Inside Russia's Strange World of Soviet Nostalgia

Rachel Bauman

Society, Russia, Former Soviet Union, Belarus

Ordinary people across the former Soviet Union have a more nuanced view of the past than you'd expect.

In Svetlana Alexievich’s 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, the 68-year-old Belarusian journalist explained the passion and necessity which underlies her work:

“We haven't been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don't appreciate it, we aren't surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk ... I love the lone human voice.”

A brutally honest collection of these human voices compose the majority of Alexievich’s latest book, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (translated into English by Bela Shayevich). Described as “an oral history,” Alexievich rarely injects her own commentary into the stories, with the exception of an introduction, explanatory footnotes, and clarifying parentheticals. As in her other works, Alexievich has cobbled together a series of diverse tales of the everyman, allowing the uninitiated to sit down, lean in, and listen with the author. Thus Alexievich is able to present those she interviews without detached biographical sterility: rather, as in any oral history, raw emotion and the idiosyncrasies of memory are on full display.

Through her conversations with ordinary post-Soviet people, Alexievich seeks to explore “Homo sovieticus,” the species arising from “seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory.” They are “both like and unlike the rest of humanity,” Alexievich muses, for she is one of them. “[We] have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death… At heart, we’re built for war… We’ve never known anything else.” Her book examines the curious and often confused relationship of Homo sovieticus to the post-Soviet world.