Today, as the pandemic world convulses in the corrosive slops of populism, and in Alexievich’s native Belarus the emboldened dictator releases smug videos of himself with an automated gun (and his own underage son grotesquely clad in a spetznaz uniform), I revisit her Secondhand Time in search of answers, clues, and prophesies. Truly, if the story (in this case, hundreds of stories) is enthralling, it requires no embellishment (sorry, Tolkien). I am fortunate to be able to read Alexievich in the original Russian, but even the English translations retain the thunderbolt strength of her laconicism.

This is work both for the intellectual and the emotional aspects of readership, often punctured by tears, but always ending in a classic cleaning catharsis.

This is not the kind of literary product one can savour with a glass of flinty Chablis, half-listening to the analog grit of some fresh lo-fi chillop. Six books were born out of this labour, each one a raw manifesto of truth, suturing a particular apocalyptic wound (Second World War, Afghanistan War, and Chernobyl, among them). Four decades ago she acquired a tape recorder (500 rubles, an astronomic number for your run-of-the-mill 100 rubles desk job salary) and set out to catalogue a multitude of voices, old and young, surging in a cacophonic symphony of victimhood and heroism from every far and near corner of the Land of the Soviets. Svetlana Aleksievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Unionīelarusian author, journalist, oral historian, and now also a political dissident Svetlana Alexievich, to use that chilling Stalinist phrase about writers, is a certified “engineer of human souls” and has a Nobel prize to prove it.

We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

Svetlana alexievich secondhand time