Michael: Alright, Kevin, quick role-play. You're a motivational speaker. Your client: the entire former Soviet Union, circa 1992. They're lost, broke, and their whole belief system just evaporated. What's your opening line? Kevin: "Okay team, let's pivot to synergy and embrace the new paradigm!" ...Yeah, I think I'd be fired immediately. Probably booed off the stage in Red Square. Michael: You'd be lucky if that's all that happened. And that's exactly the impossible problem at the heart of the book we’re discussing today: Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Kevin: I’ve heard this book is a masterpiece. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her work, right? Michael: She did, and it was for inventing what the committee called a "new kind of literary genre." She creates these vast, polyphonic books that are essentially a 'history of emotions.' She spent years collecting hundreds of conversations with ordinary people. Kevin: So this isn't a typical history book with dates and battles and political figures? Michael: Not in the slightest. This is history as it was lived in the kitchens, in the bread lines, in the heart. It's the history of the soul. And it all starts with this fascinating, almost Frankenstein-like idea: the seventy-year Soviet experiment to create a new kind of human.

Kevin: Okay, hold on. A 'new kind of human'? That sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. What does that actually mean? Michael: Alexievich gives it a name: Homo sovieticus. The Soviet Man. This wasn't just a citizen of a country; it was meant to be a new species of person. Someone who thinks and feels collectively, not individually. Their identity was completely fused with the Great Idea of Communism. Kevin: The 'Great Idea'. That sounds so grand. Michael: It was. And it was all-consuming. One person in the book says, "At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology." Life was a constant struggle for the cause, whether against the Nazis, against capitalism, or against nature itself. Kevin: That sounds exhausting. Can you give me an example of what this looked like for a regular person? Michael: Absolutely. There's this story from a woman reminiscing about her school days. Her class was organizing trips to the "Virgin Lands," this massive, ambitious project to cultivate unfarmed territory. She and her friends were desperate to go. They were true believers. Kevin: So they were excited to go do hard farm labor? Michael: Ecstatic. They felt they were building utopia with their own hands. And she remembers how they looked down on the classmates who didn't want to go, who just wanted to stay home. They felt sorry for them. She even says they were disappointed they had missed out on the heroic suffering of the Revolution and the Civil War. They wanted their own great struggle. Kevin: Wow. That's a completely different mindset. It's not about personal happiness, it's about being part of something epic, even if it involves suffering. There’s a strange purity to that, but it's also a bit terrifying. It's like a hive mind. Michael: Exactly. The individual ego is submerged into the collective. The author quotes someone who says, "Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet." They had their own language, their own relationship with good and evil, with life and death. Their value came from their role in this grand historical drama. Kevin: That sets up a terrifying question, then. What happens to that person—to Homo sovieticus—when the drama is suddenly over? When the theater burns down and the Great Idea is revealed to be a lie? Michael: That, right there, is the central tragedy of this book. An entire people, an entire identity, was suddenly made obsolete. They were, as the title suggests, living in "secondhand time," a time that wasn't made for them and that they weren't made for.

Kevin: This is the part of the story that I think a lot of us in the West have trouble understanding. The wall falls, the statues of Lenin are toppled, and we see it as this purely triumphant moment. Freedom arrives! But that's not the story this book tells, is it? Michael: Not at all. The book is filled with this profound sense of disillusionment. The dream of freedom quickly soured. Alexievich captures this perfectly with a quote from one of her subjects: "Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence... The freedom of Her Highness Consumption." Kevin: The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. That's a brutal line. So they traded the 'Great Idea' for... a great big shopping mall? Michael: In a way, yes. They thought they were getting democracy and justice, but what they got was capitalism in its most savage, unregulated form. There's this incredible scene where the narrator is in a village in the Smolensk region. She asks the locals what freedom is. Kevin: And what do they say? Michael: An old man points to the shelves of the general store. He says, "Take your pick... One hundred kinds of salami... So we’ve got our freedom." But then the conversation shifts. The same people who are celebrating the salami start talking about how their neighbors are starving, how the rich are looting the country, and how there's no fairness anymore. They have choice, but they've lost security, community, and a sense of purpose. Kevin: So freedom just meant the freedom to get rich or the freedom to starve. And for most people, it was the latter. Michael: Precisely. And this is where the most shocking part of the book comes in: the nostalgia. When the present is that chaotic and cruel, the past, even an oppressive one, starts to look appealing. People started missing the order, the predictability of the Soviet Union. Kevin: I can sort of understand missing a sense of stability, but we're talking about a regime with gulags and secret police. How deep does that nostalgia run? Michael: Frighteningly deep. Alexievich includes this piece of data from a recent survey. It found that half of Russians between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin—Stalin—an "unrivaled political figure." Kevin: Half? Of young people? That’s staggering. They didn't even live through it. They're nostalgic for something they never experienced. Michael: It's a secondhand nostalgia. They inherited the stories of a "great empire" and contrast it with their own precarious lives. The book argues that when you kill the big idea—communism—you have to replace it with something. And what rushed in to fill the void was a mix of hyper-capitalism, gangsterism, and a yearning for a strong hand to restore order. Kevin: That is... deeply unsettling. It makes the rise of authoritarian figures feel almost inevitable. If freedom is just chaos and salami, a strongman promising a return to greatness, no matter how brutal, starts to sound pretty good to a lot of people. Michael: It’s a terrifyingly human response. And the way Alexievich gets us to understand this, to feel it, is what makes her work so powerful and so controversial.

Kevin: Okay, let's talk about that. Because as I was reading about this book, I saw that it's widely acclaimed, but it also has its critics. Some argue that because Alexievich edits and arranges these interviews so heavily, it's not really pure history. They ask, is she a journalist or is she a novelist? Michael: That's the essential question, and she addresses it herself. She doesn't see herself as a traditional historian or journalist. She calls herself an "accomplice" to her subjects' stories. Her goal isn't to create a dry, factual record. It's to capture the emotional truth of an era. Kevin: An accomplice. I like that. It implies a shared journey, not an objective observation. Michael: Exactly. She has this amazing quote where she talks about the role of the artist in times of turmoil. She says, "The barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. They’re a trap. They ruin your vision... On the barricades, everything is black and white. You can’t see individuals, all you see are black dots: targets." Kevin: So she’s intentionally avoiding taking a political side. Michael: She's trying to get beyond the black and white. Her work lives in the grey areas. The book is structured with these big monologues, but it's also interspersed with these little fragments she calls "Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations." It's the overheard whispers, the bitter jokes, the private confessions. That's where she believes the real history is. Kevin: The history of the kitchen is more real than the history of the Kremlin. Michael: That's the perfect way to put it. She’s documenting the soul of a people. Think about the story of Elena's father. He was a Soviet soldier in the Russo-Finnish war, gets captured, and the Finns treat him kindly—give him schnapps and dry clothes. Then he gets back to the Soviet Union, and his own side treats him as a traitor and sends him to a labor camp for six years. Kevin: That's just heartbreaking. The cruelty is unimaginable. Michael: It is. But here's the Homo Sovieticus twist. After all that, after years in the gulag, he remains a loyal communist to the day he dies. He never blames the Idea, only the flawed people who implemented it. How do you explain that with just facts and dates? You can't. You need the story. You need the voice from the kitchen. Kevin: I see now. The criticism that it's 'not pure history' kind of misses the point. She’s not trying to write a textbook. She’s trying to build a monument out of voices. A monument to suffering, but also to this incredibly complex, contradictory, and resilient human spirit. Michael: The Nobel committee called her work "a monument to suffering and courage in our time." And that's what Secondhand Time is. It's a chorus of ghosts, all trying to explain what it felt like when their world ended.

Kevin: So, if we pull all this together, it feels like the book is telling a story on three levels. First, there’s the creation of this unique person, Homo Sovieticus, who was programmed to serve a grand idea. Michael: Then, there's the cataclysm. The idea dies, and this person is left stranded in a new world of consumerism and chaos, a world they don't understand, which leads to this painful, paradoxical nostalgia for the certainty of oppression. Kevin: And finally, there's the method itself. The only way to understand this epic tragedy is through the small, intimate, contradictory stories of the people who lived it—the history of the kitchen. Michael: That's it exactly. The book is a powerful, and I think deeply relevant, warning. It shows what can happen when a society's grand narrative collapses. The hunger for meaning, for a story to be a part of, is so powerful that people will accept almost anything to fill that void. Kevin: It really makes you think. The story of the Soviet collapse isn't just about Russia. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when people lose their sense of collective purpose. They can fall for anything—the empty promises of consumerism, the allure of a new strongman, anything to feel like they're part of a big story again. Michael: And it leaves us with a pretty profound question to reflect on, one that goes far beyond this book. What is the 'Great Idea' that holds our own society together today? And what would we be without it? Kevin: That is a heavy one to end on. It’s something we could all probably think more about. We'd love to hear what you all think. What's the story we tell ourselves about our own time? Join the conversation on our socials and let us know. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.