(Russia's perspective looking back at Stalinist Russia)
I can still smell blood, as clearly as I can taste imported wine, and it seems to me that nothing could have changed.
Some days I feel like a ghost wandering these streets. I pass by in spirit, but my body remains back in those repressed years. Caught in a loop of late night meetings, soldier's parades, and constant arrests. The radio static, to me, still carries the news of trials- endless trials. There is never enough noise in the Kremlin to cover the echoes of gunshots. There will never be enough noise to block out the sound of his voice...
I sit in my small office and expect time after time to hear reports come in from his office, to receive new orders from the NKVD. At night each passing car recalls the black limousines that we so feared, and still I am too afraid to pray. Sleeping at night feels wrong, and I dream of the long hours spent standing behind the table he was head of watching men sitting below their portraits praising their fatherland, praising me, as though I wasn't really there. As though those portraits weren't already marking graves. The white paint as white as their cheeks as white as the snow so many were covered in during that "patriotic war" until I cannot tell the living from the dead any longer...
In those years I was a monster, a victim, a dream, a broken promise, and he was hope. He was a beginning, an end, a God... I was changed irrevocably, by his will. His cruelty. His power. His dream.
They buried him without following orders. They buried him with dirt alone, when they were commanded to use slabs of concrete. I wish they had obeyed orders.
... I miss him. I miss the smell of tobacco and grand celebrations every October. I miss the company of so large a territory. I miss the fear in the eyes of my enemies... being powerful enough to have enemies.
I miss some 20 million people...