddenly, instead of missiles, the factory started putting out washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Papa was laid off. He and my mother had been fervent participants in perestroika: They painted posters, distributed flyers, and here’s where it got them…They were lost. They couldn’t believe that this was what freedom looked like. It was impossible for them to come to terms with it. The streets were already filling with cries of “Gorbachev’s not worth a pin, long live Yeltsin!” People were carrying around portraits of Brezhnev covered in medals next to Gorbachev covered in ration cards. It was the beginning of the reign of Yeltsin: Gaidar’s reforms
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and all of that “buy and sell” I can’t stand. In order to survive, I had to start traveling to Poland with big bags of light bulbs and children’s toys. The train car would be full of teachers, engineers, doctors…all of them with bags and sacks. We’d stay up all night talking about
Doctor Zhivago…
Shatrov’s plays
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…It was like we were still in a Moscow kitchen.

When I think about my friends from university…All of us ended up as anything but philologists: senior executives at advertising agencies, bank tellers, shuttle traders…I work at a real estate agency for a woman who comes from the country, a former Komsomol worker. Who owns the businesses today? The mansions on Cyprus and in Miami? The former Party
nomenklatura.
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That’s where we should look for the party’s money…As for our leaders, the dissidents of the sixties…they’d tasted blood during the war, but they were as naïve as little kids…We should have spent our days and nights out on the squares, fighting with all our might to get what we had come for—a Nuremberg trial for the CPSU. We all went home too early. The black marketeers and money changers took power. Contrary to what Marx predicted, after socialism, we’re building capitalism. [
Silence.
] But I’m grateful I lived through that era. Communism fell! And that’s it, it’s gone for good. We live in a different world and see it through different eyes. I’ll never forget how freely we breathed in those days…

ON FALLING IN LOVE WITH TANKS UNDER YOUR WINDOWS

—I was so in love, I couldn’t think about anything else. It was my entire universe. Then one morning my mother wakes me up: “There are tanks outside! I think there’s been an uprising!” Still asleep, I tell her, “Mama, they’re just doing training exercises.” But oh no! There really were tanks directly outside our windows; I’d never seen tanks that up close before. On TV, they were playing
Swan Lake
…My mother’s friend ran over, she was very anxious that she hadn’t paid her Party dues in several months. She said that at the school where she worked she had stashed a bust of Lenin in the storeroom—what should she do with it now? The lines were drawn immediately: You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that. On the radio, they declared a state of emergency. My mother’s friend shuddered at every word: “My God! My God!” My father spat at the television…

I called Oleg…“Are we going to the White House?”
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“Let’s go!” So I put on my Gorbachev pin and made some sandwiches. People were quiet on the Metro, everyone anticipated tragedy. Everywhere you looked there were tanks…and more tanks…The drivers weren’t murderers, they were just frightened kids with guilty looks on their faces. Old ladies would feed them hardboiled eggs and
bliny.
What a relief it was to see tens of thousands of people in front of the White House! Everyone was in excellent spirits. We felt capable of anything and everything. We chanted, “Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” Self-defense squadrons were already forming. They would only let the young join, which the old people really resented. I remember one old man was very upset: “The communists stole my life from me! Let me at least have a beautiful death!” “Step aside, Granddad…” Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism…That’s not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind—that’s what I was standing up for! Or at least that’s what I thought. It’s what we all thought…Three days later, when the tanks were rolling out of Moscow, they were different, kinder tanks. Victory! And we kissed and kissed…

—

I’m in my friends’ kitchen in Moscow. There are a lot of people here: friends and relatives visiting from the country. We remembered that tomorrow is the anniversary of the August putsch.

—

—Tomorrow’s a holiday…

—What’s there to celebrate? It’s a tragedy. The people lost.

—They buried Sovietdom to the music of Tchaikovsky.

—The first thing I did was get cash and run out to the shops. I knew that no matter what happened, the prices were going up.

—We got so excited—they’re kicking Gorby out! By then, we were pretty fed up with that windbag.

—The revolution was nothing but a spectacle. A play they put on for the people. I remember the total indifference of anyone you talked to. Everyone was just waiting it out.

—I called in sick to work and went out to make the revolution happen. I brought every knife I had in the house. I realized that this was war…and that I needed weapons…

—I supported communism! Everyone in our family is a communist. Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. “Are you nuts?” I ask her. She replies, “I don’t know any other songs.” And Grandpa was a Bolshevik…And Grandma too…

—Now you’re going to go and say that communism was nothing but a pretty little fairy tale. My father’s parents disappeared in the Mordovian camps.

—I went to the White House with my parents. My father said, “Let’s go, or else we’ll never have salami or good books.” We ripped out the cobblestones and built barricades out of them.

—Today, the people have come to their senses. Attitudes toward the Communists are changing. You don’t have to hide it anymore…I worked at the Komsomol District Committee. On the first day, I took all the Komsomol membership cards, unused stationery, and pins home and hid them in the basement. There was so much stuff that later on, we had nowhere to store the potatoes. I didn’t know what I needed it all for, but I imagined them coming to shut us down and destroying everything. To me, these were precious symbols.

—We could have ended up killing each other—God protected us!

—Our daughter was giving birth. I went to see her, but all she wanted to know was, “Is there going to be a revolution, Mama? Is civil war breaking out?”

—I graduated from military academy and served in Moscow. If they had given us the orders to arrest someone, we wouldn’t have even thought twice, we’d have done it. Many of us would have even relished following those orders. We were sick of all the turmoil. Everything used to be cut and dried, things were done by the book. There was order. That’s how army people like to live. In fact, that’s how everyone likes to live.

—I’m afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn down my dacha at any moment.

—What are we doing arguing about ideas, friends? Life’s too short. Let’s drink!

—

August 19, 2001, the tenth anniversary of the August putsch. I’m in Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia, where I do brief interviews with people on the street.

—

Question:
What would have happened if the putschists had won?

Answers:

—They would have saved a great country from ruin.

—Look at China, where the Communists are still in power. China has developed into the second-largest economy in the world…

—Gorbachev and Yeltsin would have been put on trial for betraying the Motherland.

—They would have drowned the country in blood and filled the camps to capacity.

—They wouldn’t have betrayed socialism. We wouldn’t have been split into rich and poor.

—There wouldn’t have been a war in Chechnya.

—No one would have ever dared to say that the Americans defeated Hitler.

—I stood in front of the White House myself. I feel like I was cheated.

—What would have happened if they’d pulled off the putsch? Well, when you think about it, they did! They may have taken down the Iron Felix,
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but the Lubyanka
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is right where it always was. We’re building capitalism under the leadership of the KGB.

—My life wouldn’t have been any different…

HOW STUFF BECAME WORTH AS MUCH AS WORDS AND IDEAS

—The world shattered into dozens of colorful little pieces. We were so terribly eager for the gray Soviet everyday to turn into a scene from an American movie! Not many people reflected on how we’d rallied in front of the White House. Those three days may have shaken the world, but we remained unshaken…Two thousand people will go out and demonstrate, and the rest will ride past them, looking at them like they’re idiots. We drank a lot, we always do, but back then, we drank even more. Society stopped dead in its tracks: Where to next? Will there be capitalism, or maybe some good kind of socialism? Capitalists are fat and scary—that’s what they’d been telling us since we were little kids…[
She laughs.
]

Our country was suddenly covered in banks and billboards. A new breed of goods appeared. Instead of crummy boots and frumpy dresses, we finally got the stuff we’d always dreamed of: blue jeans, winter coats, lingerie, decent dishware…Everything bright and beautiful. Our old Soviet stuff was gray, ascetic, and looked as if it had been manufactured in wartime. The libraries and theaters stood empty. Markets and stores had taken their place. Everyone decided that they wanted to be happy and they wanted it now. We were all like children discovering a new world…Eventually, we stopped fainting at supermarkets…A guy I know went into business. He told me about how the first time he shipped in a thousand cans of instant coffee, people bought them up in a matter of days. He used the profits to buy a hundred vacuum cleaners, and those went just as quickly. Coats, sweaters, this and that—if you’re selling, they’re buying! Everyone was making themselves over, getting a whole new wardrobe. New furniture and appliances. Remodeling their dachas…They wanted pretty little fences and charming roofs…When my friends and I start remembering this stuff, we die laughing…Savages! We were completely impoverished people. We had to relearn how to live from scratch. In Soviet times, you were allowed to have a lot of books but not an expensive car or house. We had to learn how to dress, cook good food, drink juice and eat yogurt in the morning…Before, I had hated money, I didn’t know what it was. My family never talked about it—it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist. Like everyone else, I would get my 120 rubles a month and that had been enough. Money appeared with perestroika
.
With Gaidar. Real money. Instead of “Our Future is Communism,” the signs began exclaiming, “Buy now!” If you want to, you can travel. See Paris…Spain…fiesta…bullfighting….When I read about it in Hemingway, I’d been sure that I’d never see any of it with my own eyes. Back then, books replaced life…This was the end of our nightly kitchen vigils and the beginning of making money then making more money on the side. Money became synonymous with freedom. Everyone was completely preoccupied with it. The strongest and most aggressive started doing business. We forgot all about Lenin and Stalin. And that’s what saved us from another civil war with Reds on the one side and Whites on the other. Friends and foes. Instead of blood, there was all this new stuff…Life! We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn’t really enough to go around…

—

—In Soviet times, the word had a holy, magical significance. Out of inertia, the intelligentsia still sat in their kitchens discussing Pasternak, making soup without putting down their Astafiev and Bykov,
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but all the while, life kept demonstrating that none of that mattered anymore. Words no longer meant anything. In 1991, our mother came down with acute pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. She came home a hero, having spent her convalescence talking away in the ward. She told everyone about Stalin, the assassination of Kirov, Bukharin
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…People were prepared to listen to her day and night. In those days, everyone wanted to have their eyes opened. She was recently in the hospital again, but this time, she never said a word. It’s only been five years, but things are completely different now. Instead of her, the star of the ward was the wife of a big-time businessman. Her stories had everyone hypnotized…She talked about their house—three hundred square meters! All of their help: a cook, a nanny, a driver, a gardener…Their vacations to Europe—the museums are nice, of course, but you should see the boutiques! Those boutiques! This ring has this many carats, this one has that many…And her pendants, and gold clip-on earrings…It was standing room only! Nothing about the gulag or anything of the kind. That’s all in the past. What’s the point of arguing with old people?