Reading 'Secondhand Time'

The Testimonies Of Soviet Communism's Survivors Must Not Be Ignored

I have to write again today. I’m bursting from reading Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it. I had promised not to write about it until I had finished the book; I’m only halfway through it, but it is absolutely gutting, and I have to get this off my chest now. It is especially important because today (Tuesday) the second episode of the Live Not By Lies documentary is streaming on Angel.com; there are two more to come. I’m realizing that as much as I know about Soviet communism, it is not remotely enough. Not remotely. It is one of the great scandals of our time that after the end of the Cold War, we in the West simply forgot about everything that happened there.

We cannot afford to keep doing this!

I’ll be writing more about it once I’m done with the book, but for now, some disorganized thoughts.

The book is an oral history made up of interviews with people who had lived in the USSR, taken after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is the farthest thing from a dry historical account. Alexievich just lets these people — different kinds of people — talk. What she gives us is an at times unbearable portrait of the human condition. Yes, this is about the Soviet people, and their historical experience, but it is really about the human mind, and the human soul, under conditions that are unbearable. But they bore them, and lived to tell the tale.

It is not a collection of heroic tales. Some testimonies do contain heroic episodes, but mostly they are stories of endurance and madness. On every page, the attentive Western reader will ask: What would I have done under those circumstances? I tell you, if you read this book, you will absolutely understand why the Russians went for Putin after the 1990s. The conditions in post-Soviet Russia were unspeakably chaotic and bleak. Don’t get me wrong, the book is not a justification for Putin’s rule. But it is an explanation, and a vitally important one.

I don’t know how a people — any people — so hideously maimed by a system can ever be okay.

I’ve underlined many, many passages. Let me simply quote from the material I read this morning, enjoying my coffee in a quiet Budapest coffee shop, on a beautiful spring day.

Here is part of the testimony of Olga, a Russian who had been living in Abkhazia when the USSR fell, and the former republics fell into civil war. She talks about how the people who had been their neighbors and friends suddenly turned on them as occupiers. She barely escaped with her life. When I write about the prospect of civil war coming to Western countries because of the mass migration issue, and the misgovernment of ruling elites (Left and Right) who allowed these conditions to come about in our countries, this is the kind of horror I’m talking about:

More Olga, who arrived in chaotic Moscow, and lived hand-to-mouth, like so many displaced Russians. The freedom they all wanted from the slavery of communism was … not great:

What you see, over and over in these testimonies, is the experiences of people who lived in hell in the USSR, but were delivered into a different kind of hell. What is so bizarre is the schizophrenia of people who were imprisoned and tortured by the Soviet regime, and saw many people killed, but who nevertheless miss Soviet times. Why? Because they had order then, and a sense of purpose.

Here is an excerpt of a testimony:

They hammered a nail into this man’s leg to force him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, and to get him to name names. And yet: “No matter what, there’s nothing in the world better than the red banner.”

Here is a story from a woman whose father was thrown into the gulag, and whose mother tried to abort her to spare her the horrors of Stalinism. The mom failed, and was imprisoned as well. The little girl — she was a baby — was sent to an orphanage with other children of the imprisoned (the NKVD was the secret police agency, the predecessor of the KGB):

More from orphanage life:

What was it like after communism fell? From the testimony of a former Soviet officer:

Here he is talking about how, after communism ended, people had to try to live normally with their torturers:

This man too was a torturer:

He and his colleagues wiped the blood of their victims in their own hair!

The man goes on, talking about how his mother insists that man is born good, but made evil by his circumstances. He disagrees:

The whole book is like this. I can’t stop reading it, mostly because we have to learn from the past. This is what communism was! This is what communism is! I also read it because it shames me that we have all allowed these people’s stories to disappear.

Another reason I read it: that world, that insane and satanic world, has a lot to do with the world we live in today. I’m just posting what I read this morning, but I have marked a number of passages in which these survivors lament their suffering, but also long for the Soviet Union, even for Stalin. I get why Putin once said that the fall of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Obviously I don’t agree with him, but reading Secondhand Time, I understand why many Russians believe that. Why? Because there was no way for them to make sense of their suffering absent the only framework they had: the golden dream of communism, and of Russian greatness. Some of these people talk about how despite everything they were living through, they were ready to die for Stalin — their chief torturer! I never really understood why top communists, in the 1930s show trials, confessed to crimes they didn’t commit, and went to their executions praising Stalin. I get it now: man can live with anything, but he cannot live without meaning.

“I spent my life building a great nation,” says one disillusioned woman. “That’s what they told us. They promised.” She was barely surviving in the ruins of the USSR. Another woman says that she can live with any deprivation, “but I cannot live without a past.” She’s talking about the Soviet dream, which told her who she was, and instructed her that all her suffering had meaning, because she and all her comrades were Building Socialism.

Another woman, a Stalinist, says “my greatest dream was to die” — for Stalin! Her father was a Bolshevik who fought for the revolution. But in 1937, though a faithful communist, he was condemned. He was set free because some prominent Bolshevik vouched for him.

“But they wouldn’t let him back into the Party,” she says. “It was a blow he would never recover from. In jail, they’d knocked his teeth out and crushed his skull. Still, my father didn’t change his stripes, he remained a communist to the end of his life. Explain that to me … . Do you think that these people are idiots? Simpletons? They’re not — they were smart, educated people.”

You think you and I would have been different? Solzhenitsyn warned that people in the West who say “it can’t happen here” are lying to themselves, that what happened in Russia could happen in any country on earth.

When the emigrés who escaped communism by moving to the West warn us that what we have been undergoing with the Great Awokening is a form of totalitarianism, that it feels to them like the early stages of the nightmare that overtook their countries … we had better take them seriously! In my Live Not By Lies book, I write:

Few in Russian society, outside of the imperial court’s bubble, believed that the system could carry on. But Tsar Nicholas II and his closest advisers insisted that sticking to the proven ways of traditional autocracy would get them through the crisis. The leadership of the church also ignored internal calls for reform from priests who could see the church’s influence wasting away. Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited godlike powers to make the world to suit his desires.

In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.

Please consider subscribing to Angel.com to watch the four-part Live Not By Lies documentary, written and directed by Isaiah Smallman. Show it to your children. They need to know. We all do. It absolutely can happen here if we allow it to, and if it does, it will destroy our minds and our souls. We cannot afford to memory-hole communism. And read Secondhand Time too: both for its historical value, and for a searing, unforgettable portrait of the human soul. All this suffering cannot have been in vain. The desperate, insane longing for meaning that you see in some of these survivors, such that they would miss Stalin and his evil system — what does that say about human nature? What can we learn from it?