‘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.

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

In the early 1990s, Russia and even the rest of the world had high hopes for Russian democracy and a new Russian economic system, but lacking the proper laws, rules and regulations it has since devolved down to another harsh dictatorship and a klepto-capitalism where a few politicians and businessmen, the Russian oligarchy of which some don’t even live in Russia, enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. Now Russia’s main export is corruption. What happened?

“It was 1991…What an incredibly happy time! We believed that tomorrow, the very next day, would usher in freedom, that it would materialize out of nowhere, from the sheer force of our wishing.”

In her oral history consisting of a variety of Russian voices, Svetlana Alexievich tries to answer the question of what happened. First she deals with the vanished Soviet Union.

“The Soviet civilization…I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, old age. Music, dance, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story.”

In ‘Secondhand Time’ we do get some of what Soviet life was like outside the prisons and labor camps.

“The whole country lived in their kitchens. You’d go to somebody’s house, drink wine, listen to songs, talk about poetry. There’s an open tin can, slices of black bread. Everyone’s happy.”

However, in order to deal with the Soviets, you must deal with the murderous regime of Joseph Stalin which lasted for nearly thirty years. Some of Alexievich’s interviewees were uprooted from their homes and sent to work in the harsh conditions of Siberia or to prisons, based on the spurious testimony of some neighbor or friend. Parents were taken from their families and their children were put in orphanages. Many died by torture or the harsh living conditions. The interviewees tend to blame the person who talked about them to the authorities rather than Stalin and the authorities themselves. People tend to view their youthful days with rose colored glasses no matter how terrible they actually were.

“The Devil knows how many people were murdered, but it was our era of greatness.”

Some of the interviewees in this oral history sound like apologists for Stalin.

“Now everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about it…it’s simple arithmetic…Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this…and they found millions of people who were willing to,”

The Russians are tremendously proud of their role in World War II. May 9, the day the victorious Russian army marched into Berlin in 1945, is Russia’s most important holiday. Some Russians believe they would not have defeated the Germans without Stalin’s harsh discipline.

“If it wasn’t for Stalin…without an “iron hand”, Russia would never have survived.”

Moscow Parade during Soviet Union time

In my next article regarding ‘Secondhand Time’, I will try to deal with what happened in the years following Gorbachev, “Perestroika”. “Glasnost”, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Russian people don’t expect ever to be happy.”