Alexievich makes a strong case for the Russian (and other ex-Soviet) people having the most miserable history of any people ever. Whether it's serfdom, socialism, or free-market capitalism, the Russians find a way to maximise the misery for all (or almost all) involved. The tapestry of torment is woven from many individual threads: tales of arbitrary violence, dispossession and loss of every kind, endless hunger, and physical and mental torture of every description. And these strands knit the post-Soviet gangster-capitalism together with the more familiar sufferings of Stalinism, giving the book a symmetrical, diptych structure.

Most obviously it's about the collapse of the USSR and the various dislocating effects it had on Alexievich's interviewees. But another reading becomes dominant: that such existential dislocations are a Russian malaise, fated to recur no matter the political system. Someone in the book quotes (I forgot to note the source), "in Russia everything can change in five years, but in 200, nothing". Salami is a recurring motif, an emblem of plenty. As one voice reminisces of the early 90's:

Everyone dreamt of a new life... Dreams... People dreamt that tons of salami would appear at the stores at Soviet prices and members of the Politburo would stand in line for it along with the rest of us. Salami is a benchmark of our existence. Our love for salami is existential...

But the outcome is different:

There's loads of salami at the store, but no happy people. I don't see anyone with fire in their eyes.

But as well as being an obscure object of desire, salami is a processed meat, and its recurrence in these oral histories calls to mind the sausage grinder of the gulag or the siege of Leningrad or the people-processing of the Soviet state in general. So many of the horrorshows related in these pages come down to blood and guts:

One night, three of us were left behind as the rear guard. We cut open the belly of a dead horse, tossed everything out of it, and climbed in. We spent two days like that, listening to the Germans go back and forth. Shooting at them from time to time. Finally, the forest was completely silent. We climbed out covered in blood, guts, and shit... half-insane. It was night... We saw the moon...

And the absurdities of the war and the gulag are mirrored once the almighty dollar is unleashed on the remains of the empire. This guy's story reminded me of Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22:

...I sold toys. One time, I sold off an entire lot wholesale for a truckoad of carbonated beverages, traded that for a shipping container of sunflower seeds, and then, at a butter plant, traded it all in for butter, sold half of the butter, and traded the other half for frying pans and irons... Now I have a flower business...

The polyphonic approach doesn't always pay off. A few of the voices fail to fully cohere; sometimes when several people speak in quick succession the narrative throughline gets tangled. One or two stories, like the woman who falls in love with a lifer, seem beside the point, included for novelty. But the book is overwhelmingly successful in anatomising the Russian pysche and its manifold contradictions. The persecutors are also victims; the victims also chastise themselves. Half the characters are poets or lovers of poetry; the yearning Romantic Russian character we see so much of in Dostoevsky is every bit as much in evidence here. "Russian people need the kind of idea that gives them goose bumps and makes their spines tingle." The question I was left with was, is this attitude the root of Russia's perpetual cycle of sorrow, or the result of it?

Even today, many people want to go back to the Soviet Union, except with tons of salami.