Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets, A Review

Svetlana Alexievich

English Translation: Bela Shayevich

Juggernaut Books, New Delhi, 2013; ISBN- 9788193237243

Introduction

In this splendid work of oral history the noble laureate, Svetlana Alexievich ties together the lived experiences of what she calls the Homo sovieticus. “Seventy-years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory”, claims the author, “gave rise to a new man” – the Homo sovieticus. “Homo sovieticus isn’t just Russian, he’s Belorussian, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Kazakh” (p-23). He is in a way rooted in soviet values, attitudes and behaviours. Second-Hand Time, is thus the story of people coming out of socialism. The book traces the myriad and sundry details of a vanished way of life and rests on the narratives of the “miniature expanse: one person, the individual” (p-24). In this polyphonic, yet systematically tied volume, the author blends literary extravagance with careful and critical observations making it perhaps an archetype of what one gets out of a seasoned, investigative journalist and a non-fiction prose writer writing out voices of the ordinary. The work comfortably intersects with the specificities of various academic disciplines. It of course is a work of history – of the times that went by, of the inability of the mortals to outstep the moorings of history, leaving it all behind and learning to live without it. It is a work of anthropology – of the specificities of spatiality and temporality, of sociology, of human geography and of what not. The book is about memory and longing, reestablishing the fact that the best ointment for grief perhaps is time. The book depicts the difference that speaking out can make. But as Nietzsche mentioned, “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even out of their blunders”, it makes sense to pose a question as to whether one should hold on to the memories and lament, or does one forget and move on.   Bringing up the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times to the mainstream, the author in a way redefines what was traditionally considered to be ‘worthy of telling’. History mostly has missed on ordinary and the majority while emphasizing great, outdoor affairs like nations, battles, heroes. Providing an alternative, the author claims, “In writing, I’m piecing together the history of domestic, interior socialism. As it existed in people’s soul” (p-24). The book in a way reestablishes the shortcomings of grand theories and makes a case for theorizing on the quotidian experiences of the mortals living across times.   

All these as a result bring out – in the words of J.M. Coetzee - ‘a spellbinding book’.

The overarching theme of the book rests on the landmark event of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the shadows it casted on the lives of the Homo sovieticus coming out of it. The author carefully sights out ‘people who had been permanently bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply, there was no separating them’ (p-24). The longing for a life that went by and the aspiration for possibilities that remain ahead has stayed across the individual narratives complied in the book.

Courtesy: Getty Images

Nation-making and Violence

The book brings out the complexities of nation building and the characteristic anxieties associated with it. The greatest tragedy of nation-building perhaps is the awkward othering of people – neighbours, colleagues, friends, close acquaintances – over night, which in a way makes violence the unavoidable complementary of nation-making. The jigsaw puzzle of society that till yesterday was weaved together in an organic tapestry gets shattered and the pieces are scattered by the mere arrival of the morning of nationhood. Olga V. breaks into tears recalling the troubled times of nation-making, the trauma of seeing Abkhazians butchering Georgians and vice-versa. “I remember other things… how they cut off a boy’s ears so that he wouldn’t listen to Abkhazian songs. They cut off this other guy’s you know what… so that his wife wouldn’t have his kids” (p-306). The narratives bear resounding resemblances in the postcolonial societies of our part of the world given the myriad confrontations with violence as a complementary to nation-building. The pre-matured birth of nation-states and the unfortunate confining of the phenomenon to the Western European imaginations has caused unforgettable trauma on the people living through those times. In the case of South Asia, the birth of independent nation-states India and Pakistan has had scars that haunt the collective memories of the mortals across the border. People butchering people, raping, maiming and looting, all behind the veil of an imagined identity called nationality are occasions not very new or remote to the South Asians.

Fractured Promises of Freedom and Liberation

The fact that freedom, democracy, liberation and other fancy promises of modernity does not visit each one equally is reestablished throughout the book. When freedom comes, it punches the ordinary people in their guts and the post-Soviet case is no exception. The tormented voices throughout the book rue over the freedom they had arrived at, for the Homo sovieticus expected a milder socialism out of freedom. That freedom purported to capitalism was a irreconcilable truth at which they arrived. ‘Salami’ and ‘blue jeans’ making way for super markets and individualism appeared to be a hard-to-swallow fact. “They feel like they were defeated twice over: the communist idea was crushed and then, what happened afterwards is beyond them, they don’t want to accept it. They wanted something different – if capitalism then capitalism with a human face and a charming smile” (p-416). This too bears semblance in the South Asian context where freedom for a majority of the masses has still remained an unfulfilled dream after more than seven decades of nationhood. The formal change of guards at the helm of affairs did not however ensure changes in the life worlds of the majority. Seven decades of freedom for instance in India, 20 percent of the population still crumbles at the bottom of the society and are categorized as people below the poverty line. The populace still starves for freedom from hunger, illness, illiteracy and poverty while going to bed every night, consoling own selves with the fake promises of freedom and liberation.

Shattering of utopias

The book establishes how living through extraordinary times confronts one with the realities of life and results in shattering of the utopias of a perfect world that one lives with throughout normal times. One of the interviewees mentioned, “In school, I loved books about war. And films about it. I imagined that it was a beautiful thing. That it made everything vivid… that life during a wartime was something brilliant” (p-300). Once she lived through the times that was so much romanticized she finally came to a melancholic realization that truth beyond books and movies is hard to swallow. She ended up saying, “I don’t read books about war anymore. Even the best ones… Books about war are all full of lies. War is filthy and terrifying. I am not sure any more, is it even possible to write about it?... why do you read those books? They’re not about life. Life is something else…” (p-300). The book in a way should be an eye-opener, tickling our consciousness about the self-consoling hypocrisies of the times we live in. The book finds standing in the wake of recent events across the globe. For what better example of it can be the coming to power of Donald Trump – a misogynist, racist, sexist, xenophobic – in America, the very bastion of human rights, equality, liberty and other fancy benchmarks of modernity. Equally convincing is the drive for conservatism and restrictive nationalism in Europe today in the wake of the exodus of migrants. The irony being that this is the very Europe that had once stood up as the stalwart of regionalism and borderless world. All these are incidents of extraordinary circumstances shattering the utopian myth of an orderly world. 

Defining and Redefining of Space and Identity

The book portrays the sudden inflection of identities – the passage from the one broad Soviet being to the splinters of post-Soviet nationalities. The anxieties of the overnight becoming and un-becoming of newer individuals has been beautifully captured in the book. One of the interviewees mentioned, “Only a month ago, we’d all been Soviet, now we were a Georgian, an Abkhazian… an Abkhazian, a Georgian… a Russian” (p-304). The complementary realignment of space and identity that comes with nation making finds mention through the individual narratives. Issues of identity have been existent throughout the book. In the Foucauldian sense of governmentality the book talks about the productive power of the state to brand its citizens in terms of documents of identity. The irony of the times we live in is that our very existence is needed to be justified by the documents sealed by the state. We as humans are identified in terms of mere documents and our very existence comes under jeopardy without them. For instance one of the interviewees mentioned how she had to resort to various temporary professions and confront myriad odds, for her diploma from the medical college was stolen along other belongings at the railway station in Moscow (p-310). The dearth of identity that one witnesses on occasions like this is but the melancholic reality of the modern world we live in. Taking it down further to the individual level of every reader leaves us with the very unpleasant question of who we actually are without that file of certificates tucked safely in a cosy corner of the wardrobe.

Dichotomous Ideologies

The ideological contradictions between the young, fast and risk-loving post Soviet generation and the sovok (The widely used pejorative term for one who adheres to Soviet values, attitudes and behaviours) is yet another theme touched on by the author. The book brings to fore the troubled reconciling of the Homo sovieticus with the fact that “Russian capitalism, young and thick-skinned, the same beast that had been put down in 1917” had really begun in earnest. Thus the book in a way is also about generations struggling to come to reconciliation on times that are unique for both. The longing and the grief of the lost generation vis-à-vis the aspirations of the newer generation for the time that is to come is beautifully presented in “On a Loneliness That Resembles Happiness” (p 413-428) among others. 

Alisa claims, 

“There’s one thing I know for sure: capitalism was not what my parents ordered. No two ways about it. It’s what I ordered; it’s made for people like me, who didn’t want to stay in the cage. The young and the strong. For us, capitalism was exciting… Adventures in enterprise, risk. For me capitalism is more interesting to read about than the Gulag or Soviet shortages” (p-416).

The book altogether is an interesting read and worth the money spent on it.
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Uddipta Ranjan, New Delhi