Customer Reviews

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

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This book is the absolute best I've ever seen on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When I picked it up, I was expecting a collection of dull narratives with occasional interesting ones. I was VERY wrong. Every story presented is fascinating and gives a human side to the Soviets who participated in the long Afghan war. The reader will learn of the zinc coffins supposedly carrying remains of dead soldiers winding their way home to families. However, these coffins often didn't contain anything. The reader will learn of the savagery of combat in the Afghan War and recoil at the mutilations done to Soviet prisoners. The reader is also exposed to the inhumanity and corruption of the Soviet government. For example, the government abandoned its soldiers in depots in central asia and made the troops (many of whom were from the eastern part of the Soviet Union) make their back as best they could. No paid transportation, nothing. Also the government forced secret funerals to be held for the dead so that the general public wouldn't find out about the war's growing casualty list. I highly recommend this book to all history buffs and to those who just want to understand what was going through the minds of average Soviets during a war often remembered by those outside Afghanistan and Russia as a blurb on the nightly news.

R. Chapulina needs to read this book again.

Aleksievich does not have compassion for Afghanistan vets? She accuses them of being murderers and baby-killers? Absolutely not! That's the best thing about this book - it does not judge, just tells you of how it really was.

I read this book last year, long before the September 11th attacks on the US. At times I had to put the book down because it was too disturbing. Top brass at the Pentagon and Fort Bragg, as well as prospective recruits in UK and US, need to read this book soon as it is one of a few books available from the grunt perspective. The information in this book aligns with what we are now hearing from US and British operatives who worked against the Soviets for ten years. For historical reinforcement read THE YOUNG BRITISH SOLDIER by Rudyard Kipling!

I won't repeat examples brought out by the excellent review by Cat, who also provides good background about the author. In fact, it is because of Cat's review I bought this book. What I want to mention are the comparisons to Vietnam. It is a Vietnam vet, Larry Heinemann, who wrote the introduction (see my review of his Paco's Story). I remember when Vietnam veterans went to Russia and met the Afghan vets, but I did not know that Heinemann was one of them.

What we get with this book is a sort of stream-of-consciousness telling of experiences. It is as if they were being asked for the first time and they had to get it out fast. I think Heinemann is right, in that it is only a matter of time before Russian veterans start coming out with plays, poetry, movies, etc., of their experiences.

As I started to read this book, one thing seemed lacking to me: the ever present humor of veterans. It did, however, start coming through. It takes awhile to understand Russian humor.

The stories of females is similar in one way: many were viewed as prostitutes or there just for sex (being plane-janes at home). Donut dollies had to live through that in Vietnam and the Russian women in Afghanistan. What was different was that there were female medics in the field. The civilian woman's story on page 39 captures this, as well as the humor regarding an ugly woman.

Being a paratrooper in Vietnam I liked the story starting on page 43. The brutality of the average Russian soldier towards their own, however, is hard for me to understand. He points out how they had the "FNG" system in their war, where you were nothing until you had done 6 months. It was interesting his story of how Soviet customs stole all the toys they bought with their hard-earned money. The Army set up the largest PX next to where we left, in Long Binh. When I came back from Vietnam to Travis AFB, my stereo was stolen. I screamed at the officer in charge when he told me over 20 were stolen a day. The story starting on page 88 is also similar and very Vietnam.

I really got a shock of deja vu on page 110. Drugs were shipped from Vietnam through the bodies of our soldiers to the processing point in Oakland. A huge bust happened toward the end of the war (I could be cynical about the timing).

The story starting on page 110 is very Vietnam too. At the end, he mentions that lunatics used to shout out "I'm Stalin," but now they shout out "I fought in Afghanistan." Wow. Couldn't say that better about our fakes. They also have the same problem in that their fakes are all former Spetsnaz like our fakes are all Green Berets.

One huge difference to me was cultural. I just could not imagine a relationship with my mother like those described in the book. Good God! How they tell about their loss, however, is relevant to all of us: those killed had much more to offer than dying in some idiotic useless war. That is one of the real messages you have to come away with when you read this book.

"Zinky Boys" refers to the zinc coffins young Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan would return in. Alexievich, a Belorussian investigative reporter has collected the experiences of Soviet soldiers from their service in the Afghan war. The voices are haunting, the recollections heartbreaking and honest - and at times, brutal. As history, it is oral accounts by participants that provide the basic material to be analyzed and pieced together to write the broader account. This is an excellent collection, and I highly recommend it.

In short "Zinky Boys" tells multiple stories from the USSR/Afghan Mujehideen conflict. In short, it tells the tales of sons, comrades, friends, lovers, and limbs lost and their effect on the people around them. It also shows how the Soviet government continually covered up the losses and severity of the conflict. Honestly, I found it depressing to read, but couldn't put it down. Not a "history of the Afghan war" so much as a tribute to those who sacrificed their lives on the Soviet side.

This collection of oral histories of the 1979 to 1989 Soviet war in Afghanistan is similar in format to the author's more recent, wonderfully sad story of the Chernobyl disaster and its continuing effect on the people of Ukraine, Voices of Chernobyl. Although it seems a bit less polished, it has all the impact of the latter as those providing the histories - widows, mothers, medical personnel and veterans share their stories about a situation that can only be described as the Soviet Vietnam. Victims of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, called Zinky Boys (zinc being what the coffins were made of that brought the war-dead home) were many, 50,000 all told. Afgantsi, veterans of the war, were stigmatized upon their return because of their participation in the conflict, in a similar way and for many of the same reasons as Vietnam veterans were in America.

An Afghantsi recounts how he was changed by the experience, "The fact is, in order to experience the horror you have to remember it and get used to it...This new person doesn't have to imagine...He knows the incredible excitement of seeing a body and thinking, "That's not me!..." Another veteran shares a story about going to a village and receiving food from some women (by law, the women not being allowed to refuse the request), who, along with their children, were beaten to death by the other villagers upon the soldiers' departure. Yet another tells of an Afghan girl's own people cutting off her arm to punish her for taking a sweet from a Soviet soldier. Young vets have a hard time readjusting, one sharing the fact that (after the war) he could kill someone if he knew he could get away with it. A doctor's shares his revulsion, after having spent ten years in a hospital upon seeing war wounded, "I almost went crazy. Arms and legs were missing, just breathing torsos." A mother's laments her son's death, "I've been dying for two years now. I'm not ill, but I'm dying." An Afgantsi song says it well, "Why, and for whom, did they give their lives. Cut down by bullets and mines and knives?" Zinky Boys is not for the faint of heart as it includes graphic descriptions of war injuries suffered and atrocities committed, but it is an excellent read for those (like me) who are unfamiliar with the circumstances surrounding the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Svetlana Aleksievich is a prominant Belorussian feminist writer. Her best-known work is "War's Unwomanly Face", a collection of interviews with rank-and-file women soldiers of World War ll. Despite her personal anti-war sentiment radiating from every page, the author's treatment of the veterans is sympathetic and respectful. After all, they sacrificed their youth in the Great Patriotic War. That titanic struggle is commemorated every year, its soldiers honored as heroes of their Motherland. Not so the Afghanistan War and its veterans. Not unlike American Vietnam vets, afgantsi were damned and forgotten by their homeland. "Zinky Boys" takes its name from the zinc coffins which transported Soviet remains from Afghanistan. The USSR did not learn much from the American experience in Vietnam, but one lesson they did realize early was public reaction to planeloads of returning coffins. "Zinkies" were delivered to families at night, in a government attempt to conceal information about numbers and types of casualties. Like her previous work, this book is a collection of interviews from the author's distinctly pacifist viewpoint. Fully half of her contributors are women. Most are grieving mothers, sisters, sweethearts, and wives of soldiers. These did, and still do, comprise Russia's largest and most influential feminist movement. Their stories are absolutely heartbreaking. Other correspondents include female medical personnel who treated wounded. Theirs are harrowing stories of the mutilations committed by mujahedin ("holy warriors"), whose favored attrocities were dismemberments and castrations. Some victims were tournicated and left alive to be rescued by their comrades. They often begged their surgeons not to save them. The sealed coffins of those who died of dismemberment were horribly lightweight on the shoulders of their pallbearers back home. Cynically, the military learned to weight such coffins with dirt to prevent questions from bereaved relatives. The final group of female contributors are "civilian workers", most often a euphemism for prostitutes, who went to Afghanistan for their "international duty". These correspondents speak of the emotional burden of officers and young conscripts. The majority of the men interviewed by Aleksievich are suffering from physical ailments, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, nightmares, alcoholism, and other maladies which also affected their "vietnamtsi" counterparts. These men fought a largely unsupported war against an enemy who spurned conventional tactics. They witnessed violent death and unspeakable torture of their comrades. Often they were forced to slaughter innocent Afghan civilians used by mujahedin as human-shields for their strike-and-run operations. Aleksievich has little compassion for Afghanistan vets. Like a Soviet equivalent of Jane Fonda, she accuses them of being murderers and baby-killers. She simplistically lauds the mujahedin for "defending their country", perhaps ignorant of the fact that they were mostly foreign jihadists recruited, funded, supplied, and trained by the USA to fight a proxy war with the USSR. Not surprisingly, Aleksievich was hailed by the Soviet anti-war movement while hated by the government and veterans. It is ironic that her book mimics the Soviet press by publishing only a single POV. She does give a sound-off platform to one offended and anonymous afganetz, but presents him as a disturbed psycho. Vietnam vets would probably identify. This is not the best book about the USSR's disasterous, decade-long conflict. Readers wanting to know the history and reasons behind it, as well as its present-day ramifications, are urged to get John Cooley's "Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism". For better understanding of the ordeal of the Soviet soldier, get Artem Borovik's "The Hidden War". But I nevertheless recommend reading "Zinky Boys". Despite its shortcomings, it succeeds brilliantly in its own category: a feminist treatise against war and a voice for those whose lives were destroyed by it.