In the midst of global disorder, of constant anxiety, the narrative of the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich (Stanislav, today Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, 77 years old), her voice, her thought, is an exercise in understanding and warning of the decline of democracies around the world. In her exile in Berlin, where she had to flee due to her participation in the Coordinating Council of the Opposition to dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2020, the writer speaks of the degradation of political discourse in the United States and the confusion of Europe, surrounded by “aggressive or disoriented” countries. Also, that Homo Sovieticus, the “red man” that he portrayed in his last book about the collapse of the Soviet Union, has not actually died, but continues to sit in the Kremlin and fight in Ukraine.
