Another woman, whose family were made homeless when their apartment was sold from under them by gangsters in the post-communist free-for-all, says: “There are thousands of people like me. But she’s still troubled by what’s replaced it. The life of a woman who grew up first in the penal colony where her mother was imprisoned as an enemy of the state, then in a godforsaken orphanage, is one of perpetual trauma, thanks to the regime. Svetlana Aleksievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union Belarusian author, journalist, oral historian, and now also a political dissident Svetlana Alexievich, to use that chilling Stalinist phrase about writers, is a certified engineer of human souls and has a Nobel prize to prove it. Alexievich believes those born in the USSR and those born after its fall in 1991 come “from different planets.” She presents harrowing stories from both sides of the divide. And you’re no judge either,” says one interviewee of the ways that, under Stalin, citizens were persuaded to inform on their neighbours to the NKVD (Soviet police).

The result is an extraordinary work of non-fiction which is composed of the types of stories that usually go untold amid the march of time and change. As it existed in a person’s soul… It’s where everything really happens.” She interviews ordinary citizens and shapes their testimonies into coherent narratives. Here she brings together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble. Alexievich, a Belorussian journalist, says: “I’m piecing together the history of ‘domestic’, ‘interior’ socialism. Second-hand Time is the latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In her latest book, the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich weaves together dozens of voices from the former-Soviet Union, including Gulag survivors, ex-Communist Party officials and others whose fates are bound up with the tragedies of the last century and the upheavals of this one.

Secondhand time alexievich