Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 01, 2023 Steve rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Well, this one just about wrecked me. At 470 pages, with its wide geographic, historical, age spanning interviewees, and cultural range, I have to wonder whether Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich aimed to make "Secondhand Time" her magnum opus. It's an amazing accomplishment, and it's also overwhelmingly sad.

Those unfamiliar with Alexievich's approach should note that she assembles oral histories following a central theme. Her 1997 "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" Well, this one just about wrecked me. At 470 pages, with its wide geographic, historical, age spanning interviewees, and cultural range, I have to wonder whether Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich aimed to make "Secondhand Time" her magnum opus. It's an amazing accomplishment, and it's also overwhelmingly sad.

Those unfamiliar with Alexievich's approach should note that she assembles oral histories following a central theme. Her 1997 "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" is a masterpiece, and, I think was a major source for HBO series. In "Secondhand Time" she casts a wider net, one that intends to capture impact of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its transition into whatever it is now.

The "chorus" of voices assembled here are discordant, sorrowful, often contradictory, and usually very angry. Early on I had to laugh at one person who blamed "those goddamned bluejeans" for the loss of Empire. And bluejeans and good salami(!), and the decadence they presumably represent run like black-humorous threads, amazingly, through the entire book. That said, many of those who hate what those jeans and salami represent, wouldn't mind having a pair bluejeans and some good salami themselves.

But this is not a funny book. One harbinger is the cover art showing a sad woman looking out a train car window. I didn't think anything about it until I got to the interview that told the story that the illustration no doubt comes from. The fate of that very real, very tragic woman has its echo in "Anna Karenina." Alexievich admits somewhere in the middle of the book, that she's always alert to literary arcs and echoes that her real life subjects may suggest. She admits it's not always there, and Alexievitch is scrupulous in her method, but when she connects those echoes and arcs to a real life, a special elevation and poignancy is reached.

That moment aside, "Secondhand Time" is a horrifying book filled with stories (Soviet and post-Soviet) of suicide, imprisonment, decapitation, hangings, a flaying or two, rape, abuse, torture, and just flat out murder. There is also an attendant weird nostalgia throughout, no matter who or where Alexievich conducts an interview, for Stalin, and the order he represented, and a hatred of Gorbachev and the capitalist chaos he unleashed. As I read on I got the sense that Russia will never really function as a normal Democracy. There will always be a strong yearning for a Tsar-Stalin-Putin like figure to run things, no matter that the Good Old Days were drenched in blood. ...more

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