Book review - Svetlana Alexievich: Second hand time // Imagine the tragedy of abandoning Communism without knowing how to live with capitalism
Svetlana Alexievich: Second hand time
Reviewed by Timothy Snyder
It is right, but also
not quite right, to celebrate the journalist and contemporary historian,
Svetlana Alexievich, this year’s laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, as
a Belarusian writer. The force of her work, the source of its power and
plausibility, is the choice of a generation (her own) as a major subject and
the close attention to its major inflection point, which was the end of the
Soviet Union.
She is connected to Russia and Ukraine as well as Belarus and is
a writer of all three nations; the passage from Soviet state to national state was
experienced by them all, and her life has been divided among them. Her method
is the close interrogation of the past through the collection of individual
voices; patient in overcoming cliché, attentive to the unexpected, and
restrained in the exposition, her writing reaches those far beyond her own
experiences and preoccupations, far beyond her generation, and far beyond the
lands of the former Soviet Union. Polish has a nice term for this approach,
literatura
faktu, “the literature of fact.” Her central attainment, the recovery of
experience from myth, has made her an acute critic of the nostalgic
dictatorships in Belarus and Russia.
To say that Alexievich
was born in Soviet Ukraine in 1948 is already to indulge in the kind of
simplification she has sought to expose from the beginning. Her home city,
Stanislaviv, was in a region known as Galicia, which had been part of Poland
from the fourteenth century, part of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth,
and part of the Second Polish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. It fell under
Soviet rule in 1939 when the Soviet Union invaded Poland following the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and then under German power in 1941 when Hitler
betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Jews were the largest population
in Stanislaviv before the war; almost every single one was murdered in the
Holocaust. Many of the city’s Poles and Ukrainians were killed or deported by
either the Germans or the Soviets during the war, and others were drafted into
service in the Red Army and died in combat. The Stanislaviv where Alexievich
spent the first few years of her life was thus a new Soviet city, both in its
administration and its population.
Perhaps it mattered
that essentially everything about the city of her birth was a suppression but
also an invocation of an unremembered past, and that her family was involved on
both sides in disputes that could never be fully articulated. Her Belarusian
father had fought against Ukrainian nationalists who were trying to win Galicia
for an independent Ukraine. Her Ukrainian maternal grandmother told her about
what Ukrainians call the “Holodomor,” Stalin’s political famine, which had
killed more than three million people in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. That
was crucial knowledge, because the collectivization of agriculture, whose
purported success was a central myth of Soviet history, was one of the causes
of the famine. Ukrainians were blamed for the misery and subjected to harsh
requisitions and reprisals that channeled starvation on to their territory,
whereas Soviet citizens as a whole were told that collectivization was a grand
success hindered only by nationalists and saboteurs.
It was
collectivization, along with World War II (known as the “Great Fatherland
War”), that created the Soviet Union that people of Alexievich’s generation
experienced. Both were calamities that were covered in beautiful myths, myths
that worked in part because people wanted individual suffering and death to
have meaning. Collectivization was said, in retrospect, to have been necessary
for victory in war, and victory in war was taken to demonstrate the legitimacy
of the system as such.
Collectivization was the founding stone of a new kind of
society, which after the war could be brought to new places such as
Stanislaviv. Alexievich’s family moved from Stanislaviv in Soviet Ukraine to
the Polesian region of southern Belarus in the 1950s, a land known for the
ambiguous national identity of its inhabitants. As a very young woman
Alexievich taught school and worked at a local newspaper in these provinces; in
the late 1960s, she went to Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus, to study
journalism, but returned again to the provinces when she finished, working in
Biaroza in the southwest, in another town that had been in Poland before the
war. In the meantime, the name of her hometown, Stanislaviv, was changed to the
one it still bears now, in independent Ukraine: Ivano-Frankivsk.
Three constitutive elements of the Soviet
identity of Alexievich’s generation were movement from one part of the USSR to
another, the Russian language that made such movement possible, and the
official Soviet nostalgia that slowly replaced Marxist ideology in the 1970s.
Leaving Soviet Ukraine for Soviet Belarus, as her family did, would have made
an overall Soviet loyalty more plausible than any local one; although neither
of her parents was Russian by origin, Russian was the language of the family,
and the only language in which Alexievich has published. People of her
generation, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin (born in 1952) and Belarus
President Alexander Lukashenko (born in 1954), did not take part in the great
transformations and cataclysms of the 1930s and 1940s, but were nourished on
the quasi-Marxist idea that all the suffering had a purpose, and the
neo-provincial idea that this purpose was the continuation of the exemplary
Soviet state in which they happened to have been born.
When Leonid Brezhnev
proclaimed that the Soviet Union exemplified “really existing socialism,” he
deprived the future of its utopia, insisted on the adequacy of the present, and
thereby located the legitimacy of the system in its past. When we confront,
today, the myth of the Great Fatherland War and of Stalin as a good manager, we
are hearing not the echoes of the events themselves, but of the memory campaign
of the 1970s. The generation that grew up in this era is today in power in
Russia and in Belarus—although no longer in Ukraine.
What was unusual about Alexievich as a
Soviet journalist in the 1970s and early 1980s, in Biaroza and then in Minsk,
is that she sought to halt the Soviet time machine as it switched gears from
forward to reverse. What was almost unique was that she found a way to do so:
an investigative journalism that began from the assumption that truth was
accessible but that its excavation was a matter of hard individual work with an
interlocutor who was probably already yielding the past of his or her own life
to the collective Soviet story. Her first manuscript, which could not be
published, was about the archetypical Soviet experience of leaving the village
for the city, the basic form of social advance which also meant, in the Soviet
Union as of course everywhere, the exchange of local memories for the rougher
tropes of urban life.
In the towns of the western Soviet Union
that Alexievich knew best, urban life was not simply a novelty for some, but a
novelty for almost everyone, since prewar urban classes had been destroyed by
war, Holocaust, and deportation... read more:
Nobel Prize winner (2015) Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets explores what the aftermath of the fall of USSR meant for ordinary folks. Svetlana is a Belarusian journalist who was born in Ukraine, writes in Russian and lived in Paris for nearly 11 years before returning to Minsk to be with her daughter and granddaughter. According to the New York Times, “she had left to protest the regime of the Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994 and curtailed press freedom. She said she planned to remain in Minsk and hoped the Nobel would give her some protection and freedom to speak her mind.” Based on interviews carried out between 1991 and 2012, the book was published in Russian in 2013, with the first English edition coming out in 2016.... Read more:
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