Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich Page B

come back, please look after my little girl. Don’t let them take her to an orphanage.” So that’s what happened. The neighbor took the child in, and the building administration gave her a second room…The girl started calling her Mama…Mama Anya…Seventeen years went by…And seventeen years later, the real mother returned. She kissed her friend’s hands and feet in gratitude. If this were a fairy tale, this is where the story would end, but in real life, the ending was very different. Without a “happily ever after.” When Gorbachev came to power, after they unsealed the archives, they asked the former camp inmate whether she wanted to see her file. She did. So she went down to look at it, opened the folder…and the very first page was an informant’s report. Familiar handwriting…It was her neighbor’s, Mama Anya’s…She’d been the one who’d informed on her…Do you understand any of this? I don’t. And that woman couldn’t, either. She went home and hanged herself. [ Silence. ] I’m an atheist. I have a lot of questions for God…I remember…I remember my father’s words: “It’s possible to survive the camps, but you can’t survive other people.” He’d also say, “You die today, I’ll die tomorrow—the first time I heard these words wasn’t in the camps, it was from our neighbor Kaprusha…” Kaprusha spent his whole life arguing with my parents over our chickens; he hated that they walked all over his vegetable patch. He’d run around in front of our windows waving a hunting rifle…[ She is silent. ]

    On August 23, they arrested the members of the GKChP. Minister of Internal Affairs Pugo shot himself…after shooting his wife…The people celebrated: “Pugo shot himself!” Marshal Akhromeyev hanged himself in his Kremlin office. There were a handful of other ghastly deaths…The head administrator of Central Committee Affairs, Nikolay Kruchina, fell out of a fifth-floor window…Were these suicides or murders? To this day, we don’t know. [ Silence. ] How do we go on? How can we go out? If you leave the house, you might run into someone. In those days…I had already been living alone for several years. My daughter had married an officer and moved to Vladivostok. My husband died of cancer. At night, I would come home to an empty apartment. I’m not a weak person…but I would have all sorts of thoughts…dark thoughts…They’d float up. I’ll be honest with you…it occurred to me…[ Silence. ] For a while, we continued showing up to work. We’d lock ourselves in our offices and watch the news on TV. Waiting. Hoping for something to happen. Where was our party? Lenin’s invincible party! The world had collapsed…We got a phone call from a collective farm: men with whips and pitchforks, hunting rifles—whatever they could find—had gathered in front of the farm’s administrative offices in order to defend the Soviet state. The first secretary told them, “Send everyone home.” We got scared…We were all scared…While the people were resolute. I know a handful of stories like that. But we were too scared to do anything…

    And then finally the day came…We got a phone call from the district executive committee, “We have to shut you down. You have two hours to gather your things and leave.” [ She is too upset to speak. ] Two hours…two…A special commission showed up to seal the doors…Democrats! Some locksmith, a young journalist, and that mother of five…I recognized her from the demonstrations. From her letters to the district committee…to our newspaper…She lived in a barracks house *17 with a large family. She gave speeches everywhere she could demanding a real apartment. She cursed the Communists. I’d remembered her face…This was her moment of triumph…When they got to the first secretary’s office, he threw a chair at them. In my office, one of the members of the commission went up to the window and demonstratively ripped off the blinds. So