With Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich has written an astonishing book, as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. This is only the fifth work (third to be translated into English) by the 68-year-old Belarusian author who won the Nobel Prize for literature last year. And, like all her books, Secondhand Time is a narrative of interviews—in this case, the interviews she performed over the course of a decade, asking Russians what they remembered of life as Soviet rule began to crumble 25 years ago.
The answers those ordinary people gave her are so eloquent and tragic—so poetic and profound—that I found myself unable to believe a word of it. Alexievich says the lines she sets down are authentic, just the way they were spoken to her over chipped kitchen tables in grim Moscow apartments and decaying Volgograd farmhouses. She insists that the people she interviewed really spoke this way. But her world-class literary hand has clearly shaped the material, to the point that I cannot see how readers can trust even a single piece of her quoted dialogue.
Except, maybe, that readers can trust the whole of Alexievich’s work, while doubting the authenticity of its components. Can we believe a book without believing in it? The picture of post-Soviets that emerges from Secondhand Time is so strong, so plausible, so ineffably convincing that it doesn’t matter to the experience of reading whether this is essentially fiction or the genuine reporting of oral history. Alexievich is a great writer, peering deeply into the human soul of Russia, and Secondhand Time is a novel, whatever name she wants to give it. A novel, that is to say, in the old sense in which we used to have novels: the fundamental device by which modern culture tried to explain itself to itself.
The braided voices in Secondhand Time begin by remembering their reactions and feelings in the early summer of 1991, when Boris Yeltsin became the Russian president, only to be attacked a few months later by the Communists in the failed coup that declared the end of Soviet rule. Alexievich carries her story through to 2014, when she published the book—and it seems, at times, too much: a tighter narrative might have emerged if she had concluded with the beginning of the Age of Putin in 2000.
"I don’t ask people about socialism," Alexievich writes in her introduction. "I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life." Still, the book contains much talk of socialism, and what comes through her "Snatches of Street Noises and Kitchen Conversations" is an extraordinary sense of something lost.
Quite what that Russian emptiness is—and what would fill it—remains unclear. She records some nostalgia for the old Soviet world. "Russia needs a strong hand. An iron hand. An overseer with a stick," as one of her characters declares. "Long live the mighty Stalin!" Several people speak of relatives and friends who killed themselves, typically by throwing themselves in front of trains, in their grief at the end of the socialist ideal.
But more often Alexievich records memories of the suffering the Soviets caused. "There are as many bones as stones in this soil," a woman named Anna says of the abandoned gulag in which her parents were imprisoned. One man, too young to remember communist rule, tells of meeting his fiancée’s grandfather—who shares with him a bottle of vodka and stories of his work as a torturer for Stalin. The old man spoke of wearing aprons to keep the blood off his clothes and washing at night with cologne to chase the stink of urine and feces out of his nostrils. The young man fled home that night, abandoning his marriage plans.
Many of the characters hunger for what Putin promises. "I want a great Russia!" proclaims another young person. "I don’t remember it, but I know it existed." But few of them seem to admire Putin himself or his regime. Alexievich certainly doesn’t. Yeltsin’s government tried and acquitted her for insulting the army in her 1991 oral history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (called Zinky Boys, after the zinc coffins in which the Russian dead were sent home). But under Putin and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, she was forced into European exile, returning to Minsk only now that the Nobel Prize has insulated her from arrest.
Mostly the characters in Secondhand Time resent Putin for his failure to solve the problem of Russia during the decade after the Soviets lost power. In the memory of the people Alexievich interviews, it was economic rape: the industries and properties owned by the communist government were stolen for pennies by the oligarchs of the new and unbridled capitalism. Anna, for instance, thought that the end of communism would bring national salvation: "people would repent, tears would be shed." But no one cared then, no one cares now, and "all we have is our suffering."
"Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world," shouts an elderly woman who had served as a Communist Party secretary. "Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others." And, she adds, at least their cultural leaders under the Soviets didn’t act like the oligarchs of today. "They weren’t building themselves yachts with Champagne showers."
Part of the answer to the Russian sense of loss may come with Alexievich’s references to culture. We forget, sometimes, how serious the Soviets wanted to be. Classical music, ballet, poetry, chess—all the highbrow interests that Western Europe had developed from the Renaissance through to the 1800s: These were the visible markers of European culture as late as the moment of the Russian Revolution in 1917. In Western Europe, morally focused and intellectually rigorous art was seen as a kind of soul-craft, the essence of civilization. And the Soviets were determined to show the West that those old cultural markers would reach new heights under socialism.
Even when its people stopped believing in communism, they kept the artistic ideals of culture. "In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn," a woman describes her life under Khrushchev. "Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world." And after the Soviets fell? "We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where . . . completely new people appeared, these young guys in gold rings and magenta blazers. There were new rules: If you have money, you count. . . . Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? The humanities started sounding like a disease."
A host of other explanations make appearances in Secondhand Time. "Genghis Khan ruined our gene pool," one character explains. The Russian people have never understood freedom, another adds. Alexievich herself suggests in her introduction that the Russians mistook unbridled capitalism for democracy—and so that had stolen from them again the patrimony that the Soviets had stolen first.
Still, she only suggests it, and perhaps it’s in the unwillingness to come to a strong conclusion that Secondhand Time proves its trustworthiness. A line as good as "There are as many bones as stones in this soil"? No, I don’t believe anyone spoke that, unprompted by the literary hand of Svetlana Alexievich. But the emotion of it? The novelistic sense and reality of it? Yes, that’s the truth to which Secondhand Time stands as a testament.