This is a monster of a book. So much so that I read it in two phases, roughly half and half. It’s not that it’s hard to read: the prose of reported speech flows like a smooth stream, words piling up on each other, short, brutal words which compose, amassed, a remarkable testimony. It’s more that the density of meaning underpinning these simple words is so potent that I needed, at one point, to take a breather, which I did for a few months, before returning to it.
The book recounts, in the words of people who lived through it, the break up of the USSR, the transition from a homogenous communist state to a brand of oligarcho-capitalism. The book describes the termination of an empire, a termination which was not, like the British Empire, a gradual process, but a seismic one, which happened over the course of less than a decade. People who had lived with values and a belief-system set in stone suddenly found that that belief-system, and those values, crumbling. Alexievich talks to those people, and their children, and details what it’s like to live though this process, in their own words.
As such the book is both a castigation and a lament for the Soviet Union. The book doesn’t spare details of the crimes of a totalitarian regime. There are many accounts from the camps, of lives torn in half, destinies shattered and desperate hardship. At the same time, the first half of the book details with pathos the way in which the intellectual values changed. How under the Soviet model, the greatest currency was ideas, books; under the post-Soviet the greatest currency reverted to being that which it ever was. The accounts of people huddling in Soviet kitchens, the safest place to speak, to talk about ideas, are bewilderingly touching. These accounts never suggest a vindication of the Soviet system, (far from it), but they do suggest that a society with a different set of values, one not predicated on material gain, might be a feasible concept. Perhaps in these moments, the book comes closest to suggesting how a Marxist dream might have worked, if it wasn’t for all the reasons that it didn’t. (Which the book details unsparingly).
At the same time, Second-Hand Time also succeeds in placing the USSR within the narrative of Russian dream-history and expansionism. This is something, as the book makes clear, which will never change. Russia in itself is such an unwieldy, mysterious geographical entity that it has always and will always generate a particular geo-political perspective. It perhaps requires a certain mysticism to knit the country together, one that goes hand-in-hand with neo-fascist dreams of empire. Something which helps to explain the effectiveness of the current political regime, one which clearly follows in the footsteps of the Communist autocracy. In the end, as Alexievich’s book clearly observes, for so many, the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is marginal at most. The standard of living remains the same, the stultifying nature of regional life remains the same; the consumption of vodka remains the same.
Finally, and perhaps the element of the book which has helped to lead the author to the Nobel Prize, among other plaudits, Second-Hand Time revindicates the force of oral history. There’s something Homeric about the great rain of words which fall on the page. Somewhere in this deluge, the reader knows, lies the absolute truth of the time the book describes. A historian or a novelist can aspire to the truth, but the reader knows that truth will always pass through the prism of their consciousness. Here, refracted through then prism of a hundred consciousnesses or more, shards of extreme truth glint like precious metals underground. This is what it was like and what it is like now. There is no argument. These voices have no agenda, beyond the desire that what they have known in their brief time upon this world has a value which can live on after them. Which is all any of us, perhaps, really aspire to.
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