‘Secondhand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich     (2012) – 470 pages Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich

In the early 1990s, the Gorbachev years, there was great hope in Russia for “Perestroika”, the restructuring of the economic and political system of the country. Russian leaders talked of bringing in capitalism, but there was no foundation for capitalism in the Russian way of life.

“Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb.”

Instead they wound up with the Russian oligarchs.

“The Russian oligarchs aren’t capitalists, they’re just thieves.”

“so-called businessmen – thieves and swindlers – sitting there munching, chomping, drinking”

“The bad guys took over, and the smart ones became the idiots. We’d built it all, then handed it over to the gangsters – that’s what happened right?”

The author Svetlana Alexievich or at least one of her interviewees apparently believes that the great promise of Gorbachev was that he was going to fix socialism, not replace it with a spurious thieving capitalism.

“They felt that they’d been lied to, that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought that socialism was just going to get fixed.”

One problem with an oral history in a country like Russia is that the interviewees are still afraid after all these years to criticize the murderous Stalin and today they don’t dare criticize Putin, so instead they complain about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, safe targets.

“I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbochev is all talk. . .Yeltsin is an alcoholic. . . The people are just cattle. . . How many times have I heard these things already? A thousand times.”

‘Secondhand Time’ was written in 2012. By then, it probably was already dangerous to criticize Putin. If an oral history were done in Russia today, would any interviewee dare say an unkind word about Vladimir Putin?

“I only liked perestroika when it first started. If someone had told us back then that a KGB lieutenant-colonel would end up as President,…”

Is this capitalism? Or organized crime, these Russian oligarchs? Somehow current Russian leader Vladimir Putin managed during this time to parley himself into the richest man on Earth.

However Vladimir Putin does not tolerate dissent or anyone criticizing him. In ‘Second-Hand Time’, Putin is rarely mentioned at all, even though he had been in power since 1999.

“If half of the country is dreaming of Stalin, he’s bound to materialize, you can be sure of it.”

Moscow today

In one of the last sections of ‘Secondhand Time’, the police in Belarus, mostly young guys, clamp down on a street protest. One thing the Soviets taught the modern police real well is how to torture the people who take part in peaceful demonstrations. By using an example from Belarus, a direct criticism of Russia is avoided.