Soviet Union

The Soviet Union is more than the setting for the book’s changing lives: it is a political world repeatedly remade by coercion, selective memory, and sudden reversals. From a wartime weapons factory watched by the secret police to the reading queues of glasnost and the drunken decision that dissolved the state, the narrative follows both the machinery of power and the ordinary people forced to live inside it. Its collapse does not settle the meaning of Soviet history. Instead, it leaves behind arguments over who suffered, who resisted, and what was lost.

Wartime industry and state coercion

The opening history locates the story in Dzerzhinsk, a city on the Volga that had been called Rastyapino before the Revolution and was renamed in 1929 for Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police. During the war, heavy industry was moved away from the fighting, and a weapons factory in Dzerzhinsk came to employ the city’s population. NKVD troops watched over the workers. The factory and the police presence make industrial production inseparable from surveillance: labor served the war effort, but discipline could be enforced with the same institutions that arrested, sentenced, and executed.

The scene that follows holds brutality and intimacy in the same darkness. A worker is late returning to her post while bombs fall on the city. A soldier uses his flashlight to guide her toward shelter; she stumbles, catches his arm, and he notices a tattoo on her wrist. Their lips meet. The episode does not make the surrounding system less violent. Rather, it sets private human contact against a world where a five-minute delay could bring a court-martial and where the secret police could carry out an execution with a bullet to the back of the head.

Thaw, privilege, and the burden of memory

After Stalin’s death, the return of released prisoners brought former informers and the people they had informed on into the same streets. They knew one another’s histories, yet often looked away and continued with their lives. The book presents this uneasy coexistence as a social condition, not a resolution: the past had returned, but its participants were still reluctant to speak openly about it. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the prospect of security and improved living standards seemed plausible, and the old atmosphere of terror appeared to have eased. Yet the thaw also made the recent past harder to ignore.

In 1956, Khrushchev’s report to the Twentieth Party Congress condemned Stalin’s cult of personality and acknowledged that the country had been governed by murderers for decades. In 1962 he authorized the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s account of an ordinary day in a prison camp. The issue of New World containing the story was snapped up across the country. Its power lay partly in its plainness: an ordinary inmate’s ordinary day made the camp system publicly imaginable. The book’s account of Soviet writing extends that conflict beyond the prison gates. Official writers had apartments, dachas, foreign travel, and access to privileged shops, but in the Brezhnev era many knew that their work served a corrupt regime. They denounced writers including Joseph Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn while envying the moral authority of those who refused the bargain.

The state’s authority also depended on controlling who could leave and whether they could return. Legal emigration became possible in the 1970s, but the book describes it as a departure with no return visit, even to see a dying parent. The last familiar journeys through Moscow became charged with the knowledge that they might be happening for the final time: a ride up the Kropotkinskaya Metro escalator, the flower kiosks, and the spring city were about to become inaccessible memories. Emigration was therefore not simply movement from one country to another. It was a severing from a familiar world, made heavier by the possibility that relatives and friends left behind could not be visited again.

Dissidence and the politics of belonging

The Soviet Union also appears as a contested home for people who disagreed about what political opposition should mean. When Andrei Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize, Eduard Limonov wrote a polemic against the dissidents gathered around him. He argued that they were detached from ordinary people and represented their own interests and those of the scientific elite. He described Soviet life as gray and boring, but rejected the claim that it was simply a concentration camp; he also warned that émigrés who left at the dissidents’ urging might find that the West had no use for them. The argument was bound up with Limonov’s own disappointment after six months at Novoye russkoye slovo, where his confidence on arrival had given way to fear that he had no place in American life.

That dispute over opposition reappears much later, after Limonov’s return to Russian political life. Anna Politkovskaya defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. She described the accused as courageous people who could offer hope for their country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise expressed support for the party’s members, despite reservations about its name. For the narrator, these endorsements overturned the easy division between a fascist leader and democratic heroes. They suggested that the position Limonov occupied in his country had changed, even if the evidence did not establish that Limonov himself had changed.

Glasnost and the release of history

The book identifies a decisive transformation in the Soviet Union’s final years: people gained the freedom to write their history as they saw it. Earlier, official efforts to erase the past had reached even into reference books. After Beria’s disgrace and execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to remove the entry praising him and replace it with one on the Bering Strait. The alphabetical order could be preserved while the person was made to seem never to have existed. Similar cutting and pasting removed Solzhenitsyn’s story from old copies of New World after Khrushchev fell. The physical alteration of books makes historical suppression visible as an everyday act.

When Mikhail Gorbachev used the word glasnost in an address marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he spoke of filling in history’s blank pages and referred to hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism. The actual numbers, the narrator stresses, ran into the tens of millions. Even so, the public acknowledgment opened a breach. From 1988, books previously available only to a small intellectual circle, through samizdat or smuggled foreign editions, appeared in public and sold in huge print runs. Readers queued at dawn and read in subway cars, buses, and on the street. Under Sakharov’s patronage, the Memorial Society sought to name people killed by repression and erased from collective memory. Official statements moved from rehabilitation as an act of clemency to repentance for complicity in crimes. A consensus emerged that the country had been ruled by criminals for seventy years.

The release of history also helped undermine Soviet power beyond its borders. Recognition of the secret protocol to the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact gave the Baltic states grounds to challenge their incorporation into the Soviet Union. In the book’s account, the authorities no longer answered such challenges with tanks, and 1989 became a year of largely nonviolent revolutions across Eastern Europe. Limonov opposed the celebration of Gorbachev as a liberator. To him, glasnost, official repentance, and the abandonment of territory represented weakness and a loss of national self-respect. Even the replacement of the brass buttons on a Red Army jacket with plastic seemed to condense a larger decline: a soldier stripped of confidence, in his view, could no longer command respect.

Dissolution and the Soviet afterlife

The last phase of the Soviet Union’s existence is narrated through abrupt reversals and improvised decisions. In January 1991, while the world watched the First Gulf War, Russian tanks entered Vilnius. After resistance, they withdrew, leaving about fifteen people dead. The intervention discredited Gorbachev among democrats, while his claim that he had not been informed raised doubts about his control over the army. His treatment of Boris Yeltsin, directly elected president of Russia, further strengthened Yeltsin’s position. The old political order was losing both authority and the ability to contain events.

After the coup attempt and the signing of the relevant agreement, the statue of Dzerzhinsky outside the Lubyanka was toppled and the red flag was replaced by the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. A few months later, Yeltsin met the Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and the Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest. The three leaders had no settled plan for what form of union might replace the Soviet Union. They drank vodka in the sauna and repeated that their republics had created the state in 1922 and therefore had the right to dissolve it. Yeltsin became so drunk that the others carried him to bed. Before losing consciousness, he called George H. W. Bush to say that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Shushkevich was left to inform Gorbachev, who asked what would become of him. The book’s answer is deliberately anticlimactic: he would receive a dacha, a foundation, and a comfortable life as a highly paid lecturer.

The end of the state did not produce an uncomplicated freedom. The market reforms introduced under Yeltsin began with price liberalization, which brought inflation of 2,600 percent. Vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed on September 1, 1992, to Russian citizens over one year old as shares in the national wealth. By the time they arrived, inflation had made them nearly worthless; recipients could sell them for roughly the price of a bottle and a half of vodka. The rapid transfer of property created a new class of oligarchs, while the book portrays many ordinary people as having lost both security and pride.

This afterlife shaped Limonov’s appeal among people who remembered the Soviet Union as a world in which things made sense, despite scarcity. At demonstrations in Moscow, pensioners reduced to begging, unpaid soldiers, nationalists, Communists, and disoriented citizens protested the new order and argued over who counted as hero or traitor. Limonov joined these demonstrations and denounced the supposed democrats for betraying the blood shed by their fathers in the Great Patriotic War. Later, he argued that Russians left outside the borders of the former Soviet Union had been abandoned, and called for separatist republics in territories including Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union is thus present even after its dissolution: as lost state, disputed memory, source of nostalgia, and the political inheritance claimed by those who felt dispossessed by what followed.