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

traders…I work at a real estate agency for a woman who comes from the country, a former Komsomol worker. Who owns the businesses today? The mansions on Cyprus and in Miami? The former Party nomenklatura. *12 That’s where we should look for the party’s money…As for our leaders, the dissidents of the sixties…they’d tasted blood during the war, but they were as naïve as little kids…We should have spent our days and nights out on the squares, fighting with all our might to get what we had come for—a Nuremberg trial for the CPSU. We all went home too early. The black marketeers and money changers took power. Contrary to what Marx predicted, after socialism, we’re building capitalism. [ Silence. ] But I’m grateful I lived through that era. Communism fell! And that’s it, it’s gone for good. We live in a different world and see it through different eyes. I’ll never forget how freely we breathed in those days…

    ON FALLING IN LOVE WITH TANKS UNDER YOUR WINDOWS
    —I was so in love, I couldn’t think about anything else. It was my entire universe. Then one morning my mother wakes me up: “There are tanks outside! I think there’s been an uprising!” Still asleep, I tell her, “Mama, they’re just doing training exercises.” But oh no! There really were tanks directly outside our windows; I’d never seen tanks that up close before. On TV, they were playing Swan Lake …My mother’s friend ran over, she was very anxious that she hadn’t paid her Party dues in several months. She said that at the school where she worked she had stashed a bust of Lenin in the storeroom—what should she do with it now? The lines were drawn immediately: You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that. On the radio, they declared a state of emergency. My mother’s friend shuddered at every word: “My God! My God!” My father spat at the television…
    I called Oleg…“Are we going to the White House?” *13 “Let’s go!” So I put on my Gorbachev pin and made some sandwiches. People were quiet on the Metro, everyone anticipated tragedy. Everywhere you looked there were tanks…and more tanks…The drivers weren’t murderers, they were just frightened kids with guilty looks on their faces. Old ladies would feed them hardboiled eggs and bliny. What a relief it was to see tens of thousands of people in front of the White House! Everyone was in excellent spirits. We felt capable of anything and everything. We chanted, “Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” Self-defense squadrons were already forming. They would only let the young join, which the old people really resented. I remember one old man was very upset: “The communists stole my life from me! Let me at least have a beautiful death!” “Step aside, Granddad…” Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism…That’s not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind—that’s what I was standing up for! Or at least that’s what I thought. It’s what we all thought…Three days later, when the tanks were rolling out of Moscow, they were different, kinder tanks. Victory! And we kissed and kissed…
    —

    I’m in my friends’ kitchen in Moscow. There are a lot of people here: friends and relatives visiting from the country. We remembered that tomorrow is the anniversary of the August putsch.
    —
    —Tomorrow’s a holiday…
    —What’s there to celebrate? It’s a tragedy. The people lost.
    —They buried Sovietdom to the music of Tchaikovsky.
    —The first thing I did was get cash and run out to the shops. I knew that no matter what happened, the prices were going up.
    —We got so excited—they’re kicking Gorby out! By then, we were pretty fed up with that windbag.
    —The revolution was nothing but a spectacle. A play they put on for the people. I remember the total indifference of anyone you talked to. Everyone was just waiting it out.
    —I called in sick to work and went out to make the revolution happen. I