Zinky Boys : Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War - Svetlana Alexievich

Zinky Boys

Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

By: Svetlana Alexievich, Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

Paperback | 21 February 2023

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From 1979 to 1989 a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties--and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR--it was called by reviewers there a "slanderous piece of fantasy" and part of a "hysterical chorus of malign attacks"--Zinky Boys presents the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. What emerges is a story that is shocking in its brutality and revelatory in its similarities to the American experience in Vietnam. The Soviet dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins (hence the term "Zinky Boys"), while the state denied the very existence of the conflict. Svetlana Alexievich brings us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan War: the beauty of the country and the savage Army bullying, the killing and the mutilation, the profusion of Western goods, the shame and shattered lives of returned veterans. Zinky Boys offers a unique, harrowing, and unforgettably powerful insight into the realities of war.
Industry Reviews
"[Alexievich's] books...are extraordinary: compelling, profound, and urgent." -- Claire Messud - Harper's Magazine
"Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books." -- Philip Gourevitch - New Yorker
"What Alexievich is doing is giving voice to the voiceless, exposing not only stories we wouldn't otherwise hear but individuals as well." -- David Ulin - Los Angeles Times
"A masterpiece of reportage, probably her best book." -- Timothy Snyder - New York Review of Books
"Superbly translated...Alexievich's choice of truth as hero is the right one for the age of Putin and Trump." -- Giles Whittell - Times (UK)
"Alexievich is like a doctor probing the scar tissue of a traumatised nation." -- Guy Chazan - Financial Times
"Alexievich put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of...power and insight" -- Shaun Walker - Guardian
"Shattering and addictive...This is a polyphonic tour de force that shines a light on war, the plight of heroes, and why post-Soviet Russia is as it is." -- Kapka Kassabova - Herald Scotland
"Alexievich's 'documentary novels' are crafted and edited with a reporter's cool eye for detail and a poet's ear for the intricate rhythms of human speech. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a confessional. This is history at its rawest and most uncomfortably intimate." -- Andrew Dickson - Evening Standard
"For the past 30 or 40 years [Alexievich has] been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual, but [her work is] not really about a history of events. It's a history of emotions-what she's offering us is really an emotional world...a history of the soul." -- Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy

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