"A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st-century Russia: into the lives of oligarchs convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, Bohemian theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators, and playboy revolutionaries. This is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, where life is seen as a whirling, glamorous...

Containing firsthand narrative, personal stories, and groundbreaking reporting, this work examines the Russia under Vladimir Putin, who the authors assert along with his circle of close associates from the former KGB have waged a methodical campaign to end Russia's democratic experiment and reconsolidate power in the Kremlin.

"From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of communism....