Read Online Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich - Free Book Online

“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…

    Gorbachev came to power…He started talking about the return of Leninist principles. Excitement filled the air. The people had been waiting for change for a long time. Back in the day, they’d believed in Andropov *5 …Yes, he was KGB, but…how can I explain it? People no longer feared the Communist Party. At the beer stand, the men might curse the Party, but no one would dare to say anything about the KGB…No way! It was ingrained in them…They knew the iron fist, the red-hot iron, the iron rod…Those boys would get everyone in line. I don’t mean to repeat clichés, but Genghis Khan ruined our gene pool…and serfdom played its part as well…We’re used to the idea that everyone needs a good