Boys In Zinc

By Svetlana Alexievich

Penguin, £9.99

Review by Julie McDowall

SVETLANA Alexievich’s books are almost unbearable. The words scream off the page, producing an onslaught of images which the reader must piece together into some kind of ghastly jigsaw.

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. They are torrents of pain and distress and this book, about the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is equally horrific. Her brutal books deal with the recent past, so we’re denied the comfort of believing such matters are safely sealed in history. Human nature never changes. As one veteran tells Alexievich, the war proved we’re simply animals “overlaid with a thin coating of culture”.

The Afghan war has been likened to Vietnam in that it shocked the population at home and provoked dissent, opening a devastating crack into the monolithic Soviet Union, and arguably precipitating its demise. Women made wild with despair when their men came home in zinc coffins lashed out at the regime; the gulag could not compete with their grief. As for the soldiers and medics who returned alive, they were met, not with the gratitude which greeted their forefathers in the Second World War, but with jeers. They were seen as limping, living symbols of a corrupt power, a distasteful reminder of the old days: “their mouths are full of blood and they’re still talking.”

As boys, the soldiers heard gargantuan tales of heroism from 1941 which provided a mythical masculinity, but the daily submission of Soviet life offered them little chance to emulate it, so when the Motherland spoke of “sacred duty” in Afghanistan, many were desperate for a chance at glory. Soon they found that instead of matching their grandfathers, “we played the part of the Germans”.

Alexievich visited Afghanistan during the conflict but also spoke to veterans, widows, medics and mothers back home in the USSR. Recording their testimony, she calls herself “a historian of the untraceable” because no grand history book, heavy with dates, flags and maps, will note the smell coming from those stacked zinc coffins – “a bit rank, like wild sheep” – or will tell you of the bereaved mothers who rush to their sons' graves after work each evening as though going on a date, or who lie on the soil through cold Russian nights.

This merciless book delivers the terrible truth and the impossible horror of war. A nurse sees a “roasted man … something shrivelled up, covered in a yellow crust. No screaming, just a growling from under the crust.” A soldier finds a wounded child whose arm is almost severed but when he tries to help her “she bolts, screaming, with her little arm dangling loose, about to fall off”. A boy remembers the “distinctive wet splat” of a bullet killing his friend: “You turn him over onto his back; that cigarette you gave him is still clutched in his teeth. It’s still smoking.”

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. There is a pinprick of hope as the soldier remembers his mother but it wanes when we hear wounded comrades cry in their delirium: “Home! Home! To Mama!”

The events related here are appalling. “A human being should not be subjected to trials like this. A human being cannot endure trials like this. The medical term for this is “vivisection”: experimenting on living creatures,” writes Alexievich. Her opinions are clear. With her previous works there was a sense of her standing in the wings while her speakers went onstage alone under a fierce spotlight but she is vividly present here, making it a deeply political book as well as an oral history. She includes extracts from her personal Afghanistan notebooks as well as her passionate comments at a 1992 trial in Minsk where some of the soldiers and mothers in the book suddenly accused her of misrepresenting them.

Initially these courtroom scenes, placed at the end of the book, seemed jarring, like an afterthought. 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. Likewise with Russia which opened itself up through Glasnost, overthrew communism, but now lapses into authoritarianism. Alexievich’s mission has always been the revelation of the Soviet soul.