Zincky Boys

ZINKY BOYS

From 1979 to 1989, a million Soviet troops and thousands of civilian conscripts were engaged in a war the State denied was taking place. Of the estimated 50,000 casualties, the ones who came home in zinc boxes (the 'Zinky Boys') were often the luckiest, and thousands more were wounded in ways no statistics record. Yet since 1989, a radically altered Soviet society has continued to reject the memory of war and the many lives that were lost. Not for nothing is the Afghanistan war known as 'the Soviet Vietnam'.

A book, which created controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR, Zinky Boys is not about the politics of war, but about the people it affected. Officers and men, nurses and prostitutes, mothers whose children will never come home and children who no longer know what 'home' is, describe the beauty of Afghanistan and the brutal army bullying, the shops full of Western goods and the lack of basic equipment, the killing and the mutilation... Brash or baffled, defeated or defiant, each voice contains a note of anger -the anger of those whose innocence has been taken away.

Presenting to us the words of these women and men without judgment - their confusions and contradictions as revealing as their honest self-assessments - Svetlana Alexievich has produced a unique, sometimes harrowing, but unforgettably powerful insight into the realities of war, both in Afghanistan itself and in today's turbulent Soviet society.

Autobiography:

Svetlana Alexievich is the daughter of a Byelorussian father and a Ukrainian mother. With a degree in journalism from Minsk University, she began her career with a local paper. It was there she discovered that (in her own words) 'the best way to learn about life was through the sound of human voices, through what the ear perceives.' Using the interview as a way of presenting her material, Svetlana Alexievich wrote two books about World War II, and a third, the present volume, about the USSR's war in...