But here they are in front of me. These lines. I remember now how I wrote them. How I softened the facts out of caution, how I glossed over them, not in any case exaggerating them. I reflect now on the unwritten words, seeing letters whose meaning is known to me alone. To me these lines are full of blood and life, for I breathed the atmosphere in which they originated. They may mean so little unfortunately to those who never breathed that heavy, quite uniquely thick air.
I will now touch briefly on the general external circumstances of the time in order to clear up some passages that are not otherwise understandable.
In the new year of 1919 the general situation was thus: By virtue of the countless decrees (often contradictory and confused but always menacing), nearly everything was nationalised. Everything belonged officially to ‘the State’ (the Bolsheviks). Not only all the remaining factories and plants, but also all the shops, warehouses, business and institutes, all houses and real estate, and almost all movable property. Everything had in principle become the property of, and under the administration of, ‘the State’. The decrees aimed to realise this idea. One cannot claim that the implementation of these decrees proceeded harmoniously. It was ultimately just an effort to appropriate things that ended for the most part in the destruction and desolation of whatever became ‘nationalised’. Nationalised shops, business and factories soon closed. The nationalisation of private trade led to the cessation of trade altogether, and to the terrifying development of the black market. In relation to the black market, the Bolsheviks were forced to turn a blind eye and limit themselves to periodically plundering and intercepting buyers and sellers in the street, in their own homes and in the markets. These markets, the only available food source (even for the majority of communists), were also forbidden. Subsequent terrorist raids on them, accompanied by shootings and murders, simply ended with the plundering of goods to the sole benefit of those who had carried out the raid. Above all the food. But since there is no object known to man that cannot be found in the markets, everything else was taken as well, old rags, doorknobs, torn trousers, bronze candlesticks, ladies’ shirts and even a velvet-bound prayer book stolen from some library…. Furniture was also considered state property, but since you couldn’t easily lug a sofa to the market in secret, you had to tear off the cover and try to exchange it for at least half a pound of bread baked with chopped straw… One can still hear the cries and screams of shopkeepers, scattering upon hearing that the red guards were coming! Every one of them packed their junk, often, caught in the excitement, even the stuff that didn’t belong to them. People ran, hurried, hid themselves in empty cellars and climbed out of broken windows… Customers jumped out too, as buying under the Soviet Union was no less of a crime than selling, even though Zinoviev certainly knew that without this crime his Soviet Union would come to an end in under ten days due to a lack of citizens.
We called our FSSR (Federal Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia) the RFTK (Republic for trade and corruption). That felt closer to the truth.
Here I have to mention the most characteristic peculiarity of all in the Soviet Union: In the FSSR all things are labelled, and each label, hanging like a signboard above the thing it describes, is a complete and utter lie in relation to it. What is hidden beneath these signboards, the true things, are the object of my diaries.
For Cici
Translated by Leon Friedman
Keeping up with Yesterday 
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