This oral history covers the periods 1991-2001 and 2002-2012
in Russia and former Soviet republics. Alexievich’s technique is to sit with
people, to interview them as they remember the changes since the collapse of
the Soviet Union. And it’s appalling how many miss Stalin. The sovoks would gladly trade the new cutthroat
capitalism that favors the unscrupulous (while everyone with honest jobs
struggles and starves) for the iron fist of Stalin. Some ascribe this
perversity to Russian sentimentality, simple-minded and simple-hearted; others
miss the feeling of being part of something grand – a movement for The People,
not for oneself. In the name of The People they worked hard, went to prison,
endured torture, starved – and believed. The new system rewards the selfish, its
purpose and future meaningless.
She speaks with a man who tortured prisoners under Stalin’s
regime, who did that as a job, thoroughly but without joy or vengeance. He
remarked that if a true sadist worked among them, they would get rid of him.
And what of the woman denounced by a neighbor who lusted after her? She went to
the gulag for years, eventually her husband was arrested too. And yet, they
remained true believers – Lenin and Stalin were great men, the ideals were
worth everything. The feeling of everyone working for the common good was
overwhelming – they miss that; it has left a vacuum in their hearts. “With an
Iron Fist, we will chase Humanity into Happiness!” Their most precious
possessions were their Party cards.
For decades, the death
machine worked nonstop… Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of
being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the
victims. As though it wasn’t just people running it… Things are only that
perfect in nature. The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame. No one!
Everyone wants to be pitied. Everyone is a victim.
We see the sweep of tribalism: Russia for Russians. Tajiks
in Moscow live in basement warrens, robbed and abused, doing work no Russian
will touch, and thrown out on a whim, documents confiscated, attacked on the
streets by skinheads… Sound familiar? The new economy has enriched gangsters,
oligarchs, young people swept up in materialism. During Soviet times, books
were precious, often samizdat
(published and distributed hand to hand illegally) – but after the Soviet Union
fell, no one cared. No Pasternak, no Akhmatova; no Sakharov, no Solzhenitsyn,
only money, Italian bathroom fixtures, salami… and vodka. A drunkard nation.
Alexievich interviews mothers whose children were
confiscated and raised in mass orphanages, and children who grew up without a
mother’s love but with the Party to look up to. And, the bright thread through
all the gloom: love. A mother who will do anything for her child. And a woman
considered insane by her friends and family for pursuing a man she’d never met,
based on a dream she had as a teenager – she knew she was in this life to love
him. After two husbands and three children, she found him – a prisoner who had
murdered a man. And her love, the Dostoyevskian saintliness of it, broke down
every barrier. She made him her life.
Russia is an outsized example of humanity’s potential and
pitfalls – in these stories we read extremes of what happens everywhere,
because humans are pretty much the same everywhere, only more so in Russia
through its unique combination of vast inhospitable lands, simple beauty, and
the yearning of the spirit toward something greater than this miserable
existence. Hope and love seem more precious and fleeting in the face of
starvation, brutality, and repression. These folk and their dreams have been
brought to life by the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov,
Solzhenitsyn – and now Alexievich.
