Book Review: Secondhand Time- The Last of the Soviets

Book- Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Author- Svetlana Alexievich Translated by Bela Shayevich
Publisher- Juggernaut
570 pages

It is a curious coincidence that the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union have been recorded by journalists. In 1919, American journalist, bohemian writer and socialist John Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook The World.

It was a gritty eulogy, the narrative chiselled with the grainy details of the Bolshevik Revolution in the making in November 1917. Now another journalist, Svetlana Alexievich, born in the Soviet Union in 1948, 30 years after the revolution that Reed described in his iconic book, has recorded the destruction of the Soviet Union affected by then Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1991.

Unlike Alexievich, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, Reed did not get a Nobel for his writings on the revolution and socialist episodes in Mexico, the United States and the Soviet Union. He wrote poetry, which would not have won him the Nobel, and his journalism at that time would not have qualified at all.

In 1965, the Nobel Committee gave the Prize for Literature to Mikhail Sholokhov for the epic novel, And Quiet Flows The Don. Sholokhov was one writer that the Nobel Committee and Soviet leaders had agreed on.

The two other Soviet writers who got the Nobel, but were rejected by the Kremlin, were Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak got it in 1958 for his only novel, Dr Zhivago, a poetic protest against the mechanist Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn made the Gulag a byword for repression in the world through his work on Stalin's prison camps in The Gulag Archipelago, which was published in Paris in 1973, three years after he was awarded the Nobel for Literature.

It would be useful to keep in mind Reed and Nobel laureates Pasternak, Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn as we read Alexeviech's journalistic writings on the post-Soviet state of mind of those who saw the tyranny of the system and experienced the turmoil of the post-Soviet landscape, with its psychological craters and the barren materialism of Western affluence.
 

Secondhand Time is a collection of interviews of people across the former Soviet Union, spreading from Sakhalin islands in the far-east to Baku in Central Asia. She talks to people, men and women, old and young, and lets them speak, until they almost exhaust themselves without really being cathartic. She realises there are snatches of literary beauty in these quotidian outpourings and carefully records the musical notes of human suffering and loneliness and of snatches of fleeting happiness. The Nobel Committee called it "polyphony".

She sets the tone in the book with this: "—The Russian kitchen…The pitiful Khurshchyovka kitchenette, nine to twelve square metres (if you're lucky!), and on the other side of a flimsy wall, the toilet. Your typical Soviet-floor plan...In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. That's where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev!"

What comes through is the Job-like Russian lament and wailing and tearful philosophising. The searing Russian soul, palpable in the pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky, peeps through these interviews even as Alexievich valiantly tries to remain the objective scribe who is not swayed by the emotional whirlpools in which her interviewees seem to be floating.

It is oral history in a matter of speaking, but it becomes an interior monologue as well of the Joycean kind, wit and irony entwined with pathos.

The doubt lingers at the end of it all. This certainly is not Nobel Prize stuff. Is the Nobel Committee pulling a fast one on the Russian people? But Nobel or not, the reader gets to know a bit of what Russians think and feel. It's none too happy. Tragedy is the undertow of their wordy flow.