Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

by Svetlana Alexievich

Overview

Winner of the Nobel Prize: “For her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” —Swedish Academy, Nobel Prize citation

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393336863
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/30/1992
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Svetlana Alexievich, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a journalist and author. She lives in Minsk, Belarus.

Editorial Reviews

"“[Alexievich’s] voice is much more than the sum of [her subject’s] voices . . . [making] that war as all-encompassingly present and personal—as real—as any fictional account ever did for any other war."

The New Yorker - Philip Gourevitch

"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

The 1979-1989 Soviet war in Afghanistan, as Russian author Alexievich remarks in this oral history, wrenched boys from their daily life of school or college, music and discos, and hurled them into a hell of filth. She conveys that hell here through the grotesque memories of infantrymen, helicopter pilots, tank crewmen, medical corpsmen and political officers who survived the ordeal, plus those of widows and mothers of fighters--zinky boys brought home in zinc coffins. In his moving introduction, Heinemann (Close Quarters) points out the uncanny similarities between the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the American war in Vietnam. The reality of being a soldier, as this powerful book demonstrates, is everywhere dismally and remarkably the same: grueling, brutal and ugly. Most affecting are the mother scenes, especially one in which mothers of zinky boys meet regularly at a local cemetery and talk about their sons as though they are still alive. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The price of modern war on the character of its people is something America already knew when the decade-long Soviet involvement in Afghanistan began in 1979; any comparison, only briefly mentioned in promotional material for this work, must be supplied by the reader. The Russian aspect of these recollections, with their unfamiliar allusions (partly explained in the footnotes), does not hide a similar sense of disillusionment and suffering. Alexievich uses first-person accounts to illustrate the style of conflict the Soviet soldier faced, as well as to reveal the enormity of the betrayal of the ordinary Soviet citizen that may have contributed to the end of the U.S.S.R. A powerful, lyrical, and poignant portrait of a brutal chapter in modern history. For general reading and any military collection with a Soviet emphasis.-- Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, Cal.

Library Journal

"What Alexievich is doing is giving voice to the voiceless, exposing not only stories we wouldn't otherwise hear but individuals as well."

Los Angeles Times - David Ulin

"Superbly translated…Alexievich’s choice of truth as hero is the right one for the age of Putin and Trump."

Times (UK) - Giles Whittell

"Alexievich is like a doctor probing the scar tissue of a traumatised nation."

Financial Times - Guy Chazan

"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"

Guardian - Shaun Walker

"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."

Herald Scotland - Kapka Kassabova

"A masterpiece of reportage, probably her best book."

New York Review of Books - Timothy Snyder

"[Alexievich's] books…are extraordinary: compelling, profound, and urgent."

Harper's Magazine - Claire Messud

"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."

Evening Standard - Andrew Dickson