Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

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

“The fact that money is a fiction is ineradicable from the Russian soul,”

We’re accustomed to looking at the history of people by day, while suicide is a nighttime state, when a person wavers on the edge between being and non-being.