Alexievich believes those born in the USSR and those born after its fall in 1991 come “from different planets.” She presents harrowing stories from both sides of the divide. And you’re no judge either,” says one interviewee of the ways that, under Stalin, citizens were persuaded to inform on their neighbours to the NKVD (Soviet police). The result is an extraordinary work of non-fiction which is composed of the types of stories that usually go untold amid the march of time and change. As it existed in a person’s soul… It’s where everything really happens.” She interviews ordinary citizens and shapes their testimonies into coherent narratives. Alexievich, a Belorussian journalist, says: “I’m piecing together the history of ‘domestic’, ‘interior’ socialism. In her latest book, the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich weaves together dozens of voices from the former-Soviet Union, including Gulag survivors, ex-Communist Party officials and others whose fates are bound up with the tragedies of the last century and the upheavals of this one.
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