Russian Novels Don't Teach You How to Get Rich
— "On post-Soviet nostalgia, death rates,Ein Trauriges Buch and the people who sold the factory"
Christmas evening, a bar somewhere, and a Lithuanian man in his mid-forties is telling me that he loved the Soviet Union, which is a sentence that requires some unpacking because he is Lithuanian, which means his country was occupied, which means the thing he loved is the thing that swallowed his country whole for fifty years and spit it back out in 1990 with the Baltic Way still ringing in the air, two million people holding hands across three countries in what remains one of the most extraordinary acts of collective refusal in modern history, and he knows this, he was there or his parents were there or he watched it on television at the age when television and memory have not yet learned to distinguish themselves from each other, and he is sitting in a bar on the holiday that is supposed to be about warmth and home and the proximity of people you belong to, telling a stranger from India (a country the USSR armed, incidentally; a country whose parliament observed a minute of silence when Stalin died, which is a fact I learned recently and have not yet figured out what to do with) that the thing which occupied his country was the last time the world was legible to him, the last time he understood the rules, even the cruel ones, even the ones that made no sense, because at least the rules that made no sense made no sense in a consistent and predictable way, and the new rules, the ones that were supposed to be better, the ones that came wrapped in words like freedom and opportunity and reform, those rules made no sense either but they had the additional quality of insisting that they did, of insisting that any failure to navigate them was your own.
I did not correct him. I want to explain why, though the explanation requires a coffee shop, a frozen lake, some numbers, a Belarusian journalist, and, unfortunately, a fair amount of data about death rates. I am sorry about the death rates in advance; I know they are not what anyone wants to encounter in what is nominally an essay about a bar conversation. But the death rates are what make the bar conversation serious instead of sentimental, what turns I miss the USSR from a political provocation into what I think it actually is: a statement about grief, about who profits from your grief, about what happens when the people who told you the future would be better are the same people who personally ensured that it wasn’t.
I had been reading Alexievich that week, Secondhand Time, the Finnish war chapter specifically, and I want to tell you what happens in this chapter because it is the reason I sat with the Lithuanian man instead of doing what I would normally do when someone says something politically uncomfortable in a bar: nod politely, change the subject to something I know about, the correct way to make shorba or which Gintama arcs are secretly about depression. I would have been well within my rights to change the subject; I am not Lithuanian, I am not post-Soviet, I do not have, as Alexievich puts it, the shared communist collective memory. “Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet. We’re neighbors in memory” (Alexievich, Secondhand Time, p. 28). But I sat there, and I think I sat there because of what the Finnish chapter had done to me two days earlier in a coffee shop in Heidelberg.
The father (it is always “the father”; Alexievich’s interviewees are identified by their relationships, by their positions in a family rather than their positions in history) fought in the Russo-Finnish War. He was captured. The Soviets had been advancing over a frozen lake; the Finnish artillery shot at the ice, few made it across, those who did were half-naked, shoeless, weaponless. The Finns stretched out their arms. Some Soviets took the hand, some wouldn’t, that’s how they’d been trained: you do not accept help from the enemy, you die first, dying is preferable to the shame of capture. But the father took the hand. He was pulled from the water, given schnapps, given dry clothes; they clapped him on the shoulder, “You made it, Ivan!” This amazed him, he told his daughter decades later, because he had never been face to face with the enemy before; he didn’t understand why they were cheerful (Alexievich, pp. 50–55).
Then the war ended, the prisoners were exchanged. The Finns were greeted with hugs; their country considered them heroes, the obvious thing, they had survived. The Soviet prisoners were marched off the train into barracks with barbed wire. The interrogator asked the father how he’d been taken prisoner; the father said “The Finns pulled me out of a lake”; the interrogator said “You traitor, you were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.” The father agreed. He accepted the sentence, six years in the camps, because that is how he had been trained, because the state that pulled you from the lake of history had the right to push you back in. After the camps he came home. He could not butcher chickens anymore, his daughter says; he was afraid of the blood.
I was reading this in a coffee shop in Heidelberg on a Tuesday afternoon, sobbing, not the discreet kind of crying where you can pretend it’s allergies but the full stupid kind where your nose runs and you can’t breathe properly and the page blurs and you have to keep putting the book down and picking it back up because you can’t stop reading but you also can’t see. I went outside for a smoke and there was an eighteen-year-old, maybe younger, sitting on the steps with a rolled cigarette, and she looked at me and asked, in German, why I was crying, and I could not answer her. Not because I didn’t have the German for it but because I did not know how to compress into a sentence what had just happened to me, which was that a Belarusian journalist had taken a Finnish-Soviet prisoner exchange from 1940 and a grandmother’s kitchen table and a daughter’s sixty-year-old memory of her father’s hands shaking when he tried to cut bread and had woven them together into something that made the cruelty and the loyalty and the love coexist not in the same country or the same era but in the same person, in the same family, in the same room. How do you say that to an eighteen-year-old on the steps of a coffee shop in Heidelberg? You don’t. You say ein trauriges Buch and she nods and offers you a light and you go back inside.
The daughter tells this story. The grandmother in the same household still defends Stalin: “If it weren’t for Stalin we’d be licking the Germans’ asses.” She went to church after perestroika, kept the fasts, crossed herself, but the only thing she ever really believed in was communism. The daughter’s mother disagreed — “No, we’re going to have a beautiful, fair life” — went to Yeltsin rallies breathlessly. The grandmother said: “Instead of communists, we’re going to have speculators.” The debates started in the morning, resumed in the evening; whenever Yeltsin appeared on television the mother hurried over to watch, the grandmother crossed herself, said “He’s a criminal, may the Lord forgive me.”
And, fine, the grandmother was not entirely wrong.
The question that came out of the bar and the coffee shop is not whether the USSR was good. Obviously not. Obviously the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Baltic occupation, Prague 1968, Budapest 1956, the whole catalogue of atrocities that I don’t need to rehearse because the Lithuanian man already knows them better than I do, knows them from the inside in a way I never will. The question is why the nostalgia is rational.
I think there are two layers to this; the second is the one nobody has properly assembled, the one that makes the Lithuanian man not a tankie, not a nostalgic, not confused, but a kind of analyst — someone who has done the math on his own life and arrived at a conclusion that embarrasses him slightly because it is politically illegible in the current landscape. The conclusion being: the people who liberated me are the same people who robbed me, and at least the people who occupied me had to stay.
The first layer is the one everyone writes about because it’s the most legible: the functional state, the guaranteed minimums, the floor being higher even when the ceiling was lower. I am going to spend some time on this not because it’s original but because the scale of what happened after the floor was removed is not widely understood, or rather it is understood in the way that very large numbers are understood, which is not at all.
Stuckler and Basu describe the Soviet mono-towns (those single-industry cities built around a factory or a mine, planned to the last apartment block) in a way that stays with me: on-site hospitals, diabetes screenings, childcare, the running joke being “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” The pretending was mutual; the work existed, the childcare existed, the diabetes screening existed. Then the towns collapsed (Stuckler & Basu, The Body Economic, 2013, ch. 2). Kadykchan, a coal-mining town in the Russian Far East: eleven thousand people at its peak, six thousand by the last Soviet census, under a thousand by the early 2000s. The men left first, looking for work; there was no work to find; they died (I will get to how they died). The women stayed, the babushkas stayed, peered through cracked windows at a town that was still technically a town, the way a body that has gone cold is still technically a body. The Stalin sculpture in the centre crumbled. The factories were stripped for scrap metal. People ate potato peelings.
Here is what happened to the numbers. Russian male life expectancy dropped from 63.4 years in 1989 to 57.4 years in 1994; a decline of nearly seven years in half a decade. I keep trying to find a comparison for this, and the comparisons are all wartime. The UNDP estimated 9.7 million “missing men” across the post-Soviet states (Ghodsee & Orenstein, Taking Stock of Shock, 2021, p. 79). UNICEF put the figure at 3.26 million excess deaths in the first decade alone. Poverty went from 2% in 1987–88 to somewhere between 25% and 50% by the mid-1990s depending on where you draw the line. I keep having to reread that sentence; the numbers are so large they stop meaning anything, the way all sufficiently large numbers stop meaning anything. This is why Alexievich’s method — one kitchen, one grandmother, one frozen lake — works better than any dataset, and I say this as someone who builds datasets for a living.
GDP fell by more than a third. Unemployment went from effectively zero (the Soviet system guaranteed employment, badly, but it guaranteed it) to 22% in Russia. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, increased by an average of 9 points across all post-communist states; in economics this is an enormous shift, the kind of redistribution that usually requires a war or a revolution. In a sense it was both.
But here is the thing, Stuckler’s genuine contribution, the thing that separates the data from the hand-wringing: Poland and Russia had the same death rates in 1991, before the reforms. By 1994, Russia was up 35%; Poland was down 10% (Stuckler & Basu, p. 29). Kazakhstan, Latvia, Estonia all had mortality spikes comparable to Russia’s. Belarus, Slovenia, the Czech Republic did not. Same transition, from communism to capitalism; different method, different speed, different outcome. The variable was not whether you left but how you left. The countries that pursued rapid mass privatisation (the “shock therapy” countries, advised by Harvard economists, the IMF, Jeffrey Sachs, who published his plan under the title “What Is to Be Done” in a nod to Lenin that I find more disturbing the longer I think about it) experienced what Stuckler calls a “one-two punch” of economic dislocation and social safety net destruction. The countries that went gradually, that maintained their social protection systems during the transition, saw health improvements. The Lancet paper (Stuckler, King & McKee, 2009) found mass privatisation associated with a 12.8% increase in mortality. The deaths were not the inevitable cost of freedom but they were a policy choice and policy choices have authors.
I want to pause here and talk about something that doesn’t usually appear in the economics literature, which is the particular quality of the grief, the texture of it, what it felt like from the inside to be a person whose entire framework for understanding the world had just been declared not merely wrong but embarrassing, backward, a thing to be ashamed of.
There is a recurring voice in Alexievich’s book, a kind of composite Soviet intellectual, who appears in different chapters with different names but who always says some version of the same thing: we were a nation of readers. “Reader” is our primary occupation, one of her interviewees says, “Viewer.” We liked to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. We considered ourselves exceptional even though there were no grounds for this besides oil and natural gas (Alexievich, p. 25). The kitchens were the centre of everything. Nine to twelve square metres if you were lucky, onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the windowsill, a potted aloe for fighting colds, and in those kitchens the entire culture of dissent lived and breathed: Galich and Okudzhava on the record player, illegal BBC broadcasts on the radio, arguments about Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn that went on past midnight until the children fell asleep on the kitchen couch and yelled in their dreams, “Enough about politics!” (p. 26). The kitchen was the dining room, the guest room, the office, the soapbox, the group therapy session. In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in the kitchens.
And then the kitchens stopped mattering. One of Alexievich’s interviewees, a philosopher who had worked as a stoker in a boiler plant (you took a 40-ruble pay cut from an engineer’s salary and bought yourself absolute freedom; “we read, we went through tons of books, we talked, we thought we were coming up with new ideas”) describes the moment of disillusionment with a precision that is almost unbearable: “We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadn’t had any ideas after all — that whole time, we’d just been talking” (p. 27). New people appeared, young guys in gold rings and magenta blazers. New rules: if you have money, you count; no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease. “All you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam.” The intelligentsia grew calamitously poor; at the park on weekends, Hare Krishnas set up a mobile kitchen serving soup, and the line of dignified elderly was so long that thinking about it is enough to give you a lump in your throat. Some of them hid their faces.
And the books. The books are the thing that wrecks me every time I return to this passage. Out of habit, another interviewee says, she would go into the used bookstore where the full two-hundred-volume sets of the World Classics Library and Library of Adventures now stood calmly, not flying off the shelves. Those orange bindings. She would stare at their spines, linger, inhale their smell. Mountains of books. The intelligentsia were selling off their libraries. Not just for the spare cash; ultimately, books had disappointed them. People were disillusioned. “It became rude to ask, ‘What are you reading?’ Too much about our lives had changed, and these weren’t things that you could read about in books. Russian novels don’t teach you how to become successful. How to get rich…Oblomov lies on his couch, Chekhov’s protagonists drink tea and complain about their lives” (p. 36–37).
I think about this constantly. The idea that an entire civilization’s relationship to literature could collapse not because the literature was bad but because the literature was insufficient, because it had been designed for a world that no longer existed, because the skills it cultivated (the capacity for suffering, the habit of introspection, the tolerance for ambiguity, the long patience of the kitchen conversation) were precisely the skills that the new world did not reward and could not use. In the hospital ward, Alexievich writes, the mother used to be the star; she would tell everyone about Stalin, the gulag, Bukharin, and people would listen day and night. Five years later, back in the hospital, she never said a word. The star of the ward was the wife of a big-time businessman, who talked about their three-hundred-square-metre house, the cook, the nanny, the driver, the gardener, the vacations to Europe — “the museums are nice, of course, but you should see the boutiques!” — and it was standing room only. Nothing about the gulag or anything of the kind. That’s all in the past. What’s the point of arguing with old people? (p. 36).
And the Party workers, the true believers who weren’t stupid or cynical but who had genuinely given their lives to something. One of Alexievich’s most devastating interviewees is a former third secretary of a district Party committee, a woman who had taught Russian language and literature before she was recruited into the Party, whose favourite writers were Tolstoy and Chekhov, who describes the moment she was offered the position as a “burst of desire to serve” (p. 59). She is proud of her service. She will never throw away her Party membership card. She describes the Soviet era not as paradise but as “regular life — we had love and friendship…dresses and shoes…People hungrily listened to writers and actors, which they don’t do anymore. The stadium poets have been replaced by psychics and magicians” (p. 60). Where, she asks, are the former supporters of perestroika? Where are the Metro stations devoted to dairymaids and lathe operators? Where is the vocabulary that named these people as important? “The little man, the nobody, is a zero — you’ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel. He used to be able to write a letter to the editor, go and complain at the district Party headquarters about his boss or poor building maintenance…Who will even listen to the man in the street today? Who needs him?” (p. 58).
I am not romanticising this. I know I am not romanticising this, or at least I am trying not to, because the woman who says these things also knows what the Party did, also lived through what the Party did, and is choosing — consciously, stubbornly, with full knowledge of the Gulag and the lies and the three-litre jars of birch juice that were the only things on the shop shelves — to remember the parts that were hers, the parts she built, the parts that gave her life a vocabulary and a structure and a sense that her work mattered to someone besides herself. This is not false consciousness. This is a woman who taught Tolstoy and Chekhov holding onto the Tolstoy and Chekhov while the world outside decides that Tolstoy and Chekhov are no longer relevant, that Russian novels don’t teach you how to get rich, that the only question worth asking is the son’s question: Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?
I want to pause again and talk about who misses the USSR and who doesn’t, because the generational dimension of this is important and also because it complicates things in a way that makes the story more honest.
The 2009 Pew survey (twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, nine post-socialist countries, first major longitudinal comparison with 1991) found something the researchers titled “End of Communism Cheered but with More Reservations,” which is the kind of title you write when you were expecting better news (Ghodsee & Orenstein, pp. 122–125). The headline: majorities still endorsed multiparty democracy and free markets. The subheadline, buried in the “but”: support had declined in every single country since 1991, in some cases dramatically. A 34-point drop in support for capitalism in Hungary. A 26-point drop in Lithuania. A 42-point drop in support for democracy in Ukraine. When asked whether “most people” were better off than under communism, in none of the nine countries surveyed did more than 50% say yes. In Hungary, 72% said most people were worse off. In Bulgaria and Ukraine, 62%.
But the distribution was not even; this is where it gets complicated, where I think the Lithuanian man is both typical and unusual. It was the young, the better educated, the urban populations who were cheering in 1991; the same groups reported higher life satisfaction in 2009. “How older, less well educated and rural people would adapt was then identified as one of the principal challenges,” the Pew report noted, with the politely clinical tone of people who have identified a challenge and are about to do nothing about it. The older, the rural, the less educated: they were the ones who remembered what the floor felt like, the ones who noticed when it was gone, the ones who could still vote. I think this last part is important. The Pew researchers, the EBRD, the World Bank kept worrying about “illiberal parties” in their reports; not because they cared about the pensioners choosing between heat and medicine but because the pensioners choosing between heat and medicine had the same vote as the economist in Sofia who knew his colleagues in Sweden.
The Russian data is the most striking. In 1995–96 (Kullberg and Zimmerman’s survey; Ghodsee & Orenstein, p. 115) almost half of Russian respondents, 49%, said the old Soviet political system would be most suitable for Russia. Only 17% preferred Western-style liberal democracy. When the researchers disaggregated, it was women, the elderly, the less educated, those in smaller towns who overwhelmingly preferred the old system. The people who were “locked out” of the new economy — who couldn’t retool their skills, who didn’t speak the language of the market, who were too old to start over and too young to die — those were the people who said the thing that occupied us was better than the thing that liberated us, and the researchers called this “antiliberal attitudes” as though having your pension destroyed and your factory sold for parts was an attitude problem.
We do this too, incidentally, this differential nostalgia, this generational sorting of who gets to be wistful and who gets dismissed. My grandparents in India speak about the ‘60s and ‘70s with a warmth that my parents find baffling; my parents remember the licence raj, the scarcity, the queuing for cooking gas. My grandparents also remember the scarcity but they remember it differently: as a scarcity that was shared, that was legible, that came with the understanding that the state was trying and failing rather than succeeding and leaving you behind. I am not saying these are equivalent (Indian socialism and Soviet communism are not the same thing; the scales of violence are not comparable, the institutional structures are entirely different) but the shape of the nostalgia is similar. The way it maps onto age, class, distance from the new economy. The way the people who adapted to the market remember the transition as liberation; the people who didn’t remember it as theft. Both of them are right. The failure to hold both truths simultaneously is, I think, the thing that makes conversations about post-Soviet nostalgia so difficult, so prone to the easy dismissal: oh he’s just a tankie, oh she’s just old.
By 2019, thirty years on, things had improved in some places — Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia had majority satisfaction with the direction of their country (Ghodsee & Orenstein, pp. 148–149). Hungary had shot from 8% to 47% satisfaction under Orbán, which is a fact I find both encouraging and unsettling; encouraging because things can get better, unsettling because the mechanism was populist nationalism rather than anything the EBRD would have recommended. But Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria were still hovering around 25%. A quarter of the population, thirty years after liberation, believed the economic situation was better than under communism. Three-quarters didn’t. The World Bank published a report called “Toward a New Social Contract” that found the share of national income going to Russia’s top 1% had nearly quintupled, from 4.4% to 20.2%, between 1985 and 2014. In Poland it tripled. The inequality that was supposed to be the temporary cost of transition had become the permanent structure of the new economy.
But the second layer — and this is the part I keep returning to, the part I think the Lithuanian man was actually talking about though he didn’t frame it this way because he was in a bar on Christmas not at a seminar on Bourdieu — is not the absence of the state’s provisions but the presence of the people who dismantled them, specifically the fact that they were the same people.
The nomenklatura didn’t vanish. They converted.
I want to be precise about this because precision is what separates the claim from the conspiracy theory. Derluguian reads the whole process through Bourdieu: capital as the way people store accumulated successes; economic capital, political capital, administrative capital, symbolic capital, all of which can under certain conditions be converted into each other (Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, 2005, ch. 5). The nomenklatura’s capital was overwhelmingly administrative. Office positions. Insider knowledge. Patronage networks. The ability to allocate resources. The knowledge of where the resources were, who controlled access, which forms to fill in — not a glamorous kind of power, but the kind of power that survives regime change, because the forms still need filling in, the resources still need allocating, the person who knows how to do it is, conveniently, still available. Except now instead of allocating public resources on behalf of the Party he is allocating privatised resources on behalf of himself. The Party secretary became the factory owner. The bureaucrat became the oligarch. I keep wanting to say “overnight” but it wasn’t overnight; it was a few years, which is worse. Overnight implies a coup. A few years implies a process, something with meetings, paperwork, lawyers, something that could have been stopped at any number of points. It wasn’t. Stopping it would have meant confronting the people who had just won the Cold War, telling them their advice was producing a kleptocracy. Nobody wanted to be the person who said that, not in 1993, not when history had ended, the future was liberal democracy and free markets and the fifty types of cheese.
Krastev has this phrase, via Kotkin the Princeton historian, that I think does more explanatory work than most of the quantitative literature I have read on the subject (and I have read a lot of it; that is what I do when I am trying not to cry in coffee shops, I read quantitative literature): communist elites were “no exit” elites (Krastev, After Europe, 2017, pp. 90–91). They couldn’t leave. Their capital was non-transferable, legible only within the Party structure. They had better goods, better healthcare, better dachas; they were corrupt, they were parasites, they were all the things the dissidents said they were. But they couldn’t go to London. They were stuck with you. They rode the same trams — sort of; they rode better trams, or they had drivers, but the trams were in the same city, the city was theirs in a way that it was also yours, they couldn’t take it with them because there was nowhere to take it. The nomenklatura’s children went to better schools but the schools were in the same country; the children had to come home; the home was the same crumbling, magnificent, brutal, legible place.
Post-1989 elites are what Krastev calls “no loyalty” elites. Their capital is convertible. The leading economist in Sofia, Krastev writes, “is intimately familiar with his colleagues in Sweden but has no knowledge of or interest in his compatriots who failed their technocratic examinations” (p. 91). He can run a bank in Bulgaria or Bangladesh. His children are in private schools in Vienna or London. When the crisis comes (crises come; they always come) he can leave. The pensioner choosing between heat and medicine watches him leave, watches the Audi with the Vienna plates disappear down the motorway. This is not an abstraction; this is the specific visual experience of post-communist life in the periphery. The cars getting nicer, the drivers getting fewer, the ones who stay getting older, the ones who leave getting younger, nobody on the motorway looking back.
What the Lithuanian man was mourning, I think, is not the Politburo but the shared confinement; the knowledge that the people who governed you had to stay, had to eat the same bad food, ride the same broken infrastructure, send their kids to the same schools, however unequally, because there was nowhere else to go. Krastev says this better than I can, and I apologise for quoting him this much, but he keeps arriving at the thing before I can get there: what populism promises is not competence but intimacy. Not “nationalise the industries” but “nationalise the elites.” Make them stay. Make them share the cost. The demand is for skin in the game, for the people who govern you to be trapped in the same sinking boat instead of having a helicopter on the roof. I think that’s a reasonable thing to want. Wanting the people who make decisions about your life to live with the consequences of those decisions is not populism in the pejorative sense; it is just the basic expectation of governance that the post-Cold War order quietly abandoned in favour of a technocratic class that could advise Poland on Monday, Kazakhstan on Thursday, own property in neither.
Stiglitz, who was chief economist of the World Bank (not a Marxist journal; the World Bank, the institution that advised the transition) said it plainly: “Rapid privatizations were giving away hundreds of billions of dollars of the countries’ most valuable assets, creating a new class of oligarchs who took money out of the country far faster than the inflow of billions that the IMF was pouring in as assistance” (Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 2002, ch. 5). The famous example: Roman Abramovich buying Chelsea FC, English country estates, with the proceeds of Russian aluminium and oil. The money didn’t just leave the people; it left the country, visibly, ostentatiously, on live television. The people who took it were the same people who had been running the system they had just sold for parts. The pensioners choosing between heat and medicine watched them do it on the same televisions that used to show Gagarin.
And a generation later, in Alexievich, the son asks his father: “Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?” As though the only people who didn’t profit from the collapse were the stupid and the armless. “Their eyes would glaze over,” the father says about his children, whenever he tried to tell them about 1991, about 1993, about standing in front of the White House in Moscow believing in something. “The only question they have for me is, ‘Papa, why didn’t you get rich?’” (Alexievich, pp. 301–302).
One more thing, then I’ll go back to the bar. Krastev on imitation, briefly, because this could be its own essay and probably should be, but it helps explain the particular quality of the Lithuanian man’s grief, which is not just economic but — I want to say ontological, a word I dislike because it sounds like I’m trying to be Heidegger at a party, but I mean it in the plain sense: a grief about what kind of person you are allowed to be.
Post-1989, Eastern Europe was told: become like the West. The EU accession process made this structural. Meet these benchmarks, adopt these laws, reform in this sequence; you will become, eventually, recognisably European, which is to say recognisably human in the way that counts, which is to say legible to the people who already count. It worked, for some: Poland, the Czech Republic, eventually the Baltics. Lithuania got there; Lithuania joined the EU in 2004; Lithuania is by most metrics a success story of transition. But the imitation produced something I think Krastev is right to identify as a kind of existential subordination. You are always the student, never the model. You are always approximating someone else’s normal. The approximation can never be close enough because the normal keeps moving; the West is also changing, also anxious, also unsure of itself, but the West gets to be unsure of itself and you don’t. You have to keep performing the imitation even as the thing you’re imitating loses confidence in itself. I am romanticising. I know I am romanticising. The Lithuanian man did not say any of this; the Lithuanian man said he loved the Soviet Union, and I am now several thousand words into an essay about what I think he meant, which is a kind of intellectual arrogance I should probably acknowledge and will now acknowledge and continue anyway.
Krastev cites Rawls: being a loser in a meritocratic society was not as painful as being a loser in an openly unjust society. He says it looks like Rawls was wrong (Krastev, p. 92). The Lithuanian man, I think, is the proof, or at least a data point, which is what economists call a person when we want to avoid looking at his face. He grew up in a system that said everyone is equal — a lie, obviously, a massive lie, a lie with a body count — but a legible lie, one you could see through and know you were seeing through, share the seeing-through with your neighbours over vodka, the collective cynicism being itself a kind of solidarity. He now lives in a system that says everyone has opportunity. The lie is illegible. If you fail it’s because you didn’t try hard enough; the people who succeeded did so because they were smarter or worked harder — not because they were the nomenklatura’s children with the right connections, the right timing, the right willingness to asset-strip a public enterprise. This illegibility is what makes the nostalgia rational rather than sentimental: at least the old lie didn’t require you to blame yourself.
Back to the bar. Christmas. It has been an hour, maybe more; he’s still drinking, I’m still listening, and there is a second Lithuanian now, younger, maybe early thirties, who has joined the conversation the way people join conversations in bars on holidays when everyone is a little drunk and a little lonely and the boundaries between tables stop meaning anything. The older one orders shots. He toasts to Russia. In a bar. In Germany. On Christmas. The younger one winces, or maybe I imagined the wince, but he pushes back — what about the cars, he says, do you remember how hard it was to buy a car, the waiting lists, the years. And the older one waves this away with the conviction of someone who has had this argument before, many times, probably with his own children: the cars were fine. The Ladas were fine. They were shitty, yes, everyone knew they were shitty, but everyone had the same shitty car or the same lack of a shitty car and the shittiness was a shared condition rather than a personal failure, which is — I recognise this is convoluted logic, I recognise that “the cars were bad but at least everyone’s cars were bad” is not a ringing endorsement of an economic system, but I also think he is saying something that is not actually about cars, in the way that most arguments about consumer goods are not actually about consumer goods but about dignity, about whether the world you live in treats your life as a legible thing with a knowable shape or as a set of outcomes you are individually responsible for.
And then he says the thing about his father. His father, he says, had an aura back then. A presence. People in the neighbourhood knew his father, respected him, came to him with problems; his father carried himself like a man who mattered, who had standing, not because he was rich or powerful but because the system gave ordinary competence a kind of weight, a kind of seriousness that the new system does not. His father has a successful business now. He has done well, by the metrics that the post-1989 world uses to measure doing well. But the aura is gone. The standing is gone. He is a small businessman in a world that respects large businessmen; he is comfortable in a world that worships the extravagant; he has enough in a system where enough is a synonym for failure. His father, the older Lithuanian says, was more of a man under communism, and he knows how that sounds, he knows it sounds reactionary and stupid and like the kind of thing a tankie would say, but he doesn’t mean it politically, he means it — I think he means it the way Alexievich’s interviewee means it when she asks where the Metro stations devoted to dairymaids went, the way the third secretary means it when she says the little man used to be able to write a letter to the editor. He means that ordinary life used to have a vocabulary that named it as important, and now it doesn’t, and the absence of that vocabulary is a kind of loss that no amount of consumer choice can compensate for.
The younger Lithuanian is unconvinced. He has a car. It is not a Lada. He is not nostalgic. He is also, I realise after a while, not really listening anymore; he has noticed someone at the other end of the bar and is conducting a separate negotiation with his eyes while nodding along to the older man’s monologue about state-subsidised heating. And the older man, having exhausted the Soviet Union as a topic, pivots — as men in bars on Christmas will pivot — to his marriage, which is unfulfilling, which is a different kind of nostalgia or maybe the same kind, the grief for a thing that promised to be something and became something else while remaining technically the same thing, and I am sitting there nursing this man’s feelings about his wife and the USSR simultaneously while the younger Lithuanian tries to make eye contact with a woman three stools down, and I want to record this scene because it is the honest version of the evening, the version in which the grand geopolitical argument about shock therapy and elite conversion and the rational ghost of Soviet nostalgia coexists with a man who is sad about his marriage and another man who wants to hook up and an Indian who has been crying about Finnish POWs and none of these things cancel each other out, they just sit there together at the same bar on the same Christmas the way the cruelty and the loyalty and the love sit together at Alexievich’s kitchen table, uncomfortably, without resolution.
He is a person who experienced a legible world become illegible; a world where the rules were cruel but knowable became a world where the rules are kind-sounding but unparseable. The freedom was real; I want to say this clearly, because I don’t want to be the person who writes a six-thousand-word essay that gets mistaken for an apology for authoritarianism. The freedom to travel and speak and vote and choose and leave is real, is important, is worth having. The prosperity for some was real. He is still in a bar telling a stranger he loved the thing that occupied his country and also that his wife doesn’t understand him, and the stranger spent the previous Tuesday sobbing in a coffee shop about Finnish POWs while an eighteen-year-old offered him a light. Neither of us has any business being in this conversation, yet here we are; in Germany, in a bar, on Christmas, an Indian and two Lithuanians arguing about the Soviet Union, which is itself a consequence of the freedoms the post-1989 order produced, and I am aware of this irony and it does not, I think, invalidate anything I have said; it just complicates it, the way everything real is complicated, the way the grandmother’s kitchen table is complicated, the way the used bookstore with the orange spines that nobody wants anymore is complicated, the way loving a state that didn’t love you back is complicated, the way grief for something terrible is still grief.
Alexievich: “We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.”
Derluguian, less quotable but possibly more precise: “If, in the course of just a few years, millions of people who had enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that in Southern Europe could end up enduring a degree of insecurity and misery more typical of Central America or Africa, this must be a pretty big question” (Derluguian, p. 8).
It is a pretty big question. I don’t think I’ve answered it. I think I’ve described the shape of the thing, the outline of the ghost, the rational ghost that haunts the post-Soviet imagination; the ghost is not the USSR, the USSR is dead, the USSR is not coming back, nobody serious wants it back. The ghost is the promise that the thing which replaced it would be better, the discovery that “better” was unevenly distributed in a way that mapped precisely onto who had power before, the further discovery that the people who promised you “better” are now in London. You are still here, in a bar, on Christmas, telling a stranger about a country that no longer exists, a country where people read Dostoevsky in kitchens and argued about Sakharov until midnight and sent Gagarin into space and punished a man for being rescued from a frozen lake, and all of these things are true at the same time, and the inability to hold all of them at once without flinching is, I suspect, the reason most people change the subject.