One of the book’s most revelatory moments comes during an interview with a Kremlin official who prefers to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. “Russia,” he notes, “has a tsarist mentality.… Whether it’s a general secretary or a president, either way it has to be a tsar.” It’s a point of view Alexievich regretfully admits she shares – and the reason, she says, that Russia has failed to embrace democracy.
Not that she demonises Russian President Vladimir Putin; for her, the country’s problem is a collective one. “Putin symbolises the feelings and sentiments of pretty much the majority of Russian citizens,” Alexievich says. “It looks like people in Putin’s immediate circle who are oriented toward an anti-Western, Slavophile rhetoric…and who used to be on the margins of political thought…are moving closer to the president.”
Some, such as the right-wing Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, advocate a return to totalitarian values, and as Secondhand Time unfolds, the spectre of Josef Stalin wafts in and out of the book like Banquo’s ghost. Many members of Russia’s older generation whom Alexievich interviewed yearn for the days when the dictator ruled the Soviet Union with absolute power. One extraordinary conversation with an 87-year-old veteran of World War II leaves Alexievich bewildered (she occasionally inserts her feelings between brackets).
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