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.
The global drift toward right-wing populism must also be confronted, she said, otherwise “the world itself and people will become even more terrifying, even more monstrous.”
“The people who hold power today are trying to shut us up,” she added.
In awarding Ms. Alexievich the literature prize in 2015, the Nobel Committee took the rare step of honoring an author of nonfiction, citing “her polyphonic work — a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Sara Danius, the Swedish Academy permanent secretary at the time, described her books as “a history of emotions — a history of the soul, if you wish.”
Ms. Alexievich, 77, grew up in the Soviet Union, born in western Ukraine but raised in a village in Belarus. Both of her parents were schoolteachers.
As a child, she said, she listened spellbound to stories traded among the village women, often widows, about World War II and Stalin’s concentration camps. The overall Soviet death toll from the war and later is estimated at 27 million people.
“They spoke about harsh things, very scary things, which of course were never written about in books,” Ms. Alexievich said.
She studied journalism at Minsk University, eventually becoming a cultural correspondent for a Belarus newspaper. But the voices of those women never left her.
She completed her first book, “The Unwomanly Face of War,” in 1983, after interviewing hundreds of female World War II veterans — pilots and snipers and cooks.
The book languished for several years because the government censor said anyone who read it would never volunteer to fight. An unexpurgated English translation emerged in 2017.
The author said that when she was first introduced to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, by then the former leader of the Soviet Union, he exclaimed, “You are so small and yet you wrote such a big book!” Ms. Alexievich said she responded, “Well, you are no giant yourself, but you toppled an empire.”
The quest for empire feeds the desire of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to seize Ukraine, she said in the interview. He has promulgated a mythic Russian Empire that never really existed, the writer said, but that mythology resonates in Russia, especially outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Ideology alone is not fueling the war, she said. She described the experience of a journalist friend who was interviewing a woman about her dead son. The woman suddenly clammed up, fearing being denied the death benefits she needed to buy her daughter an apartment.
“Putin bought Russia,” Ms. Alexievich said, and has committed a “moral crime” by trying to depict the invasion as a continuation of the fight against Nazi Germany.
Ms. Alexievich’s books take up to five years to write. She interviews her subjects repeatedly, using fragments of conversations like a jigsaw puzzle to construct a portrait of events. The repetition from one witness to the next forms a dense, compelling narrative. She lives for the revealing, human detail, she said.
She elaborated on her technique in her Nobel lecture, saying that listening to people talk is her greatest passion. “I would say that I am a human ear,” she said. “When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases and exclamations, I always think — how many novels disappear without a trace!”
“Voices From Chernobyl,” which recounted the harrowing experiences of those caught up in the nuclear meltdown in 1986, provided the basis for a haunting HBO series. In examining extreme human behavior, Ms. Alexievich said, she has long turned to Dostoyevsky for inspiration about its inexplicable nature.
She rarely inserts herself in her books, and offers little information about her subjects beyond what they say. Some critics find the lack of background material disorienting. Her writing also provokes debate about whether it is literature, although she rejects calling it journalism.
Given her emphasis on the violence thrumming through Russian society, her books are considered highly relevant amid the current war.
“The Soviet soldier is the cheapest soldier there is,” said a prescient combat medic in “Boys in Zinc,” her Afghan war book. “Unequipped and unprotected. Expendable. The same way it was in 1941.” He added, “It’ll still be the same in 50 years.”
After the publication of that book, Ms. Alexievich was accused in court of defaming the Soviet Army. She was acquitted, but in 2000, she moved to Europe and lived there for over a decade.
In 2020, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the autocrat who has run Belarus since 1994, won another term in an election widely considered fraudulent. Scores of protesters were tortured, and hundreds of opposition activists given lengthy prison terms.
Ms. Alexievich was the only member of the Coordination Council, a group created to unite the actions of the opposition, not to be arrested. She was interrogated, though, and after that, European diplomats and human rights activists camped in her apartment to safeguard her. But she decided to leave the country.
Her home in a pre-World War II building on a leafy Berlin side street has a bohemian, somewhat temporary air. Nothing hangs on the pale yellow living room walls, the flowery ceiling molding overhead providing the only décor. A companion served Turkish coffee from a long-handled pot.
Ms. Alexievich has one adult daughter, adopted from her late sister, and a granddaughter.
She sometimes feels guilty that she joined the millions who have left Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Still, a striking number of prominent Russian cultural figures now inhabit Berlin, she noted, much like the intelligentsia who decamped after the 1917 revolution. They can help to preserve Russian culture, she said.
During the September news conference in Geneva, she quoted the late, Soviet-born artist Ilya Kabakov: “When communism existed as an ideology, as a country, we knew what to do, we liked ourselves, we looked great in that struggle, and then we won. At the cost of huge losses, we defeated this monster and when we looked back, several years on, we found ourselves living among rats. How do you fight rats?”
That is the essence of the current struggle, Ms. Alexievich said. Democracy is in retreat partly because individuals have convinced themselves that they are too small to effect change, to confront evil.
“I think that we have to convince ourselves of the contrary,” she said. “Each of us has to find this strength, this ability to resist.”
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.
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