Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is not so much an oral history as a lament. The work is multi-vocal, like a chorus, pierced in places by the solo of an anguished voice. Readers are swept on by a cadence that can ebb and swell with tidal force. The tone induces something close to a trance, demanding a complete surrender to its message of despair. This is no dry account of politics, no tasteful essay on the ending of the Soviet dream. Like any true lament, it comes from a primeval place of loss, the sort that goes with rending your clothes and clawing at your flesh until it bleeds.
All of these voices belong to people from the old USSR. As Soviet citizens, they were survivors of a long experiment whose purpose was to reprogram the human soul. For almost 70 years, entire populations were schooled, cajoled and corralled behind moral fences. The ideological project required them to rewrite their history and redefine each of their lives. Through songs and festivals, leader cults, perverted science and the ubiquitous red flag, Soviet messages saturated everyone’s imagination, reaching into the most sceptical of minds. The system was so effective for so long that even after December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, citizens wandered amid its wreckage like the recently bereft, haunted by the only set of values they had ever known.
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