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I’m not Russian. I’ve never met or known anyone who was. When I was a young officer in the US Army in 1985, I drove a civilian Jeep CJ-7 adorned with a bumper sticker, bought at the Fort Rucker Post Exchange, that emphatically and succinctly proclaimed in white letters on a black background (accentuating the good vs evil nature of its message) what I thought of Russia at the time: Russia Sux.
I was home on leave when in late 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. I had by then spent a little over four years as a Cold War warrior, flying helicopters for Mom, hot dogs, apple pie and the American way of life. Mr. Gorbachev hadn’t torn down the Wall; German subjects of the Evil Empire had, making it all the more poignant and clear: We’d won! The Soviet Union soon fell apart.
I thought it the pinnacle of American achievement. We’d won a war with hardly firing a shot (excluding Vietnam and Korea, which isn’t fair, but points to my naivete at the time). I assumed winning the Cold War, achieving what we’d for so long struggled, was an unmitigated good for the US and West and its way of life. I was wrong.
Within a year of the Soviet Union collapsing, we’d trained our war machine on Iraq. There’d be no beating of swords into plowshares. With the Soviet Union gone, we’d simply find new enemies. It was somewhere on a sand berm in the wee hours of the morning watching B-52’s rain death on Iraqi positions a few clicks away that I realized the Cold War had been a fraud, instigated and kept simmering for the sole purpose of lining the pockets of politicians with armament industry dollars. Iraq, who we’d invited to invade Kuwait by promising beforehand to consider it an ‘inter-Arab’ conflict, proved the lie.
Iraq led directly to al Qaeda, 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq II, ISIS and the rise of Iranian hegemony in the Levant. Winning the Cold War was an unmitigated disaster for the US, not even accounting for the domestic decadence it fostered.
But defeat in the Cold War was worse, much worse, for the Soviet Union and her peoples than the victory was for the US and West. Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets reveals how and why.
Alexievich can’t be said to have written the book. More that she masterfully compiled it. It’s a series of conversations she had with a variety of people from all walks of life and a variety of ex-Soviet republics, transcribed in plain verse and brilliantly translated from the original Russian (in that the English never seems stilted or awkward). Alexievich lets her subjects speak. Rarely does she intercede or seem to be prodding. They seem to treat her as a Freudian therapist, revealing secrets and feelings in a gusher of pent-up emotion.
I happened upon the book in my local used book shop (2nd and Charles) shortly after Christmas of last year (2021), just as Russia began amassing troops on the Ukraine border for what would in a couple of months become an invasion. I bought it, not because of the possibility of war, but because I’d grown through the years to greatly admire Russia; her people and history, but especially, her literature (who says leopards can’t change their spots?). I was a bit skeptical, considering the book had won a Nobel Prize, and was in a format (spoken history) unfamiliar to me. It proved equal to the best Russian literature—to any literature—I’ve ever read.
Not only was it a gut-wrenching, emotionally exhausting, tale of real people living through harrowing times, it answered multiple questions of contemporary relevance. Within a few interviews of former Soviets, the reason for Putin’s ascendancy and his Georgian, Chechen and now Ukrainian military operations became readily apparent. Resentment, anger and confusion, even twenty and more years after the Soviet Union’s fall, drenched the book’s pages. It’s not only Putin who believes the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s not only me who thought at the time it was the West’s greatest triumph.
It’s tempting to say Russians have long memories but that would hardly distinguish them. All peoples, individually and collectively, have long memories, particularly when it comes to injustices they’ve suffered. Better to say that Russians have a lot to remember and be resentful and angry over. Or, with regards to Stalin, a lot to selectively forget for the greater good of the collective. I’ve no doubt there’s a heap these days of remembering and selective forgetting with regards to Putin, but he’s brought stability and a certain sense of revanchist glory to the Russian Empire. He seems more a throwback to the Tzars than to the Soviet General Secretary–the people’s representative keeping the oligarchs in check just as the Tzars had done in their day with the Russian nobility.
It’s hard to overestimate the amount of suffering the fall of the Soviet Union caused for the Soviet people. They went virtually overnight from being part of a grand (and to many, inspirational) experiment in socioeconomic organization, one that ensured all were equally poor but that none were abandoned, to being thrown to the wolves of the most exploitative form of capitalism since robber baron days. The ‘democratic’ era shortly after the Soviet Union fell was a socioeconomic experiment of a different, decidedly Darwinian sort. While during Stalin’s day the Soviet Union had rejected genetic determinism for the omnipotence of socialization, after its fall, the law of the Darwinian jungle prevailed. It was the Mad Max, post-apocalyptic movie that never got made. Only in books like Secondhand Time was its story told.
It’s difficult to put in words the emotional power of the oral histories Alexievich relates. Taken together—everyone from a former Soviet field officer to an Armenian teenager in love–they weave a beautiful and complex tapestry of people and the convulsions of history that tore at their souls. An excerpt of Alexievich’s own history, told in the prologue, offers a glimpse of what will follow:
…The great bloodshed of communism had been lost to the ages [by the time of perestroika]. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was ingrained in us.
…At a train station in Moscow, I met a woman from the Tambov area. She was headed to Chechnya to take her son home. “I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to kill.” The government no longer owned her soul, this was a free woman.
…So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history…After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore—instead, it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they ‘made’ it or ‘scored’ it.
…Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.
…There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an ‘an unrivaled political figure’.
…Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the Great Empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’…there’s a new Komsomol [Soviet youth group], only now it’s called Nashi…
…At heart, we’re built for war. We were always fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests.
…Was that really us? Was that me? I reminisced alongside my protagonists. One of them said, “Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.” We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.
This is a great book. One of the best I’ve ever read. That it fortuitously offers profound insight into a conflict, that with a few more stupid off-the-cuff remarks by President Biden might become WWIII, is just gravy to its greatness.