The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of … emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.
A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. “Through the voices of those who confided in her,” The Nation writes, “Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil—in a word, about ourselves.”
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50 years from now when history classes cover post-Soviet Russia, this book will be required reading.
There are a slew of books by Western and Russian journalists covering the former Soviet Union, and many are very good ( A Russian Diary and Lenin’s Tomb are both excellent).
Secondhand Time is on a different level, mainly because of the unique style and its effectiveness. The book is a collection of elegantly-curated interviews that recount personal stories. In aggregate the interviews read like a collection of narrative non-fiction short stories.
There is a the story of the Belorussian college student who gets swept up in a protest and jailed for a week. The story of a mother trying to figure out how her daughter, a police woman, died in Chechnya. The story of a woman who leaves her loving husband and kids to marry a another man in prison for murder… and on and on. Although at times heart-breaking, it’s a wonderful book.
This is a wonderful, engaging way to tackle the breakup of the Soviet Union and the human cost of those events. Highly recommended.
Informative but not especially keeping my interest. I did finish it however
At the very time that whackos in America want to import Communism and Socialism, this book with detail details the collapse of the Soviets, a hollow and misguided promises! Nobel Prize winner for Literature, from Stalin through Gorbachoff, Yeltson, and Putin, this chronicles the very, very, sad reality of the Soviets dealing with suffering, suicides, economic poverty and only few examples of “comrades” success with the unlimited potential of capitalism. Some would rather return to C/S. It is a tragic but splendid read for anyone in the west. Read it now!
I’ve had a hard time getting interested in this book.
Takes one to the place of the Soviets during perestroika, remarkable, a genuine cross culture learning experience. Also somewhat frightening as one can only surmise that such change might happen in one’s own world.
enlightening
Opened my eyes. Reading people’s opinions of what life is in Russia now and how they miss the idealism of Soviet Russia was surprising. But I understand now that the corruption of the oligarchs and the entire country is vastly worse than the corruption under communism for them. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I learned a lot from it.
Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is required reading for anyone who looks at Russia today and wonders how Putin has consolidated his hold on power so neatly.
Secondhand Time is essentially the story of the mass disillusionment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, as told by the individuals who lived through it. In a word, these people miss it. They miss the strength, yes, but also the cohesion, the sense of sameness, and the predictability that ensconced their formative years. This can be hard to understand from an American perspective, because there was no end to the suffering during the Soviet years, either. Hello, Stalin and Lenin, right? It is more understandable, though, when you consider how irrevocably their entire world changed overnight, and how ill-equipped they were for a world in which the choices suddenly seemed endless. I lost count of the number of people who mentioned the variety of salami that became available, clearly a proxy measure for so much else in their lives.
That said, Alexievich’s work is about 300 pages too long. I was engrossed for the first couple hundred pages, both by the stories themselves, as well as the window onto Russia that Alexievich opened for me. After the first couple hundred pages, though, I began to feel the interviews were repetitive and tedious, all the more so for being almost uniformly dark and depressing. It’s hard to imagine a more complete collection of suicides, for example.
Secondhand Time has the same potential to be a seminal work of anthropology, but could use a trim and some additional context. Full disclosure: Once the repetition became too much, I did not finish Secondhand Time, feeling I’d gotten the gist and needn’t learn any more tales of suicide. The interviews are certainly the heart and soul of the book, but I think it would have benefited from Alexievich’s commentary, in the same way that Barbara Myerhoff inserted herself on occasion to provide context in her formidable work Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2018/05/secondhand-time-last-of-soviets.html)
Wonderful writing