 "From perestroika to Putin")
SECOND-HAND TIME: THE LAST OF THE SOVIETS
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Translator: Bela Shayevich
Publisher: Juggernaut
Price: Rs 699
Pages: 570
Vladimir Putin may be the latest ogre for the West but poll after poll reveal that he is really popular in Russia. How true is this? There are no easy answers, as we see in Svetlana Alexievich's sweeping journalistic investigation into the lives and thoughts of those who live in Putin's Russia having survived the Soviet era and the ructions since its fall.
Alexievich is a Nobel Prize-winning investigative journalist - her probe is not only into facts that conceal the clockwork of power but also into the human soul and memory. In this voluminous book, she interrogates those who have lived through the fall of Soviet Russia, the ensuing chaos, glasnost and perestroika and Putin. Yet, she claims to be less interested in politics, philosophy and history - topics that seem to obsessively occupy Russian literature - and more in the quotidian details on the lives of her interviewees. "I don't ask people about socialism," she writes in the introductory essay, "I want to know about... music, dances, hairdos... ." A little later she writes: "I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people."
This is illustrated brilliantly in an early section on the Russian kitchen: "The pitiful Krushchyovka kitchenette, nine to twelve square metres (if you're lucky!)... . Your typical Soviet floor plan. Onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the window sill. ...That's where perestroika really happened." In this section the quotidian crosses paths with the momentous. "1960s dissident life is the kitchen life... our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government..." The kitchen becomes the space where discontent is nourished, the Derrida-esque rupture in the claustrophobic structure of life behind the iron curtain. "A tiny handful of people resisted openly," Alexievich reports, "but many more of us were 'kitchen dissidents', going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs..."
Not much seem to have changed since the end of the Cold War. Alexievich's journalism has got her into trouble with the powers before. Zinky Boys (1992), her investigation into those involved (soldiers, medical men and women, children, prostitutes) in Soviet Union's disastrous Afghanistan adventure in the 1980s, created enough controversy for her to be put on trial for allegedly defaming the army. She was later acquitted. Life for journalists can be precarious in Russia: Anna Politkovskaya, known for her critical reportage of Russia's war in Chechnya and opposition to Putin, was killed in the lift of her apartment on October 7, 2006. It was Putin's birthday.
In defiance of such dangers, this book is an interrogation of those who inhabit Russia today. There are voices of people whom traditional history usually overlooks: householders, soldiers, owners of small restaurants, former civil servants at the Kremlin, doctors and minor writers.
But revolutions always end in disappointment. Albert Camus, in The Rebel - his essay on the human soul in rebellion, eschews any glorious claim of modern revolutions: "All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler." To this we list, might add 1991, Vladimir Putin.
A construction worker Alexievich interviews at the Red Square is certainly disillusioned. He says of that fateful day in 1991, "Where are the people who called us out onto the square today? ...They ran off to the West, now they're badmouthing socialism. Sitting around in Chicago laboratories." The disappointment, anger and despair at the failure of the great social experiment of Soviet communism and the opening up is evident in every interview. This remains no more a history of fashions and hairdos but of emotions.
A couple of decades from perestroika, Russia is back under the thumb of another too-powerful president. Describing what it is like to live there, an anonymous interviewee says: "7 May 2012. On television, Putin's ceremonial motorcade makes its way to the Kremlin for his inauguration through a completely empty Moscow. No people, no cars. …Thousands of policemen, soldiers… The capital swept clean of Muscovites and the eternal Moscow traffic jams. A dead city." The date referred to Putin's farcical second coming as president after a second stint as prime minister. Another interviewee says: "Some people are shouting 'Russia for Putin!' others are shouting 'Russia without Putin!'…After all, this isn't a true Tsar."
Perhaps the only complaint against this book is that the stories sometimes get repetitive - the experiences of people who have all experienced the same events can be different, but with certain limitations. But this is only me splitting hairs. In the Julian Barnes novel The Noise of Time, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich sees French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre collecting payment for writing Soviet propaganda and thinks: "How easy was it to be a Communist when you didn't live under Communism". Having lived a quarter century in Left-ruled West Bengal, the scene is particularly poignant for me. The living reality of Communism is always brutally different from its triumphant, utopian theory, and it has been most starkly recorded in the seven-decade long social experiment in Russia from 1917 to the fall of the USSR. This book captures magnificently the transition to unabashed crony capitalism.
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Translator: Bela Shayevich
Publisher: Juggernaut
Price: Rs 699
Pages: 570
Vladimir Putin may be the latest ogre for the West but poll after poll reveal that he is really popular in Russia. How true is this? There are no easy answers, as we see in Svetlana Alexievich's sweeping journalistic investigation into the lives and thoughts of those who live in Putin's Russia having survived the Soviet era and the ructions since its fall.
Alexievich is a Nobel Prize-winning investigative journalist - her probe is not only into facts that conceal the clockwork of power but also into the human soul and memory. In this voluminous book, she interrogates those who have lived through the fall of Soviet Russia, the ensuing chaos, glasnost and perestroika and Putin. Yet, she claims to be less interested in politics, philosophy and history - topics that seem to obsessively occupy Russian literature - and more in the quotidian details on the lives of her interviewees. "I don't ask people about socialism," she writes in the introductory essay, "I want to know about... music, dances, hairdos... ." A little later she writes: "I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people."
This is illustrated brilliantly in an early section on the Russian kitchen: "The pitiful Krushchyovka kitchenette, nine to twelve square metres (if you're lucky!)... . Your typical Soviet floor plan. Onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the window sill. ...That's where perestroika really happened." In this section the quotidian crosses paths with the momentous. "1960s dissident life is the kitchen life... our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government..." The kitchen becomes the space where discontent is nourished, the Derrida-esque rupture in the claustrophobic structure of life behind the iron curtain. "A tiny handful of people resisted openly," Alexievich reports, "but many more of us were 'kitchen dissidents', going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs..."
Not much seem to have changed since the end of the Cold War. Alexievich's journalism has got her into trouble with the powers before. Zinky Boys (1992), her investigation into those involved (soldiers, medical men and women, children, prostitutes) in Soviet Union's disastrous Afghanistan adventure in the 1980s, created enough controversy for her to be put on trial for allegedly defaming the army. She was later acquitted. Life for journalists can be precarious in Russia: Anna Politkovskaya, known for her critical reportage of Russia's war in Chechnya and opposition to Putin, was killed in the lift of her apartment on October 7, 2006. It was Putin's birthday.
In defiance of such dangers, this book is an interrogation of those who inhabit Russia today. There are voices of people whom traditional history usually overlooks: householders, soldiers, owners of small restaurants, former civil servants at the Kremlin, doctors and minor writers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at his swearing-in ceremony in May 2012
In the section called "On Falling In Love With Tanks Under Your Window", one interviewee recalls the turbulent years of the early 1990s: "On the radio, they declared a state of emergency... I put on my Gorbachev badge... People on the metro were very quiet... Everywhere you looked there were tanks... The drivers weren't murderers, they were just frightened kids with guilty looks... Old ladies would feed them hardbolied eggs and bliny." This is, obviously, a personal scene from the August 1991 putsch, attempted by Gennady Yanayev and the army, which ended with soldiers refusing to fire on the protestors outside the White House in Moscow, and Boris Yeltsin addressing the crowd from atop a tank. "Three days later... the tanks were rolling out... We kissed and kissed..."But revolutions always end in disappointment. Albert Camus, in The Rebel - his essay on the human soul in rebellion, eschews any glorious claim of modern revolutions: "All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler." To this we list, might add 1991, Vladimir Putin.
A construction worker Alexievich interviews at the Red Square is certainly disillusioned. He says of that fateful day in 1991, "Where are the people who called us out onto the square today? ...They ran off to the West, now they're badmouthing socialism. Sitting around in Chicago laboratories." The disappointment, anger and despair at the failure of the great social experiment of Soviet communism and the opening up is evident in every interview. This remains no more a history of fashions and hairdos but of emotions.
A couple of decades from perestroika, Russia is back under the thumb of another too-powerful president. Describing what it is like to live there, an anonymous interviewee says: "7 May 2012. On television, Putin's ceremonial motorcade makes its way to the Kremlin for his inauguration through a completely empty Moscow. No people, no cars. …Thousands of policemen, soldiers… The capital swept clean of Muscovites and the eternal Moscow traffic jams. A dead city." The date referred to Putin's farcical second coming as president after a second stint as prime minister. Another interviewee says: "Some people are shouting 'Russia for Putin!' others are shouting 'Russia without Putin!'…After all, this isn't a true Tsar."
Perhaps the only complaint against this book is that the stories sometimes get repetitive - the experiences of people who have all experienced the same events can be different, but with certain limitations. But this is only me splitting hairs. In the Julian Barnes novel The Noise of Time, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich sees French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre collecting payment for writing Soviet propaganda and thinks: "How easy was it to be a Communist when you didn't live under Communism". Having lived a quarter century in Left-ruled West Bengal, the scene is particularly poignant for me. The living reality of Communism is always brutally different from its triumphant, utopian theory, and it has been most starkly recorded in the seven-decade long social experiment in Russia from 1917 to the fall of the USSR. This book captures magnificently the transition to unabashed crony capitalism.