The Unwomanly Face of War. By Svetlana Alexievich. Random House; 384 pages; $30. Penguin Modern Classics; 331 pages; £12.99.

“I AM writing a book about war,” Svetlana Alexievich noted in her diary in 1978. Russian does not have definite and indefinite articles, but Ms Alexievich, at the time a 30-year-old Soviet author, born to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, did not need one. There was only one war, defining the country at the cost of 20m lives: the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.

There had been many accounts, but Ms Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War”, published in 1985 and released this week in its first post-Soviet English edition, was unusual: an oral history told by women who enlisted in the army straight after school, learning to kill and die before they learned to live or give life. Some tales were blood-curdling—like that of a 16-year-old nurse who bit off the smashed arm of a wounded soldier to save his life, and days later volunteered to execute those who had fled the field. Other stories were heartbreaking, like that of a girl who first kissed her beloved man only when he was about to be buried.

The book was followed by other oral histories of people caught in calamities: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the Soviet empire. In 2015 she won the Nobel prize in literature “for her polyphonic writings”. For her, the nightmares of the 20th century made fiction impossible. “Nothing may be invented...The witnesses must speak,” she said in her acceptance speech. Her work has been called journalism or history, but it defies easy classification.

Ms Alexievich’s greatest talent may be not writing, but listening and getting witnesses to talk. The book is filled with more than 200 voices. Yet, filtered by “the human ear”, as she calls herself, they vary little in tone or rhetoric. Her book reflects an uneasy relationship between memory, which often involves mythologising, and history as a multitude of dimensions. A memoir is not a reconstruction of the past, but a record of the time when the memoir is produced and of the mental state of the person remembering. As such, Ms Alexievich’s book is a testimony to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the war for memory which she took part in.

The fight for memory began as soon as the war stopped. Stalin feared the feelings the war awoke in his people. (“The only time we were free was during the war. At the front,” Ms Alexievich was told.) Reminders of suffering were cleared off the streets. Crippled veterans who pushed themselves on self-made wheeled platforms with hands—if they had any—were rounded up and sent to a camp on the island of Valaam. Russian prisoners-of-war were sent to the gulag as potential traitors. “Liberation” brought not freedom, but a new wave of repression and anti-Semitic campaigns. “After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war,” one man told Ms Alexievich.

Victory day—the only unifying and truly national Soviet holiday—became part of the official calendar and mass culture only in 1965. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982, saw the war as the main source of legitimacy for a stagnating system, and covered himself in military medals: Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Victory. Liberals and the Soviet apparatchiks fought over its memory, and Ms Alexievich was on the front lines. The bleeding memories of her witnesses clashed with the gloss and bombast of the official rhetoric. Her book was published when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, hoping to put a human face on socialism.

Even so, the censor demanded cuts, such as the story of a young partisan woman who drowned her crying baby to avoid alerting German soldiers. Those cuts are restored in the new edition—as are her conversations with the censor, who was particularly scandalised by the description of menstruation on the battle front. “Who will go to fight after such books?” the censor demanded “You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism...You make them into ordinary women, females.”

More important, the battle for memory unfolded in the minds of storytellers themselves. A woman who joined a tank brigade at 16 tells Ms Alexievich “how it was”, only to follow her story a few weeks later with a letter that included an edit of the transcript of their interview—with every human detail crossed out. The suppression of the human and the humane in people was crucial to surviving Soviet life.

Having defeated fascism in Germany, the Soviet Union imported some of its ideas and practices, which bore fruits decades later. Waving the banners of the second world war and holding the photographs of those who perished in it defeating fascism, today’s Kremlin has restored Soviet symbols, declared the supremacy of the state over the individual and annexed Crimea. Unleashing a war against Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda described Ukrainians who demanded dignity as “fascists” and Russian soldiers as “anti-fascist liberators”. The exploitation of the memory of the war has been the central element of modern Russian ideology. It is what makes Ms Alexievich’s work so relevant today.