Book Review: Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
“Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediately predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.”
- Alexis De Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution
“Russians have never been free. There is no precedent for it in our history. Only as recently as 1861 did we free our serfs… The reason the Russians hated Gorbachev so much was because he told them the truth, he told them they were not happy, and in Russia to be unhappy was against the law. In the American media you foresee a happy capitalist Russia developing. I will be happy if we get to the point that Mexico was at in 1920–a self-sufficient economy where everybody gets enough to eat.”
Andrei Konchalovsky, a Russian filmmaker who directed Runaway Train and Tango & Cash, from a 1992 interview
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is an oral history of postwar Russia as told through the unembellished voices of its ordinary citizens. Svetlana Alexievich, an investigative reporter, interviews doctors, party officials, veterans, students, emigrants, and ordinary workers. Together they provide an intimate portrait of the country’s brief experiment with democracy in the 1990s. Their stories are suffused with varying degrees of loss from war, suicide, and political purges. But far from being a testimony to the boundless capacity of the human spirit to endure suffering, her subjects are desperate to find meaning from a painful and weary life. Alexievich has the superb ability to convey the suffering and tragedy of the human soul. Her book has the emotional weight of a good memoir; it doesn’t feel at all like a work of investigative journalism.
Secondhand Time lays bear the enormous toll that the post-Soviet period has taken on the Russian psyche. Many of the subjects lament how the transition to democracy was turned into a network of patronage in which the powerful oligarchs could loot much of the state’s assets for themselves. The historian Tony Judt, in his book about the history of post-war Europe, once called it privatization as kleptocracy. Although nepotism had flourished under Communism as well, the widening disparity between rich and poor in post-Soviet Russia bred enormous resentment and indignation. “Grindingly poor, insecure, and resentful at the conspicuous new wealth of a tiny minority, elderly and not-so-elderly voters in Russia and Ukraine especially were easily attracted to authoritarian politicians,” according to Judt. “Thus while it proved easy enough in post-Communist lands to invent model constitutions and democratic parties, it was another matter altogether to forge a discriminating electorate.”
The new generation of Russian leaders may have lacked the same ideological convictions of their Communist forebearers, but the same old authoritarian ideas and instincts still provided an ample excuse for repression under a new nationalist guise. “Nationalism and Communism had more in common with one another than either had with democracy: they shared, as it were, a political ‘syntax’–while liberalism was another language altogether. If nothing else, Soviet Communism and traditional nationalists had a common foe–capitalism, or ‘the West’–and their heirs would prove adept at manipulating a widespread envious egalitarianism (‘at least back then we were all poor’) into blaming post-Communist woes on foreign interference.” According to Tony Judt, even the most fervent anti-Communists could slip comfortably into a “symbiotic sympathy for the Soviet past, blending a sort of nationalist ressentiment with nostalgia for the Soviet heritage and its monuments,” which bound the country together.
Thus could Vladimir Zhirinovksy, a public figure who built his electoral appeal on unapologetic old-Russian xenophobia, declare with no hint of absurdity that “the Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the planet.” Judt presciently concludes that “the wish to recover some international ‘respect’ drove much of Moscow’s post-Soviet foreign policy and accounts both for the nature of the presidency of Vladimir Putin and the broad support on which Putin could draw, despite (and because of) his increasingly illiberal domestic policies.”
In Secondhand Time, this “envious egalitarianism” was expressed as nostalgia for the Soviet regime. “Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain,” says one party member interviewed by Alexievich. “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.” As another party member says, “Nobody lived for himself.”
These former Communist party members apparently see no contradiction between their “bright, just world” and the craven way in which millions of people, many of them Communist officials and ardent defenders of the Soviet system, were betrayed by their friends and neighbors to the police for trivial thought crimes. Few labored under any illusion about how the system worked; many of them were swept up in the horrors of the purges, gulags, and camps. But their experiences did not convince them to embrace a more tolerant and liberal government, nor did it weaken their fervent support for Stalin. They had an almost pathological need to excuse the crimes of the old regime and deride Gorbachev and other reformers for betraying the Soviet system.
One of Alexievich’s anonymous subjects offers an adroit explanation for this apparent contradiction. “They–our parents, my mother–want to feel like they led important, not worthless lives, believing in the things that are worth believing in.” Describing the psychological mechanisms of the totalitarian system, he explains that “for decades the death machine worked nonstop. Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the victims. As though it wasn’t just people running it. Things are only that perfect in nature. The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame. No one! Everyone wants to be pitied. Everyone is a victim. Everyone is at the bottom of the food chain.” This mindset endured even after the collapse of the Soviet regime. The Russians may have thrown off the Soviet system, but they never came to terms with the past.
This thought is echoed by another anonymous interviewee, an emigrant living in the United States, who places blame on Russia’s political culture. “In all the years I’d been gone, my friends had continued to live in a state of total euphoria: The revolution had succeeded! Communism had fallen! For some reason, everyone was positive that it would all end well simply because Russia was full of educated people. Plus, it’s an incredibly wealthy country. But Mexico is rich, too… The thing is, you can’t buy democracy with oil and gas; you can’t import it like bananas or Swiss chocolate. A presidential decree won’t institute it… You need free people, and we don’t have them. And they still don’t have them there. In Europe, they’ve been tending to democracy for the past two hundred years with the same kind of care they devote to their lawns.”
Svetlana Alexievich wisely chooses to absent herself from the book by resisting the urge to layer on the stereotypical melancholy and pathos that this kind of book would normally demand. Her entire objective is to transcribe the experiences of her subjects word for word without interjection. In one respect, however, this approach fails her. As her own voice recedes deeply into the background, it is sometimes difficult to understand the context of the stories. A little more editorializing, including dates and biographical details, would have been appreciated.
*Article originally written in January 2018.