![]() These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. ![]() The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues. Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice. ![]() But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country. ![]()
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