USSR: An Attempt at an Epitaph
Mikhail Epstein
"Never speak ill of the dead." Even when lowering a sworn enemy into the grave we must stand silently, recalling whatever was best in him. It is not the deceased him or herself who demands this, it is the ceremony of death that does, the rite of farewell and burial. There is mystery in death, and profound meaning: we the living cannot debase this mystery without debasing ourselves.
The foregoing remarks concern the grave into which an entire nation, which seemingly only yesterday was still arrogant and merciless, is now being lowered. There's nothing to be gained in dancing on its grave. There's nothing to be gained in reviling a dead power with some final insulting words. This was the proper thing to do in the past, when the Soviet Union was still dangerous and vindictive. There will be plenty of time in the future for history's stern sentence, when everything and everyone will be judged according to their merits; and this includes today's noisy, censorious judges. But now there's little time for concentrated grief, for participation in the sacrament of burial.
If it is true that the funeral knell peals for the survivors as well as for the deceased, then it is even more so when a nation dies. As we bury it, we are burying ourselves too: some of us are parting with our childhood, some with youth, others with an almost completely lived life. For this country was not separate from us. And if a part of us is dying along with this country, then a part of this country remains and will continue to live on inside us.
When I awoke on Christmas morning to read that the Soviet Union no longer existed,[1] that its flag had been lowered and its President gone into retirement, I was overwhelmed by two feelings. The first: my entire past had soared away from me in time, just as it had earlier soared away in space, as I flew to America across the rippling Atlantic Ocean. And now all of it: my dreary childhood, the Soviet summer camp and the songs sung around a campfire; the ambiguous exams, the whispered stories and first love under the clanging strings of a beat-up guitar; the innuendo I subtly sneaked into my articles, the polite disagreements with editors: all of it was pasted onto a yellowing sheaf from a page of history, after serfdom, revolution, and five-year plans: "And this is how they really lived in the Soviet Union. There was such a country. The period of late Stalinism . . . and early Khrushchev . . ."
How strange it is to feel the presence of an archaeological layer, dusty sediment of centuries, under one's own skin. Where do you come from? I was born in Atlantis. I was born in Byzantium. I was born in the Soviet Union. Exotic words: echoes of already mute, historical worlds . . .
And already I could hear the polite voice of a tour guide showing me around the back alleys of my memory. Using a pointer she motioned to some notebooks, scribbled over with crooked lines, in which we first learned to write. Suddenly it was as though my entire past was deprived of the quality of intimacy, becoming instead a museum open for inspection by an indifferent throng of descendants. And to think: only a single word was required to achieve it: "The former Soviet Union." And with that word, my entire previous life, forty years of wandering in the desert in search of a way out, was itself also suddenly former. A life lived not so much by me alone but as a member of my generation, someone born in the late nineteen forties or early fifties, now with a touch of grey, of fatigue and expectation. USSR. How many shades of grey rumble and overflow in that word![2]
But there was another feeling connected to the first. It was not that I was but a frail shadow in the Soviet Union's past: rather the Soviet Union had migrated inside me. It was settling down. Living inside me. It was singing wonderful songs in a low voice: "Along the road to battle . . . It's only the wind whistling in the wires . . . Where the sun is setting in smoke . . . "[3] This country is speaking in my voice. I speak American words with its, Soviet, accent. I touch American things with its, Soviet, hurried and awkward movements. I stare into American supermarkets with its, Soviet, distrustful glance. With its, Soviet, lightheartedness I understand nothing about the American banking system. Although no one is challenging me, I try to ground and emphasize my personal opinion with its, Soviet, punctiliousness. I am filled with its, Soviet, suspiciousness, in regard to privileges and benefits accorded on the basis of race, although many conscience-stricken American liberals think that it's fair to grant advantages to aggrieved races.
In the past, everything was so much simpler! This powerful, horrible country lived apart from me, and I did everything in power not to be Soviet, anything but Soviet: Russian, Jewish, European, American. Now that it has disappeared from the face of the earth, I feel the Soviet Union within me. Now that no one lives in the Soviet nation, it lives within us: we are its eternal foster-children and envoys. And this is especially true of those among us who have left it.
For those who remain, it is gradually becoming Russia, Ukrainia, Georgia, Uzbekistan . . . But for those who have left, it will always remain the Soviet Union, because it has no way to change. It will never become America, France, or Israel. It forced us out only to have a better chance at survival, to be preserved like a smell inside a closed cupboard.
What is left of the Soviet Union? Moscow is no longer Soviet. Gorky Street is Tverskaya Street, as it was during Russian times. Our history textbooks are all anti-Soviet. The Kremlin is bereft of its red calico propaganda panels. And on the radio there's no more sound of the marching songs of the shock brigades. In today's world, in which there is almost nothing Soviet left, I am the most Soviet thing of all. I still have my childhood instincts that no amount of adult experience can fully overcome. I have my faith in the brotherhood of nations. My pride in the color red. My tears when hearing the singing of the Internationale. My surreptitious attempts to cause the reader not to agree with my expressed opinion. My dislike of authoritative quotes and my liking for polysemantic formulations. My love of conversations that persist to the point of stupor and the loss of one's "I" in my interlocutor's "you". My avoidance of making eye contact with passersby in order to avoid misunderstandings that would require me to explain myself. My faith in the potential existence of a rigorous yet celebratory order, like on May Day when, to the blare of loud-speakers, people gathered to march in friendship and harmony, hugging each other in the reflections of red banners and yellow kettledrums. My respect for school marms who wore a medal in their lapel and always kept their hair carefully combed, my desire always to obey them, to become a model student. My burning desire to investigate any and all ideas, to live with them without being particularly concerned about whether or not they jibe with reality. All of that is the Soviet part of me.
Of course, I can't say that I like all these qualities about myself. But without them, I wouldn't be me. Also, as it is said that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, how can I not love myself, even if I don't want to? Even that part of me that is innately Soviet. Even if I'm completely anti- and perhaps even post-Soviet, it doesn't matter: I am the last refuge of a huge nation. Having ceased to exist historically and geographically, it has grabbed hold of us even more strongly in a metaphysical sense, an eternal homeland, like a bit of ash which, having lost its corporeal body, now beats within each of our breasts, exists with every beat of our heart. Like the guard who marches in circles around Lenin's corpse inside the mausoleum, so do our hearts circle and circle our lost nation — with a sharp and attentive step, which reveals the empty distance of the future.
December 1991
Transl. Thomas Epstein