It’s often said that in
Russia human life has never been valued. Ever since the Romanovs installed
themselves back in 1613, human beings have been at the mercy and disposal of
state and state-backed power. Tens of thousands serf labourers died to create Peter
the Great’s capital, St Petersburg. Plough a field almost anywhere in Russia and you turn up more
recent human bones.
I don’t often read a
700 page book now, but Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Second-Hand Time is gripping. It’s also harrowing and I found myself
putting it down at the end of a section, as if it would be indecent to hurry on
to the next tale. People tell her their stories back to the 1930s and in to the
early 2000s and the themes are repetitive but realised in different ways in
every case. State violence, a mendacious bureaucracy, poverty, alcoholism (without end),
domestic violence, forced separation of parents and children, husbands and
wives, love in a cold climate, the importance of books, the failure of perestroika, a seemingly unshakeable loyalty to Stalin. And
then there is the thin and uncertain line which separates those who do evil from those who
try to do good.
Alexievich is a seventy
year old Nobel Prize winner and what is remarkable in this book is how she
elicits narratives from her cast of mainly female characters and how, in what I
guess is an exceptionally good translation, those narratives pull you along. You never want to stop reading.
Many of her cast want
to memorialise lost grandparents, parents, lovers, children. It’s one of the
few things you can do to try to make reparation to them and to heal yourself. In
the week when I was reading this book, I came across a story of a man, Andrei
Zhukov, who has just completed a twenty-year self-imposed task. He has sat
in the archives and made a list of all the names of all the 40 000 NKVD
officers who executed Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s. The victim count is thought
to number 12 million and the Russian organisation Memorial has so far managed to list about a quarter of the names. In Alexievich's book, that Terror still affects everyone.
This book should sit
alongside the kinds of memoir and historical work which I have reviewed
elsewhere on this Blog – see the labels to this post.
The footnote apparatus
provided by the translator to assist the reader is excellent; I noticed only
one error, Latvia rather than Lithuania (page 341). As for the translation
itself, I queried only kikeling (basically, little Jew) finding that little
kike sounded better to me.