Boys in Zinc: Svetlana Alexievich (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

It is a drastic change of subject and tone: the agonised mother revealing her pain was now shrill and accusatory, but it becomes clear that this concluding section complements the book perfectly as it’s simply a continuation of the story: horror, an overflowing of passion and pain, then bitter retreat. In 1972 she graduated from Belarusian State University and became a correspondent for the literary magazine Nyoman in Minsk (1976). Like American involvement in Vietnam, the Soviet Union's decision to commit its armed forces to Afghanistan turned out to be more difficult than they could have imagined.

Prior to her departure, she was the last member of the Coordination Council who was not in exile or under arrest. He hadn’t sent a telegram to warn me that he was coming, and I had gone to my friend’s flat to celebrate her birthday.

In fulfilment of my duty as a soldier, I have to inform you that Senior Lieutenant Valerii Gennadievich Volovich was killed today at 1045 hours. Over ten years untold damage was done to the Afghan nation and eventually to the Soviet Union itself. Weaving together their stories, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict.

When he was away I got used to the waiting, but if I saw a funeral car in town I’d feel ill, I’d want to scream and cry. Diplomats from Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden began to keep a round-the-clock watch on Alexievich's home to prevent her abduction by security services. During the 2020 Belarusian protests Alexievich became a member of the Coordination Council of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement and main opposition candidate against Lukashenko.I remember he said we’d only beaten the Americans here by one hour, and everybody was waiting to welcome us back home as heroes. Sembra una Spoon River della guerra in Afghanistan dei russi, con la differenza che qui parlano anche i vivi, ma chissà come alla fine hai la sensazione che siano morti anche loro.

People mostly got killed either in their first months when they were too curious, or towards the end when they’d lost their sense of caution and become stupid. An investigative journalist from Belarus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, her works are oral histories of various Soviet cataclysms – Chernobyl, the collapse of communism, women in the Second World War – told through blunt personal testimony. a much needed documentation of the human cost and consequences in the former ussr of that misguided intervention whose effects are still with us today. But the horror is weirdly eased by occasional surreal moments, such as the Afghan children who scamper down from the mountains at night to scatter heroin in the Soviet camps, hoping to stupefy the invader, or the miles of wheat fields set alight which brought a warm flash of nostalgia to one soldier as “the fire carried the childhood smell of bread up into the air”, reminding us the bloodied warrior is still just a Soviet boy who misses home and hearth, and perhaps if war is waged by ordinary people then it can be stopped by those same ordinary people.On 20 August, Alexander Konyuk, the Prosecutor-General of Belarus, initiated criminal proceedings against the members of the Coordination Council under Article 361 of the Belarusian Criminal Code, on the grounds of attempting to seize state power and harming national security. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. They are torrents of pain and distress and this book, about the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is equally horrific.