Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

The Polyphonic Method

Svetlana Alexievich does not conduct interviews. She has a different word for what she does: she has conversations, and then she assembles the conversations into something that is neither journalism nor history nor memoir, but partakes of all three. Secondhand Time, her fifth and final book in the cycle she calls ‘Voices of Utopia,’ collects testimony from across the former Soviet space—Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Baku, the rural regions that Soviet planners named and renamed—and arranges it without editorial comment, without a narrator’s frame, without resolution.

The editorial principle is one of deliberate contradiction. A woman who weeps for the Soviet years appears beside a man who describes what those same years cost him. A true believer’s voice is not contextualized or corrected; it is simply placed in relation to voices that contradict it. Alexievich’s method treats the experience of history as primary: not what happened, but what it felt like to people who were inside it. This is what she means when she calls herself a writer of ‘the history of human feelings.’

The result is a book that defies summary because it refuses the totalizing gesture that summary requires. It is 512 pages of ordinary people speaking about the most extraordinary rupture in twentieth-century history—the collapse of the Soviet Union—and it never tells you what to conclude.

What Was Lost

The voices Alexievich assembles are not all the voices one might expect. Many of the most affecting are the voices of those who miss the Soviet system—not its terror, which they mostly acknowledge, but something else: the sense of collective purpose, the certainty of direction, the identity that the system provided even as it oppressed. A factory worker describes the moment he understood that no one needed him anymore. An elderly woman explains that she had always known what she was for; now she does not. A man in his fifties says that ‘freedom’ arrived like an illness: the symptoms were real, but he had not been raised with immunity.

This is Alexievich at her most uncomfortable and most essential. It would be easy to dismiss the grief for communism as false consciousness or Stockholm syndrome—and the book contains voices that say exactly that about their neighbors. But Alexievich does not permit the dismissal. The people who mourn the Soviet Union mourn something real: a form of life that, however deformed, had been their form of life. The freedom that replaced it was a freedom they had not been raised for, in a language of individualism and markets and choice that was not their language.

The book makes no argument about whether this grief is correct. It simply records that the grief exists, in specific voices, in specific circumstances, with specific faces attached.

The 2015 Nobel Prize

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, it was the first time the prize had gone to a journalist, the first time to a Belarusian writer, and the first time to a practitioner of oral history assembled into literary form. The citation called her work ‘a monument to suffering and courage in our time.’ The prize immediately raised the question that Alexievich’s work had always posed: is this literature?

The answer depends on what you think literature is for. If literature is the arrangement of invented language into artistic forms, then Alexievich’s books are not literature—the voices are real, the words are transcribed, the artistry is in the selection and arrangement rather than the invention. If literature is the act of making human experience available to readers who did not live it, then Secondhand Time is among the most powerful works of literature of the past century.

For readers coming to Alexievich’s Soviet cycle, Secondhand Time is the best entry point—it is the most recent, the most panoramic, and the most directly concerned with the historical moment that makes the entire cycle necessary. From there: Voices from Chernobyl for the most concentrated grief, The Unwomanly Face of War for the earliest and most formally pure expression of the method.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Alexievich’s masterpiece: a monument of voices that refuses to be anything less than the full complexity of what the Soviet collapse felt like from inside it.