Second-Hand-Time

Second-Hand Time (2016) – Svetlana Alexievich
Fitzcarraldo Editions | ISBN: 9781910695111
Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

The Soviet Union. A magnificent experiment in constructing a workers’ paradise, which somehow managed to produce shortages of consumer goods, enormous queues, political repression and a bureaucracy capable of making the simplest human activity resemble an application for permission to exist. Then, in 1991, the whole enterprise collapsed, leaving millions of people wondering what had happened to their country, their beliefs and the future they had been promised.

Welcome to Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary oral history of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the bewildering, frequently brutal world that emerged from its ruins.

Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, is no ordinary historian. Rather than concentrating upon political leaders, economic statistics and the familiar procession of important men delivering speeches, she listens to ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the disappearance of the only system they had ever known.

And what remarkable stories they have to tell.

Former Communist believers, disappointed idealists, workers, intellectuals, soldiers and families struggling to survive the transition to capitalism recount their memories, hopes, humiliations and losses.

For some, the Soviet collapse represented liberation from an oppressive political system. For others, it brought unemployment, poverty, insecurity and the uncomfortable discovery that freedom does not automatically include the means to purchase dinner.

The old certainties disappeared almost overnight. Yesterday’s official heroes became today’s historical embarrassments, yesterday’s forbidden businessmen became tomorrow’s billionaires, and an entire population was expected to exchange decades of socialist ideology for the magnificent principle that everything apparently had a price.

Including, on occasion, human dignity.

Alexievich allows these conflicting experiences to coexist, creating an unsettling portrait of a society caught between nostalgia, disillusionment and the often ruthless realities of post-Soviet life.

Her achievement lies in recognising that history is not merely something recorded in government documents. It is also what happens inside people’s homes, marriages, memories and private conversations.

The result is frequently heartbreaking, occasionally darkly humorous and profoundly revealing about the extraordinary difficulty of replacing one social order with another.

There is something bitterly ironic about a revolution promising to create a new human being, followed seventy years later by another revolution demanding that the same human being reinvent themselves once again.

Originally published in Russian in 2013, this acclaimed work appeared in English in 2016, translated by Bela Shayevich.

This 2016 Fitzcarraldo Editions copy, offered in Good condition by Crappy Old Books, is an excellent acquisition for readers interested in Soviet history, contemporary Russia, political ideology and the human consequences of enormous historical upheavals.

A powerful, unforgettable collection of voices from people who lived through the ending of an empire and discovered that the promised future was not necessarily an improvement upon the past.

Because dismantling a political system is one thing.

Dismantling the beliefs, memories and identities of millions of people is quite another.

And while governments can announce the beginning of a new era overnight, persuading history to leave quietly proves considerably more difficult.

Particularly when the past refuses to stop talking.

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