Mothers, prostitutes, and the collapse of the USSR: the representation of women in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Zinky Boys

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Zinky Boys, Svetlana Aleksievich’s “documentary novel” about the Soviet-Afghan War, women are represented in three ways: the “Motherland-mother” construct implicit in the memory of World War II but that does not fit the Soviet-Afghan War; the “mournful mother” construct of those (a majority in the book) who do not accept the loss of their sons for what they see as an unjust cause; and the “morally-loose woman-at-war” construct rooted in men’s predatory behaviour. Amid the dramatic political reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the representation of women in Zinky Boys reflects a changing discourse in Soviet society on the war in Afghanistan that helped pave the way for the collapse of the USSR. The alienation of returning veterans, the pain of mourning mothers who do not accept the reason for their sons’ deaths, and the pervasiveness of a “bad girls” image of women who served in the war all combined to undercut the power of the Motherland-mother construct so much a part of the cult of World War II this generation grew up on. Disillusionment with the Soviet-Afghan War was a crucial part of the unravelling of the discursive conditions of the late Soviet period.