Secondhand Time Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Secondhand Time

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Zusammenfassung von Secondhand Time

Name: Secondhand Time
Rating: 4.2 (62 reviews)
Author: Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich

The Last of the Soviets

4.2 (62 Bewertungen)

17 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

"Secondhand Time" by Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of interviews with people across the former Soviet Union, reflecting on the collapse of communism. It offers a nuanced and deeply personal exploration of the impact of this historical event on individuals and society.

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What’s in it for me? Understand what it means to lose your country and beliefs.

Imagine if everything you believed was true was thrown into question and the world as you knew it turned upside down overnight. How would you feel? How would you remember that old world? How would you adapt to the new one?

This is exactly what happened to the people of the Soviet Union. They were born into a society governed by a Communist regime that upheld state ideology as though it were religious doctrine and suppressed other views. In a short period in the early 1990s, that entire structure vanished.

This should have been a relief, right?

Here we’ll get to know the feelings of the people who lived through the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia and the other states that formed when the Soviet era died. From interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012, we glean fascinating insights into ordinary people’s views and lives. These are the voices usually left out of the history books.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why victims of the Soviet gulags continued to support Communism;
why people chose suicide at the fall of the Soviet Union; and
how one man continued to drink vodka with the colleague who had made his life hell.

Perestroika brought monumental changes to Soviet Russia.

On August 19, 1991 something extraordinary occurred in Moscow. A group known as the General Committee on the State Emergency (GKChP) staged a coup while the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was on vacation in Crimea. The coup, however, failed. In response, thousands of Muscovites poured onto the streets to protest, setting up barricades to halt the army tanks commanded by the GKChP.

Soon enough the soldiers sided with the protesters, and the GKChP backed down. Gorbachev had them arrested, including his own vice president. Just days later, on August 24, Gorbachev dissolved the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This, in effect, dismantled the Communist Party itself. The Soviet era was brought to a close.

But it didn’t all happen in a flash. The dissolution effectively represented the culmination of what was known as perestroika, a period of unprecedented reform in Russia.

Let’s step back a bit. Perestroika had begun around 1985. Gorbachev had triggered reforms, releasing political prisoners as well as loosening restrictions on freedom of the press and speech.

Just imagine: in a vibrant city like Moscow, it must have felt like the clouds were lifting. Banned books were finally published. It seemed like the dawn of a new humane socialism. In this spirit, the atrocities of the Soviet prison camps were also revealed.

But Russia is big, and it certainly wasn’t just made up of Muscovite city slickers. Most people lived in villages and held their Communist values close to heart.

But neither side of the divide, no matter their opinions on perestroika, could have predicted what happened after the coup and the dissolution of the Communist Party.

Instead of evolving into a humane socialism, the country veered headfirst and unprepared into a quite different world: capitalism.

Even today the effects of perestroika divide Russians.

Every Russian will give you his take on Communism if you ask. Someone born under Stalin will likely respond differently from someone born after perestroika. And there’s a geographical divide too. Country folk will have different views to city dwellers.

The author set about gathering stories because she wanted personal perspectives that would help her understand how people felt about Russia.

Suicide was not unheard of as Communism collapsed.

Can you imagine what it was like to be raised under Communism? Unlike capitalism, the state ideology was almost religious in quality. Its citizens felt they had meaning and purpose. They were happy to tolerate awful conditions because they believed they were creating a utopia based on equality.

People were so deeply schooled in this mind-set that they died for its aims. In fact, when they felt their system collapsing it was too much for many to bear and many people died by suicide.

People were even willing to endure imprisonment and torture for Communism.

Among other things, perestroika revealed the prevalence of torture and the inhumane conditions in the prisons and infamous work camps known as the gulags.

Unbelievably, people returned from incarceration willing to defend Communism even more.

Soviet Russia was a state based on informants and a code of violence.

The prisons and gulags instituted by Stalin were central to the functioning of Soviet Russia. Your neighbor or co-worker could inform on you. Other Russians were employed to torture or murder their comrades. This climate of fear colored everything.

Let’s return to Elena’s friend, Anna. She had a son. To her pride and joy, he got a government job. Unbeknownst to her, he was an executioner. Now, under capitalism, he sells vodka, clothing and plumbing fixtures. And which of the jobs is Anna ashamed of? That’s right. His tradesman hustling. She is still unaware that he had daily killing quotas and became deaf in his right ear from shooting so many people, or that he used to drown people by tying them up in stone-filled containers and dropping them in the ocean.

A series of bloody conflicts followed the end of the Soviet era.

Olga thinks a great deal about death. She’s like a lot of the former Soviet citizens the author interviewed. She witnessed brutal murders in her home region of Abkhazia when her neighbors started killing each other.

Before 1992, residents of Abkhazia just saw themselves as part of the Soviet Union. It made no difference whether you were Armenian or Georgian. But when Communism fell that all changed.

If one thing hasn’t changed since Soviet times, it’s the strength of the militaristic authorities.

In some parts of Russia, capitalism changed everything. However, elsewhere, some village squares still have their Lenin statues. In fact, many parts of Russia have not been touched by capitalism.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is the role of the military. It is a constant presence, and Russia remains a military nation.

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Worum geht es in Secondhand Time?

These blinks give some revolutionary insights into an epoch-making time in Russia’s history. The author presents an oral history of Russia’s transition from Stalinism to capitalism in which she lets people who were there tell their stories. In Secondhand Time (2016), her witnesses tell us what it means to be Russian, then and now. All of them lived through this transitional period, but some did not survive.

Wer Secondhand Time lesen sollte

Cultural historians
People who want to know more about Russia and the Cold War
Readers curious about the Russian reaction to capitalism

Über den Autor

Svetlana Alexievich is a Nobel Prize-winning author. She worked as a journalist before she started compiling her unique and exciting oral histories. She gives voice to people who lived through tumultuous times. Her other works include Voices from Chernobyl and The Last Witnesses.

Kategorien mit Secondhand Time

Geschichte Politik

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