A review by ellenguyenphuonglinh
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexiévich

5.0

I perceive the world through the medium of human voices. They never cease to hypnotise, deafen and bewitch me at one and the same time. I have great faith in life itself—I suppose I'm an optimist by nature. At first I feared that the experience of my first two books [about World War II] in this 'voice genre', as I call it, might actually get in the way of this third venture. I needn't have worried, for this was a totally different war with much more powerful and merciless weaponry: take, for example, the 'Grad' rocket-launcher, which is capable of dislodging a mountainside. The bitter psychology of this conflict was also very different from the positive mood of the nation as a whole during World War II: Afghanistan wrenched boys from their daily life of school and college, music and discos, and hurled them into a hell of filth. These were eighteen-year-olds, mere school-leavers who could be induced to believe anything. It was only much later that we began to hear such thoughts expressed as, 'We went to fight a Great Patriotic War, namely World War II, but found something totally different.' Or, 'I wanted to be a hero but now I don't know what kind of a person they've turned me into.' Such insights will come, but not soon and not to everyone.