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

whipping, that you won’t get anything done without flogging people. That was Andropov’s point of departure—tightening the screws. Everyone had let their hair down: They started skipping work to go to the movies, the bathhouse, the store. Drinking tea instead of working. So the police started doing raids and roundups. They would check documents and grab the slackers right off the street, at the cafés, in the shops, notify their places of work, fine them and get them fired. But Andropov was very ill. He died soon into his term. We kept burying them, one after the other. Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko…A very popular joke before Gorbachev came to power: “Transmitting a message from TASS news agency. You’re going to laugh, but another general secretary of the CPSU has passed away…” Ha, ha, ha…People laughed away in their kitchens, while we laughed in ours. In that little patch of freedom. Kitchen talk…[ Laughs. ] I remember how, during these conversations, we’d turn up the TV or the radio. There was a whole art to it. We’d teach one another the tricks, so that the KGB agents who tapped our phones wouldn’t be able to make anything out. You turn the dial to the end—old telephones had little holes for numbers that you could turn—and then you stick a pencil in it so that it locks…You can hold it down with your finger, too, but your finger gets tired…You probably know that one? Do you remember it? If you needed to say something “secret,” you had to get two or three meters away from the phone, from the receiver. Bugging and snitching were everywhere—from the bottom to the very top. At the district committee, we would try to guess who the informant was. As it later turned out, I had suspected a totally innocent person, and there wasn’t just one informant, there had been several. None of them were people I would have ever suspected…One was a cleaning lady. A kind, friendly, and unfortunate woman. Her husband was an alcoholic. My God! Even Gorbachev himself…the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU…I read an interview with him where he described how during confidential discussions in his office, he’d do the same thing, he’d also turn the TV or radio up to full volume. The oldest trick in the book. For serious conversations, he’d have people come out to his dacha. And when they were there…they would go to the woods, strolling and talking. The birds wouldn’t inform on them…Everyone was afraid, even the people that everyone was afraid of. I was afraid, too.

    The last years of the Soviet Union…What do I remember? The ever-present shame. I was ashamed of Brezhnev plastering himself in medals and stars, ashamed that people had taken to calling the Kremlin a comfortable retirement home. I was ashamed of the empty store shelves. We were meeting and even surpassing production quotas, but somehow the stores were completely empty. Where was our milk? Our meat? I still don’t understand where it all went. Stores would run out of milk within an hour of opening. After noon, the sales clerks just stood there behind clean, empty display cases. The only things on the shelves were three-liter jars of birch juice and packages of salt, which were always wet for some reason. Canned sprats. And that was it! If they put out salami, it’d be sold out in seconds. Hot dogs and pelmeni were delicacies. At the district committee, they were always divvying up some lot—this factory gets ten refrigerators and five fur coats, that collective farm gets two Yugoslav furniture sets and ten Polish purses. They would ration out pots and lingerie…pantyhose…The only thing that could hold a society like this together was fear. Extreme conditions—execute and imprison as many people as possible. But the socialism of Solovki and the White Sea Canal *6 project was over. We needed a new kind of socialism.

    Perestroika … There was a moment when people wanted to turn to us again. They were