Secondhand Time

 

Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (2016 Text Publishing softcover 471pp)

 

I bought this book around four and a half years ago, not long after it had won the Nobel Prize in literature. At the same time, I bought the same author’s “A Chernobyl Prayer” (aka “Voices from Chernobyl”). I read the Chernobyl book right away and left this one untouched until now.

There’s not much you can criticise about this book; it is exactly as advertised – an oral history of people who lived through the momentous changes when the USSR ceased to exist. Its split into two sections, the first features interviews undertaken in the early 1990s when events were fresh and the second section from the Putin era looking back.

The interviewees’ words are left to speak for themselves, there is little record of what the author had initially asked them to start the conversations. Most of the stories they tell include harrowing details and by the end I was a little shell-shocked from all the stories of brutality and suicides. There’s quite a lot of cognitive dissonance on show – people who pine for the security of the Soviet era whilst at the same time describing the horrors and hardships of that time. There many stories of being informed on by friends and neighbours, being sent to camps and having to live like animals for years but at the same time they want another Stalin to arise and lead the nation. Stories of family, relationships and the plight of ethnic minorities in modern Russia are also covered in depth.

It took me a while to work my way through this book, not only because of the contents but also because of the structure – its written as the people interviewed spoke, so things get hazy before becoming clear again. Those interviewed often go off into unrelated topics or speak in unfinished sentences. Sometimes its hard to even work out who is talking.

If like me you find yourself as something of a Russophile or just have an interest in the effects of history on ordinary people, this book makes for good reading. Just don’t expect any happy endings within.