Svetlana Alexievich - Literature in unexpected places

A few pages into Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, a polyphonic documentation of the stories of those present during the fall of the Soviet Union, I messaged a Russian ex-girlfriend who had come of age during Perestroika and asked her if she had read the book. Her reply that 'it is too emotionally demanding' and that she needed to get on with her 'real life' was striking, and as I made my way through this extraordinary work, her words began to resonate more and more. It is an overwhelming and often exhausting read, even for someone far removed from the seismic events that led to the collapse of a nation and an ideology. For someone who had actually grown up in the middle of such a maelstrom, it was easy to see why you would shy away from revisiting it. Indeed, over and over again, Alexievich's witnesses check themselves and retreat into silence, or are reluctant to explore or even begin their stories. It is testament to her skill that she has patience enough to wait and let these stories breathe.

It is also a curious and unusual read. Even putting aside the hundreds of snatched conversations that Alexievich overhears, there are around fifty fuller stories that are revealed in their entirety. Ordinary men and women, students, soldiers, clerks, poets, members of the Communist party, executioners and prison guards, journalists, those who have defected, those who simply left the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, the young and old, sadists and alcoholics, the cynical and the broken: all of them have their own distinctive stories to tell. These stories are often shattering; sometimes quietly so, but more often than not loud and violent. And indeed, to describe them as literature - Alexievich was the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature – feels initially peculiar. However, a casual aside late-on in the book reveals her distinct methodology. In the midst of a tale of a young soldier, she tells us of how she is always on the look-out for those stories where 'life is transformed into literature'. As she says 'I'm always listening for it, in every conversation, both general and private. Occasionally, my vigilance flags - a 'fragment of literature' may sparkle into sight at any moment, even in the most unexpected places.'  Journalism then, that by the process of accumulation, transforms itself into literature. In fact, it is no surprise to learn that Alexievich is first and foremost a journalist. And lest we forget, journalism is a very dangerous game in Russia. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, one of the most vehement critics of Putin and the war in Chechnya, is testament to that.

As with much great literature, this myriad of voices can leave you with infuriating but revealing paradoxes. How can someone be aware of the monstrous crimes of Stalin - indeed, be the actual victim of those crimes - yet hanker back to that age of 'certainty'? These positions leave you bewildered. But then you encounter other stories. Ones that tell of the injustices and suffering of those who were left impoverished by the capitalist 'shock therapy' of the early 90s. Or the experiences of the victims of the devastating wars - Abkhazia pitted against Georgia; Azerbaijan struggling with Armenia - that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. Or the shocking rise in corruption and violent crime brought about by the Russian Mafia, gangsters behaving with impunity who then go on to take up seats in the Russian Parliament. You are left dizzy and confused, and without a moral foothold with which to steady yourself.      

In fact, at times these stories take on the air of absurdity that we might find in the plays of Samuel Beckett. In the aftermath of yet another terrorist attack in Moscow, one woman declares that: "We need a war, maybe then we'll have real upstanding people. My grandfather said that he only ever met truly good people during the war. There's not enough kindness these days."

Svetlana Alexievich

No country in the world is better suited to the expression 'The despair I can handle, it's the hope that will kill me'. And a small handful of these stories do manage fleeting moments of hope. A woman who was a teenager in the years leading up to the fall of Communism talks about the febrile and counter-revolutionary atmosphere that pervaded the Soviet capital. 

"In tenth grade, I had an affair. He lived in Moscow. I went to see him, we only had three days. In the morning, at the station, we picked up a mimeographed copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, which everyone was reading at that time. We had to return the book the next day at four in the morning. Hand it off to someone on a train passing through town. For twenty-four hours, we read without stopping–we only went out once, to get milk and a loaf of bread. We even forgot to make out, we just handed the pages to one another. All of this happened in some kind of fever, a stupor… All because you’re holding this particular book in your hands… Because you’re reading it… Twenty-four hours later, we ran through an empty city back to the train station; public transport wasn’t even running yet.  I remember the city that night, walking together with the book in my purse.  We handled it like it was a secret weapon… That’s how ardently we believed that the word could change the world."

But more often than not, people refuse even to engage with hope. Indeed, how is that possible when memories of the gulag are still so raw. Vasily Petrovich, an old man, talks to the author of his youth in the days of Lenin, and just when you think he has said everything, he lurches into a devastating confession. Here we find Alexeivich almost taking on the role of a priest:

"It’s better without the tape recorder... I need to tell someone this story… I was fifteen. Red Army troops had come to our village. On horseback. Drunk. A subdivision. They slept until evening, and they rounded up all the Komsomol members. The Commander addressed us, ‘The Red Army is starving. Lenin is starving. While the kulaks are hiding their grain. Burning it.’ I knew that my mother’s brother, Uncle Semyon, had taken sacks of grain into the woods and buried them. I was a Komosol youth, I’d taken the oath. That night, I went to the troops and led them to where he’d buried the grain. They got a whole cartload. The Commander shook my hand: ‘Hurry up and grow up, brother.” In the morning, I woke up to my mother screaming, ‘Semyon’s house is on fire!’ They found Uncle Semyon in the woods, the soldiers had cut him to pieces with their sabres… I was fifteen. The Red Army was starving… and Lenin … I was afraid to go outside, I sat in the house weeping. My mother figured out what had happened. That night, she handed me a feedbag and told me, ‘Leave, son! Let God forgive your miserable soul.’

[He covered his eyes with his hand. But I could still see he was crying.] I want to die a communist. That’s my final wish."

Reading this again, I'm struck by similarities to the story told in the recent film Jojo Rabbit. Jojo, a lonely German boy, finds out that his single mother has been offering refuge to a Jewish girl. Indoctrinated into hatred of the Jews by his membership of the Hitler Youth, Jojo nevertheless overcomes his Antisemitism and eventually rejects Nazi ideology. And despite the tone of jarring comic-sentimentality, the film wins you over and you leave the cinema elated. Yet, as the above tale of a Communist child savagely betraying his uncle shows, Jojo Rabbit is an exercise in wishful thinking. Our post-movie mood is one of self-congratulation and the desire to see ourselves as kind, educated and exceptional. In reality these stories are brutal. Brainwashed children seldom recover from that kind of trauma.       

Jojo Rabbit

Indeed, satire is the province of the imagination. The horrors here are real and do not let up. An whole section deals with the confessions of a man whose job it was to execute prisoners. The details are gruesome and difficult to process. Condemned prisoners are soaked in cold water and then sent out into the open air where the Siberian temperatures are forty below zero. They freeze within minutes and remain there until the April thaw, a grizzly memento mori mocking the hope that comes with springtime. Other prisoners are drowned in buckets of shit; some are luckier, and simply despatched with a bullet. The executioner's recounting of how his wrist and trigger finger would begin to ache after a hard day's work is a quiet and horrifying detail. This section brings to an end the first half of the book, its barbarity seeming to demand some kind of closure. Countries do not get closure, though. The horrors that the future will bring will be quieter, more low-key and insidious, but just as impactful for those who experience them.   

Individual stories contrast and echo with each other, and although it is hard to find a consistent point of view, individual stories - like those I've already recounted – linger long in your mind. Small, sad details, invariably relayed over the table in the Russian kitchen, also stay with you too: government-issue coffins made from wood shavings that fall apart when you lift them, spilling the body out onto the floor; toxic vodka made from shoe polish and glue; salami as the perennial symbol of the luxurious West; the suddenly 'filthy' rich with their ubiquitous magenta blazers and the rumours of yachts fitted with champagne showers.          

On finishing the book where are you left? The point of view that I had privileged was that of my ex-girlfriend. Communism was a monstrosity, and Gorbachev was a hero for helping bring about its downfall. But some of these stories, particularly those that are critical of the architects of Perestroika and Glasnost and the eventual triumph of money above all else, left me unsure of my bearings. I ran through a mental list of the major players in my head. To start with it is easy. Stalin and Lenin were monsters. Thereafter it gets muddier. The leaders are less ruthless and more contained, but still in thrall to a desperate and cruel ideology. And after 1992? Muddier still. Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar's capitalist shock therapy is impossible to celebrate, as is the re-emergence of visceral racial hatreds that led to wars that killed millions. And where do you begin on the sinister and manipulative head of state that is Vladimir Putin?      

Indeed, the contradictions inherent in all of these stories taken together can only lead you back to overarching events and a tick or a cross against the major players. Russia itself, I'm tempted – with its literature, its music, its vastness, and that mysterious and slippery thing described as the 'russkaya dusha' (the Russian soul) – to let off the hook. But that is too easy. Perhaps instead I should just embrace the paradox. As one of the characters in Secondhand Time puts it 'in five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred - nothing.'  

Perhaps I would be better served to take Alexeivich's prescription for her project at face value. 

'I don't ask people about socialism ... I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished life. It's the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story ... History is concerned only with the facts; emotions are considered outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it's considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.'

And indeed, the big historic personalities that draw us in and more often than not appal, are not what Secondhand Time is about. It is about real, ordinary people living in extraordinary times. And there is never a more worthy subject for literature than that.