Shows through its many and varied speakers how great the loss experienced by Not paint the closing days of the Union as filled with joy and plenty, but it Union outlived Stalin, and things got better than that. Parochial view that the USSR was an “Evil Empire”, that its citizens were relentlesslyĬrushed under the wheels of a terrifying totalitarian regime. Especially in the West, we also tend to take the rather View and shows that even the “little” violence that did take place had a realĪnd terrible human cost. Second-hand Time goes against that clinical Photo by Elke Wetzig ( CC BY-SA 3.0)Ī lot of people will tell you it’s a miracle that the Soviet As you read Second-hand Time it’s worth remembering that Alexievich lost her homeland too. Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, was born in Ukraine, is Belorussian, but writes in Russian. Love again and again comes up, alongside the pain of women and immigrants in a society that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – became fundamentally reactionary and nationalist in terms of its culture. But in contrast to the historic scope of much writing on this period, these stories are fundamentally human in scale. These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues.

Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice. But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country.

Second hand time alexievich