On January 21, 1924, the architect of the Russian Revolution died, aged merely fifty-three. Last year, one hundred years later, saw only minimal discussion of this centenary. It took getting to the hundred-and-first for me to remember—oh, yes, this happened. Perhaps, it just doesn’t seem to mean all that much now that the fruit of his labors, that glorious union of the Soviet Republics that he so longed for, a union that lived for sixty-nine years—most of them after Lenin’s death—is no more. Thirty-three years removed from USSR’s collapse—officially declared over on December 25, 1991—we ourselves are beginning to forget its importance. But a centenary like this one—especially one so easily forgotten—reminds us that one hundred years is not that long in the grand scheme of human history.
It is a truth that non-historians perhaps do not consider sufficiently. An ordinary life—a really boring one—is a blessing. This is my professional opinion as a trained military historian of antiquity. It is also my personal opinion as someone who had moved from Russia to Israel as a child, before finding peace and stability in the U.S. after immigrating here as a high schooler.
Just think about it. What might a Russian Jew born in 1899 have experienced over the course of a lifetime? First, an infancy and early childhood plagued by fear from the repeated pogroms and antisemitism. Next, World War I would have drafted family members. Not all returned. Right after, the Russian Revolution and civil war brought more senseless deaths, arrests upon the slightest suspicion, confiscations of property. Lenin’s ideals brought to life—with the deaths of millions as tribute, deemed a necessary cost. You hear rumors of the islands of death where people are sent, never to return. But at home, you have other concerns.
Perhaps your city apartment, which belonged to your family alone for decades, has become densified—meaning, you now share it with three or four other families, who care not a whit for the beauty that once was in your care. The stately entrance room is piled with everyone’s dirty galoshes, over which you trip whenever you are coming or going. A drunk sleeps in the bed that was once your parents’. It’s okay, you grimly decide after a while. They’re dead anyway. And one has to live somewhere. Might as well be here.
Fine, congratulations, when you are twenty-five, Lenin dies. Now what, though? Stalin replaces him, ushering in a new round of arrests, executions, limousines whisking people off into the night. How is one to get married and raise a family like this, you wonder? All of your relatives are gone—parents dead, sister married and living in Ukraine. And so, you delay. You dreamed now and then of starting a family, and maybe even briefly did get married. It all came to nothing at the end, as your spouse vanished. How could it have been otherwise? But at least you yourself make it through the purges alive.
And then, right as you turn forty, another deadly war. You chuckle to yourself in sorrowful amusement: You still recall getting a revolution as your high-school graduation gift. And now, a war marks your passage from youth into middle age.
You were too young to be drafted for the First World War, but not this time around. At least, ironically, being in the army will prove the safest place for you. Your Jewish relatives in Ukraine and elsewhere—like your sister and her family—they will not survive. But you won’t even know about these deaths for a few years longer. You will never see their graves, and somehow this will place a dull ache in your chest that will continue for the rest of your life. And then you have relatives in Leningrad, who will die of starvation during the 872-day blockade. You saw worse yet yourself, though, you sternly think whenever tears threaten to overwhelm your eyes again in the decades that follow. After all, you made it through Stalingrad.
But you survived, made it out alive from the horrors that took so many. Isn’t this the most important? True, everyone you love is dead, but you are only in your forties still. You could rebuild a new life along with this country of yours, for which you shed much blood, for which you saw friends die. What now, though? A few more years of Stalin’s reign of terror remain until Khruschev will at last announce a sort of reckoning: Yes, there were perhaps some excesses under our dear old, departed comrade.
All great things are still ahead, the songs and slogans proclaim. Keep hope alive! Our bright and shining future is just around the corner! Haven’t you seen the construction that is proceeding apace? The most modern apartment buildings in all the big cities—because ours is a nation of cities and factories and progress, unlike that world of backward pre-Revolutionary farmers.
Of course, distant America is now threatening this future, so we must be cautious. Protect Communism from its enemies—those within and those without. You, comrade, just keep working!
And so, you do. At last, at the very distinguished old age of ninety, you are drawing a nice pension as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, and you still march annually in the May 9th Victory Day parades. Your marching has now slowed to a shuffle, but you and the few other veterans who are left still clean up well, you think. Except, now you hear new rumblings. What is this Glasnost’ that Gorbachev speaks of? What are you supposed to think? Did you work and fight for nothing all your life?
At last, when you are ninety-two, the impossible happens. The USSR, your country for all but the first eighteen years of your life, is no more. And the insult of learning about it on television one evening, as if this were happening somewhere far away, rather than on those streets just below your apartment building.
You wonder to yourself as you listen the next day to the chaotic radio broadcasts with confusing announcements about this strange collapse, what might it have been like to have a normal life? What might it have been like to love and live as an ordinary man, if only your life and your country had not been turned upside down when you were but eighteen? Perhaps your marriage would have lasted, and you would have had children, and you would have raised them and seen them thrive and get married in their own turn. There was so much you would have liked to see—but never did.
And so, with trembling unsteady hands, you put on the kettle, blackened with age. You make some tea, and you sit in your room, alone with your memories, in the gathering shadows of the declining day.
“It is a truth that non-historians perhaps do not consider sufficiently. An ordinary life—a really boring one—is a blessing.”