IT ISN’T THE WAY NOW it was before the war, when we used to go with my mother and father, and my brother and I would look at them, raising our fists just the way they did, there on Calle Alcalá, which turned into a sea of people and red flags, or in the Soviet Union in Red Square on May 1 the year the war ended, where there wasn’t room for any more people or shouting or flags or songs or fervor, with millions cheering for Stalin. Squashed in the crowd, I cheered too, excited to think that the tiny figure I could see on the platform atop Lenin’s mausoleum in the distance was him, and I cried with joy and gratitude because he had led us in the victory over Germany, which cost so many Soviet lives, my poor brother among them, although now you would think that the Americans won that war, that they were the only ones who fought, and people know about the landing in Normandy but don’t know that the German army met its first defeat at Stalingrad, in the bloodiest and most heroic battle of the war. No one even knows there was a city called Stalingrad, they didn’t lose any time changing that name, like they did with Leningrad, what a disgrace that now it’s called what it was in the time of the czars, Saint Petersburg, and they even want to canonize Nicholas II, who ordered machine guns to fire on the people in front of the Winter Palace. Oh, I see your expression, though you’re trying to hide it, don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, all those stories about Stalin’s concentration camps and Stalin’s crimes, as if he had done nothing but kill people, or as if everyone who was sentenced to the camps were innocent. Of course there were mistakes, the Party itself recognized that at its Twentieth Congress, and denounced the cult of personality, and did everything possible to remedy injustices and rehabilitate those who weren’t guilty, but how could there not be a personality cult when Stalin had done so much for us, for the Soviet people and for workers around the world? He was responsible for the great leap from backwardness to industrialization, the Five Year Plans that were the envy and admiration of all the world, when in only twenty years the Soviet Union moved from being a rural country to a world power. And all that under the worst circumstances, following a war provoked by the imperialists, in the midst of a siege and an international blockade, in a country with shortages of everything and where the great majority of the population was illiterate, a slave to the czar and the popes. Look what they were, or what we were, because I’ve been a Soviet citizen, and look how the country is now, how in a few years they’ve destroyed what it cost several generations to build, the largest country in the world broken up into pieces and Russia in the hands of the Mafia and governed by a drunk, so don’t tell me things are better now than in Stalin’s time, or Brezhnev’s, when they say the people suffered such oppression. What they don’t say is that there were saboteurs and spies everywhere, that imperialism employed the dirtiest tactics to destroy the Revolution, and that Jews had taken over many of the key posts in the government and were conspiring to benefit the United States and Israel.
JEWS, OH YES, SEÑOR, don’t give me that look, as if you’d never heard a word about that; don’t you know that some Jewish physicians plotted to murder Stalin? There was always someone to take advantage, to abuse the trust that Stalin and the Party put in him in order to line his own pockets or to gain power, but in the end those people paid for their sins, because Stalin was so upright that he wouldn’t allow it. Yezhov paid, that man who committed so many abuses, who jailed so many innocents, and then Yagoda paid, although they said that the worst of all of them was Beria, who managed to deceive Stalin to the end but who also got his, and they say that when they came to kill him he fell to his knees and begged and shrieked, so tell me whether or not justice was served in the Soviet Union. But now they want to hide everything, erase it all, even the names, they want to make everyone believe that the Soviet people were oppressed, or paralyzed with fear, or that the death of Stalin was a liberation, but I was there and know what happened, what the people felt. I was in Moscow the morning they announced on the radio that Stalin died, I was in the kitchen fixing myself a cup of coffee — I’d woken up not feeling well because I was pregnant with my first child — and then music began to play on the radio, then stopped, and there was a silence, and an announcer spoke, he said something but his voice broke, he was sobbing, and I almost didn’t understand him when he said that Comrade Stalin had died. I couldn’t believe it, it was like when they told me my brother had died at Leningrad, or when my father died, but my brother was in the war and I had accepted that he might die, and my father was very old and he didn’t have a lot longer to live, but it never occurred to me that Stalin could die, I don’t think it had to anyone, for us he was more than a father or a leader, he was what God should be to believers. I ran outside, not knowing where I was going, without a coat though it was snowing, and in the street I met a lot of people just like me, wandering about like sleepwalkers, they would stop at a corner and weep, old women bawling like babies, soldiers crying like little boys, workers, everyone, a crowd that carried me along, like a river of bodies beneath the snow, toward Red Square as if by instinct, but the streets were already flooded with people and we couldn’t go any farther, and someone said that Red Square was roped off and we should head for the Union Palace. I’m sitting here now and it doesn’t seem possible that I was in Moscow that morning, that I lived all that, that flood of tears and helplessness, women on their knees in the snow and shouting and calling out to Stalin, funeral music on the loudspeakers that had played such spirited anthems on May Day. I was crying too, and hugging someone, a woman I’d never seen, feeling the kicking in my womb, my son who would be born two months later and who, it seemed to me, would be born an orphan even though he had a father, because none of us could imagine life without Stalin, and we wept from pain but also from fear, finding ourselves defenseless after all those years when he had always watched over us.