Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Read Online Free Page A

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, yakovlev *8 —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…
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    —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, *9 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 reforms *10 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 plays *11 …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