Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology.

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

We made jokes—it was a golden age for jokes! “A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”