Response#11: Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich; “Failing the Stalin Test: Russians and Their Dictator” by Mendelson and Gerber; “An Open Call to Focus on Russia’s Educated Young Adults” by Frierson

Part 1: Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time is the narrative memoir of an elderly Bolshevik named Vasily Petrovich N. He continues to believe in the Communist Party despite being a victim of the purges. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore Gerber in “Failing the Stalin Test” decry the continued positive outlook on Stalin. They attribute this persistent Stalin legacy to one of youthful ignorance. Cathy A. Frierson disagrees with the claim of Russian ignorance and instead places the failure of destalinization on political elites.

Part 2: The power of belief is on full display with Vasily Petrovich N.’s narrative of his Communist Party life. The story starts off with his lament for Communism. Everything he stood for and struggled for ended up wasting away into nothing. The collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by consumerism and materialism. These dual forces ate away the Communism values of the Russians until there was nothing but selfish greed. While the West celebrates the collapse of the Soviet Union as the beginning of a new era of democracy, Petrovich saw his country’s collapse as the end of his way of life. Now all he could do was brood on about the past through experiences that only he could understand. Worse, he had to watch his grandchildren follow the dreams of capitalist consumer culture, something that the Communist Party long fought against.

Petrovich’s commitment is even more shocking after he reveals that he was a victim of the 1937 purges. First he lost his wife. Then he was arrested and tortured. Yet even in the face of these acts, he continued to believe in the Party; he continued to believe in Stalin. These ideals of Communism were so closely engrained in his heart that he persists in defending Lenin, Marx, and Stalin, even in the present. Even after the beatings and unjust imprisonment he rushed to join the Red Army for World War II. After the Great Patriotic War, he gets his party membership card back and is overjoyed. His wife is dead, but this sole scrap of paper keeps him happy! Later on he even breaks down when describing how his actions led to the death of his Uncle Semyon. However, he still insists that he wants to die a communist.

Petrovich’s belief eclipsed what people would expect and demonstrates that ideas are so powerful that they can transcend logic. What drives fanaticism and extremism? An unadulterated pursuit of an ideal above all else. This belief is not something a causal observer on the side can chalk down to brainwashing or indoctrination. Mendelson and Gerber can cry about the horrors of Russians failing the “Stalin test” and about Russian ignorance with their snotty attitudes. Unbeknownst to them, there are Russians who really believed in Communism. Petrovich rightly shows his contempt for these type of smug know-it-alls when he states, “You little snot! I was no slave!” The Western historiography has always fantasized that Russia was a great country of hardworking peasants enslaved by political officials. Here we have a perfect example of how someone expected to turn against the Soviet state still believes in it. Good riddance to these self-aggrandizing claims of American moral superiority! Let a new wave of revisionism sweep aside the past imaginations and show the complex truth of ideals.