Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

The only thing that could hold a society like this together was fear.

CIA director Allen Dulles’s plan…“After sowing chaos, we will imperceptibly substitute their values for false ones.

My wife worked at a shoe factory. She was a Red engineer. “Something strange is going on,” she’d told me. “They’ve taken all my friends. For some kind of treason…”

Three days later, they came for me…

often ask me, “Why did you keep silent?” “It was the times.”

It’s easy to judge us fifty years later. To laugh…mock us old fools…but in those days, I marched in step with everyone else. And now, there’s nobody left…

—Without ID, you don’t exist…