"Sooner or later, telling my stories will kill me... Why do I keep doing this? There's nothing you can do to help me. You'll write it down, publish it... Good people will read it, they'll cry, but the bad ones, the important ones... they'll never read it. Why would they? I've told this story so many times already" (p. 414)

I think this book deserves a 5-star rating for the Alexievich's bravery and determination to record what I would consider a diverse range of voices. This selection of individuals who share their accounts prove, exactly, that the Soviet Union, that Socialists and Communists and everyone in between, men and women and children (and children who must act like men and women) are all individuals. We cannot view a political party or a nation to define our (my) understanding of affairs.

This oral history was gruelling to read, in ways that it reminded me of my privilege. I was queasy or crying or sniffling in nearly every chapter - though, of course, at the end of the day, I was able to close the book to centre myself. The women who were branded on the stomach or stabbed to death with forks, children evicted to live on the streets and/ or raped repeatedly, men forced to make false confessions under torture, army men dehumanized as weapons of war, of course, had no such escape.

Another theme that was interesting to me was that of books and writing: The Gulag Archipelago, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky came up multiples times. Boris Pasternak was mentioned at least once.

I am not going to cite the individuals who offered their insights here. This is largely because, while some expressed gratitude to Alexievich for listening and publishing her work, there was one individual who, after the partial publication of his account, was worried that it would place him in a negative light with the Party. She said that someone "convinced him" such, and noted how, after his death, he left his belongings to the Communist Party and not his family. She then said, "Now I have decided to publish his story in full. It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual" (p.186)

"Did I believe in the Party? To tell you the truth, I did. And I still do. Come what may, I will never throw out my Party membership card. Did I Believe in communism?... I believed in the possibility of life being governed fairly... I still believe that... Our Soviet life... you could say that its as an attempt at creating an alternate civilization" (p. 53)

"Only a Soviet person can understand another Soviet person" (p. 134)

"'Be nice to him, he froze his feet of in the war.'...War and prison are the two most important words in the Russian language. Truly Russian words! Russian women have never had normal men. They keep healing and healing them. Treating them like heroes and children at the same time. Saving them. To thes very day. Women still take on that same role. The Soviet Union has fallen... and now we have the victims of the fall of the empire" (p.215)

"Does anyone care about any of this anymore? Show me - who? It hasn't been useful or interesting to anyone for a long time. Our country doesn't exist anymore, and it never will, but here we are... with our terrifying memories and poisoned eyes. We're right here! But what's left of our past? Only the story that Stalin drenched this soil in blood, Khrushchev planted corn in it, and everybody laughed at Brezhnev. But what about our heroes? In the papers, they started writing that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya had schizophrenia... Alexander Matrosov was a drunk" (p. 255)

"all that'll be left of us will be a couple of lines in a history book. A paragraph. Solzhenitsyn and history according to Solzhenitsyn are going out of style" (p. 265)

"They'd strip him naked and hang him from the ceiling, pour spirits of ammonia into his nose, his mouth - every orifice... The investigator pissed in his ear... And if he hadn't given him names and signed the confessions, his head would have been the one in the shit bucket... Uncle Vanya would be carried would be carried back to his cell on a stretcher, drenched in blood and piss. Covered in his own shit. I don't know when a person stops being human. Do you?" (p.273)

"This story is too terrifying and too beautiful to believe. THat's what they said... But I have no proof other than my love for hi... Do you believe me?" (-. 319)

"I wanted to kill myself about five times... The commander told us: 'Just don't shoot yourself. It's easier to deduct personnel than it is to account for missing ammunition.' A soldier's life is worth less than a service pistol" (p. 375)