The 100 best books of the 21st century
No 3
‘Secondhand Time’
by Svetlana Alexievich
ADAM HOCHSCHILD
May 27, 2016
SECONDHAND TIME
The Last of the Soviets
By Svetlana Alexievich
Translated by Bela Shayevich
470 pp. Random House. $30.
To top it off, his prison is a converted monastery, with walls five feet thick, on an island in an isolated northern lake. She divorces her husband, abandons her children, marries the prisoner, whom she is seldom allowed to see, and finds a low-paying job nearby. Then they quarrel and she disappears.But recent history has added a twist Chekhov could not have imagined. This prisoner committed his murder in what was then still the Soviet Union. If he is ever released, it will be into a radically different Russia, where, as one of Alexievich’s interview subjects says, “the discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb.” It is the contrast between these two countries — as felt by people living in the second but remembering the first — that is the subject of “Secondhand Time,” her first book to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. (It appeared in Russia in 2013.)
As in many a Chekhov story, few of the people she records are happy. “There is something in the Russian spirit,” she said in her Nobel lecture, “that compels it to try to turn . . . dreams into reality.” This was true of the woman who loved the prisoner, and it was also true of the Russian people as a whole, who lived, for some 70 years, in a society ostensibly based on a dream of human brotherhood that turned out to be something catastrophically different.Among believers in the dream of Soviet Communism, Alexievich finds a nostalgia for its achievements and a deep sense of loss. Quite poignantly, she zeros in from several angles (press reports, official documents, an interview with someone who knew him) on Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, who was said to be a supporter of the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and who hanged himself in his Kremlin office when it failed. “I cannot go on living,” he wrote, “while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed.” In a final humiliation, symbolic of the crass market society replacing Akhromeyev’s beloved Communism, his grave was robbed and his uniform, cap and medals — all of which now fetch high prices from antique dealers — were taken.
Alexievich also describes another military suicide. Anyone who spent time in the old Soviet Union will remember the immense honors lavished upon World War II veterans. One, Timeryan Zinatov, won a medal for his role in defending the famous fortress at Brest, and then fought through the rest of the war. A construction worker in Siberia, he returned to the fortress, the scene of his moment of glory, every year. In 1992, shocked by the new Russia, where brand name fashion accessories mean more than war medals, he came back one last time to Brest, which by then was in a different country, Belarus. Then he threw himself under a train, leaving a message asking to be buried in the fortress.
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| David Brauchli |
It’s more surprising that Alexievich finds similar true believers among those who suffered the very worst Soviet fury. A onetime factory director, for instance, had been arrested during Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s, beaten, tortured, hung “from hooks like it was the Middle Ages!” After the interrogator is done with you, he says, “you’re nothing but a piece of meat . . . lying in a pool of urine.” Luckier than millions, he was released after a year: “It had been a mistake.”In the army in World War II, he ran into his former interrogator, who now said to him, “We share a Motherland.” The Soviet dream, as much about patriotism for the Motherland as about utopia, offered a universe of certainties despite “mistakes,” even to those who were its victims. For this factory director, in his retirement, tells Alexievich that he feels “surrounded by strangers” in the new Russia. “When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music. . . . Their shelves are lined with empty cans of Coke and Pepsi. Savages!” He finishes: “I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”
Despite their oppressive “mistakes,” empires of all kinds keep a lid on things, and one of the tragedies of the post-Soviet world — as it was of post-British India and of the post-Tito former Yugoslavia — is the upwelling of long-contained ethnic and religious strife.
Among those whose voices Alexievich brings us is an Armenian woman married to an Azerbaijani. In Soviet times, they lived in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, “my favorite city . . . in spite of everything! . . . I don’t remember any discussion of . . . nationalities. The world was divided up differently: Is someone a good or bad person, are they greedy or kind?” To welcome spring, everyone in her apartment building — Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians — would share food around a long table in the courtyard. Then, as the Soviet Union collapsed, demagogues everywhere whipped up tensions. The bodies of murdered Armenians appeared on the streets. Azerbaijanis attacked her husband, beating him with iron rods, for being married to an “enemy.” She asked her mother, “Mama, did you notice that the boys in the courtyard have stopped playing war and started playing killing Armenians?” When she fled for her life to Moscow, her husband’s family refused to pass on her phone messages to him — and claimed to her that he had remarried. Years later, he finally made it to Moscow too, where they now live, illegally and traumatized.
I have a few minor quibbles with the way Alexievich weaves her rich tapestry of voices. Although the interviews are grouped by decades (1991-2001, 2002-12), she does not tell us whether she talked to someone in 1991, when the enfeebled Soviet Union was still alive, or in 2001, when it was 10 years dead. She uses many ellipses in each paragraph, which show how a monologue has been edited but give it a slightly spacey and disjointed feel. And unlike her distinguished American counterpart Studs Terkel, who sometimes set the scene in a headnote to an interview, she gives us little or no background on her subjects, usually just something as cryptic as “Olga V., surveyor, 24.” And when she does provide a rare headnote, her own editorial voice can intrude: “Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss.” There is no need for this: She has successfully bridged the abyss.
Adam Hochschild’s eight books include “The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.”
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