Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

This is a devastating book to read. It goes a long way to explaining why Russia invaded Ukraine, why Crimea just wasn't enough, and why even when Putin is gone the problem will remain. This is the first book that I have read by this author, but this is her fifth book about what it is to be Russian, the last in her series of investigations of the psychological make-up of the Soviet people, which she shows was conditioned by perpetual war. She has written about the Second World War as remembered by female veterans and by orphaned children, about the Afghanistan war, and about the traumatic Chernobyl disaster, combated in a war-like manner. The finale deals with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, inducing multiple civil wars in the former Soviet republics, military stand-offs in the constitutional crises of 1991 and 1993, and the war-like criminality and terrorist attacks of today. This book stands out for its wide historical scope: We hear the voices of people who survived the Stalinist labor camps of the 1930s, lived through the Second World War, and experienced postwar Soviet and then post-Soviet history, up to the present. Alexievich arranges this vast material so as to yield a unique insight into the failure of the post-Soviet democratization. shows that above all they were psychologically misguided. From 1985, under the auspices of glasnost’, the newspapers were abruptly filled with photographs of anonymous mass graves, vivid testimonies to the horrible crimes committed by the Soviet regime. The avalanche of historical revelations in the press was so jarringly at odds with official historiography that in 1988 my high school’s graduation exam in contemporary history was cancelled. No one knew any more how to evaluate and grade students’ knowledge of Soviet history. This is the backdrop against which modern Russia was crafted, and Ukraine is the first to suffer the consequences, but perhaps not the last.