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“How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms” (New York Times) is worth a look mostly for the disconnect between reader comments and the enthusiastic journalist.

How do humanities majors see computing?

Computer science is also essential to American tech companies, which have become heavily reliant on foreign engineers. Mr. Trump’s efforts to limit immigration make Code.org’s teach-Americans-to-code agenda even more attractive to the industry.

i.e., a person who can write a basic program in an imperative language (BASIC?) is learning “computer science.”

Which of these does Rachel Dolezal join?

Along with groups like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code and Latina Girls Code, Code.org has worked to make the subject accessible to a diverse group of students.

Does a student with fluid gender have to bounce between the Girls Who Code classroom and the Code.org classroom?

Mr. Partovi noted that Code.org had opposed a “more extreme” coding bill in Florida that would have required students to obtain industry certification.

Nothing’s scarier to educators than a test that students might actually fail!

As with most NYT articles, the comments are the most interesting part, offering us a window into what Americans (or at least Americans who voted for Hillary) think.

As an ex-college professor I would like to point out that many students do not know when the first and second world wars occurred. That about four-fifths of Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (despite the fact that it has been in continuously in the news for over a decade). That about half of Americans believe evolution is not true. That about 40% of college undergrads need remedial classes in math and English coming into college. That a large number cannot even write a coherent essay.

Perhaps these can be solved first. They are of greater much importance than providing a specific industry with workers it “needs” (ironic considering that high tech industry throws out employees over the age of 40 [or less], when they become obsolete).

This professor does raise a good point. If programmers are in such short supply, why can’t old programmers get jobs?

To all this talk of teaching computer programming in schools to fill tech jobs, why won’t the tech companies create their own apprentice programs? Why won’t tech companies use some of their millions/billions and open up learning centers in communities where they don’t have business centers if they are truly altruistic, and not self-serving? Logical thinking can be developed through any scholarly pursuit.

Maybe the Trumpenfuhrer should call the bluffs of the Silicon Valley Hillary-supporters! He can offer to let them bring back, tax-free, some of the overseas $billions (that they were sheltering from Obama’s tax rates) as long as they spend it to train Americans for the jobs currently done by H-1B visa holders. It would be awesome to see the reaction!

[Todd Goglia] Most jobs are for “mediocre coders”. Only a tiny percentage of programming jobs entail a real understanding of advanced computer science concepts such as machine learning. Most jobs consist of getting data from a database and outputting it to a web page or getting user input from a webpage and saving it to a database.

Maybe he read Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (or its predecessor, Database backed Web Sites) back in the 1990s!

Readers: What do you think? People have been trying since the 1970s to make programming part of K-12. Is this code.org thing going to be the initiative that succeeds?

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From Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

Love? That’s not even an option… I’m not against all that happy shiny stuff, but you’re probably the first person to say that word to me in ten years. It’s the twenty-first century: It’s all about money, sex, and two smoking barrels, and here you are talking about feelings… Everyone finally got their hands on some dough, for the first time ever… I was in no hurry to get married, have kids, I’ve always put my career first. I value myself, my time, and my life. And where did you ever get the idea that men are looking for love? Ooh, love… Men consider women game, war trophies, prey, and themselves hunters. Those are the rules that have been developed over the course of centuries. And women aren’t looking for their knight in shining armor to come galloping in on a white horse—they want him on a sack of gold. A knight of indeterminate age… even a “daddy” will do… So what? Money rules the world! But I’m no prey, I’m a huntress myself… I came to Moscow ten years ago. I was wild, fired up, I told myself that I was born to be happy, that only the weak suffer, and modesty is nothing but adornment for the weak. I’m from Rostov… My parents work at a school, my father’s a chemist, and my mother’s a Russian language and literature teacher. They got married when they were in college, my father only owned one decent suit but had more than his share of ideas. Back then, that was enough to make a young girl swoon. They still love to remember how, for ages, they got by with one set of linens, one pillow, and one pair of slippers. They’d spend their nights reciting Pasternak—they knew it all by heart! “Anywhere is heaven with the one you love!” “Until the first frosts,” I’d laugh. “You have no imagination,” my mother would reply, hurt. We were your typical Soviet family: For breakfast, it was always buckwheat or noodles with butter; we only had oranges once a year, on New Year’s Eve.

It took a long time for people like my parents to realize that capitalism had already begun in earnest. Russian capitalism, young and thick-skinned, the same beast that had been put down in 1917…[ She falls into thought.] Do they understand it today? It’s hard to say… There’s one thing I know for sure: Capitalism was not what my parents ordered. No two ways about it. It’s what I ordered, it’s made for people like me, who didn’t want to stay in the cage. The young and the strong.

I was looking up… to the top of the tall ladder of life… I never dreamed of being fucked in stairwells or saunas in exchange for expensive dinners. I had a lot of admirers… I didn’t pay any attention to my peers—we could be friends, go to the library together. It was unserious and safe. I preferred older, more successful men who had already made it. They were interesting, fun, and useful.

And that’s when I met him… You could say that I loved him. This sounds like a confession, doesn’t it? [She laughs.] He was twenty years older than me, married with two sons. A jealous wife. He lived under a microscope… Now I see that love is also a kind of business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk. You have to be ready for new configurations—always! These days, few people go weak in the knees for love. Everyone saves their strength for the leap forward! For their career! In our smoking room, the girls gossip about their love lives, and if any of them has real feelings, everyone feels sorry for her—like, what an idiot, she’s head over heels.

Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t my problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! [She suddenly loses control.] People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many different ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t!

The plot? A tale as old as time… I wanted to have his baby, I got pregnant… Maybe it scared him? Men are such cowards! Whether they’re bums or oligarchs—makes no difference. They’ll go to war, start a revolution, but when it comes to love, they’re traitors.

I am filled with horror when I consider how hard you have to work to keep someone in your life. It’s like breaking rocks at a quarry! You have to forget about yourself, reject yourself, liberate yourself from yourself. There is no freedom in love. Even if you find your ideal partner, he’ll wear the wrong cologne, he’ll like fried meat and mock you for your little salads, leave his socks and pants all over the place. And you always have to suffer. Suffer?! For love… for that harmony… I don’t want to do that work anymore, it’s easier for me to rely on myself.

I’ll never be able to fall in love with a man from a dormitory town who doesn’t have any money. From a prefab ghetto, from Harlem. I hate people who grew up in poverty, their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them. I don’t like the poor, the insulted and the humiliated.

The whole ride home, he lectured me on common sense: “It’s all bullshit! Nothing but idiocy! In 1991, I was a student in Moscow, I also ran around to demonstrations. There were more of us than there are of you. And we won. We dreamed that every one of us would start a business and get rich. And what do you think happened? When the Communists were in power, I was an engineer—now I’m a cabbie. We chased out one group of bastards, and another group of bastards took their place. Black, gray, or orange, they’re all the same. In our country, power will corrupt anyone. I’m a realist. The only things I believe in are myself and my family. While the newest round of idiots tries to usher in the latest revolution, I just keep my nose to the grindstone. This month, I need to make enough money to buy my daughters new coats, and next month, my wife needs boots. You’re a pretty girl. You’d be better off finding yourself a good man and getting married.”

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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At least 10 of my Facebook friends posted their outrage that Ivanka Trump moved up to the main table at a G20 meeting (see “Ivanka Trump briefly sits in for her father at G20 session” (CNN)). These folks describe themselves as “feminist” and “pro Affirmative Action”. However pointless the G20 meetings might be, why wouldn’t they be happy that a woman got to sit in a position of apparent power? (If the answer is “there were more qualified people available,” how can that be squared with their support for affirmative action (Wikipedia says this is called “positive discrimination in the UK”)?)

Readers: What do we think about Ivanka now that she’s had nearly six months of White House experience? Has she done anything notable other than advocate for childless taxpayers to subsidize parents via paid leave? (See Paid Maternity Leave: Employers or Taxpayers should Pay? and When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?)

The self-described feminists today on Ivanka:

• Handbag designer represents US at G20 meeting. Christ, this is embarassing.
• Yes, In America, Anyone Really Can Be President.
• I didn’t realize today was bring your daughter to work day!

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Back in April I wrote “FAA punches a hole in the U.S. economy today” about how the FAA was forcing American helicopter charter operators to spend money on radar altimeters, which actually reduce safety in a helicopter intended for visual flying (as opposed to instrument flying). The regulation was drafted with an exception for light helicopters, such as the Robinson R44, but the FAA decided that they wouldn’t give an exception unless “will not fit on the instrument panel without removing equipment required by regulation” (FAA Notice 8900.405).

A lot of R44 operators should still have been entitled to an exception because the panel of an R44 is small and typically full of required stuff. The FAA began interpreting the above guidance, however, to demand that R44 operators add an extra hump on top of the existing instrument panel (essentially taping it to the top of the dashboard, like you might do with a radar detector in a 1970s Camaro).

Here’s Maria Langer, a pilot and charter operator, on the subject of the Robinson R44 and radar altimeters: “The FAA’s Irrational Application of a Rule”

Obviously this is going to seem pretty obscure to most people who aren’t pilots or aren’t charter operators, but I think it is illustrative of what happens as an economy winds down and ever more resources are devoted to regulations and regulatory compliance.

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Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets has a lot of material on the conflicts that befell the former Soviet republics after the empire broke up. The conflicts include the Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994) and the Abkhaz–Georgian conflict (1989-present).

“… In Baku… We lived in a nine-story building. One morning, they took all the Armenian families out into the courtyard… Everyone gathered around them, and every single person there went up to us and hit us with something. A little boy—five years old—came up to me and hit me with a toy shovel. An old Azerbaijani woman patted him on the head…” “… Our Azerbaijani friends hid us in their basement. They covered us in junk and boxes. At night, they’d bring us food…” “… I was running to work one morning, and I saw dead bodies lying there on the street. Just lying there or leaning against the wall—sitting there, propped up as though they were alive. Some had been covered in tablecloths, others hadn’t. There hadn’t been time. The majority of them were naked… both the men and the women… The ones who were sitting up hadn’t been undressed—it must have been too hard to move them…” “… I used to think that Tajiks were like little kids, totally harmless. In a matter of just six months, maybe even less than that, Dushanbe became unrecognizable, and so did the people. The morgues were filled to capacity. In the mornings, before they were absorbed into the asphalt, there’d be puddles of coagulated blood… like gelatin…” “… For days, people walked by our house carrying posters that read, ‘Death to the Armenians! Death!’ Men and women. A furious mob, not a single human face among them. The newspapers were filled with ads: ‘Trading a three-bedroom apartment in Baku for any apartment in any Russian city…’ We sold our apartment for three hundred dollars. Like it was a refrigerator. And if we hadn’t sold it that cheap, they could have killed us…”

‘Be afraid, you Russian bastards! Your tanks won’t help you!’ on the wall of the building across from ours. Russians were being removed from administrative positions… They’d shoot you from around the corner… The city quickly grew as filthy as a kishlak.* 13 It became a foreign city. No longer Soviet…” “… They could kill you for anything… If you hadn’t been born in the right place, if you didn’t speak the right language. If someone with a machine gun simply didn’t like the looks of you… How had we lived before then? On holidays, our first toast had always been, ‘To friendship,’ and ‘es kes sirum em’ (‘ I love you’ in Armenian). Or ‘Man sani seviram’ (‘ I love you’ in Azerbaijani). We’d lived happily side by side…”

I’m Russian. I was born in Abkhazia and lived there for a long time. In Sukhumi. Until I was twenty-two. Until 1992, when the war broke out. If the water catches fire, how do you put it out? That’s what Abkhazians say about war… Everyone took the bus together, went to the same schools, read the same books, lived in the same country, and all learned the same language, Russian. Then suddenly they were all killing each other: Neighbor killing neighbor, classmate killing classmate. Brother killing sister! And they were warring right there, right in front of their own homes… How long ago had it been? Only a year before that, two… We’d been living like brothers, everyone was in the Komsomol and a communist.

Men are always talking about war, they like weapons—young and old alike… while women like to remember love stories. Old women tell stories of how they were young and beautiful. Women never talk about war… They just pray for their men. My mother would go see the neighbors and every time, she’d come home petrified. “They burned a stadium full of Georgians in Gagra.” “Mama!” “I also heard that the Georgians have been castrating Abkhazians.” “Mama!” “They bombed the monkey house… Then, one night, the Georgians were chasing someone thinking it was an Abkhazian. They wounded him and heard him scream. Then the Abkhazians stumbled upon him and thought it was a Georgian. So they started chasing him and shot at him. Finally, when it started getting light out, they realized that all along, it had been a wounded monkey. So then all of them—the Georgians and the Abkhazians—declared a ceasefire and rushed over to save it. If it had been a human, they would have killed him…”

Today, everyone knows about Sumgait… it’s only thirty kilometers outside of Baku… The first pogrom happened there. One of the girls we worked with was from there. One day, after everyone had gone home, she started staying at the telegraph office. She’d spend the night in the storeroom. She walked around in tears, wouldn’t even look out the window, and didn’t speak to anyone. We asked her what was wrong, she wouldn’t say. And when she finally opened her mouth and started telling us… I wished I’d never heard… I didn’t want to hear about those things! I didn’t want to hear anything! What was going on! What is this—how could they! “What happened to your house?” “It was looted.” “What happened to your parents?” “They took my mother out into the courtyard, stripped her naked, and threw her on the fire! And then they forced my pregnant sister to dance around the fire… Then, after they killed her, they dug the baby out of her with metal rods…” “Shut up! Shut up!” “My father was hacked to pieces with an ax… My relatives only recognized him by his shoes…” “Stop! I’m begging you!” “Men, young and old, in groups of twenty or thirty, got together and started breaking into the houses where Armenian families lived. They killed and raped daughters in front of their fathers, wives in front of husbands…”

…Men or teenagers… I was too terrified to remember… were beating—murdering—a woman with a fence post. Where had they found them in the city? She lay on the ground not making a sound. When passersby saw what was happening, they’d turn the corner and walk down another street. Where were the police? The police had disappeared…

The bloodbath in Baku went on for several weeks. Or at least that’s what some people say, others say it was longer… They didn’t just kill Armenians, they also killed the people who hid them. My Azerbaijani friend hid me, she had a husband and two kids. One day… I swear! I’ll come back to Baku and bring my daughter to their house: “This is your second mother, daughter.” They had these thick drapes… thick as a coat… They’d had them sewn especially for me. At night, I would come down from the attic for an hour or two…

…We never leave the house at night! If my daughter or husband are late, I take valerian. I beg my daughter not to wear too much makeup or flashy dresses. They killed an Armenian boy, they stabbed a Tajik girl to death… they stabbed an Azerbaijani. We used to all be Soviet, but now we have a new nationality: “person of Caucasian descent.” In the morning, I run to work. I never look young men in the eye because I have dark eyes and black hair. On Sundays, if we leave the house, we’ll stroll through our own neighborhood, not straying far from our house. “Mama, I want to go to the Arbat. I want to walk around on Red Square.” “We can’t go there, daughter. That’s where the skinheads hang out. With swastikas. Their Russia is for Russians. Not for us.” [She falls silent.] No one knows how many times I’ve wanted to die.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

 

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What if a Silicon Valley company raised tens of millions of dollars and the absence of software development productivity was apparent even to the management? They probably tried to bring in Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross to do some personnel consulting. Baldwin was busy, however, so a friend with a similar personality was tapped instead.

Why am I here? I came here because Mitch and Murray asked me to. They asked me for a favor. I said, the real favor, follow my advice and fire your f**king ass because a loser is a loser.

On his recommendation, the $300,000/year CTO (“a great talker”) and 11 other so-called tech people were fired. “They were all C- at best,” he said. What surprised him? “I looked on LinkedIn and they all had jobs at VC-backed companies within a week.”

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I’ve been experimenting with online grocery shopping since the mid-1990s with Peapod (started in 1989 as a dial-up service; see also company’s history page).

Amazon does everything better than everyone else, so we decided to try out AmazonFresh recently.

Late 1990s:

• Open web browser
• build up shopping cart on Peapod web site by browsing pages organized by category
• build up shopping cart on Peapod web site based on a previous order
• build up shopping cart on Peapod web site based on a saved shopping list
• pick a delivery time for the next day
• check out

2017:

• Open web browser
• build up shopping cart on Amazon web site by browsing pages organized by category
• build up shopping cart on Amazon web site based on a previous order (except not nearly as efficiently, since items need to be added one a time)
• build up shopping cart on Amazon web site based on a saved shopping list
• pick a delivery time for the current day
• discover that no same-day delivery slots are available
• pick a delivery time for the next day

Avocados have been in short supply lately and the Peruvian-grown ones at Costco are kind of tasteless, so we ordered four “ready to eat” avocados from AmazonFresh. One of them was actually arguably “ready to eat,” but the others needed a couple more days. The greenhouse tomatoes were pretty good and also the organic nectarines.

Everything showed up on time and as ordered. The delivery driver was not as excited to meet Mindy the Cippler as Mindy was to meet her. We were left with a couple of sizable and un-foldable insulated totes that we’re supposed to give back next time (with Peapod, everything is unloaded on a countertop and the packaging taken away).

So the service works reasonably well, but so does Peapod (and has for nearly 30 years). What is Amazon adding?

Related:

• Virtual Reality will put online grocery shopping over the top?

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Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

I will never forget the war… The Germans invaded our village… Young and cheerful. With so much noise! They arrived in huge vehicles and their three-wheeled motorcycles. I’d never even laid eyes on a motorcycle before. All we had at the collective farm were these one-and-a-half-ton trucks with wooden beds, these machines that were low to the ground. You should have seen those German trucks! They were as tall as houses! Their horses—not horses, but mountains. They painted a message on the wall of our schoolhouse: “The Red Army has abandoned you!” We started living under German rule… There were a lot of Jews in our village: Avram, Yankel, Morduch… They rounded them all up and took them out to the shtetl. They’d brought their pillows and blankets, but they were all killed right away. They rounded up every Jew in the district and shot them all in a single day. Tossed them into a pit… thousands of them… thousands… People said that for three days afterward, their blood kept rising to the top of the pit… like the ground was breathing… it was alive… Now there’s a park there. A place of recreation. You can’t hear anyone from beyond the grave. No one can scream… So, that’s what I think…[ She cries.] I don’t know… How did it happen? Did they come to her, or did she find them in the forest? Our neighbor hid two little Jewish boys in her barn—adorable kids. Real cherubs! Everyone was shot, but they hid. They managed to run away. One was eight, and the other one was ten. My mother would bring them milk…“ Children, hush,” she told us. “Not a word of this to anyone.” In my neighbor’s family, there was an old, old grandfather, he remembered the other war with the Germans, the first one… He’d feed the boys and weep: “Oh, children, they’ll capture you and torture you. If I could stand to do it, you’d be better off if I killed you myself.” Those were his words… And the devil hears everything…[ She crosses herself.] Three Germans showed up on a black motorcycle with their big black dog. Someone had informed on them… There are always people willing to do things like this, people whose souls are black. They’re alive, but it’s like they are soulless… Their hearts are just medical, not human hearts. They have no pity for anyone. The kids ran into the field, into the grain… The Germans sent their dog in after them… Afterward, their remains had to be gathered up shred by shred… There were nothing but rags left of them… nothing to bury, no one even knew their last names. Then the Germans tied our neighbor to their motorcycle and made her run until her heart burst…[ She no longer wipes her tears.] In times of war, people fear one another.

I went to apply to the teacher training college like I had dreamed. I had to go there and fill out an application. I answered all of the questions and then I got to the one that said, “Were you or any of your relatives prisoners of war or under occupation?” I answered that yes, of course we were. The director called me into his office: “Young lady, please take your documents and go.” He’d fought at the front and lost one of his arms. He had an empty sleeve. That’s how I learned that we… everyone who’d survived the occupation… were unreliable elements. We were now under suspicion. No one was calling us brothers and sisters anymore… It took forty years for them to remove that question from the application form. Forty years! By the time they took it out, my life was already over.

At the front, we were afraid of speaking openly with one another. A lot of people had been arrested before the war… and during the war… My mother worked at a bread factory, and one day, during an inspection, they found breadcrumbs on her gloves. That was enough to constitute sabotage. They sentenced her to ten years in prison. I was at the front, my father was at the front, so my younger brothers and sisters had to go live with my grandmother. They’d beg her, “Granny, don’t die before Papa and Sashka (that’s me) come back from the war.” My father went missing in action. —What kind of heroes are we? No one ever treated us like heroes. My wife and I raised our kids in barracks and after that, all we got was a room in a communal apartment. Today, it’s kopecks… Tears instead of pensions. On television, they show us the Germans. They’re doing pretty well for themselves! The defeated are living one hundred times better than the victors.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

 

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A rare non-Donald Trump-themed article from New Yorker: “China’s Mistress-Dispellers”. Some excerpts:

… clients are women who hope to preserve their marriages by fending off what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third”—a term that encompasses everything from a partner in a casual affair to a long-term “kept woman.”

A volatile mixture of rapid social change, legal reforms, and traditional attitudes has created something approaching a crisis in Chinese marriage. In the past decade, the divorce rate has doubled. Adultery is the most prevalent cause, accounting for about a third of the cases, and men are more than thirteen times as likely to stray as women are.

The company’s co-founder, a woman in her late forties, came out to meet me. She wore a crimson cape coat, which, combined with her swift stride, gave the impression of imminent flight. She introduced herself as “Ming laoshi”—Teacher Ming. Her actual name is Ming Li, but she was formerly a teacher and has kept the honorific, because she still sees her role as instructional. … “There are no enduring marriages,” she told me matter-of-factly. “Only mistresses who haven’t worked hard enough at tearing it apart.”

“Marriage is like the process of learning to swim,” Ming said. “It doesn’t matter how big or fancy your pool is, just like it doesn’t always matter how good your husband is. If you don’t know how to swim, you will drown in any case, and someone else who knows how to swim will get to enjoy the pool.”

Shu and Ming set up their company in 2001, just after an amendment to a law made divorce easier to obtain. This new freedom created a business opportunity, and, indeed, Shu framed the threats to marriage in material terms. “Today’s Little Thirds want a good bargain,” he told me. “They are of the post-nineties generation—competitive, shrewd, worldly.” Likewise, the best course for wronged wives was to follow the money: “Secure the marriage to secure the assets. Secure the assets to secure happiness.”

Li told me that she doubted she would ever remarry. “The truth is, in China, at least, the last thing a marriage is about is the relationship between two people,” she said. “It’s about property, the children, and the vast and various entanglements of those two things.”

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To reduce the risk of Jihad in the West, people advocate a society where citizens inform on each other and/or where government surveillance is ubiquitous. Has that been tried before? What does it feel like and how do you rebuild a society afterwards? This is addressed in Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

Here are some relevant passages:

A regular communal apartment… Five families live there—twenty-seven people in total. Sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. Two of the neighbors are friends: One of them has a five-year-old daughter and the other one is single with no kids. In communal apartments, people were always spying on one another, listening in on each other’s conversations. The people with ten-square-meter rooms envied the ones with twenty-five. Life… that’s just how it is… And then, one night, a Black Maria—a police van—shows up… They arrest the woman with the five-year-old daughter. Before they take her away, she has a chance to cry out to her friend, “If I don’t come back, please look after my little girl. Don’t let them take her to an orphanage.” So that’s what happened. The neighbor took the child in, and the building administration gave her a second room… The girl started calling her Mama… Mama Anya… Seventeen years went by… And seventeen years later, the real mother returned. She kissed her friend’s hands and feet in gratitude. If this were a fairy tale, this is where the story would end, but in real life, the ending was very different. Without a “happily ever after.” When Gorbachev came to power, after they unsealed the archives, they asked the former camp inmate whether she wanted to see her file. She did. So she went down to look at it, opened the folder… and the very first page was an informant’s report. Familiar handwriting… It was her neighbor’s, Mama Anya’s… She’d been the one who’d informed on her… Do you understand any of this? I don’t. And that woman couldn’t, either. She went home and hanged herself.

I remember my father’s words: “It’s possible to survive the camps, but you can’t survive other people.”

First they arrested my wife. She went to the theater and didn’t come back. I got home from work and found my son sleeping on a little rug in the hall next to the cat. He’d waited and waited for Mama until he finally fell asleep. My wife worked at a shoe factory. She was a Red engineer. “Something strange is going on,” she’d told me. “They’ve taken all my friends. For some kind of treason…” “You and I are innocent, so no one is coming for us.” I was sure of it. Absolutely positive… Sincerely! I was a Leninist, then a Stalinist. Until 1937, I was a Stalinist. I believed everything Stalin said and did. Yes… The greatest, the most brilliant leader of all eras and peoples. Even after Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, and Blyukher* 14 were all pronounced enemies of the people, I still believed him. It seems stupid now, but I thought that Stalin was being deceived, that traitors had made their way to the top. The Party would sort it all out. But then they arrested my wife, an honest and dedicated Party warrior. Three days later, they came for me…

The search ended toward morning. They ordered me to pack my bags. The nanny woke my son. Before I left, I managed to whisper to him, “Don’t tell anyone about your mother and father.” That’s how he survived.

I spent almost a year in prison. I was preparing for my trial. For the penal colony. I was surprised, I wondered why they were dragging their feet. As far as I can tell, there was no rhyme or reason to it. Thousands of cases… Chaos… A year later, a new investigator summoned me. My case was being reviewed. And then they released me, dismissing all charges. So it had been a mistake after all. The Party believed me!

I found my son living with strangers, the nanny had taken him out to the country. He’d started stuttering and was afraid of the dark. The two of us began a new life together. I tried to get any news I could about my wife. At the same time, I applied to get reinstated in the Party. I wanted my Party membership card back. New Year’s Eve… We’d decorated a tree. My son and I were expecting guests. The doorbell rang. I opened the door. A poorly dressed woman stood on the threshold. “I’ve come to send greetings from your wife.” “She’s alive!” “She was alive a year ago. I used to work with her in a pigsty. We’d steal frozen potatoes from the pigs, and thanks to that, we didn’t starve to death. I have no idea whether or not she’s still alive.”

I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you. She’s died. But you can have your honor back…” And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy… [I tell him that I will never understand that—never. He loses his temper.] You can’t judge us according to logic. You accountants! You have to understand! You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous! What greatness do you have in your life? You have nothing. Just comfort. Anything for a full belly… Those stomachs of yours… Stuff your face and fill your house with tchotchkes. But I… my generation… We built everything you have. The factories, the dams, the electric power stations. What have you ever built? And we were the ones who defeated Hitler.

And the ones sentencing them and guarding them were the people, too—not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside—they were the very same people. Our own men. Kin. Today, you see everybody putting on the striped uniform. Now, everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about it… it’s simple arithmetic… Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this… and they found millions of people who were willing to…”

I didn’t quote the truly painful stuff, so if you can stomach that you should read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets …

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