Secondhand time, by Svetlana Alexievich

Nearly a year after Russia ramped up its war in Ukraine, the editor-in-chief of RT assuaged viewer confusion over Putin’s aims by claiming that, actually, the end goal of the invasion was “deliberately complicated and vague.” Trying to understand how public support can brush off this patronization boggles the mind. Turn to Western media or our peers from the CTSO states for answers and you’ll be met with a common refrain: Russia’s elders are brainwashed, Russia’s young have no power. How ironic that the word ‘brainwashed’, in its neglect of individual responsibility, is so rarely persuasive.

Street interviews conducted by YouTubers like Daniil Orain seem promising for their ability to provide insight straight from the horse’s mouth. Problem is, Russia’s hobbled civil society refuses Orain’s subjects any room for nuance. Too often we find them rushing to affiliate with Russia’s most popular religious group – Apoliticism – before grasping at excuses to escape the camera frame. Otherwise, we are treated to a vitriolic repackaging of state media talking points, the declaimers too drunk off Kremlin validation to reveal their own personal path to obsequence.

In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, journalist Stevlana Alexievich’s oral history of the post-Soviet experience through the eve of the Crimean annexation, we find the explanation we seek. It is delivered as a series of interviews about the confusion, promise, betrayal, and blood of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the evaporation of wealth and purpose it brought, the invalidation of these experiences by the new Russians, the history of a people who would gladly fire a weapon, feel their heartbreak, and convince themselves it is they who were shot. It is sprawling. It is personal. Best of all, it’s unsullied by the narratives of February 2022 and beyond, a bundle of testimony limited to the actual experiences that created a collective sense of aggrievement or, in isolated cases, liberation. It is how emotion becomes reality. It is why we are where we are.

“I spent my life building a great nation. That’s what they told us. They promised.”

“We believed that one day, we’d live to see the good life. Just wait and see, wait and suffer…”

Chief among the narrative of the nostalgic is the sense they were important to a messy but assured path toward paradise on earth. Their worth wasn’t measured in the depth of their pockets. It was in their richness of soul, their dedication to the cause. They worked where the state sent them, scoffing at Westerners who would rather “invent a remedy for every little pimple” than experience even a bit of struggle. They endured the trauma of labor camps, surveillance, and war because it was all in service of something greater.

If they ever forgot it, life in the kitchen set them straight. Americans had their shopping malls. The Soviets had their books. Books “replaced life” for them. The interviewees fashion their past as a deeply literate space, wherein friends gathered in each other’s kitchens to read poetry, sings songs, decide who was an Oblomov, debate the relevancy of Hegel, and when the tap was running, even pick apart the Central Committee’s communication blunders. That their testimony to Alexievich is peppered with references to literary and historical characters corroborates the claim and admittedly stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric in Daniil Orain’s street interviews. All Soviet pain was validated through the “spiritual labor” of books. Civil society was tangible, and so too was their place in history.

Then came the fall.

“What is our national idea now, besides salami?”

Most of us in the dreaded collective West foresee the same fate for ourselves as for the Soviets crossing the threshold of 1991: market-rendered irrelevancy. For us, it is a personal moment, arriving when the younger generations swallow up the world beneath us, our labor productivity can no longer keep up, and we ship off to retirement, forced to discover an inner purpose that labor can no longer pretend to provide. For the Soviets, what else could it have been but a collective experience, a tidal wave of hollowing spirits induced by an “atom bomb” called money dropping into their lives. 

Interviewees complain about the transition to a market economy destroying social warmth, leisure time, and pensions. The kitchen speakeasy died. Bookshelves became decoration. In a soul-crushing experience not unlike that faced by many immigrants to the States over the years, degrees from a previous life were no longer worth the paper they were printed on; college professors could be found selling cigarette butts on the street. Westerners have decades to stomach cutthroat job markets and growing social atomization. The Soviets went to bed secure and woke up to find the world had moved underneath them. Never since have there been enough supermarkets or blue jeans in the Russian Federation to persuade the newly destitute their arduous struggle for socialist paradise was justifiably interrupted.

“And please, Papa, don’t start in with that spirit stuff, the humanism mumbo jumbo.”

“What’s there to talk about with sovoks? We just have to sit tight until they all die out and then remake everything the way we think it ought to be.”

It is one thing to fade into obscurity. It’s another to be booed off stage. Those inclined to look back at a tough life with rose-colored glasses only harden when ridiculed by their children. One lifelong communist party member complains to Alexievich that neighbors started crossing the street to avoid her after the USSR fell. Like the interviewees who cannot make sense of anti-Russian sentiment in post-soviet satellite states, she unknowingly ties her self worth to popular fear of the USSR, equating this fear with respect. The result is intergenerational distrust exacerbated by economic inequality. Those on the Soviet end tolerate the rebirth of totalitarian fear only because it promises them the prestige they once enjoyed.

The consequences of this would be less dire if strong institutions could cultivate a healthy Russian civil society, one that made space for the many Russians who do not support the war. Instead, the market transition of the ‘90s gave rise to chaos, and as journalist Catherine Belton explains in her book on Putin’s rise, the remnants of the KGB used this opportunity to take hold of the Kremlin. Imbued with and willing to exploit the disgruntlement of many of Alexievich’s interviewees, the self pity of some former Soviets is now baked into state policy. Unfortunately, so too is the Soviet definition of respect.

“War and prison are the two most important words in the Russian language. Truly Russian words!”

“‘My father fought in the Russo-Finnish War, he never understood what he’d been fighting for, but they told him to go, so he went. They never talked about that war, they called it the ‘Finnish campaign,’ not a war.”

The Soviet Union, like the United States, believed it earned the right to glorify war in 1945. Yet not until the USSR’s disintegration did the Victory Day parade become an annual reminder of this supposed right. Rather than keep the horrors of the Eastern Front in memory to prevent them from ever happening again, Russia has vaunted its predecessor state’s victory to convince its citizens a war fought on the same land, with the same tactics, against an unappreciative, former vassal can avenge their decade of supposed humiliation.

Few anti-war films achieve what they set out to do. Not even the recent German adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front agrees when one Soviet veteran tells Alexievich a man can “no longer be good” if he picks up a weapon. The way I see it, the anti-war genre has two options: Elem Klimov’s Come and See, or any other war film provided my father is watching alongside. “Look! That’s you!” he inevitably shouts anytime a nameless character is cut down in the first few seconds of battle. Growing up, I learned early that I’d never end up like Tom Hank’s character in Saving Private Ryan if I enlisted. I’d be the blown-up corpse he’s filmed dragging across the beaches of Normandy, my innards painting the sand.

But there’s no place for fathers who would diminish military dreams in a country that doesn’t understand what it is if not an empire. Old Soviet war films currently play in Russian conscription offices. A ruling class desperately afraid of foreign influence has reserved plenty of billboard space for a non-Cyrillic letter. Listen as a former Soviet reads off her child’s toy gun instructions to Alexievich: “A sniper must kill calmly and selectively… First, he must get to know the target.” Even among Americans, I suspect a toy with literature like this would raise eyebrows. “Russia will save the world!” announces one interviewee. “That’s how it will save itself!” I wonder how this man reacted to the Great Russian Salvation of Ukraine. I wonder if he really wants his Russia saved next.

“Every story I can remember about myself is about how I kept dying and surviving… and then dying again.”

“The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame. No one! Everyone wants to be pitied. Everyone is a victim.”

“I’ve read your books… You shouldn’t put so much stock in what people say, in human truth… History records the lives of ideas. People don’t write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.”

Truth matters less than the memories people decide to listen to. Does Putin really need to elucidate his reasons for doing what he does? If Russia wins, the truth can be written later, as an anonymous, rather poetic Kremlin insider suggests in the third quote above. I’m not convinced Russians supportive of the war care how it’s justified. It’s easier for the True Believer to rant about devil worshippers and sodomizers in the West than admit he or she just wants to feel special again.

I will always remember one of Alexievich’s interviewees. She was a mother. She lost her son Igor to suicide. Hers is a story of love. Love for a beau she walked around Moscow with all night as they took turns reading forbidden literature, their youth convincing them they could move mountains. Love for her son, a gentle boy, obsessed with poetry and affectionate to his mother – his ‘Mamochka-devotchka’, as he dubbed her. It’s a largely apolitical tale. In it, I find the most striking political insight in all five hundred pages of testimony, a warning to those both in and outside of Russia who are against this war and have the truth on their side:

“I have this terrifying thought: But what if Igor were to tell you a completely different story? Completely different from mine…”