Svetlana Alexievich, U Voiny—Ne Zhenskoe Litso: Poslednie Svideteli [War Does Not Have a Woman’S Face: the Latest Witnesses]

Book Reviews (2014), by Kristin Roth-Ey about Soviet media (2011), and by me about Western popular culture in the “closed” city of Dnipropetrovsk in Soviet Ukraine (2010) demonstrate, the cultural exchange with the capitalist West and the commercialization of cultural consumption in the USSR after Iosif Stalin contributed to the ideological and economic erosion of the Soviet system of cultural production. Tomoff’s book is a welcome addition to this literature, which examines how cultural exchange during the Cold War helped to dismantle the Soviet imperial project by integrating the Soviet cultural system into Western “global” cultural production. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/3/231/699069/jcws_r_00675.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ✣✣✣ Svetlana Alexievich, U voiny—ne zhenskoe litso: Poslednie svideteli [War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face: The Latest Witnesses]. Minsk: Mastatskaya litaratura, 1985. Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, trans. by Julia Whitby and Robin Whitby. London: Chatto, 1992. 197 pp. Reviewed by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988–1991) and to Russia (1991–1992) In the Iliad Homer calls all the fighting men “heroes,” even when they are behaving in a decidedly unheroic fashion on the battlefield. We do the same today. For the West and the former Soviet Union, the Second World War was a war of national survival. Victory was a clear and concrete objective. Few people questioned its purpose. It was a war in which ordinary people did their duty. Some did things of extraordinary bravery. Many did not. But today we look back on all those who fought in the Second World War as heroes, the Greatest Generation. Even in lesser wars we tend to see soldiers as heroes—the British soldiers who fought in the South Atlantic in 1982, the coalition soldiers who fought in the Gulf War in 1991. There is good reason for this convention, or fiction. The pain of war is so great, the loss of young lives often so futile, that the aura of heroism is invoked to ease the agony. The convention is harder to sustain when the justification for the war is disputed, as it was during the U.S. war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The soldiers who returned from those wars were often blamed for fighting an unjust war by those who had seen no fighting themselves. The soldiers felt bitterly betrayed. Years passed before some justice was rendered, before they, too, were called heroes. Svetlana Alexievich is an outspoken journalist and writer, a critic of the Soviet regime and of the authoritarian regime in her native Belarus, where she now lives after some years of exile. Her books are an accumulation of individual narratives, the stories of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances—great wars and great disasters, such as the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. In 2015 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” In her Nobel speech, she explained her approach: “I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I 231 Book Reviews collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.” Some 800,000 women served in the Soviet armed forces during World War II, many of them in the front line as nurses, doctors, communications personnel, signalers, tank crew members, sappers, gunners, and fighter, and bomber pilots. Eighty-nine received the highest award for bravery as Heroes of the Soviet Union. Nearly 40 years later, Alexievich interviewed roughly 200 of these women, and these interviews became the basis of her first book, U voiny ne zhenskoe litso, initially published in serialized Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/3/231/699069/jcws_r_00675.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 form in the journal Oktyabr’ in 1984 and then released as a book that sold more than 2 million copies by the end of the 1980s. She set out to get behind the official rhetoric of Victory in the Great Fatherland War to the real emotions and experiences of these young women, many of whom were mere teenagers who had volunteered for the front out of patriotism or to avenge a father or brother who had died at the front or a whole family who had been destroyed by German forces. When Alexievich first published U voiny ne zhenskoe litso, the Soviet censors were still active. They deleted what she had written about atrocities and rapes. They accused her of pacifism, of defaming the heroes. “We don’t need your little history,” they told her. “We need big history, the History of the Victory.” Even the women she approached were often unwilling to talk or talked only in the official language of heroism and victory: not “woman’s war” but “men’s war.” Sometimes it took hours or even days before they began to open up. Then they did not talk about the generals, the attacks and counterattacks, the shiny lethal gadgets, about “what we are used to hearing: how one lot of people heroically killed the others and conquered. Or were defeated.” The women she interviewed described a different war, a war of small personal incidents, of emotional and sometimes intimate detail. They were given men’s boots that were too large for them and men’s tunics that were too small. They coped with lice, filth, hunger, extreme fatigue. They missed their periods (the censors objected to “all that biology”). Sometimes they fell in love, though Alexievich is reticent about sex. One young partisan had to carry her new baby on patrol because she had nowhere to leave the infant. Many women died horribly and were tumbled into common graves. Some were mutilated for life. Those who came home were mostly put back in their womanly boxes. Far more brutally realistic than most of her male competitors, Alexievich writes without compromise about a war in which “there are no heroes and no incredibly heroic acts, a war in which there are only people involved in an inhumanly human activity,” a war in which young women, like young men, nevertheless did understated things that were genuinely heroic. Alexievich’s third book, Zinky Boys, published in 1989, was about the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Soviet authorities claimed that their troops were invited there to support a fraternal regime, to restore order, step up economic aid, train the local security forces, and leave in a matter of months without firing a shot. Instead they became bogged down in fighting that lasted nine years. To maintain the fiction that it was not 232 Book Reviews a real war, Soviet journalists were forbidden to report the fighting or the casualties. The bodies of the fallen were flown home secretly in zinc coffins and buried without ceremony in their home towns and villages. The secrecy could not last indefinitely, however. Gossip spread. As one man wrote to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, “A soldier comes home, and the whole village knows. A coffin comes home, and the whole province knows.” When Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed the reporting restrictions, journalists such as Artem Borovik and Vladimir Snegirev, and some of the veterans themselves, wrote with increasing freedom and truthfulness about what they had seen for themselves of the soldiers and combat in Afghanistan. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/3/231/699069/jcws_r_00675.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 In Zinky Boys Alexievich writes about the actuality of the war in Afghanistan, not the 40-year-old memory of the war against Nazi Germany. But her method is the same: the accumulation of powerful sketches, interviews with the men and women who were there. Unlike their predecessors, these young soldiers had little idea what they were fighting for. Many were disillusioned, and some were cynical. Zinky Boys was widely praised in Russia for its artistry and truthfulness. But it also provoked a furious reaction—not only from veterans but from their families as well. A group of soldiers’ mothers in Belarus sued Alexievich for misrepresenting the heroism of their sons. “My only son was killed there,” one mother wrote. “The only comfort I had was that I had raised a hero, but according to you he wasn’t a hero at all, but a murderer and aggressor.” Others wrote: “You wanted to demonstrate the futility and wickedness of war, but you don’t realize that in doing so you insult those who took part in it, including a lot of innocent boys. How could you? How dare you cover our boys’ graves with such dirt?...They were heroes, heroes, heroes!” The Soviet Union no longer exists. Alexievich deeply disapproves of its legacy, which still weighs heavily on the present. But she writes with elegiac nostalgia. Those whose voices she recorded were Soviet people, she notes in U voiny ne zhenskoe litso, “Russians and Belorussians and Ukrainians and Tajiks...I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag. But they had the Victory as well. And they know it.” ✣✣✣ Frank Close, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy.New York: Basic Books, 2015. xix + 378 pp. Reviewed by John Earl Haynes, U.S. Library of Congress (ret.) Half-Life is a biography of the two sides of Bruno Pontecorvo’s life. One part is his work as a significant nuclear physicist of the 20th century.

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