As I Lay Dying
When a country confronts malaise and even, possibly, termination, metaphors of morbidity and mortality are not far behind. In the run-up to the Crimean War (the nineteenth -century one, not its twenty-first century echo), the Ottoman Empire was diagnosed as the "sick man of Europe" (supposedly by Tsar Nicholas I, although the attribution remains debatable). In the century and a half that followed, the rest of the continent's constituent parts have unwillingly vied for that (dis)honour), with the term applied to Serbia in 1997, Germany after reunification, Italy on more than one occasion, Portugal in 2007, Greece after the 2008 financial crisis, and Scotland, the UK, and post-Soviet Russia repeatedly over the past three decades.
The gerontocracies of the Warsaw Pact towards the end of the Cold War also encouraged a pessimistic reevaluation of the king's two bodies, with Brezhnev's failing faculties, incomprehensible diction, and moribund bearing setting the tone. At the time, the aging of the leadership did not inspire much hope for significant change, let alone far-fetched fantasies of total regime collapse. After Brezhnev's demise, his replacement by two old men who died in quick succession appeared to make geriatric leadership death an ongoing feature of Soviet life. When Konstantin Chernenko became the third general secretary to die in four years, a popular joke made the rounds about someone being asked for his ticket to Chernenko's funeral and replying, "I have a subscription."
Too sexy for his shirt
The actual death of the Soviet Union took place after six years of intense dynamism rather than quasi-vegetative stagnation. The drama and trauma of the old system's passing would sometimes find itself embodied in the figure of the dying elder who lies in bed and slowly recedes from life while the outside world moves forward at breakneck speed.
That contrast has long been at the center of stories that focus on the experience of the bedridden dying, from Tolstoy's Ivan Ilich, who is outraged that the world will continue without him, to the protagonist of Yuri Olesha's "Liompa," who despairs that he is slowly forgetting the names of all the objects and creatures that will remain after he is gone. Just 10 years after the October Revolution, Olesha published his short novel Envy, whose protagonist and initial narrator, like Olesha himself, was born in 1899. At one point, the narrator, Nikolai Kavalerov, writes:
“My youth coincided with the youth of the century,” I say.
[...]
“I often think about this century. We live in a brilliant age. And it’s a splendid fate, isn’t it? I mean when the youth of the century (molodost' veka) and the youth of a man (molodost' cheloveka) coincide.”
Technically, Kavalerov could have lived to the ripe old age of 91 or 92 and seen that same era's passing, although his drinking habits and dissolute lifestyle combined with the ravages of Soviet history make this scenario unlikely. The novel ends with its hero in bed, and it is not difficult to imagine him back there again, dying along with the Soviet Union.