What did the Soviets lose in those years?

the confusion and loss of this generation who have experienced this great change is a foregone conclusion.

I have always been curious about the Soviet Union. Having also experienced the cruelest political horrors and ideological oppression in the 20th century and perhaps even in the history of mankind, I wonder why the Soviet Union can still have some world-class names: Pasternak, Shostakovich, Tarkovsky. But our side is almost desolate.

after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the once-great communist empire seemed to suddenly fall into silence and no longer make a sound culturally, while the once great Russian nation also changed from being feared to being despised and ridiculed. It has become a "fighting nation" in the eyes of the Chinese people who will always appear in all kinds of funny videos. It may be that I am ill-informed. Anyway, the only Russian cultural person I can think of who has enjoyed an international reputation in the past three decades is the high-pitched Vitas. And I don't think Opera 2 is brilliant art.

A few years ago, I bought a brick-heavy Collection of Russian Contemporary novels (2006 edition), through which I wanted to understand the current state of the inner world of Russians today. I want to see how this nation with a great literary tradition writes about its life experiences after great changes. However, after reading it, I was very disappointed, even very angry. The people who once produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Tsvitayeva, what kind of thing is this now?! The spiritual world is narrow and gray, and the literary level is inferior and vulgar-this great literary nation, which once breathed the clean air on the summit of Mount Olympus, has fallen even lower than dust! I almost feel that there are two Russian people: the present one has nothing to do with the previous one!

I only read the book halfway before I put it down in disgust. The only thing that impressed me was the burial of Valentin Rasputin. Rasputin is an older generation of writers who have made achievements in the Soviet era. I remember reading his Siberian novella in a selection of foreign literary works, the details of which have been forgotten. but the lyrical style left in my mind a vision of a foreign land of imagination.

this "burial" is about how a lonely woman buries her dead mother in a cold, dark building in a desolate and abandoned place like the remains of Communism. With no money to pay for the funeral, or even to get legal procedures, she had to bury her mother in a wild forest on a dark, slippery night with the help of an old lover.

this more than 30-page short story is depressing and suffocating. it describes a society that is desperate to the extreme. "in a hopeless era, everything that used to depend on for survival is gone." There is nothing left. "this is an era when one lives without any support, and life is sunk in the abyss of nothingness." This desolation and barrenness even erode the text itself. The novel only describes a depressing story with a kind of mediocre realism but fails to give it aesthetic salvation. This has something to do with the poetic expanse and open Siberia described by Rasputin in the past as if it were in two completely unrelated parallel universes.

in Alexyevich's second-hand time, I read a story that almost went out like this, but the result was even worse!

Lyudmila was an underage girl at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her single mother, once a technician at the Geophysical Institute, has lost her job. Their grandmother, who depended on each other, died, and they called an ambulance, but could not afford the money.

when they had no choice but to do so, they did not know where some mysterious people came from. They seemed to be kind enough to help mother and daughter bury their grandmother and give her a decent funeral. However, these people were not good, and then they grabbed the only property of the mother and daughter-their apartment, banished them to the countryside, and Lyudmila was once sent to an orphanage.

these people are new things in Russia-gangs. In this jungle society where there is no longer any "veil of tenderness" left in the jungle society, people as weak and helpless as the mother and daughter are destined to become the remnants of the beast's mouth.

Lyudmila's mother used to be such a lovely person:

 after all this, she began to drink too much and became grumpy.

later, the country farm where they worked was also closed. The mother and daughter were homeless and had to go back to the city, wandering around, relying on others, and being evicted. In the end, Lyudmila's mother was so humiliated that she drank a bottle of vodka and crashed into a train and died. After going through numerous twists and turns, Lyudmila was lucky to be bequeathed by a distant relative and finally got a place to live. It is said that their apartment has been resold three times, while the bandits who plundered them at that time had already been shot in the fire.

I still remember the rumors I heard about Russia in the 1990s, the most important point was that Russians were "poor". After reading many stories in this book, I realized that ordinary Russians at that time were not only poor in the sense of money but poor in all respects. It is not just the economy that collapses, but everything that ordinary people depend on falls apart: the party has committed suicide, the state apparatus has been paralyzed, the unit has disappeared, welfare has gone bankrupt, values have been shattered, social order has fallen into a state of near anarchy, life is boring, culture has been trampled into the mud, human dignity has been lost-in a word, people have lost everything that used to be called "life". This is a nation that has been "uprooted".

No wonder some people miss the "life" that once existed in the Soviet era.

readers may not recognize, or even despise, her view of "the Great Socialist Motherland".

Love, but you can't deny this kind of enthusiasm for life and the joy of life. However, in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all bright colors became a thing of the past and Moscow became dim the Soviet era, with Stalin's death in 1953, the harshest and most terrifying period was over. A kind of knowledge life began to breed during the reign of Khrushchev: "kitchen culture". On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, this kind of intellectual life became very active and passionate. While criticizing the system, people look forward to freedom and find a meaning of life in a poor and full life.

there are countless intellectuals living in Moscow, and the streets are full of teachers, doctors, researchers, and technicians. People love poetry, movies, music, and are keen on lectures and concerts. Various interest groups are active in the school: astronomy, geology, drama. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, what came with "freedom" was not the kind of good life that people originally dreamed of in the kitchen. Philosophy professors become plumbers and musicians become black market vendors. There is only one interest and only one shameless value left in society: money. Only the nouveau riche is respected, and people only talk about goods and make money.

what kind of literature can you expect in such an age? I suddenly understood why the Collection of Russian Contemporary novels was so badly written, and I was even surprised: how amazing it is that someone is still writing a serious novel!

however, former Soviets in republics have lost even more than former Soviets in Russia who have lost almost all their lives. "Romeo and Juliet. Margarita and Abfaz are about a pair of lovers, a male Azerbaijani and a female Armenian who live in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In the Soviet era, everyone was brotherly and close to each other:

after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Azerbaijanis turned against the Armenians overnight and began to slaughter-- elsewhere, the identity of the butcher and the slaughtered were matched-

the same killings took place every day in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and many former Soviet republics.

however, even under such harsh circumstances, the two got married because of their deep love. Later, to avoid the massacre, Margarita fled to Moscow, where she waited for Abfaz for seven years. When Abfaz went to Moscow, his relatives asked him, "where are you going?" "I'm going to find my wife." "if you want to go to our enemy, then you are not our brother or our descendant."

the two are finally reunited, Romeo and Juliet. But in Moscow, they are despised refugees and untouchables in their former homeland-

it turns out that the former Soviet people living in Russia are not the most unfortunate, at least they still have the right to stand on this land. Margarita and Abfaz, are truly rootless, abandoned by their families and races, have no motherland, have no place on the earth, and all they have left are their scarred bodies and their love for each other.

in every book, Alexyevich painstakingly describes love: Russian fanaticism, dizziness, heartbreaking, heart-wrenching love. Even in an inhuman disaster like Chernobyl, she was trying to salvage love. For Alexyevich, love seems to be the final redemption in the face of the cruelty and nothingness of this world. In the penultimate chapter of the book, she writes a story about a woman that seems to alienate from the theme of the whole book.

this beautiful woman living in abject poverty (she went to a music school and can play the piano) fell madly in love with a life-long prisoner she knew only through correspondence, leaving her husband and three children behind. He traveled thousands of miles to the prison of the convict to marry him. This is a woman like the wife of a December party in tsarist Russia, and even Russians have only read about such a person in books.

I have wondered for a long time why there is such a love story that has little to do with the times in a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union. My conclusion is: perhaps the meaning of this story lies in some counterpoint-the whole second-hand time is about a drastic, broken change, only this story is about some kind of immutable Russia, some kind of continuation of human nature.

however, the end of this woman is miserable. As the years go by, the love in the prisoner's heart dies slowly, and his eyes become cold and empty.

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in the end, love also fails. So what is left in Russia?

"second-hand time" was published in 2013, and the interviews spanned from 1991 to 2012. Most of them are frustrating, dark stories, almost without a hint of light. Most of the people interviewed are losers of the new era, and there are only a few winners who embrace the trend, even in the narration of these winners, there are traces of pain and hatred, and in their positive progress, I only see desire and strength, but no real joy. History will eventually move forward, and Russians will certainly move towards a better future, but the confusion and loss of this generation that has experienced this great change is a foregone conclusion.