Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (9 page)

You come here and right away, it’s perfectly clear, “Now, this is the
sovok
.” People live very poorly, even by Russian standards. They blame the rich and resent everyone. Blame the government. They feel that they’ve been lied to, that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought that socialism was just going to get fixed. The life that we’d all been used to, which is to say the Soviet way of life. While they were out at demonstrations, tearing their vocal chords chanting “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!,” they were robbed. The plants and factories were divvied up without them. Along with the oil and the natural gas—everything that came to us, as they say, from God. But they’ve only just understood. Back in 1991, everyone was joining the revolution. Going off to be on the barricades. They wanted freedom, and what did they get? Yeltsin’s gangster revolution…My friend’s son was almost killed for his socialist views. “Communist” has become an insult. The boys who hang out in the courtyard nearly murdered one of their own. Their friend. They had been sitting around on the benches with their guitars and talking, saying that pretty soon, they’d be marching on the Communists, hanging them from the lampposts. Mishka Slutzer is a well-read boy, his father worked on the district Party committee. He quoted G. K. Chesterton, “A man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man…” And for that they beat him…kicked him with their heavy boots. “You little kike! Who brought about the Revolution in 1917!” I remember the way people’s eyes gleamed at the beginning of perestroika
,
I’ll never forget it. They were prepared to lynch the Communists, to send us all to prison camps…Volumes of Gorky and Mayakovsky piled up in the dumpsters…people would drop the complete works of Lenin off at the paper recycling center. And I would take them home…Yes! I’ll admit it! I recant nothing! I’m not ashamed of anything! I never changed my colors, repainting myself from red to gray. You’ll meet people like that—if the Reds come to power, they welcome the Reds; if it’s the Whites, they’ll greet the Whites with open arms. People performed incredible transformations: Yesterday they were communists, today they’re ultra-democrats. Before my very eyes, “honest” communists turned into religious liberals. But I love the word “comrade,” and I’ll never stop loving it. It’s a good word.
Sovok?
Bite your tongue! The Soviet was a very good person, capable of traveling beyond the Urals, into the furthest deserts, all for the sake of ideals, not dollars. We weren’t after somebody else’s green bills. The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, the Siege of Stalingrad, the first man in space—that was all us. The mighty
sovok
! I still take pleasure in writing “USSR.” That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m living on foreign soil.

I was born Soviet…My grandmother didn’t believe in God, but she did believe in communism. Until his dying day, my father waited for socialism to return. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union was crumbling, but he clung to his hope. He stopped talking to his best friend because he had called the flag a red rag. Our red flag! Red calico! My father fought in the Russo-Finnish War, he never understood what he’d been fighting for, but they told him to go, so he went. They never talked about that war, they called it the “Finnish campaign,” not a war. But my father would tell us about it…In hushed tones. At home. On rare occasions, he would look back on it. When he was drinking…The setting of his war was winter: the forests and meter-deep snows. The Finns fought on skis, in white camouflage uniforms; they’d always appear out of nowhere, like angels. “Like angels”—those are my father’s words…They could take down a detachment, an entire squadron, overnight. The dead…My father recalled how the dead always lay in pools of blood; a lot of blood seeps out of people killed in their sleep. So much blood, it would eat through the meter-deep snow. After the war, my father couldn’t even bear to butcher a chicken. Or a rabbit. He couldn’t stand the sight of a dead animal or the warm smell of blood. He had a fear of large trees with full crowns because they were the kinds of trees that the Finnish snipers would hide in—they called them “cuckoos.” [
She is silent.
] I want to add…this is my opinion…After the Victory, our little town was flooded with flowers, people went flower crazy. The most important flowers were dahlias, you had to keep the bulbs alive through the winter and not let them freeze. God forbid! People would swaddle them, tucking them in like they were little babies. Flowers grew in front of people’s houses, behind their houses, around the wells, along the fences. People were hungry for life. After living in fear for so long, they needed to celebrate. But eventually, the flowers disappeared; there’s nothing left of that now. But I remember…I just remembered them…[
Silence.
] My father…My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy’s artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn’t accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: “They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, ‘You made it, Ivan!’ ” My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn’t understand why they were so cheerful…

The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. “Brothers! Friends!” they threw themselves on their comrades. “Halt! Another step and we’ll shoot!” The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…“How were you taken prisoner?” the interrogator asked my father. “The Finns pulled me out of a lake.” “You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.” My father also considered himself guilty. That’s how they’d been trained…There was no trial. They marched everyone out on the quad and read the entire division their sentence: six years in the camps for betraying the Motherland. Then they shipped them off to Vorkuta to build a railway over the permafrost. My God! It was 1941…The Germans were moving in on Moscow…No one even told them that war had broken out—after all, they were enemies, it would only make them happy. Belarus was occupied by the Nazis. They took Smolensk. When they finally heard about it, all of them wanted to go to the front, they all wrote letters to the head of the camp…to Stalin…And in response, they were told, “Work for the victory on the home front, you bastards. We don’t need traitors like you at the front.” They all…Papa…he told me…All of them wept…[
Silence.
] Really, that’s who you should be talking to…Alas, my father is gone. The camp cut his life short, and so did perestroika
.
He suffered so much. He couldn’t understand what had happened. To the country, to the Party. Our father…After six years in the penal colony, he forgot what an apple was or a head of cabbage…Sheets and pillows…Three times a day, they would give them thin gruel and a single loaf of bread split among twenty-five men. They slept with a log under their heads and a wooden plank on the ground for a mattress. Papa…He was a strange man, not like the others…Incapable of striking a horse or a cow or kicking a dog. I always felt bad for him. The other men would make fun of him: “What kind of man are you? You’re a girl!” My mother would cry over the fact that he…well, that he wasn’t like other people. He would pick up a head of cabbage and stare at it…Or a tomato…When he first came back, he was totally silent, he wouldn’t tell us anything. It wasn’t until about ten years later that he finally started talking. Never before…Yes…At a certain point, while he was in the camp, his job had been transporting dead bodies. There would be ten to fifteen fresh corpses a day. The living returned to the barracks on foot, the dead were pulled back on sleds. They were ordered to remove their clothing, so the dead men lay naked on the sleds, “like jerboas.” My father’s words…It’s coming out all muddled…because of my feelings…It’s all so upsetting…For the first two years in the camp, none of them thought that they would survive. Those who’d been sentenced to five or six years would talk about home, but those who got ten to fifteen never mentioned it. They never brought up anyone, not their wives or their kids. Their parents. “If you started thinking about your loved ones, you wouldn’t survive,” my father explained. We waited for him…“Papa will come back, and he won’t even recognize me…” “Daddy…” I would look for any excuse to say the word “Papa.” Then, one day, he returned. Grandma saw a man in a soldier’s cloak standing by our gate: “Who are you looking for, soldier?” “You don’t recognize me, Mama?” Grandma fainted on the spot. That was Papa’s homecoming…He came back frozen to the bone, he could never get his hands or his feet warm. My mother? Mama would say that my father came back from the camps gentle, although she had been worried, she’d heard scary stories about people coming back mean. Papa wanted to enjoy life. His motto was, “Man up—the worst is yet to come.”

I forgot…I forgot where this happened…Where was it? The transit camp? They were crawling around a large yard on their hands and knees eating grass. Men with dystrophy and pellagra. You couldn’t complain about anything with my father around. He knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap. Just those three things…that’s all…They’re no longer with us, our parents, their generation…But if any of them are still around, they should be put in museums, kept under glass so that no one can touch them. They went through so much! After my father was rehabilitated,
^*2
they paid him two months’ wages for all of his suffering. For a long time, a large portrait of Stalin continued to hang in our home. A very long time…I remember it well…My father didn’t hold a grudge, he considered it all to be a product of his era. Those were cruel times. A powerful nation was being built. And they really did build it, plus they defeated Hitler! That’s what my father would say…

I grew up a serious girl, a real Young Pioneer. Today, everyone thinks that they used to force people into the Pioneers. I’m telling you: No one was forced to do anything. All of the kids dreamed of becoming Young Pioneers. Of marching together. To drums and horns. Singing Young Pioneer songs: “My Motherland, I’ll love forever / Where else will I find one like her?” “The eagle nation has millions of chicks, and we are our nation’s pride…” There was a stain on our family name because my father had been in the camps. My mother was scared that I wouldn’t be accepted into the Pioneers right away or even at all. I really wanted to be with everyone else. I had to be…“Who are you for, the sun or the moon?” the little boys would interrogate me in class. You had to be on your toes! “For the moon!”—“Correct! For the Soviet Union.” Because if you said, “For the sun,” you would get, “For that damn Japan!” They’d laugh and tease you. The way we swore was “Pioneer’s honor,” or we gave “Lenin’s word.” The most sacred oath was “Stalin’s word.” My parents knew that if I gave them Stalin’s word, I couldn’t possibly be lying. My God! It’s not Stalin I remember, it’s our life…I joined a club and learned how to play the accordion. Mama got a medal for being a shock worker.
^*3
It wasn’t all misery…barracks life…In the camp, my father met a lot of educated people. He never met people that interesting anywhere else. Some of them wrote poems; the ones who did were more likely to survive. Like the priests who would pray. My father wanted all of his kids to go to university. That was his dream. And all of us—there are four of us—ended up with degrees. But he also taught us how to plow, to mow the grass. I know how to load a cart with hay and how to make a haystack. “Anything can come in handy,” Papa believed. And he was right.

Now I want to remember it all…I want to understand what I’ve lived through. And not just my own life, all of our lives…our Soviet life…Overall, I’m not impressed with my people. And I’m not impressed with the Communists either, our Communist leaders. Especially nowadays. All of them have grown petty and bourgeois, all of them chase after the good life, the sweet life. They want to consume and consume. Grab hold of whatever they can! The Communists aren’t what they used to be. Now we have Communists who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Millionaires! An apartment in London, a palace in Cyprus…What kind of communists are these? What do they believe in? If you ask them, they’ll look at you like you’re an idiot. “Don’t tell us your Soviet fairy tales. Anything but that.” What a great country they destroyed! Sold it off at bargain prices. Our Motherland…So that some of us could go traipsing around Europe berating Marx. The times are as terrifying as they were under Stalin…I stand behind everything I’m saying! Will you write all this down? I don’t believe you…[
And looking at her, I can tell that she doesn’t.
] We don’t have district or regional Party committees anymore. We’ve left the Soviet regime in the dust. And so what do we have in its place? The boxing ring, the jungle…Thieves running the country…They grabbed furiously, racing for the biggest piece of the pie. My God! Chubais,
^*4
“the foreman of perestroika”…Now he goes around bragging, giving lectures around the world, saying that in other countries, it took centuries to build capitalism, while here we did it in three years. They carved it up with surgical precision…And if anyone was a thief, God bless them, maybe their grandchildren will turn out decent. Ugh! And these are the democrats…[
Silence.
] They put on American suits and did what their Uncle Sam told them to do. But American suits don’t fit them right. They sit crooked. That’s what you get! It wasn’t freedom they were after, it was blue jeans, supermarkets…They were fooled by the shiny wrappers…Now our stores are filled with all sorts of stuff. An abundance. But heaps of salami have nothing to do with happiness. Or glory. We used to be a great nation! Now we’re nothing but peddlers and looters…grain merchants and managers…