Both Sides Now

I've looked at life from both sides now,from win and lose,and still somehowit's life's illusions I recall.I really don't know life at all.

—Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now," 1969

These three books, written by Soviet-born individuals, are about the same thing: what it meant to be Soviet and the radical, wrenching adjustments that perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union required. Other authors—political scientists, anthropologists, and historians—have tried their hand before at analyzing late Soviet socialism and the transition(s) to the Russia of the 21st century. Among them, Alexei Yurchak's account of komsomol´tsy unconsciously practicing post-Soviet behavior before 1991, Stephen Kotkin's structuralist approach to why Mikhail Gorbachev's renovationist efforts were doomed, and Serguei Oushakine's exploration of psychic trauma in Barnaul have nearly owned the territory, ceding some slight ground to biographies such as Archie Brown's sympathetic handling of an embattled Gorbachev, Tim Colton's apologia for Boris Yeltsin, and Leon Aron's more fawning treatment.¹ We also have the memoirs of key players in the rollicking game of regime change and some excellent accounts by journalists.²

The three books under review here differ from previous works and from one another in several obvious and fundamental ways. Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time evokes the "vanished way of life" of Soviet civilization by weaving together hundreds of conversations with ordinary people recorded between 1991 and 2012. Their recollections, though prompted by the events of the near present, manage to evoke the broad sweep of Soviet history. Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking uses celebratory meals and their preparation as a mnemonic device to reconstruct the Soviet era as she and her mother experienced it before their emigration as "refugees" in 1974. She structures the book by decades, beginning with a sumptuous feast from late imperial Russia, proceeding through the meager fare available during the early Soviet years, and so on, up to and including the bounteousness of Putin's Russia. Arkady Ostrovsky's The Invention of Russia is a more conventional history, and the only one of the three under review to bother with the scholarly apparatus of notes and an index. Ostrovsky, who left Moscow in 1992 to pursue a doctorate at Cambridge in comparative literature, dwells in the world of the media and its moguls. Relying on memoirs by, and interviews he conducted with, a few dozen dramatis personae, he takes the reader on an excursion through the ups and downs of Soviet print journalism as practiced from the Thaw years through zastoi and perestroika, before shifting in the second part of the book to what one of his heroes, Aleksandr Iakovlev (Alexander Yakovlev), called "the television whirlpool" of the post-Soviet decades (176).

An oral history, a family memoir, and an analysis of politics and the media, the three books also differ significantly in terms of perspective. Alexievich, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, considers herself "an accomplice." Her aim, as she states in the opening lines, is "paying our respects to the Soviet era" by "trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama" (3–4). The book's subjectivity is overwhelmingly that of her interlocutors. They sigh, get angry, cry, break into song, and go silent in mid-sentence. Alexievich is very sparing with her own comments. Ostrovsky, by contrast, positions himself as an omniscient outsider, one with sharply critical views of "pro-Western liberals who [in the 1990s] … used the media to enrich themselves" but "now act...