La fin de l'homme rouge - Svetlana Alexievitch
Through the witnesses collected near "homo Sovieticus", as she says, Svetlana Alexievitch talks about the life in URSS for seventy years. As a journalist, she interviews hundred of witnesses, an ordinary people. They are 40 or 50 or 80 years old; they lived in country or in town, they were peasants or worked in administrations, young or old, rich or poor, cultured or not, parents, grand parents, man or woman : everyone talks about the communism in his own life, day after day, month after month, year after year. How the communism has infiltrated their childhood, their way of life, their thoughts. In a nutshell, it's the story of "domestic communism", by interior. Russians became "l'homme rouge - homo sovieticus".
They talk about everyday life : denunciations, disappearances, deportations, death sentences. This people has lived in hell.
Svetlana Alexievitch says that Russians are warriors : they are in war or they prepare it.
Even if you think that nothing can amaze you about the communism in URSS, this book is as a blow in your life.
Today, it can help you to understand how the homeland concept is so important for Russian.