PART ONE
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THE CONSOLATION OF APOCALYPSE
SNATCHES OF STREET NOISE AND KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS
(1991ā2001)
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ON IVANUSHKA THE FOOL AND THE MAGIC GOLDFISH
āWhat have I learned? I learned that the heroes of one era arenāt likely to be the heroes of the next. Except Ivanushka the Fool. And Emelya. The beloved heroes of Russian folklore. Our stories are all about good fortune and strokes of luck; divine intervention that makes everything fall right into our laps. Having it all without having to get up from your bed on the stove. The stove will cook the bliny, the magic goldfish will grant your every wish. I want this and I want that ā¦ I want the fair Tsarevna! I want to live in a different kingdom, where the rivers run with milk and their banks are heaped with jam ā¦ Weāre dreamers, of course. Our souls strain and suffer, but not much gets doneāthereās no strength left over after all that ardor. Nothing ever gets done. The mysterious Russian soul ā¦ Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: Whatās behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul thereās just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. āReaderā is our primary occupation. āViewer.ā All the while, we consider ourselves a special, exceptional people even though there are no grounds for this besides our oil and natural gas. On one hand, this is what stands in the way of progress; on the other hand, it provides something like meaning. Russia always seems to be on the verge of giving rise to something important, demonstrating something completely extraordinary to the world. The chosen people. The special Russian path. Our country is full of Oblomovs, lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles. There are no Stoltzes. The industrious, savvy Stoltzes are despised for chopping down the beloved birch grove, the cherry orchard. They build their factories, make money ā¦ Theyāre foreign to us ā¦
āThe Russian kitchen ā¦ The pitiful Khrushchyovka kitchenette, nine to twelve square meters (if youāre lucky!), and on the other side of a flimsy wall, the toilet. Your typical Soviet floorplan. Onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the windowsill and a potted aloe for fighting colds. For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, itās a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions. In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. Thatās where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! Heās the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. Itās where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted. We made jokesāit was a golden age for jokes! āA communist is someone whoās read Marx, an anticommunist is someone whoās understood him.ā We grew up in kitchens, and our children did, too; they listened to Galich and Okudzhava along with us. We played Vysotsky, tuned in to illegal BBC broadcasts. We talked about everything: how shitty things were, the meaning of life, whether everyone could all be happy. I remember a funny story ā¦ Weād stayed up past midnight, and our daughter, she was twelve, had fallen asleep on the kitchen couch. Weād gotten into some heated argument, and suddenly she started yelling at us in her sleep: āEnough about politics! Again with your Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Stalin!ā [Laughs.]
Endlessly drinking tea. Coffee. Vodka. In the seventies, we had Cuban rum. Everyone was in love with Fidel! With the Cuban revolution. Che in his beret. A Hollywood star! We talked nonstop, afraid that they were listening in, thinking they must be listening. Thereād always be someone whoād halt in mid-conversation and point to the ceiling light or the power outlet with a little grin, āDid you hear that, Comrade Lieutenant?ā It felt a little dangerous, a little bit like a game. We got a certain satisfaction out of leading these double lives. A tiny handful of people resisted openly, but many more of us were ākitchen dissidents,ā going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs ā¦
āToday, itās shameful being poor and unathleticāitās a sign that youāre not making it. I come from the generation of janitors and security guards. Getting a job like that was a form of internal emigration. You lived your life and didnāt pay any attention to what was going on around you, like it was all just the view out the window. My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant. Youād work one twenty-four-hour shift and then get two days off. Back then, an engineer made 130 rubles a month, while in the boiler room, I was getting 90, which is to say that if you were willing to give up 40 rubles a month, you could buy yourself absolute freedom. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas. We dreamt of revolution, but we were scared weād never live to see it. In reality, we were completely sheltered, we didnāt know a thing about what was actually going on in the world. We were like houseplants. We made everything up, and, as it later turned out, everything we thought we knew was nothing but figments of our imaginations: the West. Capitalism. The Russian people. We lived in a world of mirages. The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.
With perestroika, everything came crashing down. Capitalism descended ā¦ 90 rubles became 10 dollars. It wasnāt enough to live on anymore. We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadnāt had any ideas after allāthat whole time, weād just been talking. Completely new people appeared, these young guys in gold rings and magenta blazers. There were new rules: If you have money, you countāno money, youāre nothing. Who cares if youāve read all of Hegel? āHumanitiesā started sounding like a disease. āAll you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam.ā Many unfamiliar horizons unfurled before us. The intelligentsia grew calamitously poor. On weekends, at the park by our house, Hare Krishnas would set up a mobile kitchen serving soup and something simple for a second course. The line of the dignified elderly was so long, just thinking about it is enough to give you a lump in your throat. Some of them hid their faces. By then, weād had two children. We were literally starving. My wife and I became peddlers. Weād pick up four or six cases of ice cream at the factory and take them down to the market, to the most crowded spot. We had no refrigeration, so a few hours in, all the ice cream would be melting. At that point, weād give it away to hungry kids. They were so happy! My wife did the selling. Iād deliver it, haul itāI was willing to do anything but actually make sales. It felt uncomfortable for a long time.
There was a time when Iād often reminisce about our kitchen days ā¦ There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldnāt buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, theyāre all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb ā¦
ON HOW WE FELL IN AND THEN OUT OF LOVE WITH GORBY
āThe Gorbachev era ā¦ Huge crowds of people with radiant faces. Freedom! It was the air we breathed. Everyone hungrily devoured the newspapers. It was a time of great hopeāat any moment, we might find ourselves in paradise. Democracy was an exotic beast. Like madmen, weād run around to every rally: Now weād learn the truth about Stalin, the gulag. Weād read Anatoly Rybakovās forbidden Children of the Arbat and other good books; finally, weād all become democrats. How wrong we were! A single message rang out from every loudspeaker: Hurry! Hurry! Read! Listen! Not everyone was prepared for all this. Most people were not anti-Soviet; they only wanted to live well. They really wanted blue jeans, VCRs, and most of all, cars. Nice clothes and good food. When I came home with a copy of The Gulag Archipelago, my mother was horrified. āIf you donāt get that book out of my house immediately, Iām kicking you out.ā Before the war, my grandmotherās husband had been shot, but she would say, āI donāt feel sorry for Vaska. They were right to arrest him. He had a big mouth.ā āGrandma, why didnāt you tell me before?ā Iād ask her. āI hope that my life dies along with me so none of you will have to suffer the consequences.ā Thatās how our parents lived, and their parents before them. Then it was all bulldozed over. Perestroika wasnāt created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals ā¦
āGorbachev is an American secret agent ā¦ a freemason ā¦ He betrayed communism. āAll communists to the trash heap, all Komsomol members to the dump!ā I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland. I treasure my Soviet passport like itās my most precious possession. Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland. I loved it. You lived in a third world country with missiles, but for me, it was a great nation. The West has always seen Russia as an enemy, a looming threat. Itās a thorn in their side. Nobody wants a strong Russia, with or without the communists. The world sees us as a storehouse that they can raid for oil, natural gas, timber, and base metals. We trade our oil for underpants. But we used to be a civilization without rags and junk. The Soviet civilization! Someone felt the need to put an end to it. The CIA ā¦ Weāre already being controlled by the Americans ā¦ They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum. Sooner or later, heāll see his day in court. I just hope that that Judas lives to feel the brunt of his nationās rage. I would gladly take him out to the Butovo Firing Range and shoot him in the back of the skull myself. [Slams his fist down on the table.] Happiness is here, huh? Sure, thereās salami and bananas. Weāre rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I donāt need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. Weāre a nation of slaves. Slaves! Under communism, in the words of Lenin, the cook ran the state; workers, dairymaids, and weavers were in charge. Now our parliament is lousy with criminals. Dollar-rich millionaires. They should all be in prison, not parliament. They really duped us with their perestroika!
I was born in the USSR, and I liked it there. My father was a communist. He taught me how to read with Pravda. Every holiday, weād go to the parades. With tears in our eyes. I was a Young Pioneer, I wore the red kerchief around my neck. Then Gorbachev came, and I never got the chance to join the Komsomol, which Iām still sad about. Iām a sovok, huh? And my parents are sovoks, and my grandparents, too? My grandfather the sovok died defending Moscow in ā41 ā¦ My sovok grandmother fought with the partisans ā¦ The liberals are working off their piece of the pie. They want us to think of our history as a black hole. I hate them all: gorbachev, shevardnadze, yakovlevādonāt capitalize their names, thatās how much I hate them all. I donāt want to live in America, I want to live in the USSR ā¦
āThose were wonderful, naĆÆve years ā¦ We had faith in Gorbachev like weāll never have faith in anyone ever again. Many Russians were returning from emigration, coming back to their Motherland. There was so much joy in the air! We thought that weād tear down these barracks and build something new in their place. I got my degree from the Philology Faculty of Moscow State University and started graduate school. I dreamed of working in academia. In those years, I idolized Averintsev, all of enlightened Moscow sat in on his lectures. We would meet and reinforce one anotherās delusions that soon, we would find ourselves in a completely different country, and that this was what we were fighting for. I was very surprised when I learned that one of my classmates was moving to Israel. āArenāt you sorry to leave at a time like this? Things are just starting to get good.ā
The more they shouted and wrote, āFreedom! Freedom!ā 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, sheād spend her days running around the city making sure we got our ration cardsā 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: āThis is the end of the USSR.ā He felt it coming ā¦ My father worked in the construction bureau of a munitions factory, heād 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 hereās where it got them ā¦ They were lost. They couldnāt 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 āGorbachevās not worth a pin, long live Yeltsin!ā 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: Gaidarās reforms and all of that ābuy and sellā I canāt stand. In order to survive, I had to start traveling to Poland with big bags of light bulbs and childrenās toys. The train car would be full of teachers, engineers, doctors ā¦ all of them with bags and sacks. Weād stay up all night talking about Doctor Zhivago ā¦ Shatrovās plays ā¦ It was like we were still in a Moscow kitchen.
When I think about my friends from university ā¦ All of us ended up as anything but philologists: senior executives at advertising agencies, bank tellers, shuttle traders ā¦ 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. Thatās where we should look for the partyās money ā¦ As for our leaders, the dissidents of the sixties ā¦ theyād tasted blood during the war, but they were as naĆÆve as little kids ā¦ ...