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Young builders ofof communism!
Go forward. to the new
successes in labor and study! | In 1991 the Soviet Union perished.
Its legatees inherited an ideological minefield: well-hammered imperial myths, millions of compatriots poisoned with these myths and nostalgic radiation, which is,
like nuclear radiation, invisible, omnipresent and perhaps even eternal.
I lived under Stalin for twenty-five years. In the following thirty-eight years I witnessed one Kremlin coup (Khrushchev's forced resignation), the 1991 takeover, leading to the resignation of the first and the only Soviet president, burials of five powerful chairmen of the Communist Party and the collapse of this party, in which my member number was 14.994.940.
I was a humble party member and did not influence the course of history. But I was a witness to many events. I saw the birth, rise and death of Soviet myths. Although my memory has not preserved the most fateful Soviet legends, they are material. My myths can be seen and touched.
A Record That Was Not
It was 1936. I was six years old. My father was carrying me on his shoulders along tiny potato plots, on which his colleagues, railroad mechanics, were working with choppers. Among those plots was our lot, which was often called "the oasis of individual labor" and "the burp of the capitalistic past."
I though I was flying in the sky, singing in excitement: "For the socialist competition, for the five -
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Each of us is taken care of by Stalin
in the Kremlin | year plan, / we will fulfill the task / of workers and peasants." The people smiled and commented on my song: "You are like a boss who fulfills the task, sitting on the shoulders of the worker."
I was not guilty, however, for children were not taught other songs in my kindergarten. My childish mind did not analyze anything but obvious things like a daily glass of milk, being unaware of what had happened a year before.
In 1935, coalminer Aleksey Stakhanov extracted 102 tons of coal with his hammer and thereby broke the world record by increasing the existing output by fourteen times.
Thus a myth about the Soviet people building socialism according to the "more than others, faster than others" principle appeared. Newspapers were writing about how fast and brilliantly - just like Stakhanov - workers produced steel, engine drivers drove trains, farmers gathered crops and hairdressers cut hair.
Many years later, we discovered the truth and uncovered the deceit: Stakhanov did not work alone but with other workers.
Aleksey Stakhanov was not strong enough to accept his nationwide fame and resist the disdain of local miners toward him. He died a miserable alcoholic.
The Enemy of the People is Among Us
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| Don't blab! |
It was 1937. My mother and I were visiting her elder sister, who I secretly called "my rich aunt." The aunt lived in Kyiv in an apartment beautifully named communal. I was soon very disappointed, for the aunt had only two rooms. There were five other families in her house.
The aunt's husband came home. He worked as a chief accountant at a factory. My father was a modest metalworker that mended steam engines. The chief accountant was reading newspapers, exclaiming impolitely: Scoundrels! Rascals! Traitors! Villains! Enemies of the people! He was shouting violently and nearly pierced the paper with his finger. I saw a photograph. Gloomy people were sitting in a hall, raising their hands to vote. Other men with hopeless faces were sitting in a dock. I knew those men in the dock were the "enemies," desiring to steal factories and coalmines. I did not clearly understand what the word "people" meant. Borya, the chief accountant's son, who was in the fourth grade, told me the Soviet people would be voting for Stalin's constitution on December 21, 1937, to have rights and freedoms.
One night, we all woke up, having heard loud steps in the corridor. We heard the sound of fallen books and broken glass behind the wall. Then the chief accountant and my aunt went out. Borya and I were sitting quietly in the corridor behind a huge box. Borya told me his parents had been invited as witnesses to the room of their neighbor. I again did not understand a thing. I looked at Borya's neighbor through the open door. He looked frightened, holding a suitcase in one hand and hugging his wife.
I remembered delicious lemon sweets this neighbor, Misha, had given me many times. Accompanied by four pairs of heavy boots, he left the apartment. I felt sorry for Misha and so asked my mother: "Is Misha also the enemy of the people?" My mother slapped my face so hard that I winced. She burst out sobbing hysterically. The chief accountant whispered furiously he would not tolerate little hooligans that spy and pose dangerous questions.
My mother decided to leave. Nobody stopped her. I was following her to the railway station, rubbing my swollen cheek.
I Want to Live in
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Let's go bravely forward on the path
leading to communism! |
the Movies
It was 1938. An art palace with red velvet curtains and a huge painting on one of its walls was built in my town. The painting was called "Stalin and Kaganovich by the Moscow River." Local boys knew these two men were our main leaders. Wearing long military coats, these men were both young and with black moustaches.
The curtain was drawn back and the white screen displayed a cinematographic feast with happy people in Moscow's squares, vending machines with mineral water and automobiles moving agilely along asphalted roads.
Our favorite actors starred in those movies, every time in a new role. Slender men with dazzling smiles were piloting airplanes, driving tanks and building factories. Wonderful actresses were operating dozens of weaving machines and professionally attaching milking devices to udders.
After each such movie I was walking along dirty streets of my town, which had no cars and no vending machines. At home there were beds with no bedclothes, ugly gray coats on the hallstand and many rubber boots and galoshes by the door. The blue primus stove was hissing coarsely in the kitchen. Some plain soup was cooked on it daily...
On my way home, I remembered my mother's other sister, who I called "my poor aunt." She lived in a village. Every night, she bathed her feet and hands in an herbal solution, for she always milked cows with her hands and never saw milking machines. Once she told me how her family had dug up mouse holes to find grains and seeds during the famine of 1932.
I stopped. I really wanted to return to the cinema, where the screen was filled with the world's best songs. These rhymed myths were so adhesive that I still remember them.
Stalin in his
Looking-Glass
Many years later, when it became fashionable to publish sensational articles on the Soviet Union and explore weak points of the Kremlin leaders,
I read a touching story in one of the newspapers. In Stalin's office there was a carpet above his sofa to which the Soviet dictator pinned cutouts from magazines. I realized that the aging Stalin, like me, had loved to peer into his magical looking glass. But his life was not similar to mine. His life was a nationwide, formidable bloodbath.
Soviet Immortality
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Female collective farmer, be a shock worker
inharvestingcrops |
In 1939, I was in the second grade and wore a red Pioneer tie. Previously, I had stood on the lowest step of the social ladder, being a mere oktyabrenok, one of many offspring of the 1917 October Socialist Revolution.
An older girl who was leader of all Pioneers in my school said our group would be named after Pavlik Morozov. Then she told us a sad story. During the 1933 famine, Pavlik Morozov showed the Red Army officers where his uncle and neighbor were hiding food. A few days later, the boy was found dead in the forest. His killers were executed. Pavlik was immortalized in the names of schools, ships and trains. A monument to this "fighter for the people's welfare" was even erected in Moscow.
A Withered Sprout of Communism
It was 1940. A wooden rostrum wrapped in a red cloth was built in the central square of my town. Boys were sitting on trees overlooking the rostrum. A crowd of railroad workers was underneath. A few men in hats were standing on the rostrum, among them Lazar Kaganovich, one of the Soviet Union's most important chiefs. He was the man painted on the picture in the art palace. Mr. Kaganovich was in charge of all railroads then. I did not understand what drivers of steam engines were saying but remembered one phrase. A mechanized canteen that was soon opened in our town was called "the sprout of communism." Such "buds" were created in many
railway stations to execute Kaganovich's order.
The evil violet flame of the primus stove burned out. Every day, I went to that canteen and brought home two dinners. My mother seemed pleased: food was cheap and tasty and portions big.
Soon the sprout of Communism withered. Cooks began stealing products, reduced portions and raised prices. It became an ordinary Socialist canteen.
Why My Father Did Not Love the Leader
It was 1948. I was in the tenth grade of school and had to learn a poem for kids by heart. I read out four stanzas to better memorize the words. We were warned at school that this poetic masterpiece must be recited impeccably and by all and pupils whose recitation is bad would have problems. A famous Ukrainian poet composed the poem. Being ideologically hesitant, he was asked by the KGB to either compose a poem about Stalin or go to a concentration camp. The poet was a wise man and described Stalin as the sun in his poem.
My father never interfered in my studies. But suddenly, listening to this annoying poem, he said: "Remember, a human being cannot be the sun." My mother started waving a kitchen towel in front of his face, speaking about long tongues and prison beds. But I listened to my father and became a skeptic.
My father did not like Stalin because, having issued a decree on criminal responsibility for being late for work,
he did not renew roads. Our street was extremely bumpy because of many floods. When it rained, my dad had to scoop water with his boots to rush to his factory to repair trains. He scolded Stalin and local officials, who were incapable of renovating the road, quietly.
The Internationale and Career
In 1950, I was a student of Kyiv's university and a member of the Komsomol Communist Youth Organization. I was invited as a delegate to a Komsomol conference. Before the conference, its delegates were singing the Internationale, the most important Soviet myth. As an inveterate skeptic, I was pretending to sing, watching how the others performed this ritual.
Written by Eugene Pottier, the Internationale forecast lots of troubles. Many of the disasters came true in the Soviet Union: the old world was ruined, the new world only being built.
In the Internationale, there are words for career fanatics: "those who were nothing became everything." I was watching student Alex. He was standing by the table on the stage among other members of the conference presidium. Having no good ear for music, Alex was inspiringly singing the song, as if it was some aria. Soon he came very close to the point of "becoming everything": after graduation he was appointed the secretary of Ukraine's Komsomol.
Accompanied by my skepticism, I went to Donbass as a provincial reporter to explore waste heaps and metallurgic pipes.
Khrushchev's little unpleasant secret
It was 1960. While Khrushchev was traveling around the country to promote American corn, I visited the Petrovka coalmine on the outskirts of Donetsk. In one of its workshops, where outdated equipment was repaired, I saw an old lathe with a bronze plaque. The plaque told me Nikita Khrushchev had operated this device in 1915.
In 1960, old miners of Petrovka were sill alive. The country was enjoying the warm rays of Khrushchev's thaw, recovering after Stalin's terror. They humorously told me Khrushchev had never worked as a turner but was in charge of making others boost their output.
Wet socks and the
Lenin Prize
All the commanders of the fourteen Soviet fronts had published their memoirs by 1977. Following their examples, commanders of divisions and detachments also offered their memories to the public.
There were few editors in publishing houses. A decision was made to employ good reporters. I was given a manuscript written by a commander of one of the divisions participating in the Black Sea military campaign near Novorosiysk.
The attack consisted of a number of navy raids. One of such raids was carried out in the Tsemesky bay. Bleeding sailors were fighting courageously. This place was later named Malaya Zemlya (Small Land). During the truce, the Soviet soldiers welcomed the head of the political department of the 18th Army, Colonel Leonid Brezhnev.
When Brezhnev left the boat, he soaked his feet. I suggested that the author remove this paragraph from the book:
I thought Brezhnev's wet socks were incompatible with the enormous losses of the army.
The author reacted to my suggestion as if it was blasphemous. The district party committee agreed with him, reprimanding me for "political immaturity."
In 1979, Leonid Brezhnev, USSR Secretary General, published his book Malaya Zemlya, in which he described himself as a participant of those heroic events.
The book was awarded the Lenin Prize.
This was one of the major Soviet myths. It differed from the others because it produced many jokes.
"Young builders of Communism! Go forward, to new successes in labor and study!"
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