Two decades ago, the Soviet Union and its ‘Red Empire’ fell amid joy and tears. What followed was an unprecedented historical experience. As the world changed around the Soviet man and woman, and the iron curtain lifted, voices could be heard everywhere, talking about the past, present and future. Ukraine-born Svetlana Alexievich, a journalist and storyteller who spent most of her life in the Soviet Union, went around listening to these voices and wrote an incredible ‘book of voices’.
As she said in her Nobel Prize for Literature lecture in 2015, “Flaubert called himself a human pen. I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases and exclamations, I always think, how many novels disappear without a trace! I love how humans talk… I love the lone human voice.”
Alexievich believes that though the Red Empire is gone, the Red Man, or Homo Sovieticus, endures. But in what form? As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski told us in his ‘polyphonic’ book Imperium after undertaking a journey through large swathes of the Soviet Union prior to 1989, “The Homo Sovieticus is not what he is because of any particular consciousness or attitude; his sole social determinant is membership of the Soviet state. Now, after the fall of this state, such people are searching for a new identity.” He wrote that the Homo Sovieticus “is a product of the history of the USSR, a significant portion of which comprises unceasing, intense and massive migrations, displacements, transportations, and wanderings of the population.” Kapuscinski gave us an incredible story of the Soviet empire, travelling across vast stretches of the land, talking to ordinary people. Alexievich tells us about people from various places who had great hopes from the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years, but feel betrayed.
Margarita Pogrebitskaya, a 57-year-old doctor whose husband is Armenian, narrates stories about ‘Soviets’ in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, who woke up one morning, looked out the window and there was a new flag. “Suddenly finding themselves in another country. They became foreigners overnight.” As a million mutinies broke out everywhere, a voice recalled, “Today, when I see war on TV, I can immediately smell that smell… the smell of fried human flesh… a sickening, sweet candy smell…”
In her Nobel speech, Alexievich said, “We missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of country should we have? A strong country, or a worthy one where people can live decently? We chose the former—a strong country. Once again, we are living in an era of power… A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand…” If the Soviet past and present are difficult, the future, too, rues Alexievich, is not where it ought to be.
The only minor quibble with the book is that there are perhaps too many voices and the context is not laid out as clearly as one would have liked. She lets us in on hundreds of voices, but there is no author’s thread tying up the strands.
Sudipta Datta is a freelancer