The Economist Europe – July 22-28, 2017

The EconomistJuly 22nd 2017 65

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1

“I

AM writing a book about war,” Svet-

lana Alexievich noted in her diary in

1978. Russian does not have definite and in-
      definite articles, but Ms Alexievich, at the
      time a 30-year-old Soviet author, born to a
      Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother,
      did not need one. There was only one war,
      defining the country at the cost of 20m
      lives: the Great Patriotic War of1941-45.
      There had been many accounts, but Ms
      Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of
      War”, published in 1985 and released this
      week in its first post-Soviet English edition,
      was unusual: an oral history told by wom-
      en who enlisted in the army straight after
      school, learning to kill and die before they
      learned to live or give life. Some tales were
      blood-curdling—like that of a 16-year-old
      nurse who bit off the smashed arm of a
      wounded soldier to save his life, and days
      later volunteered to execute those who
      had fled the field. Other stories were heart-
      breaking, like that of a girl who first kissed
      her beloved man only when he was about
      to be buried.
      The book was followed by other oral
      histories of people caught in calamities:
      the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the
      Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the So-
      viet empire. In 2015 she won the Nobel
      prize in literature “for her polyphonic writ-
      ings”. For her, the nightmares of the 20th
      century made fiction impossible. “Nothing
      may be invented...The witnessesmust

rounded up and sent to a camp on the is-

land of Valaam. Russian prisoners-of-war

were sent to the gulag as potential traitors.

“Liberation” brought not freedom, but a

new wave of repression and anti-Semitic

campaigns. “After the Victory everybody

became silent. Silent and afraid, as before

the war,” one man told Ms Alexievich.

Victory day—the only unifying and

truly national Soviet holiday—became

part of the official calendar and mass cul-

ture only in 1965. Leonid Brezhnev, the So-

viet leader from 1964 to 1982, saw the war as

the main source of legitimacy for a stagnat-

ing system, and covered himself in mili-

tary medals: Hero of the Soviet Union, Or-

der of Victory. Liberals and the Soviet

apparatchiks fought over its memory, and

Ms Alexievich was on the front lines. The

bleeding memories of her witnesses

clashed with the gloss and bombast of the

official rhetoric. Herbook waspublished

when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power,

hoping to put a human face on socialism.

Even so, the censor demanded cuts,

such as the story of a young partisan wom-

an who drowned her crying baby to avoid

alerting German soldiers. Those cutsare

restored in the new edition—as are her con-

versations with the censor, who was par-

ticularly scandalised by the description of

menstruation on the battle front. “Who

will go to fight after such books?” the cen-

sor demanded “Youhumiliate women

with a primitive naturalism...You make

them into ordinary women, females.”

More important, the battle for memory

unfolded in the minds of storytellers them-

selves. A woman who joined a tank bri-

gade at 16 tells Ms Alexievich “how it was”,

only to follow her story a few weeks later

with a letter that included an edit of the

transcript of their interview—with every

human detail crossed out. The suppression

speak,” she said in her acceptance speech.

Her work has been called journalism or

history, butit defies easy classification.

Ms Alexievich’s greatest talent may be

not writing, but listening and getting wit-

nesses to talk. The book is filled with more

than 200 voices. Yet, filtered by “the hu-

man ear”, as she calls herself, they vary lit-

tle in tone or rhetoric. Her book reflects an

uneasy relationship between memory,

which often involves mythologising, and

history as a multitude of dimensions. A

memoir is not a reconstruction ofthe past,

but a record of the time when the memoir

is produced and of the mental state of the

person remembering. As such, Ms Alexie-

vich’s book is a testimony to the late 1970s

and early 1980s and the war for memory

which she took part in.

The fight for memory began as soon as

the war stopped. Stalin feared the feelings

the war awoke in his people. (“The only

time we were free was during the war. At

the front,” Ms Alexievich was told.) Re-

minders of suffering were cleared off the

streets. Crippled veterans who pushed

themselves on self-made wheeled plat-

forms with hands—if they had any—were

Soviet history

The war for memory

After the Great Patriotic War came the struggle to reckon with—and

manipulate—the stories

Books and arts

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67 Victorian history

67 Alexander Calder’s mobiles

68 Johnson: Americanisms

The Unwomanly Face of War.By Svetlana

Alexievich. Random House; 384 pages;

$30. Penguin Modern Classics; 331 pages;

£12.99