Second-Hand Time

The Last of the Soviets

Svetlana Alexievich

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781868427352
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Second-Hand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it's like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.

Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely give the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.Second-Hand Time will lead the South African reader to draw unexpected parallels with life after 1994.

PART ONE

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THE CONSOLATION OF APOCALYPSE

SNATCHES OF STREET NOISE AND KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS

(1991–2001)

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ON IVANUSHKA THE FOOL AND THE MAGIC GOLDFISH

—What have I learned? I learned that the heroes of one era aren’t 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.17 The stove will cook the bliny, the magic goldfish will grant your every wish. I want this and I want that … 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 … We’re dreamers, of course. Our souls strain and suffer, but not much gets done—there’s no strength left over after all that ardor. Nothing ever gets done. The mysterious Russian soul … Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. “Reader” is our primary occupation. “Viewer.” 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,18 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 … They’re foreign to us …

—The Russian kitchen … The pitiful Khrushchyovka19 kitchenette, nine to twelve square meters (if you’re 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, it’s 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. That’s where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! He’s 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. It’s where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted. We made jokes—it was a golden age for jokes! “A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.” We grew up in kitchens, and our children did, too; they listened to Galich and Okudzhava along with us. We played Vysotsky,20 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 … We’d stayed up past midnight, and our daughter, she was twelve, had fallen asleep on the kitchen couch. We’d gotten into some heated argument, and suddenly she started yelling at us in her sleep: “Enough about politics! Again with your Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Stalin!” [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. There’d always be someone who’d halt in mid-conversation and point to the ceiling light or the power outlet with a little grin, “Did you hear that, Comrade Lieutenant?” 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 “kitchen dissidents,” going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs …

—Today, it’s shameful being poor and unathletic—it’s a sign that you’re 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 didn’t 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. You’d 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 we’d never live to see it. In reality, we were completely sheltered, we didn’t 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 … 90 rubles became 10 dollars. It wasn’t enough to live on anymore. We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadn’t had any ideas after all—that whole time, we’d 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 count—no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease. “All you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam.”21 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, we’d had two children. We were literally starving. My wife and I became peddlers. We’d 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, we’d give it away to hungry kids. They were so happy! My wife did the selling. I’d deliver it, haul it—I was willing to do anything but actually make sales. It felt uncomfortable for a long time.

There was a time when I’d often reminisce about our kitchen days … There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb …

ON HOW WE FELL IN AND THEN OUT OF LOVE WITH GORBY

—The Gorbachev era … 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 hope—at any moment, we might find ourselves in paradise. Democracy was an exotic beast. Like madmen, we’d run around to every rally: Now we’d learn the truth about Stalin, the gulag. We’d read Anatoly Rybakov’s forbidden Children of the Arbat22 and other good books; finally, we’d 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. “If you don’t get that book out of my house immediately, I’m kicking you out.” Before the war, my grandmother’s husband had been shot, but she would say, “I don’t feel sorry for Vaska. They were right to arrest him. He had a big mouth.” “Grandma, why didn’t you tell me before?” I’d ask her. “I hope that my life dies along with me so none of you will have to suffer the consequences.” That’s how our parents lived, and their parents before them. Then it was all bulldozed over. Perestroika wasn’t created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals …

—Gorbachev is an American secret agent … a freemason … He betrayed communism. “All communists to the trash heap, all Komsomol members to the dump!” I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland. I treasure my Soviet passport like it’s 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. It’s 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 … We’re already being controlled by the Americans … They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum. Sooner or later, he’ll see his day in court. I just hope that that Judas lives to feel the brunt of his nation’s rage. I would gladly take him out to the Butovo Firing Range23 and shoot him in the back of the skull myself. [Slams his fist down on the table.] Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. We’re 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, we’d 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 I’m still sad about. I’m a sovok, huh? And my parents are sovoks, and my grandparents, too? My grandfather the sovok died defending Moscow in ’41 … My sovok grandmother fought with the partisans … 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, yakovlev24—don’t capitalize their names, that’s how much I hate them all. I don’t want to live in America, I want to live in the USSR …

—Those were wonderful, naïve years … We had faith in Gorbachev like we’ll 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 we’d 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,25 all of enlightened Moscow sat in on his lectures. We would meet and reinforce one another’s 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. “Aren’t you sorry to leave at a time like this? Things are just starting to get good.”

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 reforms26 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 plays27 … 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.28 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 … ...