#secondhand time

[itmightrain]

"'How did you make it out of there alive?'

'My parents loved me a lot when I was little.'

We're saved by the amount of love we get. It's our safety net. Yes, only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can't live without. The blood curdles. The heart stops."

- Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

[ripeteeth]

“But where are these happy people? On the radio, they’d said that after the war was over, we would all be happy, and Khrushchev, I remember, promised … He said that communism would soon be upon us. Gorbachev swore it, too, and he spoke so beautifully … it had sounded so good. Now Yeltsin’s making the same promises. He even threatened to lie down on the train tracks … I waited and waited for the good life to come. When I was little, I waited for it … and then when I got a little older … Now I’m old. To make a long story short, everyone lied and things only ever got worse. Wait and see, wait and suffer. Wait and see … My husband died. He went out, collapsed, and that was that — his heart stopped. You couldn’t measure it or weigh it, all the trouble we’ve seen. But here I am, still alive. Living. My children all scattered: My son is in Novosibirsk, and my daughter stayed in Riga with her family, which, nowadays, means that she lives abroad. In a foreign country. They don’t even speak Russian there anymore.

- Marina Tikhonovna Isaichik, as told to Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

[victusinveritas]

Comrade Lenin Sees All.

A contestant waits to go onstage during the "Miss Soviet Union" beauty pageant held in Moscow in 1988 — the first pageant allowed after they were outlawed in the U.S.S.R. in 1959.

Also, if you need it, this is your reminder to read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich and The Soviet Century by Karl Schlögel.

[soracities]

Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (trans. Bela Shayevich)

[etrangersvoyageant]

History is the life of ideas. People don’t write, time writes. Human history is but a nail. For anyone to hang their hat on.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich

[asuph]

"I remember how once we were over at our friend’s house, she’s a poet. I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbachev is all talk…Yeltsin’s an alcoholic…The people are just cattle…

How many times had I heard these things already? A thousand times! [A]nd again, all evening long, that same grumbling: The government is evil, the democrats are no different from the Communists… Russian capitalism is cannibalism…

And no one was doing anything about it. Everyone was waiting for a revolution which was expected to come at any moment. I don’t like these disappointed people in their kitchens. I’m not one of them. The uprising I witnessed terrified me for the rest of my life; I know what it looks like when freedom falls into inexperienced hands. Idle chatter always ends in blood. War is a wolf that can come to your door as well…

[elizabethanism]

“I’m searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There’s the one they use with children, another one for love. There’s the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling—everywhere you go, you’ll hear something different, and it’s not just the words, there’s something else, too. There’s even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night...”

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich

[princesskuragina]

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

-Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Aleksievich