Tiden second hand : slutet för den röda människan

There's an old saying (well, it's starting to sound old) that if the 19th century with its optimism and progress ended in 1914, then the 20th century of dictatorships and great wars ended in 1989. The wall fell, the oppressed cut symbols from their flags, the experiment was declared a failure and we started over. Everyone (well, every European, which is what counts) was free and could live as they always wanted, with democracy and justice for all.

No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom.

But then there's the reality of history. Right or wrong, the Soviet Union stood for over 70 years, for better and worse, but always there as an idea, a utopia that people actually lived in. And overnight, they were told that not just the execution but the entire idea was wrong. Everything they'd fought and died and killed for, everything they believed in for four generations, abolished and replaced with the word "freedom", to many so vaguely defined that it couldn't trump the "freedom" that the powers that be had spent decades convincing them they already had. Freedom to be unemployed, freedom to be at the mercy of clever gangsters, freedom to be run from your home if you were of the wrong ethnic group, freedom to vote for several corrupt politicians instead of just one, freedom to eat at McDonald's or buy Russian-made jeans if you can afford it. If you don't have cash you can always earn it.

I worked in a perfume factory. Instead of a salary, we were paid in perfume and cosmetics.

In Time Second Hand, Alexievich finishes the mega-epos about Homo Sovieticus that she began more than 30 years earlier, with a series of interviews made during the 20 years after that moment when Boris Yeltsin stepped onto a tank and put the USSR out of everyone's misery. She tracks the death of Great Ideas, revolutions and the fall of empires by shutting up and letting people talk about themselves, letting the reader piece it together from a patchwork quilt of lives. Interview upon interview with old Soviet citizens and their children who get to speak, uninterrupted, stumbling over their words, trying to express what it means to lose something everyone tells them they're supposed to just forget. How they move on.

Or don't. Many of the interviews are with the surviving family of people who've killed themselves; the general who hung himself rather than stand trial for the 1990 coup that created Boris Yeltsin, the old WWII vet who threw himself in front of a train crying for Stalin, the woman who waited until her daughter was old enough to survive on her own, the schoolboy who just did what he'd been told was the most noble thing one could do...

"Vera, stop reading him war poems! He just plays war games all the time!" "All boys love war games." "Sure, but Igor wants the others to shoot him, so he'll fall. He wants to die! It frightens me, how happily he falls. He calls to the other boys, 'Shoot me, and I'll die!' Never the other way around." (...) What have we been taught all our lives? That you have to live for others ... for a higher goal ... to end up under a tank or burn to death in a plane for the homeland. The mighty, thundering revolution ... a hero's death ... Death was always more beautiful than life.

It's anything but nostalgic. Alexievich herself often sits absolutely dumbfounded, trying to understand. Sure, the Soviet Union was an oppressive dictatorship, nobody ... well, not many deny that when they think about it. But there has to be an explanation for how someone can return from Stalin's labour camps to find his family executed, and is still genuinely happy to be let back into the party. Someone has to take responsibility for teaching generations to adore the partisans who dove in front of tanks with grenades in their hands when Chechens become suicide bombers. It's the way people work: if millions of people have died of and for something, it can't just be in vain. So to some, perestroyka becomes a backstabbing myth, Gorbachev a traitor who sold his country to CIA, the masons, the Jews, the gays ... Though to most, it's not that easily explained. And it's not that they miss Stalin, but can you really replace him with unwavering faith in Coca-Cola®?

The beloved Russian literature - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov - gets brought up again and and again, but always in the past tense. A dictatorship based on an idea can be threatened by ideas, shaken by revelations. But a society where everyone knows that the the strongest and most ruthless comes out on top, where gangsters become idols and the only ones in exile are the nouveau riche ... what do words have to offer against that?

They used to send you to jail over The Gulag Archipelago. You read it in secrecy, copying it on typewriters or by hand. I thought ... I thought that if thousands of people read it, things would change. There'd be repentance and tears. And what happened? Everything hidden in desk drawers was brought out and printed, everything thought in secret was said allowed. And?! Now the books collect dust on the tables. And people just hurry past ... (Trails off.)

So what's next? How do you learn from history if all you learn is that it was a Bad Idea Full Stop? Alexievich barely comments on the current situation in the former USSR, that's a different matter - though the regimes of Putin and Lukashenko loom between the lines, using the boogeyman of Bolshevism to justify jailing dissidents, finding other scapegoats to strengthen their power, Alexievich doesn't write about them but of the hole they're trying to fill. Of how people try to resolve a double life, to reconcile the great ideals of solidarity and equality they fought for with the reality they actually lived with and the willingness to ignore the difference. Quite possibly, that's the story of the 21st century.