The Soviet Union died. The Soviet person survived: Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time”7 min read
The Soviet Union disappeared in 1991. The Soviet person proved considerably harder to dismantle.
That is the central paradox of Svetlana Alexievich’s La Fin de l’homme rouge (The End of the Red Man, 2013), originally published in Russian in 2013 as Время секонд хэнд (Secondhand Time). Alexievich is less interested in why the USSR collapsed than in what happened inside the people who survived it. What becomes of someone formed by a political system when that system suddenly ceases to exist?
Her subject is Homo sovieticus, the “Red Man”: a person shaped not only by communist ideology, but by decades of collective experience, sacrifice, repression, stability, war, shortages and belief in a common project. The Soviet state could disappear overnight. The habits, expectations and fears it had produced could not.
For readers trying to understand the politics of the post-Soviet world – and particularly Alexievich’s native Belarus – that distinction remains remarkably important.
A short history told through ordinary lives
Secondhand Time is not a conventional history of the Soviet collapse. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, perestroika and the economic upheavals of the 1990s provide the backdrop, but Alexievich searches elsewhere for her history: in kitchens and apartments, marriages and memories. Based on years of interviews, the book assembles extended monologues and fragments of conversations with former Soviet citizens. There are communists and dissidents, victims and believers, people exhilarated by perestroika and others devastated by what followed it.
Alexievich is interested in what political transformation does to ordinary life. Her witnesses talk about Stalin and socialism, but also about food, books, apartments, love, careers and money. The collapse of an empire becomes intimate. This is what makes the book both powerful and exhausting. Stories of suicide, ethnic violence, poverty and loss accumulate with little protection for the reader. History does not remain in the Kremlin. It enters families, changes people’s social status and forces them to reconsider what their lives meant.
Freedom without free people
Politically, Alexievich’s most provocative argument concerns freedom itself.
The comforting narrative of 1991 is linear: dictatorship collapsed and its citizens became free. Alexievich records something considerably messier. Discussing the book in Russian shortly after its publication, she recalled one of her interlocutors observing that everyone had been shouting about freedom, but there seemed to be no free person anywhere. Alexievich argues that freedom could not simply emerge from conversations about democracy. It required habits of compromise, responsibility and participation that had to be learned. “Freedom,” as she put it, was difficult everyday work.
The Soviet citizen was expected to become a democratic citizen. Instead, Alexievich suggests, the first great teacher of the new era was the market. Television could have become an “university of the new life”, she later argued; instead, that university became the bazaar. The distinction is crucial. Many people had dreamed about freedom. Few had imagined that freedom would arrive accompanied by disappearing savings, unemployment, oligarchs and spectacular inequality. Engineers and intellectuals lost status. Money suddenly determined possibilities in ways Soviet ideology had officially taught people to despise. Consumer goods appeared while familiar forms of security disappeared.
Yet Alexievich does not turn this into a simplistic opposition between noble Soviet idealism and vulgar capitalism. She repeatedly insists that her purpose is to understand rather than judge. The desire for an apartment, a car or a comfortable private life was itself a liberation from a system that had demanded sacrifice for grand historical objectives. The tragedy was that political freedom and economic upheaval arrived together, making it difficult to separate one from the other.
Two failed utopias
This helps explain one of the book’s most uncomfortable themes: Soviet nostalgia.
Some of Alexievich’s witnesses know about censorship, denunciations, the Gulag and Stalinist terror, yet still mourn aspects of Soviet life. At first the contradiction seems astonishing. But nostalgia for life under the Soviet Union is not necessarily nostalgia for dictatorship. People remember social security, status and community. Some miss the conviction that their lives participated in something larger than individual enrichment. Others are simply remembering their youth.
Alexievich’s characters are therefore not mourning one failed utopia but two: the communist future they were promised and the liberal future they briefly imagined after communism collapsed. The failure of the second could rehabilitate memories of the first. Sociologically, this may be the book’s most important insight. Political systems derive legitimacy not only from ideology or coercion, but from their ability to give people’s lives predictability, status and meaning. When a new order fails to provide those things, the old one can look different in retrospect.
Who speaks for the Red Man?
Alexievich’s literary method makes these contradictions extraordinarily immediate. Her Nobel Prize recognised precisely this “polyphonic” form: history constructed through a chorus of human voices.
Her French translator, Sophie Benech, describes Alexievich as having an almost midwife-like ability to draw from people thoughts they may not have fully articulated themselves, and then preserve each person’s rhythm and voice on the page. But Alexievich’s apparent disappearance behind her interviewees should not be mistaken for neutrality. She chooses the speakers, edits their testimonies and decides how their voices encounter one another.
That raises a legitimate question about Homo sovieticus itself. Can one “Red Man” really represent experiences stretching from Russia and Belarus to the Caucasus and Central Asia?
Probably not.
The concept works better as a literary and sociological archetype than as a universal diagnosis. The Soviet Union produced shared institutions and experiences, but it was also a multinational empire whose peoples encountered both Soviet rule and its collapse very differently.
Belarus and the afterlife of the Soviet system
This limitation makes Alexievich’s own Belarus particularly interesting.
Alexander Lukashenko came to power only three years after the Soviet collapse. His political system subsequently retained features immediately recognisable within the world Alexievich describes: paternalistic government, a powerful state, suspicion of political disorder and the promise of stability over disruptive transformation.
Secondhand Time does not explain Lukashenko, and it would be crude to suggest that Soviet psychology somehow made authoritarianism inevitable. Instead, the book helps us understand why stability could become such a politically powerful word after the upheavals accompanying the Soviet collapse. If freedom becomes associated with economic insecurity and social disorientation, promises of order acquire a different meaning.
But Belarus also exposes the limits of Alexievich’s pessimism. In 2020, enormous demonstrations following a disputed presidential election showed a society capable of horizontal solidarity, civic mobilisation and demands for political accountability. The subsequent repression does not erase what those protests revealed.
Seen through Alexievich’s book, 2020 poses a fascinating question: what happens when the children and grandchildren of Homo sovieticus begin to demand a different relationship with the state?
The Soviet person may survive. That does not mean the Soviet person survives forever.
Living in second-hand time
The book appeared in Russian in 2013 and almost immediately travelled beyond the former USSR. French, German, Swedish, Croatian and Belarusian editions appeared in 2013, with a Ukrainian edition following in 2014. The English translation by Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, was published in 2016. Alexievich’s book has been translated in numerous additional languages in subsequent years.
The differences between the titles are revealing. The French La Fin de l’homme rouge – from which The End of the Red Man derives – announces an ending. The Russian Время секонд хэнд, preserved by the English Secondhand Time, suggests something more unsettling: the past has not disappeared at all. Old ideas, memories and political reflexes are being worn again. That tension ultimately captures the achievement of Alexievich’s book. The Soviet Union could abolish itself on paper. It could change flags, borders, currencies and constitutions. Transforming the people who had lived inside it was another matter entirely.
More than three decades later, Belarus makes that argument simultaneously compelling and incomplete. The endurance of Lukashenko’s system demonstrates the extraordinary longevity of Soviet political inheritances. The rupture of 2020 shows that societies are not condemned to reproduce them indefinitely.
The Soviet Union died in 1991. Alexievich’s unsettling question is how many generations it takes for the Soviet person to die with it.
