Everything is Wonderful

by Sigrid Rausing

  Winston, on his own, couldn’t make sense of the information contained in the seemingly inconsequential answers he got. But those answers were exactly the kind of odd details Orwell himself collected in Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and other works. One of the political points made by the book, then, must be this: that Winston couldn’t do what his creator Orwell had done—create meaning and narrative from odd details—not just because the gap between him and the “proles” had become too wide, but also because the system of Ingsoc had destroyed the framework of social history and journalism needed to organise fragments into narrative. Narratives are not just about accumulations of facts; the theoretical frameworks are essential for creating stories. The people on the collective farm had no framework for their stories, now that the Soviet version of history, which no one had much believed in anyway, had become discredited. The past was always vague and anecdotal: The soldiers came knocking on doors. People disappeared. You never heard from them. Decades later some came back. Others didn’t.

  Swedes were not allowed to fish or join fishing collective farms after the invasion. Two young men, I heard, had tried to escape by boat to Sweden in the 1960s. They built the boat in secret. It took a long time, and it wasn’t a very good boat. They were caught, on the sea. One of them died in prison. No one I spoke to knew what he had died of, or the details of what happened, or even their names. Just like it was taken for granted that houses could be abandoned and slowly decay, so it was taken for granted that people died in prisons, and that it was possible that no one would really ever know the cause of death. That is the nature of totalitarianism.

  Now the era of lost history is over. On the peninsula, Ivar, Allan, the Estonian Swedish activist Ain Sarv, and many others were patiently researching and teaching history. When I was there, this process was just beginning; now much of the historical research is easily available online, in English as well as Estonian. In the early 1990s no one knew numbers, or dates, or statistics—the archives were just beginning to open. People didn’t even have proper maps, and Soviet repression still lingered in prisons and orphanages, despite occasional scandals revealed by investigating journalists or charities.

  On the collective farm it wasn’t just that history was lost. Contemporary events, too, were not discussed, and soon forgotten. After my arrival on the collective farm, in September 1993, the greatest constitutional crisis Russia had faced since the 1918 revolution unravelled. The political scene in Russia had become increasingly polarised between supporters of Boris Yeltsin’s extreme austerity reforms and critics of those reforms. Aleksandr Rutskoy, Yeltsin’s deputy, and Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin’s former ally in the 1991 coup, emerged as the leaders of the anti-Yeltsin protests. On 1 September Yeltsin tried, unsuccessfully, to suspend Rutskoy, accusing him publicly of “corruption.” Later that month he wanted to appoint the liberal Yegor Gaidar deputy prime minister and deputy premier for economic affairs, and again he failed. On 21 September 1993 Yeltsin tried to dissolve the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, which had turned against him, and where criticisms of the economic austerity programme had escalated dangerously. The deputies retaliated with an impeachment, and appointed Rutskoy acting president. There was a standoff, which ended when the army, after some deliberation, and with dubious legality, took Yeltsin’s side. On 4 October it stormed the White House, the building of the Supreme Soviet, and arrested Rutskoy and Khasbulatov. Fights broke out in the streets, but were quickly suppressed. Government sources claim that 187 people were killed. The real number may have been higher—Yeltsin’s critics put them closer to 2,000. Yeltsin won, though it was a bloody victory. The critics of extreme austerity, some communist and some nationalist, lost, and the power of the presidency grew, paving the way for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian government.

  I watched the news with Toivo and Inna. The Russian channel broadcast scenes of mayhem on the streets of Moscow. Khasbulatov and Rutskoy had been arrested, and the news anchor stated that about twenty people had been killed, and some thirty wounded. Neither Inna nor Toivo commented as we looked blankly at the scenes unfolding. My diary records that we had soup for dinner that night, and bread with tinned pork, and that we ate almost in silence. It was dark outside and silent inside, one state reflecting the other. The kettle was howling like the wind. A dog barked, answered by another one far away. Inna, later, made me a cup of tea. Erki, their son, knocked on my door, and said in his hoarse teenage voice, “Sigrid. I have apple.”

  In Tallinn, by contrast, Veevi sat up with her friends listening to the radio all night, and talked of nothing else. A few days earlier a bomb had exploded at the American embassy in Tallinn, which they thought was certainly connected with the events, orchestrated by a well-organised network of provocateurs. In Veevi’s view, Yeltsin had done battle with the communists and won; she was relieved and triumphant. On the collective farm, such current affairs passed us by. Even developments of local significance were largely ignored. I am thinking once again about the day the sign for the Noarootsi Kolhoos on the culture hall was taken down, and replaced by a new gleaming sign for a commercial bank. It might have been a momentous event: the proper end of the collective farm. But no one commented, and no one, seemingly, cared. This was at least six months after the members of the collective farm had formally voted it out of existence, but the sign had remained in place. The bank branch, incidentally, never did open, and that sign, too, was eventually removed.

  People on the collective farm knew almost nothing about the Nazi occupation, or the Holocaust, and they knew very little about the Stalinist occupation. For most people on the peninsula, even local history, and the small lost civilisation of the Estonian Swedes had been only a vague rumour in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they were now becoming aware of the current aid programme and revival, no one, except Ivar, really knew much about it. One of my students wrote the following beguiling essay about the Estonian Swedes:

  I believe that minorities in Estonia is many. But I tell to you of this nationality what threatens die out and where I actually belong. And so! I talk Coastswedens. My grandmother is Coastswede and in she’s talk and my own the study ground try I do this work . . . Coastswedens have our language. They have our customs. They’s language resemble the Swedish language. Here village where I live was before 27 homestead with 250 peoples. Now is here only 6 homestead with 17 peoples from theirs only one coastsweden—my grandmother. Swedes was living very well. Swedens have here a pot of schools. In this village school was from village 3 km. School building was grand estate. That is now remain. In the school was only sex classes. When swedes are want forward learn have to they command the Estonian language. Estonian and swedes get through well. Swedes is fighting a long time our from freedom before. That was so 1920/30. Then came war. Many Swedes flee in Swerige. Few peoples come back. The Soviet system not tolerate aliens. Coastswedes sustain a loss. Now strive I, that I get in passport Swede.

  The people on the peninsula didn’t know about the successive waves of the Swedish cultural revival before the war, the cultural debates in the Swedish newspapers and journals, the Swedish schools, the 1930s activism for minority rights, and the energetic and innovative development efforts. Even so, despite the historical amnesia, the culture of the Estonian Swedes was being revived again, for the third time in a hundred years, using very much the same methods, the same cheerful discourse—“help to self-help!”—and the same ideas. It wasn’t just the culture of the Estonian Swedes that was revived in the 1990s: the tradition of revival itself was being reinvented, that particular combination of cultural advocacy and local development initiatives that was so effective, then as now.

  In 1984 the Swedish communist Sven Bjelf published a staunchly pro-communist book (in Moscow) about the Swedes in the Soviet Union. Most of the people he wrote about were Swedish communists from the mining areas in the north, who had emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 19
30s. The people he met were, he claimed, still staunchly supportive of the Soviet system: “Imagine,” one of them says, “it’s fifty years since I arrived in the Soviet Union. So much has changed and improved in those years. The country is completely transformed. I and all Soviet citizens have a good life now. We are actually spoilt, so spoilt that we forget how good life is. Who really thinks about the obvious things, such as rent, which is as cheap now as it was fifty years ago. Who thinks about the fact that visits to the doctor are free, and that medicine is so cheap, just a few kopek. At least us pensioners, I am not sure about younger people, get new teeth for free. All studies, whatever they are, are free, with scholarships. Communications are cheap. There is so much one doesn’t notice because it’s become a habit that everything should be cheap or free.”

  The teeth are a telling point: the communists who emigrated were not to know that in Sweden old people, on the whole, still had their own teeth: diet and dental care had seen to that. Bjelf also wrote about Gammalsvenskby, a Swedish village in Ukraine. In 1781 about a thousand Swedes from the Estonian island of Dagö had a dispute with their feudal landowner, Magnus Stenbock, about their right not to become serfs. Catherine the Great intervened, and gave the Swedes formerly Ottoman land in Ukraine, which she wanted to resettle with her own people. They had little choice but to go, and set off on a long and arduous journey south. At least half the Dagö Swedes died on the way, and many more died on arrival. The survivors, however, established a village, and called it Gammalsvenskby (“Old Swedish Village”), where, improbably, some of their descendants still live, and still speak Swedish.

  In 1929 the inhabitants of the village, after years of petitioning, were given permission to return to Sweden. There, faced with depression and unemployment, a few of them, encouraged by the Swedish Communist Party, decided to return to Ukraine. They got a hero’s welcome there, and much publicity, but quite soon the repression and hunger, the political violence, and the orchestrated famine that killed millions of people trapped in dying villages, devastated the community. About twenty of the villagers were arrested after yet another petition to move back to Sweden, and some were sent to prison. Stalinist purges later led to more arrests, and some executions.

  Most of the remaining Swedes from the village were evacuated by the Nazis along with German-speaking civilians in the retreat of 1943. They ended up in Poland, where they were again caught up in Stalinist repression, the majority deported to the Gulag. Soon after the war, however, Poland negotiated to give land to the Soviet Union in return for the release of Polish prisoners in the Gulag. The Swedes, too, were handed over in that deal. The survivors made their way back to the Swedish village by 1947. It was, by then, a broken community.

  Bjelf went there when he was researching his fawning book, and was introduced to the model worker and Swedish descendant Igor Annas: “As we meet and shake hands in the yard I see that Igor Annas has very clear blue eyes. In contrast to so many of us in Sweden he looks like a real Swedish Viking. His grip makes it clear what a powerful man he is.” A photograph shows Annas’s handsome head and shoulders from below, with a Soviet harvester behind him, smiling, hair combed back, in the iconic stance of a Stakhanovite worker-hero.

  I visited Gammalsvenskby in 1996. The village is on the Dnieper River, on the fertile Ukrainian plain. It is no more than a few streets of small huddled houses, electrical wires hanging slackly between uncertain poles, along with a handful of modern buildings. I was given sweet tea and meat salad and biscuits in the culture hall, before being taken to visit some old people who still spoke Swedish. They had spent part of their childhood in Sweden before travelling back with their parents to the black and fertile soil of Ukraine, to what turned out to be hunger and violence, to the very epicentre of Stalinist and Nazi violence.

  I remember the river and the mud. I remember Odessa, where the immigration officer tried to steal my husband’s passport by passing back a closed and empty leather cover. I remember the look that passed like a current between the armed guards in the room when he went back to reclaim it. I remember the flat land, the long drive, the black fields and the broad river. But I have no real sense of the history of the village. My conversation with the old Swedes was as fragmented as the conversations I had on the collective farm. There was just one unexpected thing: one old woman said that when the villagers left for Sweden they “sold the village to Jews.” I hadn’t heard that before, so I asked what happened. There was a Jewish village nearby, she said. They moved in. Then the war started. The Jews disappeared. She looked down at the table—that was it. And this was where, finally, all the histories met: the parallel histories of the Estonian Swedes, the war, the Gulag, the repression, the hunger, and the Holocaust. She didn’t say much about it. At the very centre of the story of living without history there were only a few words, then silence.

  Recently I found a reference to this history online, in a paper about the Swedes from Gammalsvenskby who had emigrated to Canada, in a Canadian academic journal dated 2005. It is one incidental sentence: “Meanwhile Jews from neighboring colonies had taken over the houses vacated by the emigrants.” It’s clear from the context that Swedes leaving Ukraine had put up their houses for sale, and that Jewish neighbours had in fact bought them. “Taken over” is, I think, perhaps slightly misleading, in this context. But at least the history is written.

  TWELVE

  Summer

  In Pürksi, the Swedish festival carried on. After most of the visitors had gone back to the holiday village on the mainland to rest before the evening party, the villagers came in to look at the part of it dedicated to Soviet life, situated in a remote corner. Ivar showed it to me, laughing his particular ironic laugh. There were photographs of harvesters and tractors, of model workers, of celebrations of International Women’s Day, of processions and folk dancing. People quietly looked at the photographs and Russian slogans, leafed through the collective farm records, the Russian and Soviet Estonian books, and the school photograph albums. It was their recent past, now more in danger of being forgotten than the history of the minority Swedes.

  In the evening Werner, the manager of Gorbyland, once again transformed himself into a rock singer with a synthesiser. He sang hoarse Estonian rock in that dark and chilly hall with a flickering candle on the piano. Few of the Swedes staying in the holiday village, in fact, had come back from their rest. Some young people were dancing together, but the hall was almost empty. A few children ran from corner to corner, and Virve sat on a chair, looking on with her characteristic mixture of humour, resignation, and superiority.

  The next day there was a Swedish memorial service in the church, preceded by a procession of returning refugees. A vicar from Stockholm prayed with them, the best known of all Swedish prayers, the rhyming children’s prayer “God Who Holds All Children Dear.” “You all know this one,” he said cosily. The prayer set the tone, followed by hymns and songs echoing with a nostalgic evocation of Swedishness. The vicar was, I learnt, the son-in-law of Dannel, the Swedish vicar on the peninsula who had fled after the Soviet invasion. He ended the service with a bland midsummer prayer. I remembered, in contrast, the furious, powerful midsummer fire in the night, whipped by the storm and the rain.

  Outside, by the war monument, I happened to stand next to two rebellious Swedes. “Are we going to stand here for two hours now?” one of them said mutinously, in a low voice, to the other. Two women in traditional dress were arranged by the vicar as posterns. The extended family of the two next to me were told to gather together for one more picture. The other man said impatiently to his friend, “Gathering together, gathering together, gathering together.” The vicar, undaunted, began to sing “Who Can Sail without the Wind?,” the Christian love song. Despite concerted efforts by the organisers, at least a third of the people refused to collect by the monument, drifting through the surrounding cemetery instead, looking at the gravestones. “Is there a village song we can sing now
?” the vicar said innocently. He didn’t understand that there were no village songs left. The songs that people still remembered after the war had been taken over by the Soviet authorities in their attempts to make the folk culture Soviet, and later by the dissidents to help turn Estonia back into a country. Those songs no longer had anything to do with ordinary people in an impoverished village in a former border protection zone, people longing for the next episode of Rosa Salvaje, the Mexican TV show. No one volunteered, and the moment petered out.

  By mid-July I had finished my survey. Time was passing, and I was longing to leave. The daydreams about staying were gone now. I spent most of my time working in Ivar’s library, for the historical part of my thesis. Some men outside were digging channels for new telephone cables—already the village was changing. One day there was a sporting event, a remnant from the collective farm time when all the Estonian farms named Lenin met to compete every year. I was ill, not much, but in-between ill, so that I didn’t know if it was psychosomatic or not—my useless fever scanner lighted up at 37 and 38 degrees centigrade and ended uncertainly on 38, my coffee tasted of nothing, my right eye was swollen as if I hadn’t slept, and I was enormously tired, leaden. It was a beautiful morning, though, of white-blue sky. The lace curtain billowed into my room, and I heard children’s voices mingling with a dog barking and a car starting. Eventually I walked out to look at the games. It was very hot. People walked around in tiny bikinis and shorts, drinking beer and playing volleyball. A music system rigged up to a van played loud music, old Swedish hits to start with, later Estonian pop music. People were having fun, much more fun than they had with the returning Swedes. The Swedish question was ignored for the day, and the village went back to what it might have been before, drenched in heat, in beer and volleyball, children left to their own devices. It was a different world.