2006 Moscow, the TV in the kitchen it switched to Kultura
showing a documentary featuring Stalin. I am feeding my daughter as the pans of
potatoes and beetroot bubble away on the rackety stove while Svetlana
Alexeyevna moves pots and pans from one cluttered pile to another. Svetlana
Alexeyevna has read Solzhenitsyn and Varlamov, and she knows all about what the
thirties and forties meant to those living under Stalin’s rule: she is of the
generation that came to full adulthood as the soviet dream was dying and she
and her husband read about it all.
As Stalin speaks at some forgotten congress I make a vague
remark to the effect that he was a bastard and she pauses nervously before
answering: “well…. He was a complicated man.”
It is deep in them and there is some of it even in the best
of them
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