Secret Documents in Soviet Ukraine and the Making of The Face of Fire

Wars give rise to legends and stories that come down to us in many versions. Establish the truth is a complicated – at times impossible – endeavor: the confusion of war possesses a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. Decades later, when the participants and witnesses are gone, the archives open up. For anyone still interested in events that seem so long ago, they can find out at least a part of what in fact really happened. Everything happened differently – differently than witnesses recalled and told us, different than is written in history books. Different than society is accustomed to imagining. At times the stories of archival searches are no less fascinating than the events they concern; they merit their own telling. More often, however, they consist of weeks in the archive reading rooms, hundreds of document files to examine, and a kilogram of dust clogging your lungs. It can be months – even years – before anything comes of it.

 

The novel The Face of Fire is based on documents from KGB archives that were declassified in 2011, twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Documents from family archives, from the archive of the Ukrainian Partisan Headquarters, from the “Dinamo” Museum of Sports and the Bundesarchive. It is also based on a legend that endured in Kyiv for 70 years – one that is not preserved in any archive.