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LRB, Vol. 38 No. 20 · 20 October 2016
Vodka + Caesium
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future by Svetlana Alexievich,
translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait
Penguin, 294 pp, £9.99, April, ISBN 978 0 241 27053 0
Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich,
translated by Bela Shayevich
Fitzcarraldo, 694 pp, £14.99, May, ISBN 978 1 910695 11 1
Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some
people still don’t think her books are literature. In fact, they are
collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different
in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has
probably never read. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was
the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil
Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in
Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since
nobody has heard of him. Lately, Alexievich has taken to citing Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah as an inspiration. Her first book, with methodology
already honed, was finished before Shoah was made, so that obviously
can’t be taken literally. But it’s a way of letting a Western audience
know that what she’s doing is exploring suffering and loss through the
voices of the sufferers.
Whatever her genre, Alexievich is an original, with a voice that is hers
alone. That’s to say, it’s hers alone as a writer. Her respondents,
particularly the women, tend to speak in the same voice as Alexievich.
That voice is unmistakably Russian (though Alexievich, who writes in
Russian, is actually of mixed Belorussian and Ukrainian origins). It is
also unmistakably Soviet. She writes about suffering, and that means
that the Gulag and the Second World War are never far away. She writes
about death and the soul – an important word in her lexicon. She is, she
says, a sovok, the post-Soviet pejorative term for Homo sovieticus, and
so are her parents and her friends. She means the kind of sovok who
suffers because of the Soviet identity and baggage they can’t disclaim,
not the kind who glories in it. Only a sovok, she believes, could have
persuaded all those other kindred souls to talk about their guilty,
angry, nostalgic love of the world they have lost.
Alexievich came on the literary scene at the time of Gorbachev’s
perestroika, the high point of her and many of her interviewees’ lives.
Her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face, appeared in Moscow in the
mid-1980s, after a two-year hold-up by the censor. It made a big splash
in Russia but wasn’t much noticed in the West. Her subject was the
Second World War, on which the Soviet literature was enormous, but she
had a genuinely new take: the war through the prism of women’s
experiences. Her heroines, who tell their own stories, had volunteered
as teenagers along with their boyfriends because they wanted to fight
with rifles in their hands (they explain that Soviet schooling had
taught them women could do anything). At the front, they both
experienced the camaraderie of the frontline and, on occasion, felt
excluded from it. They cut their hair short on joining up and tried to
walk like men, but after a while started wanting to be women again and
got annoyed by being issued male underwear. They saw their male comrades
rape German women, and afterwards, even as they helped the weeping women
clean themselves up, were glad to see their tears. They fell in love at
the front, only in many cases to be dumped at the end of the war when
the men went back to their peacetime wives. They were shocked, on their
own return, to find themselves described contemptuously as ‘frontline
wives’ and seen as loose women.
Alexievich loves these women. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she
characterised them as the highest expression of the communist ideal,
‘higher even than the revolution and Lenin’. But she doesn’t see just
the women who went away to war in those terms: it’s a view that also
applies to the women who stayed and bore the burden on the home front.
These are people she knows from her childhood in a Belorussian village
(she was born in 1948) where the women would sit around in the evenings
telling stories about the war, particularly their wartime partings from
the men they loved and their determination to wait for them for ever.
She internalised the ‘sad intonation’ of their talk, she said in a
recent lecture given at Oxford, and learned from them that ‘suffering
was a form of information.’ Thanks to listening to these conversations,
‘I think I’ve known from childhood what love is,’ she told her Nobel
audience in Sweden. Alexievich is prone to saying things like that, on
the sentimental side to a Western ear; I have to tell myself to let it
pass, she’s Russian.
Although Alexievich says there were no men in the village, there was
actually one important man: her father. He and her mother were
schoolteachers and raised their children as Soviet patriots. A lifelong
communist, her father wept when, after witnessing the pointless deaths
of Soviet soldiers in the Afghanistan war (the subject of her 1990 Zinky
Boys), she lost her socialist faith and told him: ‘We are all
murderers.’ In the complex intergenerational relationships of late
Soviet times, that ‘we’, addressed to a parent, mainly means ‘you’, but
not entirely. ‘We were merciless towards our parents,’ she writes in
Second-Hand Time. Yet she sees her father and others of his generation
as tragic figures.
Her next big book was Chernobyl Prayer, published in Russian in 1997.
This was another totally new perspective, the nuclear disaster seen
through the remembered experience of local survivors and clean-up
people, and it too annoyed the authorities, this time the Belorussians,
who wouldn’t allow the book to be published there. Reading Chernobyl
Prayer, one is reminded that Alexievich started off as a journalist and
knows how to write a good story, as she demonstrates in her introduction
to the interviews. There is heroism to spare in this book, but even more
striking is the omnipresent recklessness and stupidity. One of the
problems of a nanny state like the Soviet Union was that everyone got so
used to ignoring the nanny that when what she said was sensible and even
life-preserving they ignored that too. Clean-up men accepted toxic
glasses of milk from locals so as not to spurn their hospitality. Locals
devised their own rules for dealing with the radiation and its
aftermath. If they listened to prohibitions on drinking fresh milk
themselves, it didn’t stop them taking it to the towns to sell. As for
cucumbers, perhaps it was better not to eat them fresh but surely one
could bottle them for the winter.
The contaminated Belorussian landscape was relatively empty, but there
were animals in abundance, including all the cats and dogs left behind,
and a few tough old characters who wouldn’t leave or had surreptitiously
returned. One woman talks about her New Year’s party with local produce
and home-brewed vodka (‘Our very own … Chernobyl-style, with added
caesium and strontium to spice it up’), where they all sang Soviet
revolutionary songs and had ‘a wonderful evening. Just like old times.’
A Russian family kicked out of Central Asia by civil war in the 1990s
and resettled in Belarus because of the cheap and available housing were
excited to see cream and butter in shops. And of course, though this is
one of the least sentimental of Alexievich’s books, we have the dying
children. A paediatrician describes them chasing one another round the
wards shouting: ‘I’m radiation! I’m radiation!’ When they die, the
paediatrician says, ‘it seems to me they look surprised. Baffled. They
lie there looking so surprised.’
*
Second-Hand Time is Alexievich’s attempt to come to terms with the
collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. The awkward title –
sekond-khend (which sounds awful in a Russian accent, though perhaps
that’s the point) is the title of the Russian version too – seems to
mean that time has gone out of kilter for the Russians, who are
experiencing capitalism after socialism, when Marx said it should be the
other way round, and are getting an already used version from the West.
At 694 pages, it’s longer than her other books, and this is probably a
mistake: towards the end, the reader may start flipping pages, feeling
slightly nauseated from a surfeit of suffering. Alexievich has written
that all her books are part of a history of utopia. The utopia here
isn’t so much the Soviet project itself – though that’s part of it – but
perestroika’s attempt to revive it. Her subjects are Soviet nostalgics
whose nostalgia is tempered by the fact that they so badly wanted the
really-existing Soviet Union to be different.
Second-Hand Time is not a coffee table book but a kitchen table one. The
kitchen table was where, in the evenings of late socialism, people sat
around, drank tea and vodka, and talked from the heart. Alexievich sees
herself not as an interviewer but as a friend and neighbour having a
conversation. ‘I reminisced alongside my protagonists,’ she tells us,
although her side of the conversation isn’t recorded. The protagonists
often burst into tears, and sometimes Alexievich weeps with them: ‘Do
you believe me?’ one woman asks, after telling a complicated story about
loss and dislocation. ‘I believe you, I tell her. I grew up in the same
country as you. I believe you! [And both of us cry.]’ The reader often
cries as well, or at least I, with my own Soviet-nostalgia reflexes,
did. But that gets tiring.
The disappointed hopes of perestroika are central to Alexievich’s story.
‘There was a moment,’ she writes, ‘when everyone was a romantic,’ when
people believed that instant freedom was possible and would cure all
ills. ‘We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in
battle.’ But there was no real battle (though she tends to write as if
there had been: ‘I’ve spent my entire life on the barricades,’ she says
at one point), and freedom turned out to be a mirage. ‘Our suffering has
not converted into freedom,’ Alexievich said in her Oxford lecture, but
she still seems to feel it was a reasonable expectation. ‘Freedom turned
out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence … the freedom of
Her Highness Consumption.’ Money, whose significance Russian
intellectuals had so long and so proudly denied, suddenly became the
thing that mattered most. Dignified members of the intelligentsia were
seen queuing up for food at Hare Krishna mobile soup kitchens. The Arbat
district, loved by generations of Muscovites, was profaned by tawdry
commerce and fast food. ‘I found rows of pedlars selling matryoshka
dolls, samovars, icons and portraits of the tsar and the royal family.
Portraits of White Guard generals,’ one respondent complained. Old
Soviet army uniforms, medals and party cards were on sale as souvenirs.
‘I didn’t recognise my Moscow. What city was this?’ She called a
policeman to have the blasphemers punished, but he said he only arrested
people for drugs and pornography.
The reading culture of the Soviet era disappeared overnight. Second-hand
shops were deluged with unwanted books: ‘the intelligentsia were selling
off their libraries. People had grown poor, of course, but it wasn’t
just for the spare cash – it was because ultimately books had
disappointed them.’ Many people didn’t even bother to sell them.
‘Volumes of Gorky and Mayakovsky piled up in the dumpsters. People would
drop the complete works of Lenin off at the paper recycling centre.’
For people who still identified with Soviet values, it was an agonising
time. ‘I’ve fallen behind,’ one woman said, invoking the old Soviet
cliché about the importance of being in the vanguard. ‘Everyone else
transferred from the train that was hurtling towards socialism onto the
train racing to capitalism … People laugh at the sovok … They laugh at
me … [the woman weeps].’ Since the young found it easier to adapt to the
new mores, a gulf opened up in many families. ‘My children already live
according to these new laws. They don’t need me anymore, I seem
ridiculous … I’m a rare specimen! … Isn’t that right? You’re very lucky
to have found me … [She laughs and cries at the same time.]’ This
respondent’s son had gone into trade, a matter of shame to his mother,
and made money. But when he and his friends got drunk, they would still
sing Komsomol songs, and someone was sure to say: ‘It’s a mess out
there. We need a Stalin.’ Another respondent, a 50-year-old doing his
best to grow out of being a sovok, still baulked at the lip-smacking TV
shows on the luxurious life of the rich. ‘It’s humiliating … I lived
under socialism for too long. Life is better now, but it’s also more
revolting.’
One special form of agony came from revelations about the Soviet past.
When Gulag returnees and their relatives asked for their files,
uncomfortable things emerged. Denunciations were the worst, especially
when they came from people who had been liked and trusted. The nice
neighbour who used to take the children fishing turned out to have
informed on a respondent’s father, who was arrested in the Great Purges.
His brother was arrested too, denounced by another family member, Aunt
Olga, ‘a beautiful woman, full of joy’. When asked in her old age about
1937, she said it was the happiest year of her life: ‘I was in love.’
She offered no explanation or excuse for the denunciation. Another
respondent told the (possibly apocryphal) story of a single mother who,
when arrested, asked her friend and neighbour in the communal apartment
to look after her five-year-old daughter. She did so, becoming ‘Mama
Anya’, and when the real mother returned from the Gulag after 17 years
and found her daughter safe, she was beside herself with gratitude. But
then she applied for her KGB file and found out that it was Mama Anya
who had denounced her.
*
The horror stories, recounted at length by many respondents, mainly
concerned the older generation. The respondents themselves – and
Alexievich with them – had better memories. Typically, they were of the
Soviet kitchen table, where the ‘kitchen dissidents’ would sit
‘criticising the Soviet government and cracking jokes. We read samizdat.
If someone got their hands on a new book, they could show up at your
door at any hour – even two or three in the morning – and still be a
welcome guest.’ They would swap precious numbers of journals like Novy
Mir, play the labour camp songs croaked out by Vladimir Vysotsky, and
listen to Voice of America on shortwave (‘I still remember that
beautiful crackling’). At some point in the evening, someone would
always point in jest to the ceiling light (a possible hiding place for
bugs) and say: ‘Did you hear that, Comrade Lieutenant?’ It was a
wonderful parallel life to their workaday existence as ordinary,
non-dissident toilers: their night-time talks weren’t really risky,
since ‘kitchen dissidents’ didn’t take their protests to the streets and
the KGB didn’t really bug them, but all the same ‘it felt a little
dangerous, a little bit like a game.’
Most of the people Alexievich interviewed are people like her,
perestroika-lovers who yearn for their lost utopia but also miss the
non-utopia that was the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was a conscious policy
to select them: ‘I sought out people who had been permanently bound to
the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply, there was no
separating them.’ Nonetheless, she also allows a few other voices into
the mix, although one feels a certain inner resistance on her part,
especially when the unenlightened voices are male. Most of the outliers
get excerpted without context or identification, in single paragraphs or
even single sentences:
I’ve had it up to here with the Jews, the Chekists, and the homosexuals.
The Soviet civilisation! Someone felt the need to put an end to it. The
CIA … They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum.
I’m a simple man. Stalin didn’t touch regular people like me. No one in
my family was affected, and all of them were workers. It was the bosses’
heads that flew, regular people lived regular lives.
A woman who from youth found capitalism more interesting than the Gulag
gets a full interview, but it’s one of the least convincing in the book,
and one suspects Alexievich of editorial intervention. The woman’s
capitalist instincts are expressed in clichéd form – ‘I was looking up …
to the top of the tall ladder of life’; ‘I want to keep moving forward.
I’m a huntress, not docile prey’ – and any admiration the reader might
have for her guts and determination is undermined by heavy-handed
reminders that success doesn’t bring happiness:
I love cats. I love them because they don’t cry, no one has ever seen
their tears. People who see me on the street think that I’m rich and
happy! I have everything: a big house, an expensive car, Italian
furniture. And a daughter I adore. I have a housekeeper … But I live
alone. And that’s how I like it … Loneliness is freedom.
When a young man identifying himself as a ‘Russian Orthodox patriot’
goes into a rant against Jews and the CIA, imperiously telling
Alexievich to be quiet when she apparently disputes his conspiracy
theories (her contribution to the conversation isn’t in the text), he
discredits himself as a respondent: ‘[I can’t stop him]’ is
interpolated, and he only gets a couple more paragraphs. But in one
notable case Alexievich breaks her rule of not including uncongenial
voices. This is the monologue from ‘Elena Yurievna S., third secretary
of the district party committee, 49 years old’ (some interviewees get
full names, others none: it seems to depend partly on whether they say
things Alexievich thinks do them credit). The double interview with
Elena Yurievna and a childhood friend of hers who comes along too,
fortunately with more congenial views, is almost a novella on its own,
taking up fifty pages.
Elena Yurievna deeply regrets the passing of the Soviet Union, but for
the wrong reason in Alexievich’s terms: she was an apparatchik, part of
the power structure, who remains loyal to the Communist Party. She still
loves the word ‘comrade’ and ‘take[s] pleasure in writing “USSR”. That
was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m
living on foreign soil.’ (She isn’t the only one of Alexievich’s
interviewees to say this.) Her father was taken prisoner in the Finnish
war, pulled out of freezing water by Finns, and therefore subsequently
deemed to have betrayed his country and sent to the Gulag for six years.
He accepted the notion of his guilt and remained fully loyal; his
daughter, on the other hand, ‘never liked Stalin. My father forgave him,
but I didn’t.’ The party she proudly served was the post-Stalin one, and
she was ashamed when it finally gave up without a fight. She gives a
memorable description of how, as the end approached, paralysed and
frightened district party officials holed up in their offices reading
detective stories, while scores of erstwhile members returned their
party cards by stealthily throwing them over the fence into the
courtyard. On her colleagues’ subsequent fate, she notes that some
killed themselves, some went into business, and one became a priest.
She is aware that her views aren’t congenial to her interviewer, and
several times interjects that no doubt, since she was saying the wrong
things, her testimony would be discarded. Finally, Alexievich takes the
bait: ‘I promise her that there will be two stories’ – i.e. Elena
Yurievna’s and that of her more appealing friend. ‘I want to be a
cold-blooded historian, not one who is holding a blazing torch. Let time
be the judge.’ A cold-blooded historian! That is the last
characterisation one would make of Alexievich, and she herself usually
repudiates any such aspiration. Elsewhere, she says she’s not a
historian because a) historians don’t go after the big questions of
death, suffering and the meaning of life, b) they don’t deal with evil,
c) they don’t deal with emotions but just want the facts and d) they
don’t base their works on the voices of the people. ‘Evil seems endless
to me. I can’t view it just as a historian,’ she says in War’s Unwomanly
Face. And in Second-Hand Time: ‘History is concerned solely with the
facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s
considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the
world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.’
*
She is wrong, of course, about the current practice of history (though
her description makes sense if applied to professional historians in the
old Soviet Union, where personal stories and oral history were shunned).
Not only is oral history now firmly ensconced in the international
historical profession, but the latest hot thing in the discipline is the
history of emotions, reconstructed from a variety of sources, not only
oral history. ‘In writing, I’m piecing together the history of
“domestic”, “interior” socialism,’ Alexievich writes. ‘As it existed in
a person’s soul.’ Well, I wouldn’t have used the last sentence when I
wrote Everyday Stalinism (1999), but lots of people since then have gone
in search of the Soviet psyche. Overall, what she is trying to do isn’t
so different from what ‘everyday’ historians of the Soviet Union have
been doing for the past couple of decades. So do we want to claim her as
one of us?
Viewed as an oral historian, she might seem on the sloppy side as far as
methodology is concerned. She finds her respondents via acquaintance and
referral and doesn’t tell readers what questions she asked or give
respondents the chance to edit their answers; no ethics committee
approved her project. Of course, the same could be said of Studs Terkel,
whose oral histories of the Great Depression (Hard Times, 1970) and the
Second World War (The Good War, 1984) are routinely cited by
card-carrying members of the American Historical Association. A stamp of
approval from a university ethics committee brings no great intellectual
benefit, and the same could be said of a number of the current
disciplinary rules surrounding oral history. Where Alexievich might be
said to differ significantly from other oral historians, including
Terkel, is in all the weeping she and her respondents do. Yet even here,
the difference may be less than it seems at first sight. Oral historians
and anthropologists learn to project empathy because that’s the way you
get your subjects to talk freely. Most of us also learn to project this
empathy even when we privately disapprove of what our subjects are
saying, though Alexievich, who has a Soviet commitment to sincerity,
only weeps with people she likes.
Still, there’s a reason, apart from the fact that there are no Nobel
Prizes for history, that I’d just as soon Alexievich stayed labelled as
a writer rather than a historian. If she’s a writer, even one who bases
her work on interviews, the assumption is that she’s writing primarily
out of her imagination and only secondarily out of documents. If she’s a
historian, the issue of imagination retreats and some kind of implicit
duty emerges to present the ‘real world’ in all its complexity. What
Alexievich shows us is real, all right, but it’s only a part of the real
Soviet and post-Soviet world, and not a part that, in my judgment,
stands for the whole. Think of Brexit before the vote: everyone you knew
was against it, but then it turned out that all the rest were in favour.
It was the same for decades with Moscow’s ‘kitchen-table dissident’
intellectuals. All the old Moscow hands from the West were friends with
these likeable, educated, morally serious people; indeed, they were
generally the only people in the Soviet Union the Moscow hands knew. By
extension, they were the only people known to readers of the Guardian or
the New York Times, who naturally tended to think that their opinions on
a given topic told us something about Soviet public opinion as a whole.
That was true, but only if you reversed the opinions. Whatever the
kitchen-table dissidents thought, the Soviet public probably thought the
opposite. That is still true in a post-Soviet context. Don’t go to
Alexievich to find out what ordinary people think about the present and
the past in the former Soviet Union, because you’ll only be misled. Read
her as literature, for the evocation of a lost world so warmly familiar
to us, albeit at second-hand, and an era when Western readers could get
innocent satisfaction from backing the good guys in the Soviet Union.
Read it, and feel free to weep.
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