WITH war raging in Ukraine, I picked up a book by Ukrainian author Ludmila Ulitskaya. The book, titled Jacob’s Ladder, begins with a memorable incident. It is the 1980s in Moscow. A young mother gets a phone call from her father about the death of her grandmother. Her father wants the woman, whose name is Nora, to attend to the rituals of preparing her grandmother’s body for the funeral.

As the scene unfolds, we enter the grandmother’s apartment, which is a relic from the days of Lenin. The grandmother lived in a room in an apartment which was owned by the state. During the communist era, numerous families or individuals were set up in various single rooms of one apartment. The grandmother, we learn, lived in one such apartment. She had lived a meagre existence in which the only ‘new’ things she ever brought were food items, that usually had to be prepared in the apartment’s communal kitchen.

In the cupboard are only two proper outfits, one of which the girl remembers her grandmother wearing when she attended Communist Party meetings. The only light in the room is provided by a single naked bulb in the deliberately spare style of Lenin himself.

As the woman dresses her dead grandmother in the clothes in which she will be buried, we learn that the two were not on good terms when they last met. The grandmother remained a staunch communist until her death; the woman is not so dazzled with life under communism. Before the funeral is even over, a woman from a government office shows up to inform the family that the grandmother’s room in the apartment, one she had inhabited for over 60 years, will be given to someone else the following day.

The new Russia does not seem suited to an ascetic life, but much of what we know of it is the picture provided by urban elites.

The certainties and indignities of everyday life in the communist Soviet Union are likely still alive in the minds of many Ukrainians. If the grandmother would have been alive to make her own case, she may have reported that she lived a good life, her room and expenses guaranteed by the state. Of course, those guarantees came at a heavy price.

The territory that is now Ukraine has had a bloody history all through the 20th century. Before the World Wars, Jews in Kyiv were massacred in some of the worst pogroms to have taken place before the rise of Nazi Germany.

Then in the 1930s, Stalin, who needed food to feed Russia, decided to nationalise all the farmland in Ukraine. Well-to-do peasants who had landholdings which produced wheat and fruit and other such things were taken over. The consequence: millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death. They had no money to buy food for themselves and their families because their purchasing power was suddenly eliminated. The staunch supporters of communism cared little about this, however. Their ascetic lives were ennobled by the fervour of doing the ‘right’ thing, of fighting capitalist exploitation.

That spirit of endurance because one believed it to be the right thing could come in handy once again in this conflict. Russia moved away from communism, becoming a capitalist oligarchy long ago, but one wonders whether the history of communism, the stories of grandmothers who endured all because they believed in resistance against a materialistic life, can still provide the cultural and historical resources needed to assist in the endurance of new suffering.

The economic sanctions imposed by the West are formidable and even if the war were to end today it appears unlikely that Russia would be able to dig itself out of the mess anytime soon. According to the latest projections, freezing the $315 billion in Russian currency reserves means that the country is likely to default on its debt within days.

The parade of businesses like McDonald’s, Disney, etc., that are marching off will likely not be able to return in an instant, not least since a new directive suggests that the Russian government intended to take over all their material assets, including billions of dollars in aircraft. All this is to say that those who have walked away and confronted the losses involved are unlikely to show up again anytime soon.

The new Russia does not seem suited to an ascetic life, but much of what we know of it is the picture provided by the urban elites in cities like Moscow and St Petersburg — people who relish consumerism and whose lifestyles are the ones that are likely to be most impacted by the current sanctions.

Beyond those cities, the average Russian makes somewhere around $6,000 a year, meaning that they have never had access to the luxury goods and foreign brands that have exited the country. This second group is supposed to be President Vladimir Putin’s power base, and according to some analysts it is more than happy to forego luxuries and foreign travel because it was never able to afford them in the first place.

The apartment blocks that one sees in newsreels of bombings in Ukraine were built during the Soviet era, their drab and uniform silhouettes representing the collectivisation of a society where individuals owned nothing. Whether it is Russia or Ukraine, the world in which these human habitations were built cannot return. At the same time, it may well be that the side that is better able to romanticise a return to a less cushy, more meagre existence will be the one that is better able to sell the new world that war has created to its inhabitants.

Ironically, just as the world of communism will never return, so too will the world that existed prior to Feb 24, 2022, be relegated to memory. Some worlds are stolen from us slowly, as we lose those who lived through them. Others vanish in an instant, rapidly dissolving through the vagaries of war.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2022