Julia's Story

Julia is fifty-seven years of age. A former Party member, she occupied a fairly important position. She was director of Kolomenskoye, the country's leading museum of traditional log architecture dating from the 17th century. Retired now, she lives with her daughter and two grandchildren.

People say that after Stalin died things became easier. Of course they did. But even though he had died, the fear remained. The consciousness of the people was so oppressed that everyone feared everything. And when I saw Yanaev and his cronies on the TV, his shaking hands, this enormous handkerchief which he kept pulling out then stuffing back in his pocket, the fear returned. And it's not only in your head, you feel it with your whole body, everywhere, in every nerve. Their faces were the same faces we had come to fear so much in the past: stone, expressionless, mechanical.

I was eighteen when Stalin died. And despite everything, I cried. I went to his funeral. He was lying in state in the Hall of Columns at the House of Unions. I stood in line for perhaps three hours. But the line was so long and it was moving so slowly that I never did get to see him. Watching these men from the State Emergency Committee on the television took me straight back to the ugly mugs of the country's leaders looking at us but not even seeing us as they were ushered past the queues into the House of Unions. No doubt there were differences. Someone had less hair, someone more. But at another level all these people are exactly the same: heavy set, withdrawn and aloof, constrained. The members of the Emergency Committee knew exactly what to say, how to behave, the formula for answering any question. Some sort of human facade, an external impression of a person, it's impossible to say what goes on inside.

And for that reason I felt that the whole thing was beginning again, the thing that my generation had already gone through and somehow even managed to forget. We are a generation who have only begun to think about ourselves as people now, in our old age. The whole of our lives we lived ground down by fear. Even when the iron curtain was lifted, we practically saw nothing of Western films, theatre or literature. I remember Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls getting passed from hand to hand in secret.

And now, looking at the faces of the coup leaders, and listening to the things they were saying, it was absolutely clear to me: that time was coming back, a time we had started to forget, but a time that had never gone away.

One year ago, I resigned from the Party. I have a very close friend with whom I have a lot in common, but she stayed in the Party. Everyone asks me why she never left the Party. And I answer that it's personal. But when I asked her myself, this is what she said:

"You know, I'm afraid. I've got no idea how things are going to work out. My husband still has five years work to go before he can retire. What these five years are going to bring, I don't know. My daughter works in a secret factory. Maybe that'll help?"

And I don't condemn her for thinking like this. She wasn't afraid for herself, she was already on the pension. She was afraid for her family. But what a wonderful education we'd all had, that we could live so many years and still find something to fear. And there are plenty of other people around, more nervous than she is. It's just that the fear was planted in us when we were still children. In the beginning I honestly believed in Communism, but gradually my views changed. But while I was still working, the thought of leaving the Party never entered my head. I only resigned from it after I had already retired. Nevertheless, resigning was still a very difficult decision to make, even though I never could reconcile myself with those people at the helm of power. The Party never did me any favours.

So I thought that I had got over that old fear, completely. But on the morning that the coup began, I felt it coming back. And it wasn't just a twinge, it washed over me. I was at the dacha just outside Moscow with my grandchildren. And I didn't have a radio, just the television. It was playing nothing but classical music. But classical music like this doesn't express anything creative for us, it only has the one association, death. The television was on all day, and all day long they broadcast nothing but the Emergency Committee's decrees and 'Swan Lake', or some other equally dreadful ballet. And you're sitting there watching this and waiting for them to say something, waiting to see what they'll say. Then my daughter and son-in-law arrived. They managed to make me feel a little better by saying that it looked like all wasn't lost, that it still wasn't clear who was going to win. And that night, watching the nightly news programme at nine o'clock, it was clear from the confusing choice of material and concentration on events like the harvest that not everything was going the conspirators' way.

The next morning, I took the children out mushroom hunting for the day in the woods. I didn't come back until it was already dark. I just wanted some time away from this thing. It wasn't as though I could do anything to change the outcome of events. What was the point in getting all excited and just upsetting the children.

And the children, I should say, understood something was going on anyway. They could sense that something very bad was happening, but had no way of knowing what, though in their own way they had already begun to understand how things are with us. They are even used to the idea that sugar, for example, has simply disappeared from our lives. On another but related theme, Vitya once asked me: "Julia, how come the only good toys are in other countries? How come the only good things we have are all from over there?" How do you answer a five-year-old's questions like this? See how much they understand. That we just don't have this or that is already obvious to them.

One day Vitya and I dropped into a 'commercial shop', the special shops where imported goods and local goods in short supply are sold for astronomical prices. The shelves were stocked with toys. There was licorice, chewing gum... Vitya asks: "Can you only buy things here with foreign money?" And though in fact you can use roubles in commercial shops, it makes no difference since their prices are pegged to world prices. Everything still costs twenty, thirty times what we can afford. And so I answered: "Yes, only for foreign money." The sales-girl heard us and played along: "That's right, little fellow, here you can only buy things with foreign money." Think about Vitya's logic: the only place where there are good toys, you have to have foreign money. And he didn't ask me to buy anything. He already knows we don't have any foreign money. Even little children like Vitya have begun to understand that you can live well almost anywhere in the world, but not in the Soviet Union. More to the point, it's not as though Vitya lives in poverty. Our family is relatively well off.

Let's go back to those three days. Or rather, to the 20th. I am walking in the woods with the kids. I've got no idea and no desire to know what's happening in Moscow. I already understood that whatever pearls the conspirators cast before us swine had no value. They were fighting for themselves alone, their own share of power. I'm not much good when it comes to economics. But then again, I had noticed that our former Finance Minister and now Prime Minister Pavlov also wasn't much good at economics either. In any case, things hadn't gotten any better with him running the show. And he had managed to steal most of my life's savings back in January with his idiotic money exchange and the law which froze all our bank accounts. Even before they set themselves up as an Emergency Committee, they were already the masters of the country. They were already in power. Everyone knew the conservatives had Gorbachev on a short leash. What on earth was the point of bringing the army in to help build our better life? They could already do practically whatever they liked, pass as many stupid laws as they wanted to, tinker with the economy to their heart's content. But why tanks!?

It was obvious. With this new Union Treaty which was meant to be signed on the 20th, they were worried about losing their own power and privileges. When they ordered the tanks out onto the streets, they were counting on us being frightened and that the promise of a better life and some crumbs off their table would shut us up and stifle any bleats of protest we might have ventured. And for the most part they were right. Not long ago I was in a shop and a woman started shouting: "For God's sake, just give us back Brezhnev!" And I understand her. Back in Brezhnev's time, the shops were full. Well not full, but you could buy most things some of the time. And people like her are the majority here. But all the same the coup failed!

The Emergency Committee didn't have the guts. And some of us at least, so it seems, have started to get over the fear that was bred into us as children. That girlfriend of mine, the Party member, she left the Party because of the coup. And not when it was all over on the 22nd, but on the first day, the 19th, she was so incensed.

So it looks like we aren't as frightened as we used to be. The only pity is that despite all this, there still isn't any food in the shops!

Julia