From Secondhand Time, an oral history of post-Soviet Russia compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and published last month by Random House. Alexievich is the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story below is that of Olga Karimova, a forty-nine-year-old musician. Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich.

If it hadn’t been for him, I would never have married again. I had everything: a child, a job, freedom. Suddenly, Gleb came along . . . awkward, practically blind, chronically short of breath. He’d done twelve years in Stalin’s camps. They’d taken him when he was just a kid — sixteen years old.…