Posted on 07/21/2016 8:46:41 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie
In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.
"Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. . . . Alexievich’s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people.”—The New York Times
“There’s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as Secondhand Timesince Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as necessary and overdue. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today’s dictatorships, that matters.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“[Alexievich’s] longest and most ambitious project to date: an effort to use an oral history of the nineties to understand Soviet and post-Soviet identity.”—The New Yorker
“In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century.”—J. M. Coetzee
Approximately, "The Regime took my wife to the camps, raped her and killed her there. They took me, and tortured me for 3 years, broke my bones and starved me. I saw the Ukranians on the trains who hung themselves at ate their own shit in front of me. I'm still a strong believer in Communism and Stalin."
You cannot make this up.
Alexievich is a Nobel Prize Winning author. I highly recommend this book as second only to the Solzhenitsyn generation's writings.
The knowledge of the evils of Communism is fading, I fear. The Millennials never learn it from the collectivists running our education establishment.
Yes. Solzhenitsyn also documents this sort of thing. True believers would rather die than change their world view.
An integral part of the Communist philosophy is that there is no God, and there is no morality or ethics except what advances the State.
To those who worship the State, murder, rape, torture, genocide, massive lying and theft, personal corruption, are all perfectly acceptable *if* they advance the state.
And how do you tell if those policies advanced the state? Who won? Who ever is in power is assumed to be moral, as long as they spout socialist platitudes.
Bkmrk.
Thanks for the heads-up on this, I just bought it.
People believe in God after bad things happen. Communism is a God. It is a belief system that replaces God with The State.
Also, Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg.
A young upwardly mobile communist party member is blacklisted for failing to condemn her reactionary Professor. A series of events follows; arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, freight car, Siberian labor camp.
Survives to write autobiography of Stalin Era ordeal.
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