While writing the book that helped propel her to the Nobel Prize in Literature, the writer Svetlana Alexievich was certain she was chronicling the swan song of the violent, authoritarian ideologues at the heart of the Soviet system.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, only two years after her native Belarus, still a Kremlin satellite, brutally crushed its democracy movement.
The mind-set she believed was headed toward extinction had been revived, she said in a recent interview in her apartment in Berlin, where she has lived in exile since 2020. “I want to understand how that happened.”
Her last book before the Nobel, “Secondhand Time,” was her fifth work about the unraveling of the utopian Communist experiment. Told in the voices of ordinary men and women narrating their experiences, the books address landmark events including the invasion of Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Ms. Alexievich used an intensive interviewing technique to write each one and, after “Secondhand Time,” intended to turn to other topics, like love and aging.
But after the protests in Belarus and the Ukraine invasion, she shelved those plans. She is now writing a sixth book on the enduring existence of what she calls the “Red man,” who, she said, is stoking a bloody war in the heart of Europe. Examining his motivations, she said, is one way to try to douse the flames.
“I don’t know where to find the right words to describe these things, yet we have to find the right words,” she told a news conference in late September at the United Nations in Geneva focused on growing repression in Russia.
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The post Understanding Post-Soviet Tyranny, in Order to Fight It appeared first on New York Times.
