On October 16, l962, President John F. Kennedy learned from US aerial surveillance that the Soviet Union was installing offensive nuclear missile sites in Cuba, 90 miles from the coast of Florida.

He was stunned.

The president broke the news to the public on October 22.

“This sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo, which cannot be accepted by this country,” he said.

President Kennedy announced the imposition a naval blockade around Cuba. He also gave Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev an ultimatum.

“I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine reckless and provocative threat to world peace.”

In other words, remove those missiles in Cuba. Or else.

So why did Nikita Khrushchev risk World War III by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba? After all, a year before, he’d promised President Kennedy he would do no such thing.

“That’s the question that everybody is trying to solve,” said Svetlana Savranskaya, director of Russia programs at the National Security Archive, and the editor of a new book, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis.

“There’s stunningly little thinking on the Soviet side about what happens if the United States responds in an aggressive way.”

Perhaps because the United States had deployed nuclear missiles in Turkey.

“Right along the Soviet borders,” Savranskaya said, “and that was a constant source of humiliation.”

So Khrushchev figured he had every right to do the same thing.

“Khrushchev felt that this is giving the Americans a dose of their own medicine,” according to James Hershberg, a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University.

“At one point Kennedy reacted to what Khrushchev did, saying ‘it’s as if we started to deploy missiles in Turkey, that would be goddamned dangerous!’ And his adviser McGeorge Bundy said, ‘well we did, Mr. President’.”

Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, is a historian at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

“[Khrushchev] did not understand at the time that the American mentality is different. Europeans, Soviets, all their history, had enemies at the gate,” Sergei said. Russians were used to being threatened.

Sergei Khrushchev says that as leader of the world’s other Superpower, his father also felt an obligation to protect his allies.

“When Castro, after the Bay of Pigs, declared officially that he joined the Soviet bloc, he put this obligation on my father’s
shoulders. So Khrushchev decided to send missiles there as a diplomatic signal: Don’t invade Cuba. We are serious.”

Svetlana Savranskaya says in the spring and summer of l962, the Soviets were receiving lots of intelligence that the United States was preparing another invasion.

“Khrushchev doesn’t want to lose Cuba. It’s his most important ally, the ally that’s genuine. Plus, it’s Latin America. The Soviets don’t have real allies in Latin America,” she said. “Cuba is so important for the Soviets.”

The Cubans weren’t just a valuable Cold War ally. They were genuine folk heroes in the Soviet Union.

“The Soviets were in love with the Cuban Revolution,” Savranskaya said. “It was really a love affair. They looked at Cuba and saw their own revolutionary youth. ”

“All the Soviets, from the top to the bottom, wanted to help the Cubans fight against possible American invasion, American aggression,” said Sergei Khrushchev.

Unfortunately, Khrushchev nearly did provoke a full-scale US invasion, by sending missiles to Cuba.

And here’s where the story gets really scary. Cuba was far more armed and dangerous than the US realized.

Svetlana Savranskaya says there were 42,000 Soviet combat troops in Cuba. The US didn’t know about them.

The Soviets also had about 180 nuclear warheads in Cuba, Savranskaya says, and the United States thought they had zero.

“What we know now is that without doubt, if there was an invasion of Cuba by US land forces, there would be a nuclear response, and then the US would have to respond with nuclear weapons.”

The crisis reached a boiling point on October 27th, says James Hershberg.

“Clearly, October 27, l962 goes down as the most dangerous day in human history.”

Savranskaya added that “it’s dangerous, amazingly not because of decisions the leaders are taking, but because the situation is spiraling out of control.”

A Soviet commander in Cuba, acting without authorization from Moscow, shot down a U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing the American pilot. Another American U-2 accidentally strayed into Soviet territory in Far East for a couple of hours.

“Also, by October 27, we’ve learned, you had Soviet submarines around the blockade equipped with nuclear torpedoes,” Hershberg said. “In at least one case, and the evidence is still coming in on this, arguments breaking out as to whether World War III has broken out and they should use their nuclear torpedo or get sunk.”

The next day, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev went on Radio Moscow, with an announcement.

“Premier Khrushchev has sent a message to President Kennedy today.

The Soviet government has ordered the dismantling of weapons in Cuba, as well as their crating and return to the Soviet Union.”

In return, President Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, although he refused to put it into writing. He also agreed to withdraw the US nuclear missiles in Turkey.

“It was a compromise on both sides; admittedly the Soviets had to undo their major deployment. But to see it as one side giving up isn’t correct.”

Both sides blinked.

Americans thought the crisis was over. President Kennedy made it official by lifting the blockade on Cuba on November 20th, after receiving assurances from Khrushchev that he’d withdrawn all of his offensive weapons.

In fact, he hadn’t.

“What we’ve only learned in the last 10 years or so was that the tactical nuclear weapons were still there,” said historian James Hershberg.

Svetlana Savranskaya says Khrushchev decided to leave these weapons in Cuba.

“For some time in November, which we call the November Crisis, the Soviet position was that they would train the Cubans to use the remaining nuclear weapons, and transfer tactical nuclear weapons to the Cubans, which would have been the most dangerous situation.”

In other words, Cuba almost became a nuclear power.

“Had Kennedy discovered that, after this incredible crisis, this incredible rupture in trust, that Khrushchev was lying again, the pressure to invade, to get rid of the threat permanently, would have been overwhelming,” according to Hershberg.

Khrushchev changed his mind, and secretly withdrew the remaining weapons in December, over the vigorous objections of Fidel Castro.

There are lots of lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis. But here’s what President Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, told filmmaker Errol Morris in his award winning documentary, The Fog of War.

“At the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”

McNamara said. “We came that close to nuclear war at the end.

Rational individuals. Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational. Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”

McNamara added that the major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.”

But, at least 50 years ago, it didn’t.

Olga Korbut on the uneven bars during the 1972 Munich Olympics. (Photo: olgakorbut.com)

Forty years ago, a tiny pigtailed gymnast from the Soviet Union was the darling of the Munich Olympics. Olga Korbut captured three gold medals and one silver at the l972 games. She also inspired tens of thousands of little girls all over the world to take up the sport.

Olga Korbut seemed to come out of nowhere. She was 17-years-old, 4-foot-11, and as slender as a sparrow.

During her first routine on the balance beam, she executed a move never before seen in Olympic competition: a backward aerial somersault.

Olympic announcers went wild.

Olga Korbut, who now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, says of that moment, “I can’t believe I did it like that. This girl is good!”

Korbut then did something even more astonishing on the uneven bars, a move that was subsequently banned because it was so dangerous.

Standing on the top bar, she dived backwards, and somehow managed to arch around and catch the bar with her hands. One announcer said at the time that the move had never been done by any human that he knew of.

“Those kinds of comments just excited and ignited the public in no way we’d ever seen before,” said Paul Ziert, publisher of International Gymnast Magazine and a former Olympic coach.

He said Olga Korbut didn’t just dazzle everyone with her acrobatics.

“I think the most interesting thing for most of us was how different she was from the stereotypical Soviet gymnast.”

She was wild and unpredictable, and utterly charismatic. The crowd loved her even when she stumbled.

“And of course that wonderful scene when she burst into tears, we didn’t think during the Cold War like that the Soviets had any ability to show any emotion publicly like that,” said Ziert.

See more video of Olga Korbut here.

Soviet gymnasts might have been poker faced. But they always took home the gold.

“At that time, the Soviet team was the best,” Korbut said from her home in Scottsdale.

In fact, Soviet gymnasts dominated the Olympic competition for decades. It’s just that no one else paid very much attention, until Olga Korbut came along.

But Paul Ziert said the sport was always popular in the USSR.

“They did gymnastics the right way. It might not have been easy for the athletes, but my goodness, they were all trained classically in ballet and all the basic skills were taught perfectly.”

Olga Korbut began training at one of the Soviet Union’s elite gymnastic schools when she was nine. The youngest of four girls, she says her mother didn’t even know she took gymnastics until she saw Olga perform on TV.

“Because my mother and father worked very hard, four kids, and we were poor,” she said.

After the Munich Olympics, President Nixon invited Korbut to the White House. “You are a little girl,” he quipped, to which she replied, “You are a big boy.”

Korbut made the Soviet Olympic team again in l976, but she retired from competition after a disappointing showing in Montreal. She then became the head coach for the Soviet Byelorussian team.

Korbut emigrated to the United States in 1991, she now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Photo: BBC)

“Actually, I didn’t want to leave country, but I raise money to help victims of Chernobyl, and I was in the United States a lot,” she said.

She ended up staying, and teaching gymnastics. She became an American citizen in 2000.

Olga Korbut was named one of Sport’s Illustrated’s 40 greatest athletes in l994, and was the first person inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame.

Now 57, she still teaches, and she’s still incredibly fit.

“I work out every day, because my body needs that,” she said.

And she’s still passionate about gymnastics. But she said the sport has changed a lot over the past 40 years. Now it’s much more about power than artistry.

“You know what, I’m waiting maybe another Olga will be born and change gymnastics to be more graceful and beautiful. But now it’s like robots — not smiling, not enjoying. And sometimes it’s boring to watch.”

But she’ll be in the Olympics’ North Greenwich Arena, watching the gymnastics and providing live commentary on Twitter and Facebook.

Red Square in Moscow, from the Saint Basil's Cathedral. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

On December 8th, l991, the Soviet press agency TASS stunned the world with this statement: “We, the Republic of Byelorussia, the Russian Federation and the Ukraine . . . state that the U.S.S.R., as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.”

With that simple declaration, the world’s largest country by landmass, and a nuclear superpower, vanished in a flash. Reporter Brigid McCarthy examines some of the important lessons embedded in the Soviet collapse and its aftermath.

How Rock & Roll Brought the Soviet Union Down

Sergei Zhuk, an author and rock fan, says Rock and Roll helped bring down the Soviet Union. He writes how this forbidden music slipped into his hometown in Ukraine. His book is called “Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, l960-l985.”
More>>>

Soviet Lines, a Way of Life in Grushin Novel

The collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago eliminated one of the most defining and despised features of Soviet life: standing in line – lines for bread, butter, and other basic necessities. According to one estimate, citizens in the USSR spent up to a third of every day standing in lines. Olga Grushin has written an entire novel, now out in paperback, about a line.
More>>>

The Soviet Coup – 20 Years Later

Twenty years ago, residents of Moscow awoke to the sound of tanks in the streets. There was a coup in the USSR. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, had been put under house arrest by members of his own government. Just about everyone in the former Soviet Union remembers where they were on August 19, l991.
More>>>

Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the Demise of the USSR

There are many Russians who say a critical factor in the demise of the USSR was the power struggle that broke out between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
More>>>

Stalinism Survivor Runs Gulag Museum In Moscow

Sunday, October 31, is remembrance day in Russia. But one thing people there don’t really like to remember is the Gulag, the Soviet work camps where tens of millions died during Stalin’s reign. 91-year-old Gulag survivor Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko keeps on trying to remind them. He runs the Gulag Museum in Moscow.
More>>>

Why Some Russians Miss the Soviet Kommunalka

The Kommunalka was a Soviet experiment in communal living. Entire families were forced to live in a single room, nevertheless some have surprisingly fond memories of the experience.
More>>>

The End of the USSR

On Christmas day 20 years ago, news reports around the world announced the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union. With his departure, the USSR dissolved, and the first socialist state was consigned to the dustbin of history. It was the end of an ideology, and an empire. Brigid McCarthy reports on why it all came crashing down.
More>>>

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union dissolved 20 years ago on Dec. 25. More than half of all Russians now regret that demise, according to a recent poll. Brigid McCarthy visited a restaurant in Moscow that lets nostalgic customers pretend they’re back in the USSR.
More>>>

Dealing With Money in Post-Soviet Life

After the collapse of the USSR, Russians and other ex-Soviets had to learn to face a new culture – a money culture. For many, that was a huge shock.
More>>>

Grappling With a Post-Soviet Identity

The host of a Russian history program says his TV series, titled Kto my? (Who Are We?), is about Russians understanding themselves.
More>>>

Soviet Era Dark Humor Makes a Comeback

Russians were able to survive tough times in the Soviet Union, by making jokes about their leaders. Now, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the jokes are back
More>>>

The tournament is one of Europe’s biggest sporting events, and it’s likely to attract tens of thousands of fans. Some of the matches will be held in the city of Donetsk, a coal mining city in eastern Ukraine.

It’s also the setting of an award winning new documentary by a German filmmaker called “The Other Chelsea.” The name is a reference to Donetsk’s professional soccer club, Shakhtar. The film follows a group of coal miners from Donetsk in 2009, the year Shakhtar won the Europa league tournament, a first for a Ukrainian team.

But “The Other Chelsea” isn’t just about soccer. It’s about the other Ukraine, the one that didn’t support the 2004 Orange Revolution, and that still considers Moscow its capital, not Kiev.

Jakob Preuss, the film’s director, got interested in this part of Ukraine after working as an election observer in 2004.

“I was sent to Donetsk probably because I speak Russian,” Preuss said, “and I was deeply impressed by this divide in the country between east and west, orange and blue.”

Preuss’s film shows the country’s starkest divide — between rich and poor. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Donetsk; it’s Ukraine’s Appalachia.

“I have these coal miners who are the losers of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, who live in really horrible conditions, still working in this mine which is really dangerous,” Preuss said.

They’re also fanatically devoted to their soccer team.

“You have this new political elite, the oligarchs, who also go to the stadium, because if you want to become something in Donetsk, you have to be there,” he said.

The oligarchs are up in the VIP box, rubbing shoulders with Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. He owns the club, and never misses a game.

Preuss wasn’t able to get an interview with the reclusive Akhmetov, but he did get to know another Donetsk oligarch, an ambitious young politician named Kolya.

“He’s really representative of this very corrupt, Machiavellian elite,” said Preuss.

Kolya actually has a copy of Machiavelli in his flat, not to mention a picture of Stalin on his office wall. He lives like a prince, despite his small salary as a city councilman.

“Normally people go into business, make a lot of money, and then they go into politics just to protect their wealth and have the immunity and play around with politics to make even more money,” Preuss said.

But Kolya got rich from politics, by steering government contracts to his construction companies.

“All Ukrainian politicians in parliament, on paper they’re not supposed to have businesses, but they’re all millionaires or billionaires,” Preuss said. “This is so normal there that Kolya didn’t even think not to tell me, which shows what a mess this country is in.”

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Kolya calmly explains the way the political system works in Ukraine.

“In your Europe, the judiciary protects both government and opposition,” Kolya says. “Here, the judiciary only protects the people in power. If you lose the election, you go to jail.”

Like former presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko.

“This has been quoted a lot of times in Ukraine,” according to Preuss, “because people couldn’t believe that this guy would say it so bluntly.”

But Kolya’s not the only blunt talker. Preuss introduces us to Stepanovitch, a pit-worker in his late sixties who’s spent his whole life in the mines.

In the film, Stepanovitch says, “I think all these millionaires are thieves and bandits. Our whole system, everyone in power, they’re all criminals.”

Stepanovitch, whose son was killed in a mining accident, thinks life was better back when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

“Even when times were bad,” he says in the film, “at least we stuck together.”

His girlfriend, Valentina, who works in the mine’s front office, agrees.

An irrepressible flirt, she sports an enormous blond beehive and leopard skin outfits, despite her not exactly girlish figure.

Preuss said when Valentina attended the premier of “The Other Chelsea” in Kiev, she received a standing ovation.

In fact, audiences throughout Ukraine — east and west — love this film, perhaps because Jakob Preuss doesn’t just show us the miserable living conditions of the coal miners, but also their warmth, humor and humanity.

“A Ukrainian told me yesterday that for him, post-Soviet people are often like coconuts. They’re a little bit hard on the outside, but they’re soft inside. And Europeans and Americans are like peaches, soft on the outside, but hard on the inside.”

But “Animal Farm” was an instant classic with an unexpected group of readers — Ukrainian refugees from the Soviet Union. One of them was Vitalij Keis.

When Keis was a kid, he spent six years in a Displaced Persons camp for Ukrainians right after World War II. The camp was on a former military base in West Germany.

Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (Photo: Vitalji and Tanya Keis Family)

“This was in Ukrainian, not in English,” Keis said.

He had picked up translation of Orwell’s novel at the camp commissary. Several thousand copies had been printed by hand at another Ukrainian DP camp.

“From what I understand, it was the first translation,” he said, in any foreign language. It was l947. Keis vaguely remembers discussing the book with his mother, who read it too.

“You have to remember, this was many years ago. I’m 76 now. But definitely this book made a splash.”

In fact, Animal Farm was required reading in some DP camps.

The First Orwell Fans

After the war, there were nearly three million Ukrainian refugees in western Europe. Most, like Keis’ family, came from the Soviet Union.

“I would say we were the first Orwell fans,” he said, laughing.

Because Orwell’s story described what they’d lived through — from the idealism of the Russian Revolution to Stalin’s forced collectivization, famine, and mass arrests.

“This was right after World War II, and was very fresh in memory,” Keis said. “My family, one fifth of my family was exiled to Siberia, and we never found any trace of them.”

Vitalji and Andrea. (Photo: Vitalji and Tanya Keis Family)

She said a young Ukrainian scholar named Ihor Shevchenko wrote to Orwell in l946, after reading “Animal Farm” in English. According to Chalupa, he wrote that he’d love to translate the novel.

“The message of your book resonates with me and I translated it out loud to Ukrainian refugees here, and they love it, and we want to make copies and give it out to people.”

Orwell was delighted. He refused any royalties, and even agreed to write a preface for the Ukrainian edition, and it remains the most detailed and personal description of how he came to write the book that made him world famous.

“I am aware that I write for readers about whom I know nothing, but also that they too have probably never had the slightest opportunity to know anything about me,” Orwell began.

“He basically said, please let me introduce myself and humbly tell you how I feel about your government and the events that you recognize in Animal Farm,” Chalupa said.

Orwell told his Ukrainian readers that he was a Socialist, more out of sympathy for the plight of the working poor than out of any theoretical fondness for a centrally planned economy.

He then explained how in l936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to fight with the Communists against the Fascists. He didn’t realize there were warring factions among the Communists, and that he had, more or less by accident, joined the Communist militia that wasn’t controlled by Moscow.

“And he goes on to tell the story in the preface of being in Spain on the frontlines, of almost being killed, of being with his wife and running for their lives from the Stalinists, and how that opened his eyes for the first time to the horror of Stalin,” Chalupa said. “On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.”

Orwell said he wrote “Animal Farm” so that people in Western Europe would see the Soviet regime for what it really was.

“In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated,” Orwell wrote in the preface.

“So Orwell was moved to say that’s not socialism everybody, stop just blindly supporting it. The Russian Revolution, that spirit is over, it’s dead. Stalin’s killed it,” said Chalupa.

1946 wedding in the Ukrainian refugee camp. Vitalji is the little boy in the front. (Photo: Vitalji and Tanya Keis Family)

Vitalij Keis’s family escaped repatriation. They moved to the United States in l951, when Keis was a teenager. He later became a professor of comparative literature and writing at Rutgers University.

A couple of years ago, Keis’ niece Andrea came over for dinner. Even though she’d been working on a project about Ukrainian and Soviet history, she’d only just learned about the Ukrainian edition of “Animal Farm”.

“And over dinner, which was of course borscht and vareniky and stuffed cabbage,” Chalupa said, “I was telling them what I’d been up to, and about Orwell and the refugees and “Animal Farm”. And my uncle just looks at me and says, “Oh yeah, I have a copy of that book.”

It was his copy of “Animal Farm” from the DP camp. He’d kept it all these years.

He then gave it to his niece as a gift.

Andrea Chalupa keeps it in a glass case at her parents’ house. The cover shows large, menacing pig learning against a fence, clutching a whip. Boxer, the story’s long-suffering workhorse, is in the background, pulling a heavy wagon up a hill.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm
by George Orwell
March 1947

I have been asked to write a preface to the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm. I am aware that I write for readers about whom I know nothing, but also that they too have probably never had the slightest opportunity to know anything about me.

In this preface they will most likely expect me to say something of how Animal Farm originated but first I would like to say something about myself and the experiences by which I arrived at my political position.

I was born in India in 1903. My father was an official in the English administration there, and my family was one of those ordinary middle-class families of soldiers, clergymen, government officials, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc. I was educated at Eton, the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schools.* But I had only got in there by means of a scholarship; otherwise my father could not have afforded to send me to a school of this type.

Shortly after I left school (I wasn’t quite twenty years old then) I went to Burma and joined the Indian Imperial Police. This was an armed police, a sort of gendarmerie very similar to the Spanish Guardia Civil or the Garde Mobile in France. I stayed five years in the service. It did not suit me and made me hate imperialism, although at that time nationalist feelings in Burma were not very marked, and relations between the English and the Burmese were not particularly unfriendly. When on leave in England in 1927, I resigned from the service and decided to become a writer: at tirst without any especial success. In 1928—9 I lived in Paris and wrote short stories and novels that nobody would print (I have since destroyed them all). In the following years I lived mostly from hand to mouth, and went hungry on several occasions. It was only from 1934 onwards that I was able to live on what I earned from my writing. In the meantime I sometimes lived for months on end amongst the poor and half-criminal elements who inhabit the worst parts of the poorer quarters, or take to the streets, begging and stealing. At that time I associated with them through lack of money, but later their way of life interested me very much for its own sake. I spent many months (more systematically this time) studying the conditions of the miners in the north of England. Up to 19301 did not on the whole look upon myself as a Socialist. In fact I had as yet no clearly defined political views. I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society. Continue Reading >>

Remember Monty Python’s skit about “the world’s funniest joke?” Anyone who heard it died laughing.

Well, the Soviet Union was finished off by not one, but tens of thousands of jokes. Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak said 21 years ago, Soviet television aired the biggest one of all.

“I was watching it live in St Petersburg. It was May 17, 1991.”

Yurchak had settled in to watch one of his favorite TV shows, “The Fifth Wheel.”

“It was a very popular program for several years,” Yurchak said. “It had a huge audience, and they did weekly an investigative story into Soviet history.”

It was sort of like a Soviet version of “60 Minutes.”

Surrounded by mountains of books and papers, the host of the program introduced his guest: a handsome, young entertainer named Sergey Kuryokhin.

“Kuryokhin set up the program by saying it will be an investigation into the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and that he has some new facts about that history which remain unknown until this day,” said Yurchak.

It had to do with mushrooms. According to Kuryokhin, Lenin and the other the Bolshevik leaders really liked mushrooms. Not just ordinary mushrooms; the hallucinogenic kind.

“Basically his point was that they ate so many mushrooms that mushrooms started affecting their personality,” Yurchak said. “And when you eat very powerful, hallucinogenic mushrooms, he claimed — which is completely fake– they have the power to take over your personality completely and you become a mushroom. In short, I want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.”

For the next hour, Kuryokhin presented historic photographs and other documentary evidence to make his case. Neither he, nor the program’s host, ever let on it was a joke.

“So people didn’t know what to make of it, and many people believed it,” Yurchak said.

Even the station managers didn’t know it was a prank. Alexei Yurchak said this show is still talked about in Russia to this day.

It was also a political watershed.

“It was really the last indication that the Soviet Union was imploding,” Yurchak said, “that the whole ideological system and the system of truth of communism had no foundation behind it.”

Because a little-known actor had reduced Lenin — the Soviet deity — to a joke. Not in the kitchen, but on state television.

Alexei Yurchak, who is now a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and the award-winning author of “Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation,” illustrates the ways humor helped undermine the communist system.

“The Lenin Mushroom hoax was an example of a whole genre of irony which developed in the late Soviet period, in the 1970s and 80s. We call that genre ‘stiob’. It’s directed at some person or statement, but it imitates it.”

It’s a lot like the Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart brand of humor, Yurchak said.

Another type of humor that was even more prevalent during the Brezhnev era was Soviet jokes, or “anekdoty.”

Man on Red Square shouts, ‘Brezhnev is an idiot!’ He gets sentenced to 15 years: five years for insulting the Soviet leader, and 10 years for betraying a state secret.

Yurchak said, “You couldn’t go through life on a daily basis without hearing constant jokes everywhere.”

Brezhnev rehearses his speech for the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980:
“Oooooohhhh.. Ooooooohhh.. Ooooooooohhhh.. Oooooooooohhh. Ooooooohhh..”
His assistant said, Comrade Brezhnev, these are the Olympic circles! You don’t have to read them!

Yurchak said people would gather in the hallways at work, during cigarette breaks at the university, even on the playground, and start telling jokes.

“We even had this slang expression in Russian, ‘traveet,’ which meant reel out, so people would just take turns one after another telling those jokes, and it could take an hour. That ritual was really pleasant and everyone loved it.”

Armenian Radio jokes were a perennial favorite:

This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: What shall we do if suddenly we feel a desire to work?” We’re answering: “Just rest for a while on a sofa. It will pass.

This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Why is our government not in a hurry to land men on the moon? We’re answering: What if they refuse to return?

There were even jokes about Chernobyl.

A grandson asks his grandfather: “Grandpa, is it true that in 1986 there was an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant?” “Yes, there was,” answered the Grandpa, and patted the grandson’s head. “Grandpa, is it true that it had absolutely no consequences?” “Yes, absolutely,” answered the Grandpa, and patted the grandson’s second head.

President Ronald Reagan was also big fan of anekdoty.

“I’ve been collecting stories that are told in the Soviet Union, by their people, among themselves, which reveals they’ve got a great sense of humor, but they also have a pretty cynical attitude toward their system,” Reagan said.

A member of Reagan’s staff collected some 15,000 of them, which the president used to spice up his speeches.

“It’s very easy to make a claim that these jokes really show that the people were resisting the party,” Yurchak said, “and it’s a very triumphalist point of view.”

But Yurchak said anekdoty weren’t just a form of political dissent. Soviet citizens were also laughing at themselves because everyone had to participate in the system, whether they believed in it or not.

“During the Brezhnev period, life became really quite absurd in many ways, and people were involved in reproducing that absurdity in many ways, and making it meaningful, making it livable. So the jokes were a way of dealing with it.”

Still, Yurchak said, Soviet anekdoty unwittingly set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“They really emptied out the system from inside.” He said they didn’t do it by resisting it directly, but by constantly drawing attention to the huge, and sometimes hilarious, disconnect between the official rhetoric and reality.

This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: When the final phase of socialism, namely communism, is built, will there still be thefts and pilfering? We’re answering: No, because everything will be already pilfered during socialism.

Soviet Anekdoty disappeared when the Soviet Union did.

But guess what? Russians have rediscovered the power of humor.

Citizens in several cities recently got around the Kremlin’s ban on unsanctioned public gatherings by staging toy protests — with legos and teddy bears holding tiny signs like “I’m for clean elections.”

Authorities responded by banning this form of protest, saying “toys are not citizens of Russia.”

And another joke, this one from Russia today:

The Chairman of the Election Commission comes to Putin after the election: I have good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?

The bad news.
Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate, got 75% of the votes.

Holy crap! – cried Putin. What’s the good news?

You got 76%.

Images and captions courtesy of Alexei Yurchak.

Images courtesy of Artplayer Gallery

Soviet and post Soviet reality in Kiev, Ukraine. (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

The series is really about self-understanding, said Felix Razumovsky, the bearded, burly historian who hosts “Who Are We?” Normal countries don’t have to ask themselves this question, he added.

“But Russia is a peculiar country, with a very strange fate,” according to Razumovsky.

Our history is characterized by these dramatic ruptures, he said, or tears in the historical canvas. The Bolshevik Revolution and the end of historic Russia in l917 was one such tear.

“Of course, another tear in the historic canvas was 1991, and the end of the Soviet Union.”

Razumovsky said after all, the Soviet Union didn’t break apart 20 years ago, Russia did.

“Again, there was this attempt to recreate Russia from scratch, by denying everything that came before, everything Soviet.”

Razumovsky wants Russians to understand this impulse for revolution and radical reinvention, because the results are so often tragic.

“It’s like, if you get your hands dirty, instead of washing them, you just cut them off,” he said. “I’m a big believer in washing.”

He said political, economic and cultural factors help explain Russia’s extremist tendencies.

“But as someone who studies the history of this country, it’s the spiritual level or the inner workings of the nation that I find interesting.”

Psychologically, Razumovsky said, Russians remain profoundly shaped by their Orthodox Christian heritage, and the idea of “Holy Russia.” That heritage can be summed up in a single Biblical verse:

“‘Don’t gather your treasures on earth, but store up your treasures in heaven.’

This very simple phrase is basically what characterizes the Russian soul or spirit,” Razumovksy said.

“Everyone in Russia is still pretty much this way, even if they try to hide it.”

Razumovsky thinks one reason Communist ideology got a foothold in Russia was it offered a modern, secular version of Holy Russia. Soviets were ready to lay down their lives for the sake of a future, workers’ paradise.

“So that’s why Russia took up the call. Excuse me, but no one else in Europe screwed around like this,” he said, with a laugh.

When Communism collapsed 20 years ago, Russians not only lost their state religion, they lost their Soviet identity.

According to Razumovsky, this is the real crisis in Russia today: there’s no agreement among the population about the country’s post-Soviet identity.

But the Russian Orthodox Church has made a startling comeback over the past 20 years, a trend that’s been encouraged by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other political leaders. More than 80-percent of Russians consider themselves Orthodox Christians, even if they don’t attend church. Felix Razumovksy thinks this transition from militant atheism to Orthodoxy makes perfect sense.

“It’s the same type of world view. If you’re a person who needs that bigger force or idea in your life, then it’s easier for you to switch from the Bolshevik/Communist future paradise to the Orthodox Christian future paradise.”

But some view Russia’s religious revival with scepticism. Valery Khazin, a writer from Nizhniy Novgorod, said he has friends who used to be active members of the Communist Party.

“Now they’re carrying small crosses. At the same time, they toast the Soviet holidays, drink vodka, in the same way they did 20 to 25 years ago.”

Razumovsky said this kind of muddled thinking is typical. Just look at our national symbols. Our flag is from imperial Russia, he noted, while our national anthem is from the Soviet era, except that it now begins with “Russia our Holy Nation.”
We should neither romanticize, nor reject our past, Felix Razumovsky said.

We should learn from it.

“Russians have this unique experience of having lived through so many different kinds of rule, and forms of the nation state, and that’s a treasure that can be used.”

But for now, he said, history still has us by the throat.

When the USSR broke apart 20 years ago, the biggest shock for Russians and other ex-Soviets was what came afterwards.

Communism was out, capitalism was in and with it, life based on the Almighty Ruble.

“Did they really want a market economy where prices and money determined things? I’m not so sure,” said James Collins, former US Ambassador to the Russia Federation.

“It was a terribly wrenching experience, because it essentially upended the entire system by which everybody had structured a life — everything from the fact that money counted, to the idea that an academic would make less than some fellow selling Snickers bars in a corner kiosk. I mean this was just incredible,” Collins said.

Many people simply couldn’t make the transition, according to Valery Solovei, a professor at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations.

“Very often I say to my friends, those who could survive the 90s and who are still mentally healthy and who are not hard drunkards, they could survive anything,” Solovei said.

Another university professor, Nikolay Nikolayev taught in Nizhniy Novgorod, a Russian city 250 miles east of Moscow. After the collapse of communism, he drove a taxi at night so his family wouldn’t go hungry.

“I remember meeting with my friends every New Year’s, and our first toast was, ‘Well, it can’t get any worse!’ And it kept getting worse,” Nikolayev said. “We just couldn’t believe how much things could fall apart, and how poor people were.”

Nikolayev said things are better now. He and several colleagues left the university in the mid 90s to form a small publishing firm, and their office is in a beautiful old building in downtown Nizhniy Novgorod.

Lena Konstantinova, who works there as a graphic designer, said, “People have learned to be like frogs, to beat the butter with their little legs to survive in these new conditions.”

“Look at us”, she added, “we’re obviously fine, we’re sitting here in this nice office. But the underlying chaos and uncertainty hasn’t really disappeared. We’ve just gotten used to it.”

Larisa Bukarina, Nikolay Nikolayev, and Elena Konstantinova (Photo courtesy of http://master-raduga.nnov.ru)

“It makes life much narrower, much poorer, and less interesting, because everything is measured by how much it costs, or whether you can afford it. It’s very sad actually.”

Konstantinova said one of the most positive aspects of the Soviet Union was that you almost never thought about money when you considered love, work, or anything else.

But at this point, Nikolayev interrupted: “You were just running with the wrong crowd back then. There was always a group of people who cared about money or whose car was better.”

Yes, said Konstantinova, but they were a minority. She also thinks because consumer goods were so scarce in Soviet times, people were satisfied with a lot less.

“If I managed, for instance, to buy this one really cool sweater and a pair of boots, I was really happy to wear them over and over, and I felt very fashionable.”

Larisa Bukarina, who sits next to Lena, said since there wasn’t much in the stores to tempt them, they spent their money on concerts or theater tickets, and it was all very cheap, though the shows sold out immediately.

“Now we have a lot more entertainment — foreign movies and performers — but many people can’t afford to go because it’s so much more expensive,” Bukarina said.

Same goes with travel. Lena and Nikolai say they’re grateful that Soviet-era travel restrictions have disappeared.

But the end of communism has also meant the end of cheap holidays and travel within the former Soviet Union.

“Back then, totalitarian though it may have been, we could afford to take a river cruise on the Volga. Anybody could. It was very cheap. Now I can’t afford it, even though I have a good job,” Konstantinova said.

Nikolay Nikolayev added that they also had a lot more time off back then to enjoy a holiday.

“I remember when we were young, even though we didn’t earn a lot, my wife and I could afford to spend a month in Crimea. Now, I can afford to go to Turkey, but the most I can take off is 10-12 days,” he said.

In fact, Nikolayev hasn’t had a vacation in more than five years. But he’s not complaining.

Everything is just different now, he said. Things are much more unpredictable – but in some ways, more interesting, too.

Andrei Bilzho at his art studio. (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

But what really draws customers is the décor. The walls are plastered with Soviet memorabilia: boxy, wood-paneled radios, fishnet shopping bags, bright red tins for flour and rice that were fixtures in every Soviet kitchen. A Soviet-era payphone in the hallway looks like it came straight out of the Stone Age.

In the evening, Petrovich turns into a club, with dancing to golden oldies.

Twenty years after the end of the USSR, Soviet nostalgia is big and getting bigger all the time. Andrei Bilzho, one of the owners of Petrovich, is quick to point out that nostalgia isn’t the same thing as memory. It’s selective, and emotionally tinged. So when people say they’re nostalgic for the USSR, Bilzho always asks them which era in Soviet history they mean, because every period was so different.

“For instance, in Stalin’s times, both of my grandfathers were executed and my grandmother was sent to the camps. So I don’t have any nostalgia for that time or for communist ideology,” Bilzho said.

Bilzho’s is more of an artist’s nostalgia for the everyday objects of Soviet culture: Young Pioneer uniforms; Father Frost figurines — the Soviet version of Santa Claus; cigar boxes with Sputnik themes; artifacts of an entire culture that vanished when the Soviet Union died.

Bilzho, who’s a former psychiatrist turned political cartoonist, said nostalgia for the Soviet Union began bubbling up in the late 1990s when Russians started comparing communism to capitalism, “especially when people started to realize that not everything in the Soviet Union was bad, and that there were actually quite a few good characteristics.”

Bilzho said for all of its deprivations, life was much more predictable back then. “Because it was pretty clear: you were born, you went to college or got a job, got married, and died picking strawberries at your dacha.”

He said there was also less corruption: “People are actually seeing that the communist leaders didn’t steal as much as the current leaders do.”

Andre Grachev, who was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s press secretary, said he thinks it’s only natural that Russians are increasingly nostalgic for communism, “especially facing the extreme brutality of the model of capitalism which was imposed on this society which was not at all prepared.”

In the 1990s, tens of millions of people lost their jobs and life savings. Boris Kapustin, a visiting professor at Yale University, said Russia’s post-Soviet leaders also dismantled the country’s social safety net.

The Soviet system “was not perfect at all, by any standard,” Kapustin said. “But nonetheless it shielded millions and millions of people from abject poverty.”

Kapustin said he thinks Russians aren’t really nostalgic for the USSR.

“They’re not actually mourning the disappearance of the nation. They’re mourning their actual present condition which has deteriorated in many ways,” he said.

The sudden death of the Soviet communism has also left many Russians profoundly disoriented.

“Especially for the older people, for millions of people, there’s a feeling of losing their identity,” said Valery Khazin, a writer from Nizhniy Novgorod.

“A lot of my relatives feel the pain, almost a physical pain, that we were so great, we used to be so powerful, so influential, and we lived in the best country in the world, the most progressive, and all that. A lot of people did believe in it.”

Andrei Bilzho, ever the psychiatrist, believes that despite all the dramatic changes in Russia, the current nostalgia craze actually stems from something much more ordinary.

“I think for most people, they don’t realize it, it’s a nostalgia for themselves, when they were young, and they just can’t figure it out,” Bilzho said.

Bilzho said he thinks the l960s were the high point of the Soviet era, in terms of science, culture, and education. The country was also starting to open up, after the terror of the Stalin years.

“At that time, if the authorities had been more decisive and less timid, and they’d allowed a little bit of private ownership, and had opened the borders so people could go abroad more, I think the Soviet Union would have survived.”

Bilzho added that that’s what Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, was trying to do.

He was just 30 years too late.

This song is called “If You Don’t Have an Aunt,” it’s from the Twist of Fate (Ironiya Sudby) – it’s about the trouble with having too many relatives.

This is a song from the 1930s, from a old Soviet movie. The man featured is Leonid Utyosov, a famous singer and actor. This is an older song called “Steamboat.”

A song by Mark Bernes, from the WWII movie “Two Soldiers.”

With his departure, the USSR dissolved, and the first socialist state was consigned to the dustbin of history.
It was the end of an ideology, and an empire. (Watch the Soviet flag lowered for the last time.)

Andrey Grachev retired from politics the day after Mikhail Gorbachev did. His final assignment, as Gorbachev’s press secretary, was to tell the international press corps that the Soviet Union was no more.

“Somebody compared my role in those days to a character in the medieval theater, who’s switching off the light once the play is over,” Grachev recalled.

There are lots of theories for the Soviet Union’s sudden demise. But how does an insider like Andrey Grachev explain it?

“I think it died from inside,” he said, and not as a result of external pressures or enemies.

Grachev said he thinks the times of greatest conflict, the Second World War and the Cold War, actually strengthened the Soviet state.

“The most dangerous phases for the regime were the periods of detente, of peaceful co-existence, the periods when the external threat could not be used as the justification for the persecution of dissidents and the internal opposition,” Grachev said.

The Soviet Union’s chief vulnerability, he added, was a structural one; it was a huge, multi-ethnic empire.

“The great historic paradox of the Bolshevik Revolution was that when most world empires were breaking up, it was this new project, the communist project, with its international message, which amazingly helped the former Russian Empire to survive in the form of a new, rejuvenated, revolutionary state. A common motherland for all the nations, with most of the oppressed nations participating in the struggle against the Czarist regime.”

The Bolsheviks were the first Marxist party ever to seize state power. They promised to build a worker’s paradise, and a common motherland for all of Russia’s national and ethnic minorities. But by the l930s, the dictatorship of the proletariat had turned into the dictatorship of Josef Stalin, and the Soviet state came to resemble the vast, imperial system it had overthrown.

“It was a very rigid structure, which could be kept together mostly by force and coercion,” Grachev said.
It also barricaded itself and its citizens from the rest of the world.

Even so, the Soviet regime had some staggering achievements. It transformed Russia from a mostly peasant society to a modern industrial state; it vanquished Hitler’s armies during World War II; and it became a world leader in science.

On April 14, l961, Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. There was world news coverage of Gagarin being greeted by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev.

Four years earlier, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. It was the height of the Cold War, and the beginning of the space race.

Soviet leaders poured money into space and military programs. By the early l980s, the Soviet Union had more tanks, troops and nuclear weapons than any other nation on earth.

“The Soviet Union was competitive in one sector, which was this military economy,” Grachev said, “but at the price of destroying the rest of the economy and the standard of living of most of the population.”

When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in l985, the Soviet economy was in a state of near collapse.

“He realized something had to be done. We can no longer live like this’ was a common line,” said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow.

“A common word that people used to describe the period of late stagnation was ‘marasmus.’ And it was merazum in Russian. Because the system was in a state of degradation, and everybody saw it.” Lipman said.

It was an economy of shortages; Soviet citizens spent hours standing in line for basic necessities. The gap between the official communist rhetoric and reality was a mile wide.

“The ideology that had been part and parcel of the system early on, after all it was an ideological empire, this ideology had grown hollow, and become hypocritical.”

Gorbachev tried to rescue the system by allowing private enterprise and ending the communist party’s monopoly on power. He also vowed to slash military spending, and end the Cold War.

But then in June of l987, President Ronald Reagan stood in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and dared him to do even more. He famously urged Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall.”

Two years later, Gorbachev allowed that to happen.

In an interview on Russian television earlier this year, Gorbachev said he knew he was doing the right thing by letting the Eastern Europe satellites go. But it was still hard.

“And it was so moving because he admitted it,” according to political analyst Masha Lipman. “He as a person who inherited this huge empire felt that there was something very wrong about them suddenly setting free of us. I mean we are the boss, we are the master, we are at the center of this universe. But he let them go.”

Andrey Grachev in the backyard of his dacha outside Moscow. (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

Andrey Grachev said that during his last months in power, Gorbachev was trying to transform the USSR into a voluntary federation.

But once it became clear he would not use force — or fear — to keep the USSR together, the whole structure imploded.

“After all one of the elements of keeping together this huge historic and geographic reality was fear,” according to Andrey Grachev.

But the USSR wasn’t just destroyed by the forces of nationalism. The collapse of communism unleashed something even more powerful: greed and lawlessness.

Perhaps that’s what Gorbachev was warning about in his farewell address to the nation on Christmas Day of l991, when he said that Soviet society had acquired political and spiritual freedom, but that it had yet to come to grips with that achievement.

“People in this country are ceasing to be citizens of a great power,” Gorbachev added.

In the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union turned out to be a great misfortune for most of the population, said Boris Kapustin, a visiting professor of ethics and politics at Yale University

“We are increasingly becoming a third world in any respect,” he said, citing declines in science, education and health. “This is not just an economic disaster; it’s a cultural disaster as well.”

Valery Solovei, a professor of history at Moscow State Institute for International Relations, thinks this might explain the current protests against the Putin regime.

“The Russians hate the authorities,” Solovei said.

He said he doesn’t think most Russians want a return to Soviet socialism, but they’d like to have a functioning state.
“They want to have normal health care, which they’re willing to pay for. But even for money, they can’t receive anything. Even very rich people can’t receive normal health care or education for their children,” he said. “It means that the social system doesn’t work now, and the authorities don’t function either. The Russians see it and this is a problem.”

In other words, it’s not over yet.

Twenty years later, the Soviet Union is still collapsing.

• Program 1 – Part 2
• Program 2 – Part 1
• Program 2 – Part 2

Westerners trying to understand the Russian national character might start by looking in the home. For many of those who grew up in the USSR, home was the cramped confines of a communal apartment

Valentina Baskina grew up in a large communal apartment in the center of Moscow, in the 1930s. Her entire family lived, ate and slept in one room. They shared the apartment with three other families, plus an old woman who lived in an alcove off of the kitchen.

As for privacy? It didn’t exist. There’s not even a word for it in the Russian language.

Still, Valentina has fond memories of her childhood home.

“I don’t remember that we visited each other or made some communal food. No, each family lived their own life, but it was very peaceful.”

Valentina mostly remembers the hours she spent in the long, dark corridor with her friend, Irina, whose family lived in the room across the hall. They’d sit on top of a large dresser and play imaginary games. Her mother worked as a truck driver, so she had to leave Valentina at home by herself.

Valentina said every family had children, so children became “a communal responsibility.”

When Valentina got married, her husband moved in with them. They shared the room with her older brother, her two younger sisters, her mother, and grandmother.

“It was not comfortable,” Valentina said. “But nevertheless we lived and enjoyed. And we didn’t feel it as a problem, because we couldn’t compare it.”

All of Valentina’s friends lived in communal apartments, too, and some of the apartments were terrible.

She thinks hers was better than most.

“Maybe it was just luck,” Valentina said. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just nature of my mother who was very friendly to everybody.”

That’s probably why everybody liked to go to Valentina’s flat.

“All friends of my older brother, all friends of mine in school and university, and friends of my younger sisters would sit around the table with some small food. Only my grandmother was very serious.”

When friends rang their bell, Valentina’s grandmother would open the door and say: “We have nothing to eat!” Valentina laughs, saying her grandmother, “took life very seriously, very tragically. But not for us. We were young and had many friends.”

Valentina and her friends may not have realized it, but they were actually part of a massive and ambitious social experiment.

After the Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks expropriated the apartments of the upper classes, and filled them to the brim, one family per room. All of the tenants had to share the kitchen and bathroom. The housing authorities deliberately mixed people from different social classes.

The aim was to create a truly collective society. But it was also the Bolsheviks’ solution to the urban housing shortage. Communal apartments remained the most common form of housing in Soviet cities for several generations.

The Russian poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, who grew up in a communal apartment in Leningrad, wrote: “For all of the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartment has its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics, it strips off any illusions about human nature.”

Valentina Baskina and her family were evacuated from Moscow during the Second World War. While they were away, their neighbors across the hall, an elderly couple, quietly paid their rent for three years.

“When the war was at the end, and we returned home, we got our rooms back,” Valentina said.

Even so, Valentina says her mother, who was widowed during the war, resented this couple, who were professors.

“She always found a pretext to be ungrateful, always felt they lived good and we lived bad. She was always stressed by the differences in the levels of our lives.”

Valentina lived in this communal flat even after she and her husband had a daughter. They eventually moved into a private two-bedroom apartment in the late l960s. Her daughter cried every night for the first year; she missed the kommunalka.

Andrei Barbje (Photo: courtesy Andrei Barbje)

“I remember my parents actively disliked living in the communal apartment, and my grandmother, who was little when our apartment was taken away, was always angry and resentful,” Barbje said.

But young Andrei didn’t mind it a bit.

He said everyone in his kommunalka did their best to get along, by following an elaborate system of rules.

“For instance, there was an unspoken order of people who went to wash in the morning, based on what time they had to get to work.”

The communal kitchen had four stoves, and each family used two burners. But if someone was having dinner guests, they could always ask to borrow one or two burners.

No one ate in the kitchen; they took the food back their room. They also kept refrigerators in their room.

Still, they all celebrated the holidays together. Andrei said there was a ritual.

“We’d visit each other’s rooms, and sit for half an hour or so,” Andrei said. “It was always customary when you visited to bring a small gift, so it was all very friendly.”

He said the one place where the system broke down was over the telephone, which was kept in the corridor.

“There was only one line for five families, and if someone liked to sit and chat and somebody else needed to make an urgent phone call, that’s when it got ugly.”

His most vivid childhood memory is of an old German man who lived in the basement of their building. He was a former P.O.W. The man’s entire family was killed during the war, so he just stayed in Moscow. He played the organ at a Lutheran Church.

“He was very very kind,” Andrei said, “and all the children, we just adored him. Even though he had a tiny salary, he’d buy old harmonicas and fix them. He gave them to us and taught us how to play. I still play the harmonica.”

Andrei Barbje’s family moved to a private apartment in l978, when he was 18. It was in a newly built high-rise on the outskirts of Moscow, with a small balcony and two bedrooms. They loved all the space, but they also felt isolated, because they didn’t live near anyone they knew.

When asked how growing up in a kommunalka shaped him, Andrei Barbje thinks for a moment before responding.

“Before I do something, I always think about whether this will bother someone else,” he said. “It’s about self control, and learning to take responsibility for your actions from a very young age, simply because you’re surrounded by so many people.”

Two well-dressed elderly women brush past our table. We watch as they walk down the sidewalk arm in arm.

Andrei Barbje then points to them: “I’ll bet they grew up in a kommunalka, too.”

• Russian Elections 2012

Part I: The Soviet Coup – 20 Years Later

Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 (Photo: White House Library)

Part II: Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the Demise of the USSR

Boris Yeltsin speaking at a meeting of his supporters in 1993 (Photo: Creative Commons)

Part III: Stalinism Survivor Runs Gulag Museum In Moscow

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko holding a book with a picture of his father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who fought for the Bolsheviks in 1917. (Photo: Iva Zimova)

Part IV: Why Some Russians Miss the Soviet Kommunalka

Valentina Baskina (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

Part V: The End of the USSR

Mikhail Gorbachev's televised resignation speech, Dec. 25, 1991 (Photo: Russia TV)

Part VI: Nostalgia for the Soviet Union

Andrei Bilzho and the interior of his Soviet restaurant. (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

Part VII: Dealing With Money in Post-Soviet Life

5,000 rubles (Photo: Flickr)

Grappling With a Post-Soviet Identity

Host of a Russian history program says his series, titled Kto my? (Who Are We?), is about Russians understanding themselves. More>>>

]]> http://www.theworld.org/2011/10/soviet-union-collapse/feed/ 3 yesno62030045473869291903Brigid McCarthySoviet UnionreportRussiahistoryEurope http://www.theworld.org/2011/10/stalinism-gulag-museum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stalinism-gulag-museum http://www.theworld.org/2011/10/stalinism-gulag-museum/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:30:20 +0000 Brigid McCarthy http://www.theworld.org/?p=91906 Series: 20 Years After the Soviet Collapse

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko holding a book with a picture of his father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who fought for the Bolsheviks in 1917. (Photo: Iva Zimova)

But one thing people there don’t really like to remember is the Gulag, the Soviet work camps where tens of millions died during Stalin’s reign.

91-year-old Gulag survivor Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko keeps in trying to remind them. He runs the Gulag Museum in Moscow.

“He who has not been there will get his turn. He who has been there will never forget.”
– Soviet writer and Gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov –

Moscow’s Gulag museum is a modest reminder of a monstrous history. It chronicles the history of the millions of people who disappeared into the Soviet Union’s vast network of prisons and forced labor camps known as the Gulag.

Most never returned.

The museum is tucked inside a courtyard off of one of Moscow’s busiest streets, right around the corner from the Cartier and Louis Vuitton boutiques. A wooden watchtower and large photographs of famous victims adorn the entrance.

The museum’s director is a 91-year-old historian and Gulag survivor named Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. He works in a small, cluttered office on the museum’s top floor.

Antonov-Ovseyenko spent more than ten years in the camps.

“I’m kind of a living museum exhibit,” he said.

He’s got a thatch of white hair and glasses as thick as coke bottles.

“The only reason I’m here is because of my eyesight.”

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko is legally blind, although he can see a bit out of one eye.

He looks frail, but he’s feisty.

“Feisty is the right word for Anton!” said Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian Studies at New York University. “He’s an extraordinary figure, sort of like he walked out of a crazed Russian novel.”

Cohen writes about Anton and other Gulag survivors in his book, “The Victims Return.” He first met Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko in Moscow in the l970s.

“I was particularly struck by his certainty that the camp had made him the most clever and cunning person in the world,” Cohen said.

Antonov-Ovseyenko had to be, just to stay alive.

During his 25 years of absolute power, Soviet leader Josef Stalin murdered between 10 and 20 million of his own citizens. His victims included peasants and factory workers, Bolsheviks and Baptists; poets, painters and ballerinas. Most perished in the Soviet Union’s vast network of forced labor camps.

Stephen Cohen said we’ll never know exactly how many were killed during the Stalin era.

“All we can say is that it was a kind of holocaust, it was enormous, tens of millions of people died, and disappeared and mass graves are still being discovered around the former Soviet Union today.”

Stalin’s terror touched every family; in Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko’s case, his entire family. His father, a famous Bolshevik military commander who led the storming of the Winter Palace in l917, was executed in Stalin’s purges in l938. His mother committed suicide in prison. Both he and his sister were arrested and sent to the Gulag a few years later.

Anton, who was in his early twenties at the time, was accused of being a terrorist. “But if you’re blind, how can you engage in terrorism?” he says now.

So, instead of the death penalty, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He’d just gotten married. While he was in the camps, his wife remarried.

“Our feelings were still the same for each other, but there wasn’t much we could do.”

Antonov-Ovseyenko said his poor eyesight is one of the reasons he survived the camps. Camp doctors tried to protect him from hard physical labor. But he still had to work. All the prisoners did.

“If we think of Nazi Germany, the Nazi ideology regarding Jews was to exterminate. The Soviet ideology was to make prisoners work,” said historian Stephen Cohen.

Gulag prisoners built canals and railroads, cut timber, and mined gold; no matter how cold, sick or hungry they were.

Antonov-Ovseyenko came close to death several times, from scurvy and starvation.

“Three hundred thousand people died in the camps in a year. They gave us tiny rations of meat and butter, but even that was often taken away by the criminals in the camp.”

Antonov-Ovseyenko said criminal gangs often terrorized the other prisoners. But the criminals and thieves liked him, because he would recite poems and tell them stories.

“And I was expected to do this after a while. So I always enjoyed this special status. But of course thieves are thieves. They can still steal from you even if they like your stories.”

He had other skills that protected him: he had a strong voice, and could act and sing, so camp commanders let him perform in Gulag theater productions. He said once he played a secret policeman. He even sang in a Gulag operetta.

That was a lot more fun than the time camp commanders made him voice one of his Stalin’s speeches over the radio.

“They basically took me at gun point from the camp to the radio station and back. I had to read the words of the person who was my enemy, and I was an enemy of the state!”

This enemy of the state finally became a free man after Stalin died in l953. His successor, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, shut down most of the camps by the mid l950s.

The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote at the time: “Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will be eyeball to eyeball: The one that put people in the camps and the one put there.”

One day, Antonov-Ovseyenko bumped into the informer who put him in the camps. Anton could barely contain his rage.

“And I said “What about that hearing when you accused me and lied about me? What did you think I was doing? And he became very shy and said ‘let’s not talk about the past.’ ”

Perhaps because this fellow, like many others who made false accusations, ended up in the gulag, too. Antonov-Ovseyeno said, “They did what they had to do, so let’s not accuse them. They thought it would protect them.”

He also thinks many of these people honestly believed that the Soviet Union was overrun by spies and saboteurs.

Twenty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russian historians are debating not just what happened, but why so many people got sent to the Gulag.

Stephen Cohen said there’s no single explanation. But it’s worth noting that Stalin’s political terror gradually acquired an economic function.

“It became a kind of second, slave workforce run by the political police, and the regime came to think of it as essential.”

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko said Gulag prisoners built much of the Soviet infrastructure and helped Stalin transform the USSR into a military superpower.

“A lot of the major construction projects, plants and factories, and transport arteries, were built by prisoners. Nearly 200,000 prisoners worked on the Moscow-Volga canal, according to official records. That’s twice as many as worked on the Egyptian pyramids. So it was a major economic machine. Stalin didn’t care how many suffered or died.”

Cohen said Gulag work projects are in plain sight in downtown Moscow.

“The 7 Stalinist buildings that look like wedding cakes, which include the foreign ministry and Moscow State university, were built for the most part by Gulag slave labor,” he said.

There’s a less visible, psychological legacy of the Gulag, too.

Roman Romanov is the 29-year-old deputy director of the Gulag museum.

“This wasn’t that long ago. On a subconscious level, it’s still in our heads; we carry it with us,” Romanov said.

The Gulag museum doesn’t get many visitors. One reason, Romanov said, is that many Russians don’t know their own history. His mother’s entire family was deported during the Stalin era, their village burnt to the ground.

“Only now, since I’ve started working here, has my mother started opening up. But when I was growing up, not a word was mentioned, nobody talked about it.”

His boss, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, has never stopped talking, writing, and bearing witness.

Stephen Cohen thinks Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko is a kind of hero.

“The fact is that almost everything he’s done in his life since he got out of the Gulag has been virtuous. And his final heroic act is the creation in Moscow of the first ever state museum of the history of the Gulag. There is no other in Russia.”

Valery Solovei has spent the past two decades pondering what happened to his country.

“It was a very interesting time for me as a historian, because it was like the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Solovei, a soft-spoken professor at Moscow State Institute for International Relations. “I was an observer, and even sometimes a participant in those events.”

Even so, like most former Soviets, Solovei was stunned by the sudden dissolution of the USSR.

Solovei said Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies set the stage for the country’s collapse. By trying to reform the ailing communist system, Gorbachev unleashed forces that ultimately destroyed it.

But the abrupt way it ended? According to Solovei and other Russian analysts, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s chief rival, was responsible for that.

In Solovei’s view, Yeltsin was driven by more than just anti-communist fervor.

“I think that the personal factor played a very important role,” he said. “Because Boris Yeltsin hated Gorbachev.”

Yet Yeltsin would not have risen to a position of power were it not for Gorbachev. The two had started out as allies. Gorbachev brought Yeltsin, a regional Communist party boss, to Moscow in l987 to promote his political reforms.

“Gorbachev wanted to introduce somebody dynamic, and profit from Yeltsin’s personal dynamism,” said Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s press secretary and advisor at the time.

For a while, he did. Yeltsin was charismatic, fearless, and outspoken in condemning Communist party perks and privileges.

But then, Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev in a speech to the party’s Central Committee. Grachev said even though Yeltsin didn’t criticize his boss directly, he crossed a line.

“In Russian and Soviet tradition, anybody who would challenge him would be a dead man politically at least,” Grachev said.

Valery Solovei said Gorbachev and some of his advisors told him to send Yeltsin to be ambassador in Africa or Latin America, “where shortly he would become a drunk. But Gorbachev said no, it’s impossible because now we live in another society, we must be human.”

It’s a decision, according to Solovei, that Gorbachev still regrets.

“He told me he made a mistake in his assessment of Boris Yeltsin.”

Gorbachev forced Yeltsin to recant, but only demoted him. Yeltsin then took advantage of Gorbachev’s democratic reforms to stage a political comeback. In l991, Yeltsin ran for president of the Russian Republic, becoming the first popularly elected leader in Russian history.

Real power still rested with Gorbachev and the Communist Party. But the attempted coup by Communist hardliners in August l991 changed everything.

Yeltsin’s bravery in facing down the coup leaders transformed him into a national leader. Gorbachev, meanwhile, emerged from the coup not only fatally weakened, but dependent on Yeltsin.

Masha Lipman of Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said Yeltsin wasted no time seizing the initiative.

“Gorbachev was rescued by Yeltsin’s people, brought back to Moscow in a plane, rushed to where Yeltsin was holding his victorious press conference,” Lipman said. “Yeltsin made him, on air, sign a decree banning the Communist Party. Gorbachev was totally confused. He said we didn’t have any such agreement. He looked totally lost and confused.”

Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former speaker of the Russian Parliament, worked alongside Yeltsin in the summer and fall of l991.

“After we crushed the coup, Yeltsin behaved very underhandedly in relation to Gorbachev,” Khasbulatov said. “He isolated Gorbachev, and constantly exerted pressure on him. Then he basically finished him off.”

The final act came on December 8, l991. Yeltsin met secretly with leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and together they agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. In its place would be a voluntary union, the Commonwealth of Independent States

When Gorbachev heard what they’d done, he said “They’ve begun carving this country like a pie.”

With the Russian Republic comprising 3/4ths of the Soviet Union’s territory, Yeltsin got the biggest piece.

Boris Yeltsin later wrote in his memoirs, “I never intended to fight with Gorbachev personally. But why hide it? The motivations for many of my actions were embedded in our conflict.”

Andrei Grachev thinks without Yeltsin’s actions, the USSR could have remained intact, at least a while longer.

“Because Russia took the lead in challenging the union state,” Grachev said. “Russia declared its independence from the USSR, of which it was actually the bulk and the dominant force. The only explanation for this surreal situation was precisely this personal confrontation between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.”

But Yeltsin also had some help. Boris Kapustin of Yale University said many opportunistic members of the Communist bureaucracy abandoned Gorbachev once it looked like the Soviet state might not survive.

“I believe it was just this shift of some power elites from Gorbachev to Yeltsin which proved to be decisive for the outcome of their struggles,” Kapustin said.

Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union on December 25, l991, handing the suitcase with the nuclear codes to President Boris Yeltsin of Russia. By the end of the year, the USSR was no more.

Historian Valery Solovei said it’s nothing short of a miracle that the Soviet empire expired relatively peacefully, without massive bloodshed. For this he credits Gorbachev. But he also views the last leader of the Soviet Union as a tragic figure.

“He wanted better,” Solovei said. “Now people in Russia hate him. Very often I think he looks like King Lear from Shakespeare, who lost his kingdom. And Gorbachev lost his kingdom too.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, had been put under house arrest by members of his own government.

Just about everyone in the former Soviet Union remembers where they were on August 19, l991.

Andrei Grachev, who was Gorbachev’s press secretary and foreign policy adviser at the time, was at his dacha, or summer home, just outside of Moscow.

Gorbachev's dacha (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

So Grachev switched on his radio, and he heard an announcer say, “Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, for health reasons, is unable to perform his duties as President of the USSR.” The statement went on to say that in order to prevent the nation from sliding into a national catastrophe, an Emergency Committee, led by former vice president Gennady Yanayev and the heads of the KGB, the Soviet military, and interior ministry, is now in charge.

“And my first psychological, rather than political reaction, was to say to myself, so finally it happened,” Grachev said.

By which Grachev means their luck had run out. In just five years since Gorbachev had come to power, the Soviet leader and his team had done the unthinkable: Lifted Soviet censorship. Abolished the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Introduced multi-candidate elections. Helped end the Cold War.

Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, said it was a time like no other in the Soviet Union. “It was historical, it was revolutionary, it was exhilarating for many people actually. For many, this was not obvious that the Soviet Union was falling apart, but that something very important was happening.”

On August 20th, Gorbachev was about to take another historic step – signing a new union treaty that would give more autonomy to the 15 Soviet republics that comprised the USSR.

This was too much for hardliners in the Kremlin.

On August 18th, a group of Soviet ministers paid a surprise visit to Gorbachev’s vacation home on the Black Sea coast. They severed the phone lines, and held him captive for three days.

“It came as a great shock to the Embassy. Nobody had expected it,” said former US Ambassador James Collins. At the time of the coup, he was the chargé d’affairs, and the most senior person at the Embassy.

“My reaction is one I don’t think I can say on the radio,” Collins recalls, “but it was obviously not something someone in a position of charge wants to deal with.”

Later that morning, the coup leaders held a press conference. Soviet citizens turned on their televisions to see six dour men sitting side by side at a long conference table.

The press conference didn’t go very well. Political analyst Masha Lipman said “they didn’t know what they were doing! They were a bunch of people with shaking hands.” At one point, former Vice President Gennady Yanaev’s hands were visibly trembling.

Then a pretty young reporter in a green checkered dress raised her hand. “And she asked them, ‘Are you aware of the fact that you have just committed a state coup?’ ” said political analyst Masha Lipman.

She didn’t know that she was supposed to be afraid of them.

“Which made her historical,” Lipman continued. “She was 18, she was a kid! She was the one who said the word. They didn’t say that we have just committed a coup. They said the Secretary General is sick, and they pretended this was business as usual.”

Earlier that morning, the coup plotters began sending tanks and soldiers into the capital, to surround key government buildings, including Russia’s parliament, the White House.

Masha Lipman was working for the Washington Post as a translator and researcher back in l991. On the morning of the coup, she grabbed her notebook and ran downtown.

She was stunned by the scene unfolding in front of her: tens of thousands of citizens streaming into the streets to protest the overthrow of Gorbachev. There were even bigger public protests in St. Petersburg, and mass gatherings in Kiev.

“We were standing in the square in front of the White House, and I saw a crowd moving toward the White House,” said Lipman. “Many people who’d been in the square at the time, mostly reporters, had tears in their eyes. These were people who organized themselves, who in a unique circumstance in Russian history, and realized that they could make a difference. They were coming in a throng.”

The protesters erected barricades and formed a human chain around the White House, seat of the Russian parliament.

Boris Kapustin, who’s now a visiting professor at Yale University, spent two days camped out in front of the White House.

“I would say that the army, even the elite forces of the army, were absolutely peaceful, I mean you cannot imagine the spirit of this event. It was like, how to say, like a carnival! I saw girls exchanging flowers with those guys sitting on tanks, and exchanging ice creams. The atmosphere was absolutely unforgettable,” Kapustin recalls. It was only discovered much later that many of the soldiers had no ammunition.

Then, Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of the Russian republic, climbed on top of a tank and gave his famous speech denouncing the coup.

Yeltsin supplied the coup with its most iconic image. And he became the leader of the resistance.

One of the great mysteries is why the coup organizers didn’t arrest Yeltsin. It would prove to be their most costly mistake. Yeltsin was a former Communist Party boss and Gorbachev protege, until the two men had a falling out.

Andrei Grachev (Photo: Brigid McCarthy)

They intended to ask him, are you with us or against us? Still, they were confident that Yeltsin would be an ally.

“They thought that the personal rivalry between Yeltsin and Gorbachev would push Yetsin to join them in order to get rid of Gorbachev.”

And if he stood up to them? They’d arrest him. “And there was even a place where he would be taken by a KGB unit,” said Grachev.

Grachev, who’s written two critically acclaimed books on the Gorbachev era, said the coup organizers had contacted all the other leaders of the Soviet republics ahead of time, too. None put up any resistance.

Ruslan Khasbulatov, who was the speaker of the Russian Parliament in l991 and a Yeltsin ally back then, was astonished to see how scared everyone was, and how easily intimidated they were.

“Even the Baltic politicians, who were constantly and very adamantly campaigning for autonomy, even they all fell silent,” Khasbulatov said, in between puffs on his pipe. “Not a single sound of dissent from them, not one! They thought, oh, those were games with Gorbachev. But these guys are Stalinists, they will execute everyone. They all behaved like rabbits, like scared rabbits!”

So what happened when the coup plotters tried to meet with Yeltsin on the night of August 18th? According to former Gorbachev spokesman Andrei Grachev, “things all went wrong. ”

Grachev chose his next words carefully.

“The initial discussion with Yeltsin couldn’t take place because he arrived in his plane from a visit in Kazakhstan in a state that made it impossible to negotiate the options with him,” he said.

They couldn’t wake him up. Or perhaps sober him up. So the meeting had to be postponed.

Grachev said “maybe these several hours played a crucial, probably a historic role. Because the next morning, when he was back to his shape and capacities, he was already surrounded by his team of political advisors, who already realized what was the danger for them, and this danger made them brave and resolute and determined.”

Unprepared for resistance, the coup collapsed within 72 hours. The military leaders weren’t willing to fire on their own people.

But Gorbachev returned from captivity a broken man. He gave a brief, perfunctory speech at the Moscow airport on the night of August 22nd.

Then, instead of addressing his cheering supporters gathered at the White House, Gorbachev went straight home. He was soon to discover that power had shifted to his former ally turned nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. And over the next several months, he used that power to destroy the remnants of the Soviet Union.

In their attempt to preserve their own power, Communist Party hardliners helped precipitate the death of the Soviet Union. Boris Kapustin of Yale University said the coup “revealed the weakness of the regime, and moreover, its rotten character.”

By December of l991, the Soviet empire was no more; in its place,15 newly independent countries with the Russia, and its president, Boris Yeltsin, at the center.