Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

This book gave me a different perspective of the Russian people, not necessarily a better one; however a different one. I found they have a fervent love for their country, a deep-seated respect for Stalin and, in my opinion, a strong respect for military action. Stalin-ism killed many of their family, friends and co-harts, imprisoned them, maimed many, destroyed their health, starved them and yet many still wish for his promises, regardless of their cost.
I enjoyed the book from cover to cover, intrigued by each interview and surprised by many of them.

I found the book well-written, though I agree with those who found it overly long and that the continuity of narratives was sometimes hard to follow. For those like me, who have never been there and aren't planning to go, one has to wonder how representative these narratives are of Russian experience. If they are representative, then the country meets one's darkest imaginings. I believe that is the author's intent. If they are not generally representative, as suggested by several of the reviewers who have lived there, they may provoke undue fears for the future.

I do think this is the sort of work that people who hand out Nobels, National Book Awards, etc., always flock to.

This book had great reviews so I was really hopeful I would like it, but the way it is written is confusing and rambling. Its just a lot of random quotes from people who lived in Russia. Would not recommend.

To read this book is an amazing experience. Since 1917, the authentic voice of Russia has been stifled by political propaganda. Svetlana Alexievich has given that voice back and provides us with the stories of just some of the people who survived the events of the last 70 years.

Although the theme of the book is the fate of the Soviet Union, the individuals whose stories are told in this book are still haunted by the time before, Stalin and "the Great Patriotic War" weigh heavier on contemporary society in Russia than FDR and WWII do in the USA.

Along with the various traumas of the past, the collapse of "the unbreakable union" of Soviet Socialist Republics inflicted new burdens. Alexievich provides her readers with tales of people fleeing from one corner of the Soviet Union for another and living, but generally leading miserable lives. While many initially thought they would get rich and start a business after the fall of communism, most hanker for the days of Brezhnev only with enough salami.

The consensus of many people in the book is that the mighty fortress that was the Soviet Union, the country that beat Hitler and conquered space was exchanged for blue jeans and VCRs and destitution. Engineers became cab drivers, families could not afford to bury their dead, refugees from the former outposts of empire were forced to squat in the Moscow train station.

There are some who (mistakenly, in my opinion) believe that these economic dislocations will lead to "rebirth of freedom" that will drive autocrats like Putin from power. If anything this book underscores the fallacy of that expectation. Every neo con with an opinion on Russia ought to be forced to stand in a corner and not be allowed to leave until he has read this book. If anything, this book is a justification and explanation for Putin. Freedom, in the minds of the former Soviet citizens led to murder, rape, homelessness, and suicide. Why would they want more?

There are a couple of things I would have liked to have seen with this book. Most of the people, though certainly not all, are women. I would have like to heard From more male witnesses to the post
1991 dislocations. I would have like to have also read about some of the winners, the profiteers and gangsters who rose to prominence. However, Alexievich's subjects tend to be introspective and candid, virtues not generally associated with either group.

This is an important book and worth reading. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015, this work more than justifies the honor.

Most of the subjects interviewed by the author are Russian, though there are also Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chechen, and Central Asian voices as well.

The stories that struck me the most were the ones that contrasted the "Sovoks", those whose miss the Soviet Union, and the younger generation that acclimated their selves to capitalism, having little memory of the Soviet Union. The stories of the horrific xenophobia that came to the surface of Soviet society, with its collapse, with the pogroms against Russian minorities in other former Soviet countries, and the violence against migrant workers in Moscow, are also compelling, and make you wonder if all the Sovoks just couldn't see the resentment boiling under the surface, when they say there weren't Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, etc, and everyone was simply "Soviet".

"I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change."
Scorpions, Wind of Change, 1990.

This book was a brass-knuckles punch to my arrogant American belief that all Russians and Eastern Europeans welcomed capitalism with open arms. This is the incinerating oral history of the the ursine Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc from 1991, the time of perestroika, until 2012. The author is Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Laureate in Literature from Belarusia. It was published originally in 2013, but translated into English only this year.

The oral history is split into two different periods: first from 1991 to 2001 as the transition from Communism was occurring, and from 2002-2012, which shows, I think, the reverberations of the transformation and transition. This book hits full-throttle from page 1 and is unrelenting until the last page. I've never read anything like it. It's a raw raising of the Iron Curtain to stories of the violence, the attempt to overthrow Gorbachev by the old line communists, suicides and rapes. The first part was taken down while some of the old communists who lived under Stalin were still alive and includes a few jarring jeremiads to solidarity, Lenin, Stalin, and the communistic ideal of heaven on earth.

An example of one of the old Bolsheviks: "You have your own utopia. The market. Market heaven. The market will make everyone happy. Pure fantasy. The streets are filled with gangsters in magenta blazers, gold chains hanging down to their bellies. Caricatures of capitalism. A farce. Instead of the dictatorship or the proletariat, it's the law of the jungle. Devour the ones weaker than you and bow down to the ones who are stronger."

Both parts tell of all the problems in the transition without any planning. People starving. Former Communist apparatchiks who were esteemed scientists who now are unemployed and homeless. Complete overhauls to a way of living from the overnight move from communism to a capitalism-based economy. I plan to read this again because there was so much to digest; the author calls this form of oral history "snatches of street noise and kitchen conversations." I was shocked, for example, to learn of how much the ones interviewed hate Gorbachev now, though they supported him in the early 1990s.

This was like a Thunderbolt thrown into my routine reading. A stunning book that should probably be required reading in any history/civilization type of course.

This is a deeply interesting historical account of the USSR during the twentieth century. The contributions of the people interviewed made me sad, and I hope things are brighter for the people of Russia today although the book didn't give me any reason to believe that to be true. It did give me a deeper understanding between socialism and democracy however.

Interesting perspective on life in Russia AFTER the fall of communism. The sad reality is that the meanness and cruelty we in America have so long blamed on the communist structure and leaders are actually part of the personnae of the people. The nostalgia for the "old days" of Stalin and the KGB and deprivation is based on the feeling that "everyone else had it just as bad." This is a sad characterization of a people - and - it's not the author's fault.
The dispirate comments between those who had lived long under the soviet rule and those who were born under it just as it fell are revealing. The former grew up in the cucoon of socialism and felt they were part of a great experiment to make everyone equal. Their grandchildren look to be self-sufficient and live the good life now. Don't know if there is a "Truth" revealed here - just perhaps a reinforcement of the old cliche about how it gets harder to change as you grow old; so that even misery is welcome becaue it is understood and has been coped with. Whereas the new Russia takes the worse from the old and couples it with the worst of the new and the old timers don't -or can't- adjust.

As usual in this kind of book, it gets repetitive on the last third. But it makes you think about the complexity of human nature. It would be interesting to compare it with a similar book on a section of the American population, if that were possible.

Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel prize in Literature for her unique writing style. She lets her informants tell the story in their own words. This book is about the break up of the Soviet Union and people give their life stories around that event. As we progress through the book we learn more and more about life in the Soviet Union and the new Russian oligarchies. It is fascinating to read because of the writing style. Her way of writing is the future of narrative.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I lived in Russia in the late 90s and am fascinated by the transition from the Soviet period to "capitalism", but (and perhaps this is my fault) I didn't realize that this book was nothing but oral histories, disjointedly strung together with no additional information or analysis or context by the author.

I was somewhat disappointed by this book. After having lived in Russia and Ukraine for 15 years I didn't recognise most of the society described by Svetlana Alexievitch. She concentrates only on the negative aspects with many people which do not all really represent the post-soviet population. If she would have been anything else but ex-soviet, Mme Alexievitch would not have been Noble prize material.

Svetlana Alexievich may have won the Nobel Prize but she certainly didn't win it for this book. This is a random assortment of testimonials on why Russians grew disenchanted with the Russian spring that adds a lot of personal color but very little new insight. And the repetition of the same old insights page after page, coming from the mouths of different speakers, may add weight to conclusions but makes for a tedious read. I quit reading after about 50 pages.

A grim portrait of a dysfunctional empire. Whether the author's disjointed interviews are soviet era or post-soviet era it is the melancholy chronicle of a pathetic nation of victims, finger pointers and blame.

This was a long, laborious and depressing read. I learned a lot about Russia and the USSR, but holy crap! I wouldn't have read it if it hadn't been a book club read. I've never been so glad to finish a book... ever.

Not a literary masterpiece, really literary journalism. The stories while tragic in so many cases become redundant. Really totally missing were any independent research on the old party members to verify their version of events to determine the degree to which their narratives were self serving. Is it possible really that amongst all of those interviewed none recognized their own role in the corruption of Soviet Russia? The endless praising of Stalin by those she interviewed became sickening the more one read the book.

The sudden and dramatic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1992 was a big shock to the political Left all over the world. They were left scrambling for explanations. Die-hard communists naturally resorted to explanations based on conspiracy theories around CIA and the Western Corporations scheming for opening up these new markets. Social Democrats pointed to the absence of democracy as the reason. Conservatives pointed to the non-viability of the state-driven economic model and pronounced that capitalism with its focus on self-interest is the ‘natural’ order of life on earth. Yet others hoped that this is only a blip and that communism will bounce back. Whatever the real reason, the consensus among the elite in the West is that Freedom is a good thing and that the Russians are the better for it. This book takes a critical look at this popular wisdom and presents the view of Russians living in Russia. It provides a snapshot during the years 1992 to 2012. It is not a scientific study of ‘how Russians feel about the fall of communism and the resulting Freedom’. It is rather an anecdotal account of average Russians on these questions, through interviews with individuals in various walks of life. A wide variety of Vox Populi is chosen, ranging from ex-Party members, policemen, Armenian refugees through to soldiers to students to Babushkas.

The author herself kicks off the discussion in the introduction in typically Russian fashion, melancholically stating that no one taught ‘us Russians’ how to live free but only how to die for freedom. To her inquiries on freedom, Russian parents tell her that freedom is the absence of fear. Children see freedom as Love, as not being afraid of their own desires. However, the actual freedom Russians experience post-1992 has a different ring for different sections of the society. Old babushkas denounce it saying derisively that Boris Yeltsin has shown them that freedom is living in a huge supermarket and that Russians have been short-changed by exchanging socialism for chewing gum! On the other hand, the young believed that freedom will make salami magically appear in stores and that one wouldn’t need to stand in a kilometer-long line anymore to buy a foreign-made bra.

Still, even ex-communist party members admit that everyone on the left as well as the right was naive, romantic and had great expectations in 1992. At the same time, in spite of the failings of communist rule, seventy-five years of socialist rule had made the average Russian believe in the possibility of a society where fairness rules. But they see capitalism making selfishness, individual ambition and materialism as legitimate goals.

Idealistic young people in the post-1992 years are also disillusioned. They say that while they were busy running around protesting in the early 1990s and then sniffing the air of freedom after 1992, the smart ones among them started quickly divvying up the oil and gas and splitting up the big USSR pie. Tragically, now decades later, their own children ask them, ‘Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?’.

For many of the average Russians, Perestroika brought only ration cards for everything. Repeatedly in the interviews, we see Russians in all walks of life emphasizing the importance of culture above materialism as a focus of their earlier socialist life. Sprititual labor through books was seen as important. One could live with the same suit for twenty years but can’t live without Pushkin or Gorky. One wanted to be part of a larger thing in life, as part of a grand scheme instead of living with petit-bourgeois pre-occupations like decorating one’s house. Husbands and wives read Doctor Zhivago, Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam together and argued about what a poet was. People lived in their small kitchens, drank wine, listened to songs and talked poetry. Soviet life was where you stood in line with the ration card in one hand and waited for hours reading the book in your other hand. They were a nation which believed that art saved people. When Soviet Union collapsed, it took friendships along with it because people became too busy trying to make money and there was no time left for friendship and discussions on books or movies. In short, the Market became the new University. Women left their husbands who were poets and artists in favor of men who are brokers and accountants.

There are interesting insights into Russia’s relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. The leader is revered in the West as a forward-thinking, liberal revolutionary. In Russia, he is variously called ‘traitor’, ‘the prophet’, ‘little Judas’, ‘perfect German’, ‘great reformer’ and so on. Many denounce him as naive, anti-socialist, selling out the motherland and making Russia a second-rate power. From the author’s interviews, we see that Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa neither fitted the accepted mould of the ‘communist leader’ among the party members nor that of the ‘authentic Soviet’ among common Russians. Raisa was beautiful, dressed pretty well and shared the stage on an equal footing with her husband, unlike previous Party wives. Russia is mainly a military nation. It has a Tsarist outlook and needs a Tsar as leader. Gorbachev was civilian and disliked being a Tsar. While previous General Secretaries of the Party spent time in war and combat, Gorbachev was busy in the Philosophy Dept of Moscow University. While Party poliburo members ate black caviar and herring and drank vodka, Gorbachev didn’t drink and preferred Salads and Kasha. He and Raisa dieted and fasted. He loved his wife in a tender, un-Soviet way. They held hands, went for long walks. Gorbachev was also suspected of being a closet dissident by Russians. It is because of his past in Moscow University. There, he was known to be close to Alexander Dubcek and Zdeněk Mlynář, both of whom later were the leaders of the Prague Spring in 1968. In many ways, Gorbachev was the rebel in the USSR and a conformist society quickly rejected him. Perhaps, history will be kind to him in Russia in a hundred years,

There is often the discussion in the Western press about why capitalism isn’t taking root in the Russian soil. Is it due to corruption or just some peculiar fall-out of seventy years of socialist rule? In the chapter titled, ‘Snatches of street conversations….’, the author quotes a Russian as follows: “...the Russian isn’t rational or mercantile….he is elemental, he can go on very little...accumulating money isn’t for him, ‘saving money’ tires him, he has an acute sense of fairness….he just doesn’t want to live, but to live for something…”. Not exactly the mindset you need to succeed in the Market!

The book is a lengthy one at more than 450 pages. Readers, who are interested in Russia, its culture and its communist history, would find it quite interesting. The author was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015 with the citation ‘for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’. This book certainly is one such monument.

These personal life stories accurately depict the grief of a society where perceptive, intelligent, and virtuous individuals are repressed by their governing regime, its bullies and exploiters. Russia is one of the few countries where, in contradiction to Aristotle’s dictum, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The catalogue of social disaster seems endless, from Stalin’s Terror, through the continuing abuses of military conscription, the prevalence of domestic violence against women, the Azeri/Armenia atrocities, alcoholism, casual everyday anti-Semitism, vicious ethnic discrimination against Tajiks, the takeover by a brash oligarchic consumer society, brutal repression of demonstrators in Belarus, the horrific Chechnya war, widespread police corruption, and the overall rule of fear.

In a particularly telling passage, one correspondent, an architect Anna, states that these horrors are visited on Russians by none other than their own Russian compatriots. ‘It wasn’t just anyone doing time, it was the people. And the ones sentencing them and guarding them were the people too – not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside – they were the very same people. Our own men. Kin…Millions of inmates had to be arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this....and they found millions of people who were willing to’ (p 396).

And as another correspondent says of modern Russia, ‘So what if Putin leaves. Some new autocrat will come take the throne in his place. People will go on stealing, same as before. We’ll still have the filthy entranceways, the abandoned elderly, the cynical bureaucrats, and the brazen traffic cops. Bribing officials will still be considered a matter of course’ (p445)

There remains a bipolar division in Russian society. In private networks, Russians are intelligent and virtuous. They prize love, friendship, and trust. But hostility characterises the public domain, and many of Russia’s international relationships. To change this requires overcoming decades of deeply ingrained cynicism. Agents of change are rare. Liberal politicians like Grigory Yavlinsky are vilified and marginalised. Reformers like Boris Nemtsov are shot. Opposition figures like Alexei Navalny are persecuted and repressed. The church is compromised.

It’s time for the many intelligent and virtuous Russians to be determined to insist on change. Sadly, too many either do not care, or do not dare.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize winning collection of interviews with Russians since the implosion of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s, SECOND HAND TIME, is a grim reminder that the horrors of the Czar and Communism are little changed in the 21st Century rule of Vladimir Putin.

The number of witnesses who have been tortured or know of fellow Russians who have been tortured by Government authorities in these pages is staggering. The number of family members driven to suicide is also staggering. There is no evidence in these interviews that the Russian Government has ever given up its tactics of repression and intimidation.

The brief period of protest and reform under Mickhail Gorbachev, not in the least understood by the hardline former Communists interviewed, was but a brief glimmer of hope in time, a romantic Camelot as it were. Of course, the United States could have done more to help the reformers create a legitimate and credible financial and legal system in Russia, but the overtures to do so by the first President Bush met deaf ears in Congress, where there was no enthusiasm for such investment in Russia’s future, as there was once bipartisan interest in helping Western Europe after World War II. We are now paying the price.

What is frightening is that Stalin’s dark predictions for the chaos that would follow any collapse of Communism have all become true. Lawless gangs and rogue businessmen hold sway while Vladimir Putin tries to hold the former empire together with expansionist overtures that puts Russian troops in their most aggressive posture since the Communist expansion of the 1930s.

Mass numbers of Russians have immigrated to the United States, Canada, and Israel to escape the horror. Many others would like to leave, according to a lot of these interviews. The stench of failure, defeat, depression, exudes through the interviews. The interviews read like the novels of Solzhenitsyn without the religious hope of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

A common theme of both former Soviets and reformers is a nostalgia for poetry and the love of literature and the love of the Russia landscape that united a people divided by everything else. Yet most of those interviewed lament the lack of interest in culture and literature by the new generation which grew up under the introduction of capitalism under the reforms.

It is, by any account, an unbridled capitalism of the worst kind, with few regulations to protect unsuspecting senior citizens who barely understand the idea of capitalism to begin with. Of course, since the deregulation in the United States that led to the Wall Street crash of 2008, one could say that the relative positions of workers in the two countries is not totally divergent, but that is not the order of these interviews.

What has been lost in Russia, these searing interviews reveal, is at least the dignity of pride of country accomplished through the victory over Germany in World War II, a Christian suspicion of money, which of course was the root of Communism, however wayward it veered, and a love of the arts. Ballet has survived. Poetry has died.

Poetry used to be read in Russia in large athletic stadiums before adoring and inspired crowds. No longer.

The last of the World War II generation interviewed in these pages were justifiably angry that most Americans did not, and do not, understand the enormous sacrifices and successes achieved by its Red Army in defeating Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, it is hard to tell any difference between the Red Army and the military complex now led by Putin. Indeed many of the interviews with former veterans tell us that army training methods have scarcely changed since Stalin’s time. And as mentioned above, the Russians under Putin are testing the international limits of where they might push militarily on a daily basis. Not only are they moving their submarines around the world on questionable maneuvers, even off the coast of tiny, neutral Sweden, but of course have marched into the Ukraine, have their eyes beyond Turkey to the traditional path to the Far East, are pushing back into the Middle East via Syria.

Putin seems as clueless as American leaders in fashioning anything other than a military response to the Islamic terror networks, and several of the interviewees have experienced the terrorism personally with Moscow bombings and lost family members fighting in Chechnya. Russia has waged two wars in Chechnya since 1994.

Obviously these interviews do not imply that daily life, of sorts, does not go on in Russia today. Humans have survived under all kinds of repressive regimes since the beginning of time on this planet. Presumably, more fortunate, middle class Russians, have figured out how to avoid the gangsters and live a normal life. In addition, Russia is not considered among the more dangerous countries for Americans to visit.

Yet these interviews make clear that life in today’s chaotic Russia is in many ways more fearful and much less stable than at the height of Soviet rule.

It is a frightening coincidence that the last time the Russians were in such an aggressive posture in the 1930s the West was experiencing a similar, nervous, economic environment, with its social safety net under severe pressure for employment and old age retirement.

This all said, SECOND HAND TIME, is a powerful, must read. To get through it, however, you will probably have to read the book in small installments, taking plenty of time for stiff drinks. And if you don’t drink, allowing plenty of time to go vomit between stories.

[Hansen Alexander’s most recent book is THE LIFE AND TRIALS OF ROGER CLEMENS.]

Voices from the heartland of Russia recount the years from 1991 to 2012, after the fall of Communism. The voices are as varied as the sweeping land that comprised the Soviet Union, each with a different story to tell. Some long for the days of Communism and Stalin, when they knew what to expect. Some see the new Russia as a land of opportunity and a gateway to money (and always, always, the comfort of salami). Some recount imprisonment and torture, some tell of their war experiences (and there have been so many wars), some long for past loves, conversations around kitchen tables, closeness of families. And while so different in scope and subject matter, they are all distinctly Russian. The author has a unique writing style punctuated with many silences - she allows the speakers to tell their stories uninterrupted - and she spent two decades compiling this people's history. For this, she won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature - an award well-deserved.

I am completely immersed in this read for some two weeks now and just about done. What fascinates me is the sheer admittance from these people of a Totalitarian system of life that seems to have been a lost asset. That's the overall amazing thing about these people's testimonies. Many of them miss their oppressive regimes. Not unlike Pavlov's conditioned dog. And perhaps, not unlike the battered wife who keeps returning to her abuser. The compelling thing here is their passion. Their fierce loyalty in spite of brutal suffering--some of whom were incarcerated in intolerable Siberian prisons so hideous it is hard for me to even fathom their survival, much less their strange loyalties. It's works like these that give the grist of a complex reality, one I would hope is brought to American schools where such reading is badly needed. There seems to be a general lack of expansion in understanding the vastness and variety of human suffering and I am so honored to read this author's enlightening work. Superb all the way through.

I remember well the Russian literature class I took in college, where we read the great works of the 19th century. A troubled people, a slave society, really, that went on early into the 20th century until the revolution catapulted these people into a different kind of slavery known as Communism. What a joke. It was Totalitarianism all the way through and the second wave of the latter part of that century-- where everything collapsed into a faux free society known as Capitalism--is at the core of this marvelous, exhausting work from this unique journalist, who was rightfully awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here are real accounts of a people—in their own words-- who suffered through atrocities barely a contemporary American—no matter their race—could even imagine. A society where obtaining a single orange or an apple is a sign of prosperity. Where the slightest, suspicious move could get you an interminable prison sentence in Siberia where conditions are so unimaginable of which we have no ready, contemporary reference. Yet these people depicted here, many of them, regret the fall of what was a comfortable, predictable system of control. Which explains Russian society today under Putin’s rule. It’s a read that just blew me away in its depth, in its gut-wrenching descriptions of loss and the wish for renewal. May this work be taught in American high schools and universities. May we Americans wake up to the blessed miracle that is our Constitution and everything we hold dear. I’m quite serious. If anything, this book will open your eyes in astounding ways. Thank you, Ms. Alexievich for this unparalleled reading experience.

5402. Secondhand Time The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich Translated by Bela Shayevich (read 29 Aug 2016) The author won th 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature although I did not realize that when I decided to read this book. It is made up of interviews the author conducted of various men and women after the fall of the USSR. The interviews are not very rigorously edited so they tend to go on and on--long after one gets the idea of the interviewed person's slant on Russian life and history. Many of the interviews are doleful and one is annoyed at the stupidity of some of the persons interviewed. Nearly all of the women interviewed seemed to have had husbands who were drunks and viciously abused their wives. Many of the interviews expressed disappointment with the capitalistic system and were sure they were better off when the Communists were in power--even though they know of the horrors of Stalinism. Much of the book is depressing to read.