Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

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