Because men are greedy, they will never want to share and Karl Marx had a dream that this might be possible. The above joke aside, communism is a good idea, if only it was invented for other species than men. Yes, there were a lot of people who saw something positive in their oppression and partly, I even understand them. With her work, the author has put together a vivid history of the USSR, of its failures and its positive sides. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands him.' But one of my favourites is: ' In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred - nothing.' ' How do you tell a communist? It's someone who reads Marx. 'Reader' is our primary occupation.' Or the way they joke about politics, the best jokes always are from oppressed people. I liked how they said ' For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, it's a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox.' and ' We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I always loved Russian literature.Īnd then there are the stories she tells that get you closer to her interviewees.

Not exactly the same but our lives were still closer to that than to our children's nowadays. Having grown up during a different time, we probably went through a lot that the former Soviets had to go through after their state broke apart. I also could relate to many of the stories. I love how understanding she is with everyone, how she manages to report their feelings, their stories as if we are there with the storytellers. This is what makes politics so hard, trying to please everyone is not possible, there is always someone who disagrees with a certain decision. She wrote down their life stories and you can understand every single one of them. The author wrote down her interviews with former citizens of the Soviet Union, people who liked the new system, people who disliked it, people who loved it, people who hated it. After she received the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, I found many more of her books and 'Second Hand Time' sounded like a great read. I discovered Svetlana Alexievich three years ago when she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) and then decided to read ' Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster'. ' Born in the USSR - that's a diagnosis.' This is what one of the people interviewed by the author said and it would have been a great title for this book, as well.

The Last of the Sovjets' ( Russian: Время секонд хэнд = Vremja sekond khend) - 2013

Second hand time alexievich