Secondhand Time

Secondhand Time essentially invented a new literary genre. Through hundreds of meticulously edited oral testimonies, Svetlana Alexievich constructs a choral portrait of Soviet and post-Soviet experience that no single narrator could encompass. The result is documentary literature of exceptional power, capturing the voices of ordinary people caught between the collapse of one world and the chaotic emergence of another. Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for what the committee called ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.’

Secondhand Time gathers the testimonies of men and women who lived through the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the bewildering decades that followed — the poverty, the gangster capitalism, the nostalgia for lost certainties, and the painful reckoning with the crimes of the Communist past. Alexievich's subjects include former true believers, gulag survivors, Afghan war veterans, and young people who never knew the Soviet system but inherited its psychological legacy. The book stands as the definitive oral history of the post-Soviet experience, documenting a civilizational rupture that reshaped the lives of hundreds of millions.