Soviet era

The Soviet era is a lived historical layer in the novel rather than a distant backdrop: it persists in the work that shaped Sergey Sergeyich’s family, the photographs and books he keeps, the holidays and organizations inherited by the post-Soviet world, and the language used for wartime loss. Its traces are intimate and practical as well as political. They connect private memory to the industrial identity of Donbas and show how older institutions and vocabularies survive even as the world around them changes.

Industrial identity and ordinary lives

The novel’s account of the people of Donbas links their inconspicuousness to the region’s coal mines and metallurgical plants. In Soviet times, they took pride in playing an unobtrusive part in what the narrator calls the “great industrial whole.” The designation “the people of Donbas” could reduce them to children of mines and slag heaps, as though they had no ethnic roots. This inherited image helps explain why the book centers an ordinary resident rather than a military hero: a life formed around work and endurance becomes one way of seeing history from inside its consequences.

Sergey Sergeyich’s family history gives that industrial past a personal scale. Looking through old photographs, he recalls parents who already seemed worn down by work. His mother managed bed linens at a district hospital, handling the repeated cycle of linens returning from patients, being washed and disinfected, and going back onto the beds. His father loved light machinery but earned his living operating heavy equipment, including Kamaz lorries that frightened him because of their size and unwieldiness. The father’s pleasure in his scooter with a sidecar offered a contrast: it was a machine he enjoyed, and he sometimes rode it to collect his wife after work. The difference between the machinery he loved and the heavy vehicles he had to operate makes the cost of earning a living visible without separating it from affection and family routine.

Objects that carry memory

Sergey Sergeyich’s albums assemble several periods into a domestic record. They begin with his parents’ postwar lives and reach his own life before the current war, preserving images of Vitalina and their daughter, a neighbour’s wedding, and a beekeepers’ convention. Looking at them gives the past a concrete order, but not a simple or uniformly comforting one. The photographs of his parents return him to the physical cost of their jobs; the photographs of fellow beekeepers lead him to remember a picnic by a river and a bonfire, and to hope that he might meet his old companions again after the war.

The keepsakes also register how much the present has disrupted. In a photograph, a scooter with a sidecar belongs to an earlier family life; Sergey Sergeyich reflects that the vehicle is now somewhere in Russia. The album preserves its image even as the vehicle has passed out of his reach. Elsewhere, a photograph of Vitalina pregnant offers quiet pleasure, while a small wedding photograph shows the couple at the beginning of their shared life. These images do not undo their later separation, but they let him revisit the relationship in its earlier form.

Books and candles bring the Soviet-era household into the wartime present. Sergey Sergeyich’s books are old, from Soviet times, and kept behind glass beside the china. He finds them easy to read, with large, distinct letters and simple stories. In a home without reliable electric light, his supply of candles has become equally important. After a shell destroyed the wooden church on Lenin Street, he found two boxes of candles in the damaged stone outbuilding and carried them home. He understood this as a return of what he had given: for years he had donated beeswax so the priest could make candles. The candles thus join prewar habits of contribution to the immediate work of living through a blackout.

Public memory and inherited institutions

Some Soviet inheritances appear in the novel as historical or civic facts rather than domestic objects. Defender of the Fatherland Day, celebrated in Russia and several other former Soviet republics but not in Ukraine, was formerly known as Red Army Day and Soviet Army and Navy Day. Its history reaches back to the Russian Civil War; its current name was given by Vladimir Putin in 2002. The holiday’s changing label records a shift in political framing without erasing the older military association beneath it.

The Pioneer Organisation represents a different form of Soviet inheritance, one directed at childhood and collective identity. From 1922, Soviet children aged ten to fifteen were inducted into the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation, which was modelled on scouting groups in the West. Its familiar red scarf and bugle made membership legible through uniform and symbol. The organisation was disbanded after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, but its place in the account shows how political systems once reached into ordinary childhood, not only public ceremony or adult work.

The novel’s historical notes also place Soviet repression beside these everyday legacies. They recall Taras Shevchenko’s arrest under the tsarist regime and internal exile, and describe Ivan Yakir’s arrest, torture, and execution during the Great Purge. These histories do not make the Soviet past a single undifferentiated experience: work, family, childhood organizations, public holidays, and state violence occupy distinct but connected parts of the record.

War language and the persistence of the past

The Soviet era’s vocabulary survives most starkly in the expression Cargo 200, a code word from that period that remains in use for the transportation of military casualties. Its continued use draws an old administrative term into the present conflict. The language is efficient and impersonal, while the novel’s attention remains with the people and households for whom military loss is not an abstraction.

That tension between inherited systems and ordinary survival also shapes Sergey Sergeyich’s life under wartime conditions. He reads Soviet-era books by candlelight, warms his home with stored coal, and relies on the material knowledge accumulated over decades. In one winter passage, the narrator describes coal as sufficient to last until spring and perhaps summer, while Sergey Sergeyich recognizes that time itself is now abundant. The measure of abundance is not political power or prosperity, but the ability to keep the stove burning and continue through another day.

Across family albums, work histories, public commemorations, and military terminology, the Soviet era appears as something neither wholly past nor simply restored. Its institutions have fallen away, its symbols have been renamed or discarded, and its language still circulates. What remains most insistently is the everyday: people shaped by industrial labor, material objects that preserve family experience, and routines repurposed to meet the needs of a later war.