Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich Read Free Book Online Page A

novel written by Ivan Goncharov published in 1859, Oblomov is an idle aristocrat whose extreme laziness and apathy gave rise to the expression “oblomovism.” Stoltz, his friend, is an active and energetic young man.
    *3 Khrushchyovkas are cheap, prefabricated concrete panel or brick apartment blocks that started being built in the 1950s, during the administration of their namesake, Nikita Khrushchev. Though they are cramped and shoddy, they provided many families with their first-ever private apartments.
    *4 Alexander Galich (1918–1977), Bulat Okudzhava (1924–1997), and Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1990) were singer-songwriters who rose to popularity in the 1960s, primarily among the Soviet intelligentsia. Their songs were known for being anti-Soviet.
    *5 Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet and essayist who died in the gulag.
    *6 Anatoly Rybakov (1911–1998) was a Soviet writer most famous for his anti-Stalinist Children of the Arbat tetralogy.
    *7 Between 1936 and 1953, over twenty thousand political prisoners were executed on the Butovo Firing Range as victims of Stalin’s purges. It is located just outside of Moscow.
    *8 As the minister of foreign affairs from 1985 to 1991, Eduard Shevardnadze (1928–2014) was responsible for many important foreign policy decisions in Gorbachev’s administration. He was the president of Georgia from 1992 to 2003. Alexander Yakovlev (1923–2005) was a Soviet politician and historian, sometimes called the “godfather of glasnost.” He was one of the main theoreticians behind perestroika.
    *9 Sergey Averintsev (1937–2004) was a philologist, cultural historian, translator, poet, and specialist on antiquity and Byzantine culture. He lectured on Russian spiritual traditions.
    *10 Yegor Gaidar (1956–2009) was an economist and the author of a series of controversial “shock therapy” reforms that defined the early post-Soviet Russian economy. As a result of these reforms, which entailed the privatization of all major Soviet industries, most of the largest formerly Soviet enterprises ended up in the hands of a small group of Russian executives who would come to be known as the Russian oligarchs. At the same time, due to reform-related hyperinflation, most Russians’ assets and savings were devalued wholesale, landing a large percentage of the population in poverty overnight. Many Russians blame the ensuing high crime rates and low quality of life on Gaidar’s reforms.
    *11 Mikhail Shatrov (1932–2010) was a Soviet dissident playwright.
    *12 The nomenklatura refers to the Soviet government elite.
    *13 The Russian White House, originally known as the House of the Soviets, is the primary Russian government office and serves as the official office of the Russian prime minister. In 1991 and 1993, it was a locus of protest: first during the 1991 coup d’état and then, in 1993, during the Russian constitutional crisis, when the building was stormed.
    *14 Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), also known as Iron Felix, was responsible for creating and developing the Soviet secret police. The “Iron Felix” also refers to a gargantuan statue of Dzerzhinsky that stood on Lubyanka Square in Moscow from 1958 to 1991, when it was removed following the failed coup. Many statues of Dzerzhinsky remain standing throughout the former Soviet Union, where towns and streets and squares continue to bear his name.
    *15 The Lubyanka is an infamous Moscow prison that also served as the KGB headquarters in Soviet times. Its name is synonymous with the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet secret police, especially during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Today, it houses the directorate of the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation, the FSB.
    *16 Viktor Astafiev (1924–2001) and Vasil Bykov (1924–2003) were both prominent Soviet novelists who wrote candidly about social realities and war.
    *17 Sergey Kirov (1886–1934) was an early Bolshevik leader whose assassination,