Storytelling Truth: Lessons from Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
Karolina Cialkaite reviews Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time and its exploration of the collapse of Soviet ideology through personal stories, revealing the tension between meaning and truth. Like therapy, it challenges fixed perspectives and opens space for new understanding.
At various points in our lives, we confront the challenge of deciphering statements that span a spectrum of reception—do they come as gifts, veiled truths, or imposed narratives? Experiencing this ambivalence is one thing, but the subsequent tasks of processing and responding to these statements add necessary layers of complexity. Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, emphasised the importance of analysing the narrative: in making sense of dreams rather than the mere (surface) content. Dreams serve as offerings by providing space to experiment with different perspectives. Another example is the offering of the psychotherapy session itself, where our dialogue becomes a meta-space for insight, giving the potential for transformation in our beliefs by distancing ourselves from entrenched truths. In this space, we not only distinguish but also actively choose between our sense of meaning—the personal significance we derive from experience—and our sense of truth, our understanding of what is real or valid.
This interplay is crucial because our search for meaning often shapes our perceived truths, while questioning those truths can, in turn, reshape the meanings we ascribe to our lives. Psychotherapy becomes the process by which we step back from ourselves to explore both dimensions. By examining the narratives imposed on us or created by us—whether personal, social, or political—we can better understand their emotional impact and how they transform both our sense of meaning and our sense of truth. This approach reveals how we perceive the relationship between our internal experiences and external narratives.
There is a clear intersection between literature and psychoanalysis, particularly in how both engage with storytelling truth. In both writing and therapy, individuals navigate the tension between vision and proof, or the subjective and objective. Instead of focusing on narrative merely for its impact, the emphasis should shift toward the deeper themes and motifs it uncovers. The question then becomes: do our narrative choices serve to protect, challenge, or define the self?
Reconstructing Reality: Perspectives from Post-Soviet Russia
In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich offers a vivid portrayal of Soviet history through the voices of those who experienced its ideology and subsequent collapse. The title Secondhand Time underscores the complex and multifaceted nature of truth, as seen through various conflicting viewpoints on post-Soviet Russia. Depending on the perspective, the meaning of truth can shift significantly; what evokes nostalgia for some might provoke resentment in others.
Often discordant, Alexievich’s documentary approach captures a cacophony of voices, offering space for a diverse array of individuals: veterans of the Afghanistan and Chechen wars, former apparatchiks, technicians, teachers, family members of the Soviet elite, retired factory workers, and emigrants. The book presents poignant testimonies from victims, executioners, Stalinists, supporters, and opponents. These voices illustrate how successive generations perceive the present and the past differently, reflecting the varied experiences of former Soviet citizens and their views on the current state of the country. The mutual incomprehension between these generations is acute:
“…the young who will never understand their parents because they didn’t spend a single day of their life in the Soviet Union – my mother, my son – me…we all live in different countries, even though they’re all Russia.”
“Our little Olga got sick, she was just four months old. In the hospital I kept pacing and pacing with her back and forth through the corridors. And if I managed to get her to sleep for even half an hour, what do you think I would do? Even though I was beyond exhausted…Guess! I always had The Gulag Archipelago under my arm, and I would immediately open it and start reading. In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn. Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world.”
“...Where is our capital? All we have is our suffering, everything that we went through… We’re always talking about suffering. That’s our path to wisdom. People in the West seem naïve to us because they don’t suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We’re the ones who went to the camps, who piled up the corpses during the war, who dug through the nuclear waste in Chernobyl with our bare hands. We sit atop the ruins of socalism like it’s the aftermath of a war. We’re all run down and defeated. Our language is the language of suffering.”
“Everyone is terribly lonely. Life has completely transformed. The world is now divided into new categories, no longer ‘white’ and ‘red’ or those who did time and the ones who threw them in jail, those who’ve read Solzhenitsyn and those who haven’t. Now it’s just the haves and the have-nots.”
The narrative dynamics in the book invite perspective experimentation, as the concept of truth moulds itself to individual worlds—now permissible in New Russia—as people navigate shattered collective illusions and dashed hopes. By presenting texts side by side, the book portrays a society grappling with cultural shock and intergenerational divides, compressing a reshaped world into many perspectives.
Anxieties around notions of triumph and defeat (or love and hate) emerge amidst ideological, political, and emotional transformation. The book explores how truth is constructed, highlighting the tension between singular perspectives and the complexities of hegemonic historical narratives from Old Russia. Beginning with a top-down view in Part 1: The Consolation of Apocalypse, which recounts historical changes chronologically, it shifts to the personal and internal experiences in Part 2: The Charms of Emptiness. Alexievich’s method emphasises the need for individual truth, shaped and reshaped by personal, local, and societal influences throughout an idealised past. This approach presents truth as a new prospect in post-Soviet Russia, as narratives cross linguistic and cultural boundaries, complicating our understanding of truth as it is filtered through memory and experience.
Alexievich’s collection is categorised as oral history rather than fiction, yet some critics question her editing choices. But while the English word truth connotes rigid terms of fact concerning history, the translation of the Russian word 'Istoriya' (История), relates history with story, elucidating the tensions between objective truth and lived experience. With the abrupt upheaval of a pervasive political mindset that suddenly finds itself obsolete in Russia—a jarring experience that reverberates through personal belief systems and the very essence of identity—memories transcribed not only contest the understanding of truth with reality but also prompt the reader to consider how experience affects both our perspective on reality and our interpretation of truth.
Further, there are two words used to distinguish the meaning of truth in Russian, ‘Pravda’ and ‘Istina’, and their connotations evolved during the Soviet era. ‘Pravda,’ commonly associated with factual truth via newspapers, implies an objective truth. But within the context of oral histories in this book, with individuals affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘Pravda’ now takes on a more dubious significance, one which is manipulated to suit political agenda.
In contrast, ‘Istina’, usually representative of immutable truth, transcends individual or societal biases – some would say divine truth. Alexievich’s structuring of subjective experience flips this dichotomy between the two concepts, suggesting that the imposition of a universal truth with a capital 'T' is inherently oppressive. Instead, personal stories weave together an experience that represents an end to an era of a societal, universal Truth. Moving forward, truth has the opportunity to emerge from individual perspectives and interpretations. ‘Istina’ is internalised, within reach of each person's reality.
Personal accounts thus become the paradigm through which truth is reimagined. Embracing the ambivalence of truth, as experienced and narrated, shows that exploring different viewpoints requires a transformative and fluid approach. What once served us may come to an end, making way for new understanding. In Secondhand Time, post-Soviet Russia reveals tensions between dominant narratives, counter-memories, and marginalised voices at various levels (global, national, and local).
The tension between grand historical events and personal lived experiences is reflected in the contrast between big and little in one account: “This is Big History. I have my own little history.” While the notion of truth in history in English often implies a flattened, objective pursuit of the past, storytelling embraces the nuanced, lived experiences of individuals and communities, allowing for the complexity inherent in Russian history, as Istoriya, as little history. As Alexievich states: “I’m piecing together the history of domestic, interior socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.”
This also brings us to the presence of banned texts, or Samizdat, woven into the stories in the book. As evenings unfolded, kitchen conversations would drift from politics to literature. Kitchens became spaces where people read and exchanged forbidden books and writings. Copies were made and passed from one household to another, circulating political works, fiction, poetry, and philosophy—ways to hold onto hope and confront disillusionment. The stories preserved through Samizdat and in Alexievich’s book speak to a deep need to understand oneself beyond the reach of political authority. They reveal how people longed for a space where personal experience could be explored publicly. In the privacy of kitchens, a complex Russian culture thrived, shaped by individual lives rather than by the monotonous dictates of the regime.
Interpreting Reality: The Psychotherapeutic Process
Entrenched structures dictate our understanding of the world– whether they're societal norms, belief systems, or personal biases—a singular form often dominates, obscuring alternative perspectives and perpetuating repetitive patterns. This is also to say that perspective-shifting necessitates the transformative process in psychotherapy.
Psychoanalytically, we proceed by observing how we experience the narratives of individuals: do they speak to us in documentary prose, or do they give us fiction (via metaphors, or fantasies)? Psychotherapists aren’t as concerned with determining what is objectively true. Instead, it's about picking up on the signals of a person’s experience in the context of a dialogue. The situation, therapy in this context, is seen as a textual narrative to be received, understood, and responded to. Psychoanalysts ‘read’ not only the semantic contents of the patient's words but also, for example, prosody and force in speech, facial expressions, and so on.
In the process of psychotherapy, as with Secondhand Time, history serves as the backdrop against which narratives unfold, shaping personal understandings of events and their significance. Questions about the objectivity and veracity of the psychotherapeutic event, the relation of the unconscious to intended meanings, the relation of theory to practice, the relation of explanation to understanding, the relation of empathy to interpretation, the relation of present meaning to past events, are forever present, but these are not to be seen as parameters in which to seek out objective truth. Instead, it’s there to warn us of blind spots: urging both the psychotherapist and the individual to avoid fixating on one position.
Interpretation of stories in the context of psychotherapy involves observing before experiencing, experimenting, and only after, understanding: the themes, patterns, and underlying meanings within these narratives. It’s important to consider how they may change over time, particularly in response to the therapeutic relationship. Transference, in one step, is a developmental impasse and can indicate how past experiences dictate present perceptions. Through the use of transference, the act of projecting onto the therapist—them becoming representative of someone or something familiar—and thereby influencing the positions we assume in the relationship.
To know the narratives we create for ourselves and are done to us is to acknowledge that there is more than one version of how to interpret experience. Generally speaking, ‘character’ and ‘transference’ may be seen as models for where the individual stands in entering therapy; they may be constrained to a fixed form, through which reality is apprehended, and by which the world is approached. Just as a story allows a writer to experiment with perspective, psychoanalysis invites individuals to reimagine their stories, open to reinterpretation and revision.
What significance do the stories of witnesses acknowledging multiple truths hold? Such an approach might allow us to reconsider our stances, leading to a reconciliation of ‘my’ truth with that of others. Whether in literature or therapeutic dialogue, new possibilities in understanding are cracked open. Within each gradation of experience, there’s an opportunity for ourselves to reshape and transcend fixed perspectives. It is in dismantling hegemonic narratives, which represent singular perspectives of the world—internal and external—that we cultivate a multiplicity of viewpoints. Storytelling truth serves as a boundless domain where truths are not constrained but rather liberated—a space where the author, contributors, and readers alike are empowered to enter worlds, free from the limitations of predetermined visions.
Karolina Cialkaite is training in psychodynamic psychotherapy and lectures on fashion communication at University of the Arts, London.
