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

brought every knife I had in the house. I realized that this was war…and that I needed weapons…
    —I supported communism! Everyone in our family is a communist. Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. “Are you nuts?” I ask her. She replies, “I don’t know any other songs.” And Grandpa was a Bolshevik…And Grandma too…
    —Now you’re going to go and say that communism was nothing but a pretty little fairy tale. My father’s parents disappeared in the Mordovian camps.
    —I went to the White House with my parents. My father said, “Let’s go, or else we’ll never have salami or good books.” We ripped out the cobblestones and built barricades out of them.
    —Today, the people have come to their senses. Attitudes toward the Communists are changing. You don’t have to hide it anymore…I worked at the Komsomol District Committee. On the first day, I took all the Komsomol membership cards, unused stationery, and pins home and hid them in the basement. There was so much stuff that later on, we had nowhere to store the potatoes. I didn’t know what I needed it all for, but I imagined them coming to shut us down and destroying everything. To me, these were precious symbols.

    —We could have ended up killing each other—God protected us!
    —Our daughter was giving birth. I went to see her, but all she wanted to know was, “Is there going to be a revolution, Mama? Is civil war breaking out?”
    —I graduated from military academy and served in Moscow. If they had given us the orders to arrest someone, we wouldn’t have even thought twice, we’d have done it. Many of us would have even relished following those orders. We were sick of all the turmoil. Everything used to be cut and dried, things were done by the book. There was order. That’s how army people like to live. In fact, that’s how everyone likes to live.
    —I’m afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn down my dacha at any moment.
    —What are we doing arguing about ideas, friends? Life’s too short. Let’s drink!
    —
    August 19, 2001, the tenth anniversary of the August putsch. I’m in Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia, where I do brief interviews with people on the street.
    —
    Question: What would have happened if the putschists had won?
    Answers:
    —They would have saved a great country from ruin.
    —Look at China, where the Communists are still in power. China has developed into the second-largest economy in the world…
    —Gorbachev and Yeltsin would have been put on trial for betraying the Motherland.
    —They would have drowned the country in blood and filled the camps to capacity.
    —They wouldn’t have betrayed socialism. We wouldn’t have been split into rich and poor.
    —There wouldn’t have been a war in Chechnya.

    —No one would have ever dared to say that the Americans defeated Hitler.
    —I stood in front of the White House myself. I feel like I was cheated.
    —What would have happened if they’d pulled off the putsch? Well, when you think about it, they did! They may have taken down the Iron Felix, *14 but the Lubyanka *15 is right where it always was. We’re building capitalism under the leadership of the KGB.
    —My life wouldn’t have been any different…
    HOW STUFF BECAME WORTH AS MUCH AS WORDS AND IDEAS
    —The world shattered into dozens of colorful little pieces. We were so terribly eager for the gray Soviet everyday to turn into a scene from an American movie! Not many people reflected on how we’d rallied in front of the White House. Those three days may have shaken the world, but we remained unshaken…Two thousand people will go out and demonstrate, and the rest will ride past them, looking at them like they’re idiots. We drank a lot, we always do, but back then, we drank even more. Society stopped dead in its tracks: Where to next? Will there be capitalism, or maybe some good kind of