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

boutiques! Those boutiques! This ring has this many carats, this one has that many…And her pendants, and gold clip-on earrings…It was standing room only! Nothing about the gulag or anything of the kind. That’s all in the past. What’s the point of arguing with old people?

    Out of habit, I would go into the used bookstore where the full two-hundred-volume sets of the World Classics Library and Library of Adventures now stood calmly, not flying off the shelves. Those orange bindings, the books that had once driven me mad. I’d stare at their spines and linger, inhaling their smell. Mountains of books! The intelligentsia were selling off their libraries. People had grown poor, of course, but it wasn’t just for the spare cash—ultimately books had disappointed them. People were disillusioned. It became rude to ask, “What are you reading?” Too much about our lives had changed, and these weren’t things that you could read about in books. Russian novels don’t teach you how to become successful. How to get rich…Oblomov lies on his couch, Chekhov’s protagonists drink tea and complain about their lives…[ She falls silent. ] There’s a famous Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Few of us remained unchanged. Decent people seem to have disappeared. Now it’s teeth and elbows everywhere…
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    —You want to talk about the nineties…I wouldn’t call it a beautiful time, I’d say it was revolting. People’s minds flipped 180 degrees. Some couldn’t handle it, they went crazy, the psych wards were overflowing. I visited a friend of mine in one of them. One guy was screaming, “I’m Stalin! I’m Stalin!” while another one screamed, “I’m Berezovsky! I’m Berezovsky!” The whole ward was filled with these Stalins and Berezovskys. *18 Outside, there was always gunfire in the streets. A huge number of people were killed. Shootouts every day. You have to make it, you have to snatch it—get your hands on it before anyone else can snag it! Some people went broke, others went to jail. Down from the throne, straight into the gutter. On the other hand, it was cool to see all that happening right before your eyes…
    People were lining up at the banks eager to try their hands at business: They wanted to open bakeries, sell electronics…I stood in one of those lines myself. It surprised me how many of us were there. Some woman in a knit beret, a boy in a tracksuit, this big guy who looked like he might have done time…For over seventy years, they’d told us that money wasn’t happiness, that the best things in life were free. Like love, for example. But the minute someone from the podium said “Sell and prosper!” all of that went out the window. Everyone forgot the Soviet books. These people were nothing like the ones I’d been staying up all night with, strumming the guitar. I barely knew three chords. The only thing they had in common with the kitchen folk was that they were also sick of the red calico flags and all that flotsam: the Komsomol meetings, political literacy classes. Socialism had treated the people like they were dummies…
    I know full well what it means to dream. My whole childhood, I begged for a bicycle, and I never did get one. We were too poor. In school, I sold blue jeans on the side; in college, it was Soviet war uniforms and memorabilia. Foreigners loved that stuff. Your run-of-the-mill black market goods. In Soviet times, you could get three to five years for that if they caught you. My father would chase me around the house with his belt, screaming, “You profiteer! I spilled blood defending Moscow only to raise a little shithead!” Yesterday, it was crime—today, it’s business. You buy nails in one place, heel caps someplace else, put them together in a plastic bag and sell them as a set, like new. That’s how you bring home the bacon. I was making sure that we always had a full fridge while my parents kept waiting for them to come for me. [ He