I am drawn to the stories of working people of the Soviet Union who lived through its last years, and for a long time I wondered why. It was probably Brexit, oddly, that clarified it for me. Here was a rupture incomparably smaller, just one country stepping out of a trade bloc, preceded by years of argument, afforded the luxury of a formal process, a negotiated settlement, a decade of aftermath coverage that has yet to end. And there, in 1991, a state spanning a sixth of the world’s land was taken apart in eighteen days, by three men at a hunting lodge, with blatant disregard for the predictable human suffering that was to follow. The more airtime Brexit consumed, the louder that other silence became to me. How much intention was there in that process, what degree of agency was exercised in dismembering a union thought unbreakable only three years before?
The records of the dissolution give a sense of sudden catastrophe, of a positive feedback loop that went out of control, rather than of a prolonged, measured, deliberate process. There was a referendum, yes, but six republics had already declared independence beforehand, the question was formulated in a confusing manner, and a good deal else seems to have been off about it. And yet I find it curious that, despite all its flaws, the referendum points toward massive residual support for the USSR in some shape or form — a country that was taken apart within months of the vote. Looking at protest footage from the time, often shot beneath the enormous statues of Lenin on central squares, you see a sea of people in dark coats, mustaches and headscarves, their eyes full of anger, fear and uncertainty. It is not some joyful celebration of self-determination, as it has been advertised to the future generations; it is a desperately uncertain time in which people are trying to make sense of what is happening around them, and of whether they will have enough to feed their families tomorrow. Their horizons seem to have shrunk to the most immediate needs, their actions dictated by necessity and the looming threat of hunger rather than by informed consideration of some bright vision of the future. What does it mean to decide when you face a real threat of going hungry tomorrow? What if you are already hungry?
These days, if you speak to the people who filled those squares, the class divisions re-established in the aftermath surface: those who ended up better off through the appropriation of common resources, one way or another, are unsurprisingly unequivocal about how the event was inevitable and ultimately beneficial, whereas those who ended up with the short end of the stick will, if given the chance, reminisce about the time lost — when they could traverse 15 percent of the Earth’s land on the vacation putyovkas they received through their labor unions. Incidentally, the latter group makes up the majority of those who today feel lucky to be given the opportunity to stand in line for a visa to visit 3 percent of it. And whereas members of the first group were able to get their bodies and stories across the border, the voices of the second were filtered out of English-language interviews and Western-funded NGO projects, not to mention out of the programs of the nationalist, conservative, right-wing politics that has plagued this geography since then.
All too often, I see the story of these people flattened into a formula that starts with an enumeration of the ills of a past repressive regime and follows it with a self-pitying attempt to direct the attention of some abstract Western viewer (assumed to care, which is indeed a big ask these days) toward the corruption and oligarchy that have become entrenched in most of these places today. The story of getting out of the rain only to find yourself in a deluge, as we say. The joy is written out of our official histories, the colors bleached, and it is always snowing in the photographs. And yet I can’t help wondering whether there was more to their lives than that. What if, under different circumstances, without being confronted by hunger, they had chosen a different path? What would that path look like? What parts of their now-lost civilization would they choose to carry into the new millennium? To break out of the memorized template of the Eastern European story, we may first need to reimagine its past.