Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

will be. Take a good look at your beloved democrats…They seized power and took off running—toward what? Toward the trough. Toward the horn of plenty. The trough’s been the downfall of more than one revolution. Before our very eyes…Yeltsin fought against special privileges and called himself a democrat; now he likes it when they call him Tsar Boris. He’s like the Godfather now…

    I recently reread Ivan Bunin’s Cursed Days. [ She takes the book down from the shelf, finds the bookmark and reads from it .] “I remember the old man who worked in front of the gates of the building where the Odessa News bureau used to be. It was the first day of the Bolshevik uprising. A gang of boys ran up to the gates with heaps of Izvestias hot off the presses, shouting, ‘Odessa bourgeois are required to pay an indemnity of 500 million!’ The worker sputtered, choking on rage and Schadenfreude: ‘It’s not enough! It’s not enough!’ ” Remind you of anything? It reminds me of the Gorbachev years…The first uprisings…When the people started pouring out into the streets making all sorts of demands—one day it would be bread, the next, freedom…then vodka and cigarettes…The terror! So many Party workers ended up having strokes and heart attacks. We lived “surrounded by enemies,” as the Party had taught us, “in a besieged fortress.” We were preparing for world war to break out…Our greatest fear was nuclear war—we never saw our nation’s demise coming. We didn’t expect it…not in the slightest…We’d gotten used to the May and October parades, the posters, “Lenin’s Work Will Live On for Centuries,” “The Party Is Our Helmsman.” Then suddenly, instead of a parade procession, it was a primordial mob. These weren’t the Soviet people anymore, they were some other people that we didn’t know. Their posters were totally different: “Put the Communists on Trial!” “We’ll Crush the Communist Scum!” I immediately thought of Novocherkassk…The information was classified, but we all knew what happened there…how during Khrushchev’s time, hungry workers had protested and were shot. Those who didn’t die were sent off to labor camps; their relatives still don’t know where they went…And here…it’s perestroika…You can’t shoot them or put them in camps. You have to negotiate. Who among us could have gone out into the crowd and addressed the people? Initiated a dialogue…agitated…We were apparatchiks, not orators. I, for instance, gave lectures in which I denounced the capitalists and defended blacks in America. I had the full set of Lenin’s collected works in my office, all fifty-five volumes…But who really read them? People flipped through them while cramming for tests in college: “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” “All worship of a divinity is necrophilia.”

    There was a sense of panic…The lecturers, instructors, and secretaries of district and regional Party committees, all of us were suddenly scared of visiting workers at factories and students in their dormitories. We were afraid of the phone ringing. What if somebody asked about Sakharov or Bukovsky *10 —what would we tell them? Are they the enemies of the Soviet state or not anymore? What was the official line on Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Shatrov’s plays? There were no orders from above…Before, they would tell you when you’d fulfilled an assignment and successfully enforced the Party line. Teachers were striking in demand of higher salaries, a young director in some factory workers’ club was putting on a forbidden play…My God! At a cardboard factory, the workers had pushed the director out in a cart, shouting and breaking glass. At night, a monument of Lenin was wrapped in a metal cable and toppled, now passersby were making obscene hand gestures at it. The Party was at a loss…I remember what it was like to be at a loss…People sat in their offices with their blinds shut. Day