Time for second-hand. The end of the red man

Having built itself on the ruins of the USSR, the new Russian empire was in no hurry to say goodbye to its past, which, among other things, offered diabolical resistance to the new time. This gave rise to a transitional era that Svetlana Alexievich rightly dubbed the second-hand period.

“Second-hand time” is the monologues of people who were “lucky” to live in the USSR and during its collapse. These revelations — from the admiringly nostalgic to the terrifyingly dreary — form a mosaic portrait of the “Soviet man,” who, despite the difficulties of life at that time — persecution by the authorities, ideological pressure, and ascetic life — mostly misses that time and rarely thinks about the price of that “greatness.”

These monologues are saturated with human suffering, physical and mental pain, painful longing for what was lost, the desire to regret a difficult fate, disappointment in the present and romanticization of some unfulfilled past.

Together with her heroes, the writer shows that the period of Yeltsin's democracy was a screen, that deep social transformations did not take place. And the Soviet system demanded a continuation in another monster...