Zinc Boys

From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet army fought in Afghanistan, a war that killed around fifteen thousand people and left more than four hundred and fifty thousand wounded and ill, profoundly affecting an entire generation. Targeted by criticism and controversy in the Soviet Union at the time of its publication, accused by critics of being “a fantasy riddled with lies” and part of “a hysterical chorus of vicious attacks,” Zinc Boys offers a poignant and affectionate account of the soldiers, nurses, mothers, sons and daughters who lived through the war and its devastating effects.

These pages reveal a story of brutality and lies, close to the American experience in Vietnam, symbolically marked by the zinc coffins used to transport the dead home, in the face of a Soviet Union that denied the horror and destruction caused by the war.

Drawing, as is her trademark, on the voices of those interviewed, on eloquence and silence, the mirror of reality, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth about the Soviet war in Afghanistan: the beauty of the country contrasting with the violence of the army, death, the forceful entry of the West into the territory and the destroyed lives of war veterans, shrouded in shame. A unique, lucid and powerful vision of the reality of war.