Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

in big, plastic bags…What were we supposed to do with all that stuff? Where were we supposed to take it? There were no orders. No signals from above. Instead, there was dead silence. [ Falls deep in thought. ] Those were the times…when people started changing everything…absolutely everything. Starting over from scratch. Some left, changing homelands. Some changed their convictions and principles. Others changed their possessions, buying all new stuff for their homes. Throwing out everything old and Soviet, and replacing it with everything new and imported…The shuttle traders had already brought it all over: electric kettles, telephones, furniture…refrigerators…Mountains of goods materialized out of God knows where. “I have a Bosch washing machine.” “I bought a Siemens TV.” Every conversation was sprinkled with words like “Panasonic,” “Sony,” “Philips”…I ran into my neighbor: “I’m embarrassed that I’m so excited because of a German coffee grinder…but I’m just so happy!” It had only been moments ago—just a moment ago—that she’d spent the night waiting in line to get her hands on a volume of Akhmatova. Now she was head over heels for a coffee grinder. Some piece of junk…People threw away their Party membership cards like they were just trash. It was hard to believe…The whole world had transformed in a matter of days. Tsarist Russia, as you can read in the memoirs, slipped away in three days, and the same went for communism. A matter of days. It boggles the mind…There were also the kind of people who hid their membership cards, stashing them away just in case. I was recently at a house where they took down a bust of Lenin from the storage cabinet to show me. They’re holding on to it for a rainy day…The communists will come back, and they’ll be the first ones to pin the red bow on once more. [ She is silent for a long time. ] I had hundreds of declarations of resignation from the Party piled on my desk…Soon enough, they were all rounded up and taken out to the trash. To rot at the dump. [ She looks for something in the folders on the table. ] I saved a few…One day, a museum will ask me for them. They’ll come looking…[ She begins reading from them. ]

    “I was a devoted Komsomol member…I joined the Party with a sincere heart. Today, I wish to say that the Party no longer has any power over me…”
    “The times have led me into confusion…I used to believe in the Great October Revolution. After reading Solzhenitsyn, I realized that the ‘beautiful ideals of communism’ were all drenched in blood. It was all a lie…”
    “Fear forced me to join the Party…Leninist Bolsheviks executed my grandfather, then Stalin’s communists massacred my parents in the Mordovian camps…”
    “On behalf of myself and my deceased husband I hereby resign from the Party…”
    You had to live through this…and not drop dead from the horror. People stood in line outside the district Party headquarters like it was a store. They were queuing up to return their Party membership cards. A woman got in to see me, she was a dairywoman. In tears, she entreated me, “What do I do? What am I supposed to do? In the newspapers, it says that we’re supposed to throw out our Party membership cards.” She justified herself, saying that she had three children, she had to think of them. Someone was spreading rumors that the Communists were going to be put on trial. Exiled. That they were already fixing up the old barracks in Siberia…A new shipment of handcuffs had come into the police headquarters…Someone saw them being unloaded out of covered trucks. Dreadful stuff! And then there were the real communists. The ones still devoted to the Idea. A young teacher…Not long before the putsch, he’d been accepted into the Party, but he hadn’t been issued a membership card yet. “You’re going to get shut down soon,” he said. “Issue me a membership card. Otherwise, I’ll