Alexievich vs. Suny: Oral History and Soviet Experience

Introduction: Two Approaches to Soviet History

Svetlana Alexievich provides the reader of Secondhand Time with a personal, intimate glimpse into the real-life experiences of Russians during the Soviet era and the post-Soviet era. These glimpses are often chaotic and disordered, but they carry the feeling of authenticity, showing an unfiltered, raw side of life that does not come across in more staid and structured productions — such as Suny's The Soviet Experiment, which reads more like a textbook or a conventional history book: dry, free of emotion, sentiment, personality, and intimacy. While undoubtedly equally authentic in its approach, Suny's work wields a more sophisticated air and exudes a scholarly perspective that does not always deliver to the reader the kind of immediate sensations that people in the twenty-first century are accustomed to having.

In the digital era, audiences have grown used to instant gratification and to jumping from one tidbit of information to the next — and that is precisely what Alexievich is able to do for the reader in both Secondhand Time and The Unwomanly Face of War. Each work offers morsels of authentic experience, of oral history that is uncensored and presented as-is. There is no attempt to pretty it up: the reality of the subject, and the manner in which Alexievich presents it, tells the whole story of the chaos of life in a specific place at a specific time. Suny accomplishes a far more prosaic depiction of Russian life during the Soviet era — but for a sense of how people lived, thought, spoke, expressed themselves, and communicated their feelings, there is no substitute for the kind of oral history that Alexievich provides.

Street Noise and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

In the section entitled "Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversation," Alexievich ties together multiple anecdotes and personal narratives of people recounting their own experiences during the collapse of the Soviet Union. What one quickly sees and learns is the manner in which the institutionalized corruption of the Soviet system impacted the lives of everyday people — how it affected everything, from the way they loved to the way they worked to the way they thought about themselves. For example, one individual who worked in the real estate industry describes the corruption and how the agency was taken over by the nomenklatura: "We should have spent our days and nights out on the squares, fighting with all our might to get what we had come for — a Nuremberg trial for the CPSU. [Instead] we all went home too early. The black marketeers and money changers took power. Contrary to what Marx predicted, after socialism, we're building capitalism."¹

There is also the description of a young woman in love, recounting the experience of seeing tanks in the streets for the first time — feeling alive, liberated, in love with Oleg and in love with the idea of socialism (happy to see Soviet socialism falling, but hoping for a purer socialism to prevail): "Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism… That's not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind — that's what I was standing up for! Or at least that's what I thought."² From such snatches, one learns the confusion of the times and the confusion in ordinary people's minds. There is a sense of holding an ideal, a belief, while being uncertain about what that belief truly is. In the real world, most people are not academics. They do not consistently reflect on their own thoughts, actions, or beliefs. They are passionate but not always self-scrutinizing. This reality is precisely what oral history can teach.

Conclusion: The Soul of History

The pictures of memory are what Alexievich's oral histories provide to the reader: real, authentic, first-person glimpses into the reality of history that Suny's survey textbook misses. Suny may be able to explain the whole in a more organized and coherent fashion — but real life is not always coherent, and if it is not, how can history be viewed as such? Alexievich does not explicitly ask this question, but it is embedded in the rich texts she has collected. The oral histories convey the real soul of history and communicate the actual reality: it is not always ordered or even sensible, but then, rarely is human life. People have the capacity for reason, as Suny demonstrates, but they also have the capacity for emotion and a respect for those things that lie beyond the art of scholars and academics to encounter and adequately define.

Bibliography

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. New York: Random House, 2007.

Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II. New York: Random House, 2017.

Suny, Ronald. The Soviet Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.