Bolshevik Olga and her gold
I was only seven in 1937 but knew that public enemies were caught and punished in Moscow every day. Life in my village was monotonous and routine.
It was early summer. My mother was puttering around in the garden over some vegetables. Olga, a sixty-year-old mother of Tikhon, who was thirty, was rooting out plants and cursing.
They sometimes came to our yard to drink water because they had no well. They were very strange, extremely rude and profoundly critical. They introduced themselves as Comrade Olga and Comrade Tikhon but Olga was nicknamed Bolshevik in a skirt in our village and my father called her "a splinter of the revolution." Olga did not like my father, although he helped her son find a job in a steam engine depot, where he was a brigadier of metalworkers.
Once my father visited a town where Olga and Tikhon had lived before. He secretly told my mother - and I overheard what he told her - that Olga had been summoned to court for selling pieces of gold from church interiors. He concluded that this money had helped her buy a house in our village.
Our new neighbors loved speaking about the 1920s. My silent mother and I, a great fan of exciting stories, were a good audience.
Olga wore a red kerchief and a leather coat in the revolution. She often caught cold when traveling around the country as a propagandist. She held political concerts in squares of towns and cities. During one of such concerts she read out a verdict to condemn the counterrevolution. Her husband abandoned her.
Then Olga joined the Union of Atheists to persecute monks. She was in charge of volunteers that brought down crosses from churches. The Red army officers tied them with ropes that they threw to guys standing underneath. They tugged the ropes to pull the crosses down. Tikhon was also involved in this "revolutionary job," as he said.
Soon Tikhon's wife, who secretly believed in God, also abandoned him.
"I forced her to leave my house," Olga later explained.
Tikhon became famous in our provincial town. He was the best gas welder in the depot and so energetically wrote "Death to Bourgeois" on its gate. First his boss wanted to punish Tikhon for wasting electrodes but then complimented him on what he had done, for it was 1937.
 Communist war veterans save a public enemy
I turned sixteen in 1946 and was given a passport at a local police department. When I asked my closest friend Vadim to show his passport, he humbly produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket. He had no passport but a temporary ID, the price he paid for the sins of his parents.
He told me his mother had refused to give a calf to her kolkhoz in 1934. It was taken. It was raining at night and Vadim's mother found the calf in a dark stall and drove it back home, leaving it in her house by the stove. In the morning the calf was expropriated again. This happened three times. A furious kolkhoz official then put the names of his father and mother into the list of kulaks, the richest farmers in the village. Soon they were banished to Siberia. Vadim was not sent to this dreadful journey because his grandmother adopted her starving grandson.
The loss of the parents affected Vadim so much that he started to stammer. He always cited his defect to explain why he always was "in the crowd of the most passive youngsters" in the pioneer organization and the Komsomol.
The director and the secretary of the party organization, both lame war veterans covered with medals and orders, knew Vadim's secret but decided not to give him away to the ideologically aggressive Komsomol members. They promised to him he would go to construction works in Siberia after graduation. They thought it would help him find his parents as a new young builder of socialism.
After school Vadim went to build coal mines in Siberia.
How we kicked history
In 1950 I was a student of Kyiv Journalism Institute. Every night I unloaded refrigerator cars. Those nights were really slow. Boxes with frozen fish were wet and slippery and often fell down. There were ten of us and we all heard insults every time we dropped a box.
"Be careful with people's property!" our brigadier shouted after each rude word.
With twenty rubles in hand, we left the storehouse at six in the morning.
We stank of fish and went to drink a few glasses of beer. Our monthly stipend was only thirty-five rubles.
To earn money, we also often loaded more intellectual cargoes of Kyiv's publishing houses. Magazines and books were packed in heavy pasteboard boxes, which we carried from trucks to postal cars.
We very carelessly threw about brochures telling of the formation of the communist outlook and the deepening of ideological conflict between the two social systems. As loaders, we were particularly tortured by brown books with a golden-letter title "The Brief History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." Stalin has edited this book personally. We were so tired to carry these books that we simply kicked them with our feet. The brigadier did not object and uttered no curses. He even did not say anything when one of the boxes accidentally opened, showing what was inside.
When we were going back home, one of the guys produced a book from under his coat.
"I will give it as a present to my dad," he said.
This Soviet habit was impossible to eradicate.
"Saxophone is our class enemy"
In 1952 I was in my second year at school. As a future journalist, I physically sensed the senile agony of Stalin. Some of us, however, got used to the dismal Kremlin etiquette.
Our secretary of the party bureau of the journalism faculty had been a student
a few years ago. His eyes shone with sincere optimism, his lips exuded patriotism and loyalty to the leader. His brain constantly generated ideological innovations.
We were in a hall intended for party meetings. The presence of non-party activists was obligatory at such meetings. Our task was to root out ideological hesitations among our co-students. The first such problem was reflected in a slogan written above the stage "Today you play jazz and tomorrow you will betray your motherland." (Unfortunately, this line does not rhyme in English.) The second social blunder was being too smartly dressed.
Another slogan threatened: "We will not let fops come to lectures in tight trousers."
The party leader instructed volunteers, having first discussed the topics of their speeches with them.
Impatient hands nervously but unanimously went up to condemn tight trousers and saxophones. Our legs were ready for a sprint.
Then the party leader announced that there was a decision to send a telegram to the Central Party Committee and personally to Comrade Joseph Stalin. He started reading out a long and very boring text of the telegram.
A provoker and his dog
It was cold and gloomy on March 5, 1953 in Kyiv. People with petrified faces were holding a panicky picture reading "How shall we go on living?"
Sinister loudspeakers on lampposts were playing inhumanely sad music. We gathered in streets to mourn the demise of the great Kremlin leader, Joseph Stalin.
Students were standing on dirty snow. We were quietly exchanging our impressions. Someone saw that no woman in the crowd had lipstick on her lips.
Then we saw an old man with a dog on a leash. The dachshund saw some people obstructed the entrance to her favorite park. The dog grew nervous. It had been walking in this park for years and wanted to do it now and so started barking loudly. The crowd started, then hissed, then hit the dog and its owner with feet and hands. The old man dropped the leash and his frightened dachshund crawled as a snake among the legs and disappeared in the park. The old man dragged after it, rubbing his beaten buttocks.
I wanted to concentrate on the mournful ritual but started wondering if the old man and his dog would find each other in the park. I also wondered if the man would be detained and punished as a provocateur.
Goose, the Rat
In 1955 I was heading for graduation. I was completing my research paper on Chekhov's satirical stories, although I knew that the fate of a reporter writing satires would not bring much success. Such was my nasty character.
There were only diploma students in my room. My roommate had a tasty surname Gus (Goose). Every night he would open his suitcase, and the smell of homemade fat filled the room. He champed quietly, naively thinking that my eternally hungry stomach would not hear these torturing sounds.
That night he did not champ. He smelled of chops, olives, caviar and vodka. He told me he had marked the receiving of diploma in a restaurant with his tutor, who promised to give Gus some materials so that he could have a Ph.D. degree in history.
When I learned Gus had analyzed the class struggle in rural areas, I sarcastically suggested that he write about the expropriation of rich farmers. That act must still be in the Archive of the National Academy of Science. With naive cruelty, it enumerated expropriated possessions: four shirts, two shovels, one kettle, one mirror, one rack, and one chandelier (broken).
Gus looked insulted but controlled his temper. He only noted that there were some extremes in the seminal process of collectivization.
Then I came to the library of the Academy of Science. I was deprived of my pass permitting me to work in the archive. I was lucky to have met Gus after Stalin had died.
Gulag and its guardian angels
In 1970 I had already heard two threats to break my backbone and had three official reprimands.
When my colleague, a reporter of one of the provincial newspapers, met me at a hotel to introduce me to a unique stoker, I thought I would again have to face the music with my editor and party leaders, for censored artists, sculptors, constructors and writers often became stokers in the Soviet time.
I was mistaken. Our interviewee was one of the priests in the Gulag department. He was an old man with blue eyes and shaking hands of an alcoholic. He drank and ate heartily. He told us he did not guard the prisoners but served them, being their guardian angel. We were depressed by the list of duties he had to perform. He had to feed, dress and shoe the prisoners. His colleagues cut wood for kitchen, brought water and cleaned floors in the camps. They had many professions: they were cooks, sentries, water-carriers, carpenters and metalworkers. He was tipsy and upset and completed his story with a terrible revelation, "There were no grave-diggers among us, for we did not bury them separately."
Atheists and their God
In 1990 I went to Moscow on a business trip in early spring. I had a few free hours on that Saturday morning. In Red Square I was suddenly struck by the feeling of the imminent downfall of the Soviet Union. This trip, I thought, can be my last visit to Moscow.
That morning, however, the world functioned as usual. There was a long line of Moscow residents and tourists at the Mausoleum of Lenin. There was no agitation in the queue but people knew that there were demands to rebury Lenin.
I have known since childhood that the Mausoleum was "site number one of our Motherland." We often saw this mournful chamber with a high bed and the adored leader behind the glass in documentaries. His image rooted in our memory firmly and forever.
…When I was eight I made my parents laugh when I asked them if plaster from the ceiling fell on Lenin when other Soviet leaders stood on the Mausoleum…
I came out of the mausoleum. As a reporter I was pleased. I saw with my own eyes the miracle of biomedical technologies: Lenin's face had been robust for eighty years as if he was sleeping. I realized why one classic had said, "Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live!"
Church bells rarely pealed over Soviet Moscow. I did not hear them that morning also. The embalmed people in the embalmed country were queuing to the mausoleum to see their atheistic God.
I sat down on a bench in a park. There were two men nearby. They had also just visited the mausoleum. I overheard that one of them would have to perform
a difficult surgery on Monday in the cancer institute. This must be the reason why he came to Lenin, I thought.
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