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

how it will save itself!
    —My father lived to the age of ninety. He said that not a single good thing happened in his entire life; he was always at war. That’s all we’re capable of.
    —God is the infinite within us…We are created in His likeness and image…
    ON EVERYTHING
    —I was 90 percent Soviet…I couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember seeing Gaidar on TV saying, “Learn how to sell…The market will save us…” You buy a bottle of mineral water on one corner and sell it on another—that’s business. The people listened, bewildered. I would come home, lock the door, and weep. All of it scared my mother so much, she ended up having a stroke. Maybe they wanted to do something good, but they didn’t have enough compassion for their own people. I’ll never forget the rows of elderly begging along the road. Their worn-out little hats, their jackets that had been mended too many times…I would run to and from work with my eyes down, afraid of looking at them. I worked at a perfume factory. Instead of money, they paid us in perfume…makeup…

    —There was a poor girl in our class whose parents had died in a car crash. She lived with her grandmother. All year long, she wore the same dress to school every day. No one felt sorry for her. It’s surprising how fast being poor became shameful…
    —I don’t have any regrets about the nineties. It was an exciting, tumultuous time. Even though I’d never been interested in politics or even read the papers, I ended up running for deputy. Who were the foremen of perestroika? Writers, artists…poets…You could have collected autographs at the First Congress of the People’s Deputies of the USSR. My husband is an economist, and it would drive him up the wall: “Poets are capable of setting people’s hearts on fire with words. You’re going to end up with a revolution on your hands—and then what? How are you going to build democracy? Who’s going to do it? I can already see what your efforts are leading to.” He laughed at me. We ended up getting divorced because of it…But as it turned out, he was right…
    —Things got scary, so the people turned to the Church. Back when I still believed in communism, I didn’t need church. My wife goes to services with me because in church, the priest will call her “little dove.”
    —My father was an honest communist. I don’t blame the Communists, I blame communism. I still can’t decide how to feel about Gorbachev…or that Yeltsin…You forget about the long lines and empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.
    —We triumphed. But over whom? And for what? You turn on the TV, and they’re playing a movie about the Reds beating the Whites. You flip the channel, and it’s the Whites beating the Reds. Sheer schizophrenia!
    —We’re always talking about suffering…That’s our path to wisdom. People in the West seem naïve to us because they don’t suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We’re the ones who went to the camps, who piled up the corpses during the war, who dug through the nuclear waste in Chernobyl with our bare hands. We sit atop the ruins of socialism like it’s the aftermath of war. We’re run down and defeated. Our language is the language of suffering.

    I tried to talk about this with my students…They laughed in my face: “We don’t want to suffer. That’s not what our lives are about.” We haven’t understood a thing about the world we’d only recently been living in and yet we’re already living in a new one. An entire civilization lies rotting on the trash heap…
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    *1 The Russian stove is a large masonry stove that, to this day, serves as the central and most important feature of rural Russian houses. Stoves are used not only for cooking and heating, they are large enough to accommodate people sleeping on top of them—and they are always the warmest place in the house.
    *2 Hero of the eponymous