Secondhand Time

Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, published in Russian in 2013 and translated into English in 2016, is an oral history composed of interviews, monologues, and collaged voices documenting the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turbulent decades that followed. Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, assembles testimonies from across the former Soviet world to create a composite portrait of a people caught between a vanished communist past and an uncertain capitalist present. The book is divided into two parts spanning roughly 1991 to 2012, with each part containing a chorus of anonymous street and kitchen conversations followed by extended individual narratives.

In her prologue, "Remarks from an Accomplice," Alexievich establishes the scope of her project. She describes Homo sovieticus, a distinct human type produced by over seventy years in the "Marxist-Leninist laboratory," recognizable across all former Soviet republics by a shared vocabulary of state violence. She divides the Soviets into four generations, from Stalin's to Gorbachev's, and places herself in the last, noting that her generation inherited the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life. She describes the euphoria of perestroika, the period of political and economic restructuring under Gorbachev, when the archives were unsealed and people learned horrifying truths about the scale of Soviet terror, followed by the confusion of freedom: fathers defining it as the absence of fear, children defining it as love, money, or normalcy. She observes a resurgence of Soviet nostalgia and old political structures returning under new names, arguing that "Our time comes to us secondhand" (11).

Part One, "The Consolation of Apocalypse," opens with a montage of anonymous voices from 1991 to 2001 capturing the contradictions of the first post-Soviet decade. Speakers reflect on the kitchen as the center of Soviet dissident life; the initial love affair with Gorbachev and its swift disillusionment as store shelves emptied; the August 1991 putsch, when tanks rolled into Moscow and ordinary citizens built barricades; and the jarring shift in values as consumer goods replaced ideas. Others describe growing up among both victims and executioners, explaining that informants and torturers were often neighbors and family members, making a reckoning with Stalin nearly impossible.

The extended narratives of Part One explore different facets of Soviet collapse. Elena Yurievna, a former district Party committee secretary, defends socialism as a civilization of justice, recounting her father's six years in Soviet labor camps for the crime of being captured as a prisoner of war, and her own humiliation when the Party headquarters were shut down during perestroika. Her friend Anna Ilinichna offers a contrasting view, recalling the intoxication of early reform and the night she spent on the barricades during the putsch, where professors, punks, ex-convicts, and students sat side by side. The two women remain friends despite irreconcilable political views, having agreed to discuss only children, grandchildren, and gardening.

Several narratives center on suicide as a response to the Soviet collapse. A neighbor recounts how Alexander Sharpilo, a retired factory worker, burned himself alive in his vegetable patch after discovering his life savings could no longer buy more than a pair of boots. Timeryan Zinatov, a decorated defender of the Brest Fortress, threw himself under a train in 1992, his suicide note refusing to die "on my knees, begging for my pauper's pittance" (188). Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev hanged himself in his Kremlin office after Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party and called for the Party's self-dissolution; a confidential insider describes Akhromeyev as a peasant boy who rose to the pinnacle of Soviet military power and could not survive in a world where the red flag would be removed from the Kremlin. A schoolteacher recounts the suicide of her fourteen-year-old son Igor, who hanged himself while she slept in the next room, and torments herself with the realization that Soviet culture, which she herself taught, glorified heroic death over everyday life.

Other Part One narratives explore the emotional and psychological toll of the transition. Margarita Pogrebitskaya, a doctor, describes a psychological crisis triggered when relatives fleeing ethnic pogroms in Baku and Dushanbe flooded her Minsk apartment with stories of murder and displacement. An eighty-seven-year-old Communist Party member who survived arrest, torture, and rehabilitation in 1937 insists on dying a communist, while his grandchildren read the Dalai Lama and celebrate birthdays at McDonald's. After his death, his will bequeathed his apartment to the Communist Party rather than to his grandsons. Olga V., a young woman from Sukhumi in the Georgian region of Abkhazia, describes the Georgian-Abkhazian war transforming her multiethnic city into a killing ground and her subsequent life as a refugee in Moscow until she entered a monastery. Anna M., an architect who survived childhood in Karlag, a labor camp in Kazakhstan, returned there fifty years later to find the camp sites converted into dachas, or country houses, with bones surfacing in potato patches. Anna's son provides a counternarrative about a dying former secret police executioner who described mass killing procedures in graphic detail, warning that "The axe is right where it always was. The axe will survive the master" (278, 281).

Part Two, "The Charms of Emptiness," opens with voices from 2002 to 2012 reflecting on Putin-era Russia. Speakers offer contradictory assessments of the 1990s and describe a country that is simultaneously stable and suffocating. A university professor notes that students who once laughed at Soviet history now wear Lenin T-shirts and discuss The Communist Manifesto. The anti-Putin protests of 2011 and 2012 produce responses ranging from idealism to cynicism to the conviction that revolution always ends in looting.

The narratives of Part Two explore life in the post-Soviet world. Margarita K., an Armenian from Baku, tells of her romance with Abulfaz, an Azerbaijani man, against the backdrop of ethnic pogroms; after years of separation, the couple reunited as undocumented refugees in Moscow, afraid to leave the house at night. Yulia, the daughter of Ludmila Malikova, recounts how criminal gangs exploited her family's vulnerability after her grandmother's death, coercing them into selling their apartment and beginning a descent into homelessness that ended when her mother threw herself under a train. A mother and daughter who survived the 2004 Moscow Metro bombing testify about unanswered cellphones ringing beside the dead, surgeries, and hearing loss; the mother reflects on a Soviet education that glorified revolutionary terrorists as heroes and wonders how the Chechen suicide bomber differed from those celebrated figures. Gafkhar Dzhurayeva, director of a Tajik migrant aid organization in Moscow, reads from files documenting police beatings, stolen organs, and murdered workers, while Tajik laborers in basement apartments describe exploitation and racist violence. Tamara Sukhovei, a waitress, describes a life saturated with violence: a grandfather with an alcohol addiction, marriages to abusive men, and the murder of her sister by her sister's husband. Alexievich notes that Tamara's final suicide attempt succeeded. The mother of Olesya Nikolayeva, a police sergeant whose death in Chechnya was officially ruled a suicide, describes years of obstructed investigation into what she believes was a murder by fellow officers. Tanya Kuleshova, a Belarusian student, recounts her arrest after protesting President Lukashenko's fraudulent reelection in 2010, her month in jail, and her return to a village where neighbors treated her as a terrorist.

The book closes with "Notes from an Everywoman," a monologue from an anonymous sixty-year-old woman living one thousand kilometers from Moscow. She describes a life untouched by political change: the same house without running water, the same diet, the same Soviet fur coat. Her single happy memory is her wedding day, when the lilacs bloomed and nightingales sang. She offers to cut the interviewer a bouquet from her glowing lilacs, a quiet gesture of generosity that echoes the acts of ordinary kindness running through the entire book.