If you set off on a road you will inevitably get someplace, even if someone puts obstacles in the way. This is especially true of a whole nation, a giant society determined to reach a happy future, traveling along a thorny and winding path. And especially when no one puts up obstacles except the nation itself. This is probably why this road has been so long for this long-suffering people. In a word, a high-wire act. Or they sat and talk, or they were sitting and crying.
I will try to discuss things generally known, using a forgotten and silenced language. I will broach the subject of communism, a phenomenon well known in this country, and its antipode, capitalism which does not seem to please many and is still yet to be understood. As for the former, I was a boy when they started stuffing my head with stories about heaven on earth where everyone would have everything, without any money in circulation, with absolute equality and fraternity among all nations. There were times when I voiced certain doubts about the indisputable wisdom of the bald character with a Vandyke beard in the picture on the wall of our guest room. I was harshly lectured and even spanked. That was how I grew up, watching the man next-door come home, pockets bulging with chocolate bars stolen at the confectionery. Later he would come to have me check another anonymous report to the militia he had composed (the man had problems with grammar and wrote in a first-grader's hand). Later I realized that there was only one way to make mankind equal: by chopping off everyone's head. In a word, as a teenager I was already fed up with communism. Of course, I was not the only one who felt that way. A whole generation was rising in a Soviet society being gnawed from inside by material and moral misery like one in the final phase of syphilis. I mean people aged between 30 and 50 now. We grew amidst endless talk about stores offering goods free, women everyone could take, and apartment buildings where everyone was free to take any vacant apartment. The part about houses eventually came true, in the form of structures written off to be torn down then forgotten, turned into dumps and lodging places for the homeless. Then a relative of mine came from Vladimir and surprised me by saying that work was not necessary. One could have a job and was free to do without. In a country where every square foot was drenched in sweat and blood, where every place smelled of death, where most of the work-trodden proletarians (lauded as masters of the land and all wealth beneath and above its surface) gurgled down bottles of cheap vodka or moonshine after work and then started philosophizing, while refined intellectuals shook their heads and clicked their tongues, having to build their bright future with this riffraff – one and all, every beggar, every top-level bureaucrat were convinced that they were indeed building it and moving toward it. I mean they did not go through the motions of believing. They really believed. Then suddenly all that belief crumbled and the obvious truth was as obscene as the middle finger thrust in one's face: there would never be socialism, not even with a "human face." Times are different now. People denied the benefits of socialism are no longer dispatched to fell trees in Kolyma and Magadan. Waiting for them now were top-notch Soviet-trained doctors clad in snow-white gowns. It transpired that man was brought under control very easily. All it took was to lead him into the trap of self-exaltation.
It was then Soviet intellectuals feeding on rancid fatback and liverwurst started harboring dreams about equal opportunities and free enterprise. They were about to enter an entirely different strange world, only yesterday strictly forbidden, thus being all the more alluring. After the Iron Curtain and all attendant restrictions were lifted, after the Berlin Wall and all the other barriers were torn down, everybody became convinced that the time of full stomachs and intellectual freedom had finally come. Now they had capitalism, albeit "primative," as discreetly referred to by a People's Deputy. It turned out primitive in the historical sense, with bared teeth, smacking of Soviet wilderness and Slavic sloth. People stopped being paid for their work altogether. I know of many workers who were just shown the door and told their back wages would never be paid. Over the past five years I have come across thousands of homeless and jobless, people not wanted by anybody. They would stare morosely into the twilight of time just as their country lit by luxury shop windows was vanishing from history.






