Title: Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Publisher: Juggernaut
Price: Rs 699/-
Pages: 570
I was wandering in the rain
Mask of life, feelin’ insane
Swift and sudden fall from grace
Sunny days seem far away
Kremlin’s shadow belittlin’ me
Stalin’s tomb won’t let me be
On and on and on it came
Wish the rain would just let me
— Stranger in Moscow by Michael Jackson
For over 40 years now, the Belarusian writer, journalist and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich (69) has specialized in narratives based on extensive oral testimonies of those involved and impacted. Equipped with the simplest of tools – a tape-recorder and a note-pad – she lets witnesses tell their stories about a particular period in their lives or of their country’s transformation. In her Nobel-Award acceptance lecture, she had said: “When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think — how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. We haven’t been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don’t appreciate it; we aren’t surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk.”
She sincerely does. In one of her earlier book ‘Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War’, Alexievich chronicled the trauma of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan through interviews with officers and men, nurses and prostitutes, and mothers and their sons many of whom did not return. In another one ‘Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster’, she interviewed firefighters, politicians, physicians and ordinary people to unravel the psychological and personal tragedy of the nuclear plant accident.
Second-Hand Time is the latest in her series of oral histories, focusing on the disintegration of erstwhile Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. It weaves hundreds of interviews in two phases — between 1991 and 2001 and then again, between 2002 and 2102 – with students and teachers, doctors and engineers, writers and workers, soldiers and waitresses, Gulag survivors and ex-Communist Party office-holders.
Much of the book is about ‘betrayal of a dream’ and the longing for Soviet times. “Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others,” a former Communist Party Secretary tells the author. Many others are hateful of Boris Yeltsin and bitter about Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of Perestroika and Glasnost. This is the account of a former, high-ranking Kremlin insider: “Stalin created a state that was impossible to puncture from below; it was impenetrable. But from the above, it was vulnerable and defenceless. No one thought that they would start destroying it from the top; that the top leaders would be the ones to betray it first. The General Secretary turned out to be the chief revolutionary, installed in the Kremlin…. It’s as if Caesar himself had initiated the fall of the Roman Empire.”
There are protagonists on both sides of the fence, though fewer favour the current dispensation. Consider this snippet from an elderly woman. “… heaps of salami has nothing to do with happiness. Or glory. We used to be a great nation! Now we’re nothing but peddlers and looters . . . Grain merchants and managers.” Elsewhere, someone says: “People used to be put in jail for The Gulag Archipelago, they read it in secret. I believed if thousands of people read it, everything would change. But once censorship was relaxed after perestroika people weren’t interested in banned books; they only wanted to discuss the exchange rate.”
In contrast, a 35-year-old, Moscow advertising manager, believes totally in the system. “Instead of your samizdat poems, show me a diamond ring, expensive labels … I liked … and still prefer bureaucrats and businessmen. Their vocabulary inspires me: offshore accounts, kickbacks, barters, internet marketing, creative strategies.” And here is another confession of an elderly father: “Several times, I tried…I wanted to tell them about 1991…1993…but they are not interested. The only question they have for me is ‘Papa, why didn’t you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?’…. We were too busy running around to protests. Sniffing the air of freedom while the smart ones divvied up the oil and gas…”
Though the book is largely about collective lament, there are fascinating revelations too. For instance, did you know that Perestroika was born in Soviet kitchens! “For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook; it’s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions….where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends.” Or the fact that Russian women had all along a special affinity for prisoners. “We have this custom…Girls and young women write letters to prisoners. All of my friends and I, we have done it since we were schoolgirls. I have written hundreds of letters to prisoners and received hundreds of replies,” a young woman confesses. “Russian women never had normal men. They keep on healing and healing them. Treating them like heroes and children at the same time,” adds another one.
So much so that a woman, married to a descent man and has three children, leaves the family to marry another one, based on just a photograph. And it happens to be the picture of man who is in prison, serving a life sentence for murder. This real-life story was captured on screen in a documentary titled Suffering. “Russia has loved its prisoners since the dawn of the ages … There’s a whole culture of pity, and its traditions are carefully preserved, especially in the small towns and villages,” explains the film-maker. All of it makes this 570-page tome an extremely engaging read and truly Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece.
