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Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Paperback – March 21, 2017
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NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • LOS ANGELES TIMESBOOK PRIZE WINNER
One of the New York Times’s100 Best Books of the 21st Century
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Hereis an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.
A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. “Through the voices of those who confided in her,” The Nation writes, “Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil—in a word, about ourselves.”
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateMarch 21, 2017
- Dimensions5.48 x 1.05 x 8.19 inches
- ISBN-109780399588822
- ISBN-13978-0399588822
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Editorial Reviews
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“There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent. . . . But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker
“Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. . . . Alexievich’s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.”—The New York Times
“The most ambitious Russian literary work of art of the century . . . There’s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as Secondhand Time since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as necessary and overdue. . . . Alexievich’s witnesses are those who haven’t had a say. She shows us from these conversations, many of them coming at the confessional kitchen table of Russian apartments, that it’s powerful simply to be allowed to tell one’s own story. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today’s dictatorships, that matters.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Alexievich’s masterpiece—not only for what it says about the fall of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of Russia and its former satellites. . . Stylistically, Secondhand Time, like her other books, produces a mosaic of overlapping voices… deepened by extraordinary stories of love and perseverance.”—Newsweek
“A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful . . . [Secondhand Time] is one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts of [Soviet] society caught in the throes of change that anyone has yet attempted. . . . Alexievich stations herself at a crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. . . . [She] makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony.”—The Washington Post
“An enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism fall, [Secondhand Time] gives a staggeringly deep and plural picture of a people that has lost its place in history.”—San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
(1991–2001)
ON IVANUSHKA THE FOOL AND THE MAGIC GOLDFISH
--What have I learned? I learned that the heroes of one era aren’t likely to be the heroes of the next. Except Ivanushka the Fool. And Emelya. The beloved heroes of Russian folklore. Our stories are all about good fortune and strokes of luck; divine intervention that makes everything fall right into our laps. Having it all without having to get up from your bed on the stove.1 The stove will cook the bliny, the magic goldfish will grant your every wish. I want this and I want that . . . I want the fair Tsarevna! I want to live in a different kingdom, where the rivers run with milk and their banks are heaped with jam . . . We’re dreamers, of course. Our souls strain and suffer, but not much gets done--there’s no strength left over after all that ardor. Nothing ever gets done. The mysterious Russian soul . . . Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. “Reader” is our primary occupation. “Viewer.” All the while, we consider ourselves a special, exceptional people even though there are no grounds for this besides our oil and natural gas. On one hand, this is what stands in the way of progress; on the other hand, it provides something like meaning. Russia always seems to be on the verge of giving rise to something important, demonstrating something completely extraordinary to the world. The chosen people. The special Russian path. Our country is full of Oblomovs,2 lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles. There are no Stoltzes. The industrious, savvy Stoltzes are despised for chopping down the beloved birch grove, the cherry orchard. They build their factories, make money . . . They’re foreign to us . . .
--The Russian kitchen . . . The pitiful Khrushchyovka3 kitchenette, nine to twelve square meters (if you’re lucky!), and on the other side of a flimsy wall, the toilet. Your typical Soviet floorplan. Onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the windowsill and a potted aloe for fighting colds. For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, it’s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions. In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. That’s where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! He’s the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. It’s where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted. We made jokes--it was a golden age for jokes! “A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.” We grew up in kitchens, and our children did, too; they listened to Galich and Okudzhava along with us. We played Vysotsky,4 tuned in to illegal BBC broadcasts. We talked about everything: how shitty things were, the meaning of life, whether everyone could all be happy. I remember a funny story . . . We’d stayed up past midnight, and our daughter, she was twelve, had fallen asleep on the kitchen couch. We’d gotten into some heated argument, and suddenly she started yelling at us in her sleep: “Enough about politics! Again with your Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Stalin!” [Laughs.]
Endlessly drinking tea. Coffee. Vodka. In the seventies, we had Cuban rum. Everyone was in love with Fidel! With the Cuban revolution. Che in his beret. A Hollywood star! We talked nonstop, afraid that they were listening in, thinking they must be listening. There’d always be someone who’d halt in mid-conversation and point to the ceiling light or the power outlet with a little grin, “Did you hear that, Comrade Lieutenant?” It felt a little dangerous, a little bit like a game. We got a certain satisfaction out of leading these double lives. A tiny handful of people resisted openly, but many more of us were “kitchen dissidents,” going about our daily lives with our fingers crossed behind our backs . . .
--Today, it’s shameful being poor and unathletic--it’s a sign that you’re not making it. I come from the generation of janitors and security guards. Getting a job like that was a form of internal emigration. You lived your life and didn’t pay any attention to what was going on around you, like it was all just the view out the window. My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant. You’d work one twenty-four-hour shift and then get two days off. Back then, an engineer made 130 rubles a month, while in the boiler room, I was getting 90, which is to say that if you were willing to give up 40 rubles a month, you could buy yourself absolute freedom. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas. We dreamt of revolution, but we were scared we’d never live to see it. In reality, we were completely sheltered, we didn’t know a thing about what was actually going on in the world. We were like houseplants. We made everything up, and, as it later turned out, everything we thought we knew was nothing but figments of our imaginations: the West. Capitalism. The Russian people. We lived in a world of mirages. The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.
With perestroika, everything came crashing down. Capitalism -descended . . . 90 rubles became 10 dollars. It wasn’t enough to live on anymore. We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadn’t had any ideas after all--that whole time, we’d just been talking. Completely new people appeared, these young guys in gold rings and magenta blazers. There were new rules: If you have money, you count--no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease. “All you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam.”5 Many unfamiliar horizons unfurled before us. The intelligentsia grew calamitously poor. On weekends, at the park by our house, Hare Krishnas would set up a mobile kitchen serving soup and something simple for a second course. The line of the dignified elderly was so long, just thinking about it is enough to give you a lump in your throat. Some of them hid their faces. By then, we’d had two children. We were literally starving. My wife and I became peddlers. We’d pick up four or six cases of ice cream at the factory and take them down to the market, to the most crowded spot. We had no refrigeration, so a few hours in, all the ice cream would be melting. At that point, we’d give it away to hungry kids. They were so happy! My wife did the selling. I’d deliver it, haul it--I was willing to do anything but actually make sales. It felt uncomfortable for a long time.
There was a time when I’d often reminisce about our kitchen days . . . There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb . . .
Product details
- ASIN : 0399588825
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 21, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780399588822
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399588822
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 1.05 x 8.19 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Russian & Soviet Politics
- #15 in European Politics Books
- #18 in Russian History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
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Customers find the narrative compelling and interesting. They describe the book as an amazing, surprising read with high value content. The book provides them with insightful perspectives into the lives of three eras of Russians. Many readers praise the power and authenticity of the work. However, opinions differ on how heartbreaking or poignant the book is.
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Customers find the narrative compelling and creative. They appreciate the literary innovations and cross-section of life represented. The book is complex and not for the faint of heart, but it's a splendid collection of memories, guilts, and sorrows.
"...of recorded interviews into the most relevant, revealing and interesting passages. That takes a great deal of skill and artistry. ...." Read more
"...-Soviet Russia collected in Alexeyev's "Secondhand Time", a splendid book of memories, guilts and sorrows, of what the Soviet union, and its passing..." Read more
"...It runs through peoples varied life stories from the period, breathlessly, as told by themselves, many of which could stand alone as self-contained..." Read more
"...It stirs the heart and mind and gives the reader the opportunity to examine a shattered world, the chance to think about other such civilizations,..." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as an important read with authentic content. The English translation is also praised for its quality.
"...Read this great book. Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus and Ukrainian parents, spent years on this book...." Read more
"...This volume is certainly worth a purchase; it is in such assemblages of one-on-one testimony that authentic and meaningful works of history are made." Read more
"...While I took the reminder seriously, it is only after reading this great book did I feel the impact of the Soviet belief system...." Read more
"...provided they are distinguished by artistic excellence and high value of content...." Read more
Customers find the book provides interesting insights into the lives of Russians from three eras. They say it brings truth and is an oral history. The book provides a clearer understanding of today's contemporary Russia and life under the Soviets. It's a real eye-opener for US observers.
"...thousands of hours of recorded interviews into the most relevant, revealing and interesting passages...." Read more
"...By the halfway mark, the interest has built and built, and then it becomes a page-turner...." Read more
"...This book presents a new way of examining broad stretches of life...." Read more
"...is meant to include philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical writings, provided they are distinguished by artistic excellence and high..." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and memorable. They appreciate the author's original perspectives and vibrant writing style. The book provides a vivid, gripping account of post-Soviet life.
"...That takes a great deal of skill and artistry. . It lifts this book to the level of literature...." Read more
"...the reader, and which make this book of memories so remarkable and illuminating...." Read more
"...of interviews with subjects who had experiences or observations of great moments in history. This is oral history, a form of non-fiction...." Read more
"...As such, it delivers a more effective and memorable overview of the past and especially the current state of mind of the Russian people...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's power. They describe it as a remarkable project that gives voice to those who are rarely heard. The writing is excellent and the quality is good.
"...It was worth the long slog of reading this long and magnificent work, and I recommend it highly to all serious readers." Read more
"...Second, the author has done a very good job of finding a particular type of Russian (namely, the inhabitants described in the first paragraph) and..." Read more
"...A remarkable project, giving voice to those who normally are never interviewed by anyone." Read more
"...It is memorizing, shocking, numbing, and powerful. I strongly encourage anyone to read this who is interested in the psyche of a people...." Read more
Customers find the book honest, sincere, and accurate. They describe it as a unique and wonderful documentary style. The reporting is brilliant on how ordinary people live.
"...peoples varied life stories from the period, breathlessly, as told by themselves, many of which could stand alone as self-contained works of strong..." Read more
"...Brutal, tender, honest, heartbreaking and hopeful. Alexievich is extraordinary writer, who has absolutely earned her Nobel Prize all over again." Read more
"Heartwrenching but brilliant reporting on how the ordinary person lives and suffers in Russia and satellite countries, no matter what political..." Read more
"A wonderful, unique, and authentic style of documentary." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's heartbreakingness. Some find it poignant and a deep, empathic reading experience. Others find the stories depressing and graphic, making it emotionally draining to read.
"...This book frightened and saddened me. There were passages where I, an old veteran, noticed tears on my cheeks...." Read more
"Reading the many perspectives and stories was absolutely fascinating, sad, happy, and everything in between...." Read more
"...this government proceeded instead to ignore, brutalize, imprison, torture, kill, and starve to death a goodly part of its people, enabling their..." Read more
"...It is memorizing, shocking, numbing, and powerful. I strongly encourage anyone to read this who is interested in the psyche of a people...." Read more
Customers have different views on the pacing of the book. Some find it well-written with interesting interviews and stories of kindness. Others mention meanness, cruelty, and unusual thinking.
"...It is journalistic and documentary. It links the people in a collective whole...." Read more
"...But there are also stories of incredible kindness and sharing of what little they have to help a neighbor worse off than themselves...." Read more
"...I think Svetlana is saying the inability to control your instincts and a desire to make the grand gesture is a Russian trait...." Read more
"Extremely well written and researched. A chilling look at the brutality and senselessness of the Stalin purges; however, too much repetition of..." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2017My family, long ago, came from Ukraine so I have a special interest in this book, though most of the interviews are with Russians. Over the decades I read many books, before and after the collapse of the USSR, These books would describe the great events, the leaders, the wars, the financial shenanigans, but they were like getting all the nutritional and marketing information on a food product but never being able to taste it. Do you want to know what the collapse of the USSR meant to most of its people? Read this great book. Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus and Ukrainian parents, spent years on this book. She has a genius on getting people to open up and, distilling thousands of hours of recorded interviews into the most relevant, revealing and interesting passages. That takes a great deal of skill and artistry. . It lifts this book to the level of literature. I cannot remember reading a book that was so moving; much more so than some of the best novels I have read. Svetlana deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature she was awarded in 2015, primarily for her books on the Aphganistan war and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. She was the first journalist, who only wrote non-fiction, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This book frightened and saddened me. There were passages where I, an old veteran, noticed tears on my cheeks. How can people do such things to each other? Do we all have a beast inside us that the right circumstances and forces can release? How can Armenians and Azerbaijani, who had lived peacefully as neighbors for generations, commit atrocities against each other? One witness describes an Azerbaijani gang killing a pregnant woman and then cutting the baby out of her. Another describes a terrified little girl climbing a tree to get away from her pursuers. They surrounded the tree and shot at her until she fell to the ground.
Another interviewer describes what his future father-in-law, a retired NKVD colonel, told him about his service. How he would torture prisoners, make them kneel, and then shoot them behind the ear. This colonel seethed with rage at the new Russia but behind his words I felt shame and pangs of conscience, all repressed. After hearing the colonel’s stories the future son-in-law broke his engagement and fled the family.
Many of the people said they never told their story to anyone, not even family members. But finally they were willing to talk. One man described that as a schoolboy in Ukraine he fell under Communist propaganda requiring denouncing “enemies of the people.” So he denounced his uncle. What had the uncle done? He hid several sacks of flour and other food in the forest because he saw communist gangs going from farm to farm and confiscating all available food. This was the start of the Great Famine in Ukraine 1931-1933 in which several million Ukrainians starved. Stalin’s purpose was to force the farmers to give up their land and go into collective farms. But it was also meant to induce terror and break the spirit of the people, make them docile and obedient. “Bitter Harvest”, a just released dramatic film, deals with this period. Anyway, the uncle was arrested and sent to Siberian prison, the mother disowned her son and threw him out of her house. The family apparently perished in the great famine.
Some old communists describe how they hate predatory capitalism. They were poor in their time but the West feared the USSR and they still believed communism would make life better. They had their pride and ideals. Now they just have their poverty, pensions that may not permit even buying a sausage, though there always seems to be money for cheap vodka.
It seems nothing much has changed. During communism it was the opportunists, the liars, thieves and psychopaths who had the best chance to get ahead. After the USSR fall it was the thugs, bribers, and people with connections and with power who had a jump on everyone else. Strangely, almost none of the old communists question the criminality of the system. One woman, though, whose daughter was badly injured in a terrorist attack in a Moscow subway, said. “The Chechens are doing to us what we did to them.”
Near the end of the book I got irritated and impatient with the long saga of Lena. But maybe Svetlana wanted to make a point about the Russian character. Lena marries for love but, as happens to the majority of the women in these interviews, her husband becomes a heavy drinker and constantly beats her. After a time Lena flees to a boy who loved her in school. Eventually they marry and have two sons. Some years pass but Lena is obsessed with a dream she had of a handsome man who is her soulmate. Corresponding with a lifer in prison Lena decides he is it. She divorces her husband and marries the lifer. No matter that she has married a murderer who is permitted visits twice a year. No matter that her former husband did not drink, or beat her and loved her. A filmmaker hears about Lena and makes a documentary about her life. She and her former husband are invited to Moscow to tell their story before a television audience. Meanwhile, her prison husbands says she lives too far away from the prison, located in the boondocks of Russia and has probably been unfaithful to him. So he demands Lena move to a nowhere town near the prison even though she can visit him only twice a year. Lena complies.
Her prison husband is also a piece of work. He was 18 and walking from a dance with the girl he loved. She asked how much he loved her. He said more than life itself. He would die for her. Dying for me is nothing; would you kill a man for me, the girl asked. Yes, I would, he replied. Good; kill the next man that comes up the road. He did.
Now the Russians may be fascinated with this story but I am disgusted. This is not great passion and tragedy but two people in need of psychiatric help. I think Svetlana is saying the inability to control your instincts and a desire to make the grand gesture is a Russian trait. If you can’t control your instincts and are a romantic you need outside control. So hand the Russians democracy on a platter; they will choose dictatorship. “Everything Russian is filled with sorrow” Svetlana has written.
One lesson I got from the book is that civilization is a thin veneer covering potential savagery; and that democracy is fragile. The “enemy of the people” quote made me think of Trump and what an American journalist described recently about her visit to a beauty salon in Moscow. She was having her nails done when Trump’s name came up. The Russian manicurist started crying. Why, what’s wrong, the journalist asked. “That’s the way it started here,” the beautician said.
Please God not here.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2022Let me tell you a story. It is about people, good people, who lived in the largest country on earth, and for 70 years this land was governed to become-or to resemble-a paradise for the workers inside it. And the rulers of that "worker's paradise" did try to put out written statements telling everyone inside and outside their country that it was such a "paradise" for the least privileged of its own citizens, or that it was fast on the way to becoming in full reality this sort of utopia. And however much they kept telling their own people, their workers, how special and "revolutionary" they were, they never succeeded in their task of building for their citizens their long-promised utopian worker's paradise, and, over the course of their rule, this government proceeded instead to ignore, brutalize, imprison, torture, kill, and starve to death a goodly part of its people, enabling their top leaders to live like kings and magnates. Of course the people remembered this ill-treatment they had received over the course of 70 years, but they also valued the stability of their lives, under a government that provided free education, cut-rate (but shoddily built) apartment residences, free health care. And then, after a few decades of this kind of stability and half-prosperity, again, with everyone hoping that they were really on the "revolutionary" train to earthly perfection, as their commissars had told them to believe, poof, it was all gone. In its place, a decade of shortages of everything, a worthless paper currency, the rise of a class of ultra-rich who cared nothing for anyone else who weren't as rich and privileged as they were. And all the people's sufferings and brave endurance under the hoof of all those promises, and those sacrifices were just forgotten. This is the story of reminiscences by ex-Soviet citizens of a post-Soviet Russia collected in Alexeyev's "Secondhand Time", a splendid book of memories, guilts and sorrows, of what the Soviet union, and its passing, meant to them. What can a reader who did not grow up in Russia, particularly in the Soviet Union, tell these people? What can he tell them what their lives, their decades of hoping, of sacrifices, of sufferings and betrayal by the Regime that so many of them utterly believed in are worth, now? There are in this carefully compiled book, so many agonizing statements by these men and women, life-veterans of a great endeavor that never really worked, that betrayed in the end the very people who believed in it and its leaders the most, which cry out to the reader, and which make this book of memories so remarkable and illuminating. The volume is divided into two big parts: interviews taken 1991-2001, and 2002-2012. Like her respondents, the interviewer, Svetlana Alexievich, is herself a former citizen of the Soviet Union, the worker's paradise that went askew early in its course, and that never got re-righted into something humane and just, but became first a shameless plutocracy and then, under Putin, an utter, bloodthirsty dictatorship. (She has also received the Nobel Prize for literature.) This volume is certainly worth a purchase; it is in such assemblages of one-on-one testimony that authentic and meaningful works of history are made.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2022I like the authors style of interviewing numerous people and collecting and interconnecting their experiences. It is journalistic and documentary. It links the people in a collective whole.
Its starts slowly and there is a sort of lack of continuity, there is no plot to follow. This does mean that you can pick it up and put it down at any page. It’s a kaleidoscope, a fascinating gallery of voices. By the halfway mark, the interest has built and built, and then it becomes a page-turner.
This memoir includes some remarkable individual accounts. It runs through peoples varied life stories from the period, breathlessly, as told by themselves, many of which could stand alone as self-contained works of strong individual interest. Most memorable and notable of which, “on the mercy of memories and the lust for meaning” and “A mans story” (p 195). One womans fickle mind is revealed in “the story of a love affair”. A romance across sectarian divides, to the backdrop of the ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan is told in “On Romeo and Juliet…”. These are snapshots from the recent past, of a country rapidly changing. They are already memorable lives to me. And those are the bits you will want to return to and savour.
Top reviews from other countries
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Sergio Levin KosbergReviewed in Mexico on August 5, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Periodo histórico muy importante
El uso de la técnica de Historia Oral nos ofrece la vivencia directa de los habitantes de Rusia durante esos años.
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HelenaReviewed in Brazil on October 20, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Chegou logo
Gostei que chegou logo e bem embalado. Ainda não li mas sei que vou gostar.
- Tomas DanielisReviewed in Germany on January 1, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read
Books offers unique view into experiences of post-soviet times. Stories of ordinary people creates bridge for understanding without prejudice or need of judgment.
- vivekReviewed in India on September 3, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars The most humane writing
vivek
Reviewed in India on September 3, 2022
Images in this review - John CookReviewed in Canada on August 4, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars From Stalin to Putin
A super book about the very complex and difficult transition from communism to capitalism, from an almost religious sense of communal life to the challenges and disappointments of the competitive market economy.
One person found this helpfulReport