Especially at the current time, it’s really useful to have a window into what makes Russia and Russians tick. It’s not a chronological history, it’s a report from the past, with all the caveats that that requires. There is some grim reading about personal hardships, the worst of them from the Communist era. The subsequent collapse of Russian society, except for the super-privileged, has lent the Soviet years some undeserved retrospective legitimacy. There was good in the old system, in the sense of social solidarity and a sense of common purpose, but it was outweighed by the grinding poverty and brutal oppression. Here she takes on the lived experience of the break-up of the Soviet Union, mainly (though not only) as it affected Russians, simply told through their own testimony. Another in the grim sequence of Nobel Prize winner Alexievich’s accounts of her country’s history (I have previously read Voices from Chernobyl and Boys in Zinc).
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