Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is required reading for anyone who looks at Russia today and wonders how Putin has consolidated his hold on power so neatly. 

Secondhand Time is essentially the story of the mass disillusionment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, as told by the individuals who lived through it. In a word, these people miss it. They miss the strength, yes, but also the cohesion, the sense of sameness, and the predictability that ensconced their formative years. This can be hard to understand from an American perspective, because there was no end to the suffering during the Soviet years, either. Hello, Stalin and Lenin, right? It is more understandable, though, when you consider how irrevocably their entire world changed overnight, and how ill-equipped they were for a world in which the choices suddenly seemed endless. I lost count of the number of people who mentioned the variety of salami that became available, clearly a proxy measure for so much else in their lives.

That said, Alexievich's work is about 300 pages too long. I was engrossed for the first couple hundred pages, both by the stories themselves, as well as the window onto Russia that Alexievich opened for me. After the first couple hundred pages, though, I began to feel the interviews were repetitive and tedious, all the more so for being almost uniformly dark and depressing. It's hard to imagine a more complete collection of suicides, for example. 

Secondhand Time has the same potential to be a seminal work of anthropology, but could use a trim and some additional context. Full disclosure: Once the repetition became too much, I did not finish Secondhand Time, feeling I'd gotten the gist and needn't learn any more tales of suicide. The interviews are certainly the heart and soul of the book, but I think it would have benefited from Alexievich's commentary, in the same way that Barbara Myerhoff inserted herself on occasion to provide context in her formidable work Number Our Days: A Tirumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto.