Nobel lecture of Svetlana Alexievich

“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We were taught to love people with weapons. Had I grown up in a different country, I couldn’t have traveled this path. Evil is cruel, you have to be inoculated against it. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fear and didn’t tell us everything – and more often than not they told us nothing – the very air of our life was poisoned. Evil kept a watchful eye on us.” That was what Svetlana Alexievich stated when she received the Nobel Prize literature in 2015.

All my life, before the USSR collapsed, almost every morning I woke up thinking how lucky I was to be living in Soviet Union and how unfortunate were those people, who did not, and how I would love to help them to live the same way, and that was one of the primary motivation of me working hard, so we could build true communism with material abundance, when nobody cares about the material and thrives only to apply self to the maximum capacity for the benefit of humanity and own satisfaction of knowing that you did all you could and realized your potential. Then we would spread this new way of living across the globe and I would never be sorry for others again.

If you would ask me at the time, if I wanted to go anywhere, I would say no or maybe only to visit. But why even to visit? There were dangers and pitfalls everywhere. We were completely isolated from any information from abroad, except really bad news (by the way, that is exactly what Putin manages to accomplish today too, but in a different way – by drowning any semblance of good news from abroad in a sea of controversy). I never met anybody who traveled abroad until the USSR dissolved. I never saw any foreigner, only on TV. As a teenager, at times I allowed that other countries just did not exist, and their TV images are just that – staged movies. Complete isolation. One world and no doubts.

Even after the USSR collapsed, I did not want to go anywhere, especially for the reason of “opportunities”. I had plenty of them at home, in the place I loved, where all my family and friends lived, where I was happy.

Then the ruling criminals robbed me and majority of the people of everything material and any opportunity too. It was either join the gang or die. Therefore, I started looking for escape abroad. Again, I was not looking for opportunities. Anything was better than dying. Actually, if I were alone, I would find my tiny niche somewhere at home. But I had family, including two talented teenagers daughters, and that’s why I had to get them out. My wife and I even considered to never seeing them again, if there would be a chance to get them out of the country – out of physical danger, psychological and moral collapse. Eventually we got the chance to live as a family in the US.

While flying over ocean the first time, I was almost sure I would be poor and work on the lowest job possible, if I were lucky to get a job at all. Many Russians reported from the US as much. I never had heard about any successful Russian living in the US until I came here. However, we still wanted to move to the US, because it could not be worse than our life at home at the time.

True story. Literally. I captured much of it in the diaries and three not published volumes of memories, before my views and feelings faded away.

I can imagine it sounds very strange to you. You do not read such point of view often. But I cannot help it. That’s how it was for me.

Today, I am a middle class American. But I walked very close to failure and still have a good chance to fail, as each an American has. And there was a lot of luck involved. That is why, if asked today for advice to immigrate here or not, I would first advise to examine very carefully and without prejudice, what kind of an opportunity the person misses in his motherland.

When Svetlana Alexievich describes tragedy of the “Red”, it gets its dark colors from the defeat and ultimate failure. If the communism were built, the colors would be brighter and the feeling would be bittersweet, because the victory would justify the sacrifice. So, when she says, “We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves”, it sounds true to me and I still believe it. Why would not one sacrifice self if the cause worth it?

This and other themes are treated in more details in the following books: