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A review by ruthiella
Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union by Svetlana Alexiévich
5.0
“We had a great empire—stretching from sea to sea, from beyond the Arctic to the subtropics. Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb. Without Hiroshima. It’s been conquered by Her Majesty Salami! The good chow won! Mercedes-Benz. The people don’t need anything else, don’t even offer it to them. They don’t need it. Only bread and circuses for them! And that truly is the most important discovery of the twentieth century. The response to all of the famous humanists and Kremlin.”
I read this mostly on an e-reader which made it easy to grab quotes. But I was pulling pages and pages of quotes. And there is no one line that can summarize this work because it runs the gamut of real people and their voices, from former dissidents to former loyal communists; from those who wanted free market capitalism to those that wanted a more just version of socialism. I think it is easy to read these accounts with pity and think it represents a way of thinking completely alien to that of the first world. But hearing how one could return from the gulag and still be a faithful Stalinist made me think of all our own home grown cognitive dissonances in the U.S.; the gulf between our history and the propaganda espoused in the “American Way”.
I read this mostly on an e-reader which made it easy to grab quotes. But I was pulling pages and pages of quotes. And there is no one line that can summarize this work because it runs the gamut of real people and their voices, from former dissidents to former loyal communists; from those who wanted free market capitalism to those that wanted a more just version of socialism. I think it is easy to read these accounts with pity and think it represents a way of thinking completely alien to that of the first world. But hearing how one could return from the gulag and still be a faithful Stalinist made me think of all our own home grown cognitive dissonances in the U.S.; the gulf between our history and the propaganda espoused in the “American Way”.