Svetlana Alexievich enchants London: on Anna Politkovskaya and the importance of truth

Marta Biino recounts a prizegiving presentation at the British Library

On 9th October, for the first time in her life, Svetlana Alexievich landed in London. Humbly, the Nobel laureate discussed the constraints of human expression, during the Anna Politkovskaya Memorial Lecture at the British Library. “Words cannot capture the depth of human feeling. Words are enough to merely scratch the surface”. Yet, just like in her books, she made a powerful use of the words at her disposal, masterfully shaping them into a concise but extremely detailed account of the motives of her literary production. 

Anna Politkovskaya, photographed in 2005

These motives are honesty and truth: the same truth Anna Politkovskaya pursued all her life, prematurely ended by four gunshots in 2006. Politkovskaya was a reporter and a narrator. She firmly believed in her right to speak up and bear witness to what she saw, in a country where speaking up and bearing witness seemed close to impossible. Alone she stood, for years, attempting to recount what was happening in Chechnya, enduring hundreds of death threats, before being silenced forever in the entryway of her house in Moscow.

Since then, she’s been remembered and celebrated through a literary prize, awarded annually to women human rights defenders around the world, by the NGO ‘RAW - Reach all Women in War’. Svetlana Alexievich was this year’s winner, and we had the honour and pleasure of attending the memorial lecture.

“I don’t want to call this a lecture; let’s say I came here to talk a bit to you about what I do and the issues of the world we live in”. “Lecture” would not have done justice to the heart-wrenching, two-hour journey Alexievich took her audience on, covering more than 60 years of Soviet history, from the Second World War to Chernobyl, through the hardships of the Afghan war and the evolution of the so-called “Soviet Man”, the homo sovieticus. Alexievich spoke in third person, reporting the experiences of ordinary, forgotten citizens of the USSR: the definition of “narrator who gives a voice to the voiceless” seems more appropriate than ever.

Thus, we learned how a young nurse felt when an old colonel, hospitalized after being seriously wounded, tenderly asked her to show him his breasts “because, you know, I haven’t seen my wife in a long time”. She obeyed, despite all the embarrassment, and when she found him dead an hour later, he still had a warm smile on his face.

We heard about the astonishment and bewilderment caused by the Chernobyl disaster. How people felt threatened by something that they couldn’t see, or smell, or feel. The slow, inexorable deterioration of their land, the nature around them, the only place they could call home, rebelling against them and becoming a silent enemy to its own inhabitants. The excitement, then the pain they experienced when they realised all the beautiful, succulent produce coming from their soil was going to kill them.

“You would see old ladies walking out of their houses with soldiers, carrying eggs, flour, potatoes, and you’d ask them: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To bury the food’, they said, because it was radioactive, it couldn’t be eaten and it had to be thrown in a huge pit to avoid being contaminated”. 

Svetlana Alexievich, photo credit: Elka Wetzig

Throughout her account, Alexievich did not refrain from making personal remarks. She expressed her astonishment in front of a tragedy as alien as Chernobyl, which transported people to a world they knew nothing of, where everything around them was a possible threat.

And she couldn’t but express the shock and horror she felt when she visited Afghanistan during the war. The feeling of impotence in front of young boys, fresh out of school, who’d been turned into machines made to shoot, proud of their ability to kill. When she was presented with the opportunity of trying to shoot for herself, she categorically refused.

“There was another person visiting with me, a very famous singer, and she was really excited, she took the fire gun and you could see her, eager, going BOOM BOOM BOOM. And I was so upset, I didn’t want to know how that felt, it’s just not for me. The way I see it, in the world we live in nowadays, real heroes are not the ones who have the guts to shoot, but the ones who refuse to”.

In difficult times, Alexievich argues, people tend to lose sense of what really matters, causing a general sense of grotesque disproportion or derangement: she remembers when, at the very end of World War II, people would take pleasure in hearing the sound of the German soldiers’ bones being crushed by the passage of tanks. Yet, she spoke to a woman who tearfully grieved for all the animals, especially horses, which “must have endured such crazy pain all these years”.

This way, we are brought back to the present: we are also experiencing a dangerous moral shift, and we are most likely unaware of it. The society we live in prides itself in its freedom, its democracy, its equality. However, at least with regard to contemporary Russia, Politkovskaya’s experience proves that our freedom is limited. Worshipping freedom is a common tendency — we like to think that we have made substantial progress in safeguarding human rights, but does this happen in practice? 

It certainly wasn’t the case for Politkovskaya, who actively chose to risk her own life every day rather than self-censoring her work. Alexievich reminds us about the invisible fil rouge connecting her oeuvre to that of Anna Politkovskaya: a selfless, never-ending search for truth, and the possibility of sharing the truth of ordinary people with the world.

It’s this that we are encouraged to fight for, and Alexievich is a perfect example of a woman in war.

About the author

Marta Biino is a UCL student, currently on her final year of a BA Language and Culture degree in Russian and Arabic. After a year in St Petersburg, she is now back in London to complete her studies