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

believed by many to have been ordered by Stalin, served as one of the pretexts for the Great Purge that followed. Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary who worked closely with Lenin and Trotsky. He was executed by Stalin, who saw him as a rival, as part of the Great Purge.
    *18 Boris Berezovsky (1946–2013) was one of the first Russian oligarchs.
    *19 The NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, was the central Soviet law enforcement agency from 1934 to 1946. It contained both the public police force and the secret police. The NKVD was responsible for carrying out Stalin’s Terror, including mass executions, arrest and torture of political prisoners, and running the gulag system. It was also responsible for foreign espionage. Its predecessor was the Chekha secret police force formed in 1917 by Lenin’s decree.
    *20 Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953), the chief of the NKVD from 1938 to 1946, was responsible for significantly expanding the gulag system, overseeing the exile of many ethnic minorities from their native lands, and supervising the Soviet atom bomb project. He was arrested and executed shortly after Stalin’s death.



There were two of them waiting for me: Elena Yurievna, with whom I’d arranged to meet, and her friend Anna Ilinichna M., who was visiting from Moscow. She immediately joined the conversation. “I’ve been waiting for someone to explain what’s going on to me for a long time.” Their stories had nothing in common except for the significant proper nouns: Gorbachev, Yeltsin. But each of them had her own Gorbachev and her own Yeltsin. And her own version of the nineties.
    ELENA YURIEVNA
    Is it really already time to tell the story of socialism? To whom? Everyone around is still a witness. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that you’ve come all this way just to see me. I’m a communist, part of the nomenklatura …No one wants to listen to us anymore…everyone wants to shut us up. Lenin was a gangster, and don’t even mention Stalin…We’re all criminals, even though there isn’t a single drop of blood on my hands. Still, we’ve been branded, every last one of us…
    Perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now they’ll be able to write objectively about the way of life we called socialism. Without all the tears and obscenities. They’ll unearth it like ancient Troy. Until recently, you weren’t allowed to say anything good about socialism. In the West, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they realized that Marxism wasn’t really over, it still needed to be developed. Without being worshiped. Over there, he wasn’t an idol like he’d been for us. A saint! First we worshiped him, then we anathematized him. Crossed it all out. But science has also caused immeasurable suffering—should we eliminate scientists? Curse the fathers of the atom bomb, or better yet, start with the ones who invented gunpowder? Yes, start with them…Am I wrong? [ She doesn’t give me a chance to answer her question. ] You’re on the right track, leaving Moscow. You could say that you’ve come to the real Russia. Walking around Moscow, you might get the impression that we’re a European country: the luxury cars, the restaurants…those golden cupolas gleaming! But listen to what the people talk about in the provinces…Russia isn’t Moscow, Russia is Samara, Tolyatti, Chelyabinsk—some Bumblepinsk…How much can you really learn about Russia from sitting around in a Moscow kitchen? Going to parties. Blah, blah, blah…Moscow is the capital of some other nation, not the country beyond the ring road. *1 A tourist paradise. Don’t believe Moscow…

    You come here and right away, it’s perfectly clear, “Now, this is the sovok .” People live very poorly, even by Russian standards. They blame the rich and resent everyone. Blame the government. They feel that they’ve been lied to, that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought that socialism was just going to