Paradise Lost

What happens when Heaven on Earth doesn’t work out.

In the fall, we liked to drive from Baku to Guba (or Quba) during apple season. Guba is in the northeast corner of Azerbaijan and was home to one of the Soviet Union’s largest apple growing regions. After the collapse of the Union in the early 1990s, the huge apple collective farms in Guba were divided into small plots from which undercapitalized fruit growers tried to make a living.

On one of our visits to Guba, we followed a little Soviet-made Lada Zhiguli (Italian engineering built with Soviet craftsmanship) on our trip home. At about 45 kilometers per hour, the little car threw out a spray of sparks each time it hit a bump, and there were a lot of bumps.

The interior of the car was filled with apples, except for a small space partitioned off with cardboard where the driver sat. The trunk was also filled with apples, as were the six wooden boxes on the roof, and the spare tire was lashed to the back window to allow for a few more apples in the trunk. Last but not least, two geese were stuffed into a used feed sack with their heads protruding from two small holes cut in the sack.

If you don’t have the pictures, it didn’t happen. I have the pictures.

When we first saw the car, I was amused, relatively rich westerner that I am. Overloaded Zhigulis were a common sight in Azerbaijan. Big, empty pickup trucks and SUVs are common where I live, but I can imagine how they would be overworked in places like Guba. Big and empty are luxuries; small and overloaded are necessities.

I’ve seen two ponies riding in the backseat of one and some enterprising soul produced a fundraising calendar featuring twelve months of magnificently overloaded Zhigulis. I once saw a Zhiguli filled with green beans at the border crossing between Azerbaijan and Georgia. Behind the driver’s cardboard green bean retaining walls, a young Azeri soldier was completely compressed by an avalanche of green beans that pressed his left cheek against the window. It was probably the safest place in case of an accident, because instead of non-existent airbags, he was totally encased by a green bean bag.

While the little overloaded cars were amusing at first, I learned to admire the determination and ingenuity of the owners who were busily trying to survive in a collapsed economy. Then at some point, pictures like the goose mobile left me with a sense of loss and sadness. The Heaven on Earth, the workers’ paradise, died and there was nothing to fill the void except survivors struggling with their loads of unsold apples to rebuild their lives.

For a few days short of 69 years, millions of people lived and then were murdered in the Soviet Union to make the dream of a Heaven on Earth come true. Lives were cheap, even those of the true believers. Stalin is often quoted as saying a lot of eggs must be broken to make an omelette. Although the saying did not originate with him (it is a relic idiom from the French Revolution, which shared many similarities with the Russian Revolution), he certainly broke a lot of eggs, or as decent people call them, the tragically murdered people who were victims of a psycho dictator controlling a totalitarian government. Only Mao Zedong racked up a higher body count during the building of the Chinese workers’ paradise, but it was not because of a lack of effort on Stalin’s part.

Before Stalin, Lenin got the revolution off to a bloody start by murdering or starving somewhere between 6.7 and 8 million people until he finally died and was turned into a waxy yellow corpse of a tourist attraction. After Stalin, the slaughter continued, but on a smaller scale. The unanswered question is why and for what greater good? I cringe when I hear someone claim that sacrifice is required for some course of action that is allegedly for the greater good, because too often it means a lot of people must die.

Was such an outcome inevitable? In a famous passage from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago,” he wrote the following:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

The price of liberty, it seems, is eternal vigilance armed with axes, hammers and pokers. If that’s too high a price to pay, resign yourself to the Gulag, or even worse in its own way, the bleakness of a life lived for the greater good in whatever version of Soviet hell you are relegated to.

After almost 70 years of murder and suffering for the elusive greater good, here’s a video from the late 1980s that reveals what the greater good achieved at its peak: Soviet Supermarket, late 1980s

Things are better now in Azerbaijan after the death of communism, but poverty still exists and despite the gleaming new skyscrapers in Baku built with revenue from the country’s vast oil wealth, many still eke out a living from the rubble of that failed attempt to build a Heaven on Earth. The stinking corpse of communism is still a reality for many people.

Maybe someday the human race will finally shake off the envy-driven vision of Karl Marx and we will all be better for it. Maybe we will stop believing that it is only a matter of finding the Right People (which sounds messianic to me) to do Communism or Socialism “right.” After over a hundred million deaths because of the dream of “doing it right,” it’s well past time to acknowledge that it can’t be done “right.”