How Women Lived Under Soviet Rule - the Atlantic
I admitted to Alexievich that I, too—just entering my 20s when her book came out—had found the record of our gruesome survival too hard to bear. I read through to its end only as a graduate student in the gender-conscious 1990s, after I had moved to the United States. “I myself didn’t always believe that I was strong enough for this path,” Alexievich told me. She had faced outraged censors. “Who will go fight after such books?” they demanded, as she duly noted down after her encounter with them. “You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism … You make our Victory terrible.” Her book “might never have gotten published if it weren’t for one man,” she said to me, and paused—“Gorbachev.”