Scan barcode
A review by grisostomo_de_las_ovejas
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexiévich
5.0
With the exception of my high school-age years, I've always had a hostile relationship with what I think of as the hard left. Neoliberalism (with a smattering of progressivism) has framed my thinking, providing me a lens by which I judge people, ideas, and nations. My judgements looked something like this:
US Democratic Party: More or less love
US Republican Party: Bush era? Distaste; Trump era?
Communism: unconscionably loathe
My critiques of parties and ideologies have naturally filtered down to the people who hold them. Most of my friends are on the progressive liberal spectrum; the few on the right get a good amount of side-eye from me; the one or two on the hard left get a mix of bewilderment and scorn when it comes to politics.
I very much expected Secondhand Time to confirm my priors that (Soviet) communists were dumb idealistic sheep led by a vanguard of predatory scheming murderers. That's a pretty easy viewpoint to hold today. In America, it's popular to see Russia and its people as the ass-backwards enemy--aggressive, economically incompetent, and inexplicably archaic. That's not a stereotype that leaves much room for actual people to live in, but stereotypes are rarely accommodating like that.
Secondhand Time, for me, was a humanization of the people of the Soviet Union. It was a collection of the tales that never percolated to my neoliberal bubble in the United States: The story of a girl raised to dream of joining the Komsomol in Russia and pressured into thinking that redemption and goodness would come from informing on her own family for impure actions, but who actually found that life in the SU, while brutal, hard, and overbearing, was one of contentment... The story of Armenians who lived alongside their Azerbaijani brothers and sisters in the SU only to one day wake up, see the Union dissolve, and open the front door to find Azerbaijanis raping and killing their Armenian neighbors and those same Armenian neighbors exacting the same treatment in revenge... The story of a generation of young adults brought up in the SU to value a tradition of poetry and literature who, after the 1989 shock reforms of Gaidar and Yeltsin, found themselves poor, unmoored, and marooned from the now-crumbled state which had promised them lifelong protection.
The heart-rending nature of an oral history of stories of loss, uprooting, suicide, and torture bowled me over. I'm ashamed that it took this book to make me realize that the people whom my nation has convinced me are my enemies are indeed people with life stories. But it did. And I'll forever be thankful to the book for that.
I see this book as a great salve for the milieu of our times: a collection of personal histories that warn of the dangers of totalitarianism, but breed empathy for not just the people living under it, but also those who argue for its spread. I'm still a liberal, but I'm glad to say I've begun to understand the illiberal, who, as much as I may disagree with, is still my brother/sister on this planet.
US Democratic Party: More or less love
US Republican Party: Bush era? Distaste; Trump era?
Communism: unconscionably loathe
My critiques of parties and ideologies have naturally filtered down to the people who hold them. Most of my friends are on the progressive liberal spectrum; the few on the right get a good amount of side-eye from me; the one or two on the hard left get a mix of bewilderment and scorn when it comes to politics.
I very much expected Secondhand Time to confirm my priors that (Soviet) communists were dumb idealistic sheep led by a vanguard of predatory scheming murderers. That's a pretty easy viewpoint to hold today. In America, it's popular to see Russia and its people as the ass-backwards enemy--aggressive, economically incompetent, and inexplicably archaic. That's not a stereotype that leaves much room for actual people to live in, but stereotypes are rarely accommodating like that.
Secondhand Time, for me, was a humanization of the people of the Soviet Union. It was a collection of the tales that never percolated to my neoliberal bubble in the United States: The story of a girl raised to dream of joining the Komsomol in Russia and pressured into thinking that redemption and goodness would come from informing on her own family for impure actions, but who actually found that life in the SU, while brutal, hard, and overbearing, was one of contentment... The story of Armenians who lived alongside their Azerbaijani brothers and sisters in the SU only to one day wake up, see the Union dissolve, and open the front door to find Azerbaijanis raping and killing their Armenian neighbors and those same Armenian neighbors exacting the same treatment in revenge... The story of a generation of young adults brought up in the SU to value a tradition of poetry and literature who, after the 1989 shock reforms of Gaidar and Yeltsin, found themselves poor, unmoored, and marooned from the now-crumbled state which had promised them lifelong protection.
The heart-rending nature of an oral history of stories of loss, uprooting, suicide, and torture bowled me over. I'm ashamed that it took this book to make me realize that the people whom my nation has convinced me are my enemies are indeed people with life stories. But it did. And I'll forever be thankful to the book for that.
I see this book as a great salve for the milieu of our times: a collection of personal histories that warn of the dangers of totalitarianism, but breed empathy for not just the people living under it, but also those who argue for its spread. I'm still a liberal, but I'm glad to say I've begun to understand the illiberal, who, as much as I may disagree with, is still my brother/sister on this planet.