Media

Russian author Mikhail Shishkin’s fiction is complex and challenging, but also beautiful and warmly familiar. The images he can create within just one sentence capture moments, thoughts and glimpses of a life that are fleeting and yet that linger long after the book is finished.

Shishkin believes in the power of words to preserve human dignity, and to overcome death. His novels Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark, along with his short story collection Calligraphy Lesson, embody this belief. In The Light and the Dark, translated by Andrew Bromfield, a man and a woman write letters to one another from different ends of a century. They fall in love, their written missives powerful enough to overcome the obstacle of time. In Maidenhair, Shishkin’s most well known and celebrated novel, translated by Marian Schwartz, his eponymous hero (an interpreter) writes letters to his young son about a mysterious, imagined country. The novel’s branching storylines, which we discuss in our interview, include the diary of a famous Russian singer. Her life, largely forgotten, is resurrected on the page. All the while, Shishkin’s mesmeric use of language, most acute in Maidenhair, weaves a spell, creating what he refers to as an “ark” for the Russian language, and a last refuge for human dignity.

Alongside his prose, but very separate from it, Shishkin is increasingly well known for his strong anti-Putin stance. This first became public in 2013 when he refused to represent Russia at the American BookExpo in New York. He followed this with a slew of anti-Putin articles in the international press, including calls to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics, as well as the World Cup hosted by Russia. In addition, Shishkin’s new non-fiction book, My Russia, War or Peace? makes clear his opposition to Putin’s regime. As the interview below reveals, he stands firm in his unequivocal support for Ukraine and does not hold back when he calls Russia a fascist country. While he does not want to sully his fiction with contemporary politics, Shishkin does, however, see a way to use literature as a political tool. He plans to launch a new literary prize called “Dar” (meaning gift) that will celebrate Russophone (that is, Russian-language literature) no matter where it is written.

Shishkin very generously answered my questions via email from his home in Switzerland, where he has lived since 1995. We discussed the themes of his novel Maidenhair, and why he believes politics has no place in literary prose. We spoke about the fascist nature of Putin’s Russia, and why culture is the enemy of the incumbent dictatorship. Shishkin also described his unstinting support for Ukraine, and expressed his strong views about the need to decolonize the country, to liberate the Russian language from Putin’s dictatorship and to preserve Russophone literature, music and art until such time in the future when they might help build a bridge to peace.

—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor

Your most well known novel, Maidenhair, is a beautiful, ephemeral text that grows out of entwined stories, snippets of memories, and glimpses of other worlds. The language it uses weaves a spell on the reader. Since it is such a complex novel, what do you see as its main theme?

It seems to me that all real novels are always about one and the same thing. Real prose does not have “themes”. If Tolstoy’s theme was “the Napoleonic Wars” and Varlam Shalamov’s was “Stalin’s prison camps”, we would be better off reading the work of historians than these authors. Both Shalamov and Tolstoy wrote about one and the same thing. Human life does not have a “theme”. The book that you write is like a tomographic image not only of your brain, but of all your life lived up until that point. As the years pass, life becomes about something else, and hence the book you are writing also becomes different. But this is not a different book, it is exactly the same book, written by another you.

Maidenhair is a classic novel about simple things. It is about overcoming death with love and words. Maidenhair is a type of plant—Adiantum capillus-veneris; somewhere in the South, in Rome, it is a weed, but in Russia it would die without human love and warmth. This wild-growing plant becomes the grass of eternal life. Numerous storylines intersect in the novel. I write about my work as an interpreter at a refugee reception centre: people from former soviet states come to Switzerland to seek asylum, and I interpret at their interviews. Nobody tells unscary stories there. This strand of the novel becomes metaphorical—it symbolizes Heaven, which these souls want to enter. To gain entry they recount what has happened to them. But Heaven is locked tight.

In another strand, the history of my family is intertwined with Anabasis, written by the ancient Greek [soldier and author] Xenophon. Anabasis describes the arrival of tens of thousands of soldiers at the Black Sea, which, it becomes clear over a couple of thousand years, is the sea of immortality. My heroes join them. I also write the biography of a real, famous woman who lived through the whole of the twentieth century, the singer Izabella Yurieva. Her life disappeared with her, but my words give her a new life—this is the only real resurrection, there can be no other kind. Only the word can become flesh. In the end, these storylines converge in Rome—in the eternal city, which is so fleeting for maidenhair, the grass of life.

In the novel, I want to link the love of the word with the love for the person that is inherent in Russian literature—a love that exists even for characters where there is probably not much to love, as with Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich. The written word is not only a sacred way of creating the world, but the only way to overcome death. In the epigraph to Maidenhair, I took a line from the Apocrypha: “For by the word was the world created, and by the word shall we be resurrected”. There is likely no other way to defeat death. The novel is about resurrection through words and love. Words alone are simply ash and pixels, printer powder, paper. Words must be brought to life, to create a reality where there is no death, where everyone can escape from King Herod. King Herod represents time.

One of the novel’s heroes, an isolated prisoner serving a life sentence, uses a spoon handle to scratch the image of a boat onto the wall of his cell. He sits in the boat and sails away from his prison. In the same way the writer, imprisoned in his life of solitude, sits in his novel as if it were a boat. He takes all of his heroes and readers with him and sails towards the one that loves us and waits for us all.

You are well known for expressing your political views. What political message, if any, does Maidenhair, or your other novels, have?

There is no contemporary politics in Maidenhair. Neither Putin, nor anyone like him, will ever appear in my novels because literature, music—these are far too large guns to fire at today’s dictators. Politics belongs in the newspapers, and yesterday’s newspaper is a metaphor for death. Art and literature form the ark we need to build in order to combat time, and you must only bring the most important things to this ark. Politics kills prose and infects it with the here and now. If this happens, books can only live as long as politics—just for today.

Around the same time Maidenhair was published in the US and UK, you refused to represent Russia in 2013 at the BookExpo America in New York. Can you tell us why you made this decision, and the effect it has had on your career in Russia?

At the beginning of the 2000s I was happy that Russia was becoming a civilized country, that the government was beginning to support literature and writers in the same way that Switzerland’s Pro Helvetia gives money for translations of Swiss writers abroad: Russia’s Institut Perevoda, along with other foundations, began to award grants for the translation of books by Russian authors. But it was very clear that the country was moving in the opposite direction, back to the past. Russia was turning into a criminal dictatorship, which was hiding behind a “democratic” façade. The West heard the “right” words from the Kremlin, and either didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, what was actually happening in Russia. In particular, the authorities were using us writers as the “human face” of the regime. As they sent us to the most important book fairs in the world I recall them telling us, “criticize Putin as much as you like. It will only confirm that we have a real democracy”.

I did not want the regime to use my name, or my texts, as a mask for itself and its crimes. In 2013 I published my open letter, where I refused to represent Putin’s Russia at the book fair in New York:

A country where power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime, where the state is a pyramid of thieves, where elections have become farce, where courts serve the authorities, not the law, where there are political prisoners, where state television has become a prostitute, where packs of impostors pass insane laws that are returning everyone to the Middle Ages—such a country cannot be my Russia. I want to and will represent another Russia, my Russia, a country free of impostors, a country with a state structure that defends the right of the individual, not the right to corruption, a country with a free media, free elections, and free people.

This was before the war. The thousands of people who would later be killed in Ukraine were still alive, tens of thousands had not yet been wounded, millions had not yet become refugees. It was clear where Putin was taking my country, and I wanted to somehow stop this, to cry “Russia stop! Wake up!” But the country was gripped by the frenzy of the Olympics and Crimea. The occupation of Crimea became a watershed, a border, a front in the civil war that is now in full force across Russia. Crimea divided Russians. Either you are a “krymnash” [believing “Crimea is ours”] or you are a “national traitor”. This is a civil war. Russians have become the enemies of other Russians. After my open letter appeared in the press and on social media, I was attacked. They stopped giving money to translate the books of a “national traitor”. I haven’t been back to Russia since 2014.

You have been very open and consistent in your condemnation of the Russian government, long before the intensification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. You open your 2019 book My Russia, War or Peace? with the statement that “The language of Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, Marina Tsvetaeva and Joseph Brodsky has become the language of war criminals and murderers.” In interviews, you have referred to Russia as fascist. Do you have the sense that it has become more dangerous for authors to speak the truth since 2022?

We are at war. It is always dangerous to be at war. For writers, telling the truth is always dangerous. Even more so now. This is a twenty-first-century war—killing does not only take place at the front line. I often receive threats. In one email from Germany, someone wrote to me in Russian, “Shishkin is a national traitor. Death to traitors.” Traitors have always been more threatening than enemies. But am I supposed to keep quiet? If I did that, what meaning would my life have? Everyone must do what they can. A writer can and must write and speak out. Silence is exactly what the regime wants from its subjects. “The People are silent.” Only the word can challenge silence.

You wrote My Russia, War or Peace? in German. Why did you decide to use German, and how did the process differ from writing in Russian?

This book has now come out in twenty languages, but not in Russian. I’ll tell you why. I have tried many times to read books written by so-called experts about Russia, but it is completely impossible: these books explain to the Western reader and to Western politicians the need to build bridges towards Putin. It is thanks to these “experts” that we now find ourselves in this catastrophe. For years I tried to explain through my essays and speeches that a bridge to Putin is a bridge to war. It can’t be any other way—a dictatorship lives by war, this is its daily bread. But here in the West people closed their eyes to the obvious.

In 2013 I called for a boycott of the Olympic Games in Sochi, but who listens to writers? Immediately after the Olympics, which reeked of patriotism, came the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war. In 2014, The Guardian published my essay, in which I wrote that instead of a soul, Putin possesses a black hole that is swallowing up the world. At that time, Russia and Ukraine were already in this black hole, which would first suck in Europe, and then the whole globe. Alas, everything is flying rapidly into this black hole right before our eyes.

All these years I have been writing in the world’s most influential newspapers that Russia was already in a state of war against the West, that we need to aggressively fight this dictatorship, protect human values, and help Ukraine prevail. In 2018 I again tried to organize a boycott of the World Cup, but Switzerland, along with the other democratic countries, sent their teams to chase a football around in front of the dictator who had already been terrorizing Ukraine for four years. Can the world really not have seen the thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands of refugees? They didn’t want to see. [The World Cup] was the last chance for the free world to display solidarity and prevent the catastrophe in which we currently find ourselves. Putin took universal participation in the games to mean universal support for his aggression in Ukraine. The road to 24 February 2022 was open.

I had to explain Russia and its war to the Western reader. That is why I wrote this book in German—it came out in Germany in 2019. The last two chapters are about the future, where I explained what would happen. We are now resolutely in the future that I predicted. Now this book is being published around the world. I haven’t changed one word of it, I just added a foreword and afterword—and every day the book becomes more relevant. I have had a flood of responses: “You opened our eyes! Why were our politicians so blind?”

Why is this book not translated into Russian? Because we are in the midst of a civil war. Those who stand with me on the front line do not need anything explained to them. Those who stand on the other side of the line would not read the book of a traitor. But here [in the West], I can perhaps explain things to others. I do what I can. It is important for people to know that there is another, non-Putin Russia, which supports Ukraine and its fight against [Russian] aggression.

In a recent interview you talked about the fact that the next great Russian novel would have to be one of atonement—one written by someone who is fighting in Ukraine now. The novel should explore questions such as “What are we Russians doing over here killing people” and “Why are we Russians fascists?” What does the Russia that would allow the publication of such a novel look like? Do you think anyone could already be writing such a text?

A person can only repent if they have committed a crime and are sorry for it. A novel of atonement would be a symbol of regret and repentance for a nation that has participated in this criminal war. I have criticized the Putin regime and its aggression from the start, as well as Russia itself for supporting the vile authorities and their war and for not repenting or recognizing any guilt. If an emigrant like myself were to write such a novel, this would represent no one’s repentance. That is why I think that a genuine novel of atonement should be written by someone who participated directly in this crime. So long as people [in Russia] believe that the war in Ukraine is taking place to defend the motherland and Pushkin from fascism, and don’t recognize the fact that they themselves are the fascists, my country does not have a future.

Until Russia itself repents this crime, until there is an admission of national guilt, until the next Putin falls to his knees in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Bucha, the country will not be ready for such a novel. I am afraid the next Tsar will again talk about Russia rising “from its knees” before the West, instead of recognizing guilt. Is it not Tsar-like to fall to one’s knees. In the Russian national consciousness a Tsar who falls to his knees is not a Tsar at all.

Is someone already writing this novel of atonement? I can only repeat what I have already said: God knows.

In April 2022, Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko described Russian literature as weaving “the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks” as Russia commenced its attack on Ukraine. Given current attitudes towards Russia, is there a role for Russian literature during the war? If so, what should it be?

I have already spoken about this many times, but I will say it again. The emotions felt by Oksana are understandable. I understand why in Ukraine with every day of the war, with every rocket that falls on Kharkiv or Odessa, hatred grows for all of Russia. I understand why people are taking down statues of Pushkin. Putin’s war transformed the language of Pushkin into the language of criminals and murderers. The empire hid itself behind Pushkin’s name and erected statues to him everywhere as a symbol of colonial power. What can I say when I hear that in Ukraine they are taking down statues to Pushkin? The empire and its symbols must be erased. Absolutely.

The Putin regime placed Russian culture in the line of fire across the world, but the shattering blow has, as always, been achieved by its own government. Today’s Russia is a fascist state. It is not important what people are saying in the Kremlin, it is important what these people do. And they are carrying out fascism. Cultural figures either have to sing patriotic songs or emigrate.

In the end, it is naive to say that Russian literature lies at the root of this aggression. The war crimes taking place in Ukraine are not happening because soldiers in the Russian army read Tolstoy or Chekhov. On the contrary, free Russian culture has always opposed the criminal [Russian] state. The history of Russian culture is the history of desperate resistance to successive totalitarian regimes. For centuries the Russian people’s survival strategy has been silence, humility, and submission to the authorities no matter what they demand. “The people are silent” is the strategy described by Pushkin [in Boris Godunov]. And the only thing that can counter this silence and obedient submission to the authorities is the word, is culture. That is why the regime has always considered culture as the main enemy—that is why they eradicated it and continue to eradicate it. Culture is resistance to totalitarianism. Culture exists as a form of human dignity, and that is why culture will always be the enemy of the regime in Russia.

You are currently launching a new literary prize for Russophone fiction. What are the aims of the prize, who is it for, and how does this fit into your political worldview?

The public position of the award is as follows: Everyone who takes part in the organization, including authors who submit their work to the competition, are against the war, against dictatorships, and support Ukraine in its fight for freedom and independence in the face of aggression.

The Russian Federation’s disgusting war against Ukraine is a blow to all Russophone culture. Free literature written in Russian needs assistance, and one of the ways to provide this is via the foundation of a literary prize, which we have named “Dar,” meaning “gift”. This short word holds important meanings, and everyone will recognize the title as the last, and best book written in Russian by Nabokov. The prize was founded by an organization I formed with Slavists and professors at Swiss universities. Well-known authors including Ludmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, Dmitrii Bykov, and Dmitrii Glukhovsky have already agreed to join the board of founders. We also have Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich from Belarus (she writes in Russian) as our co-founder.

The prize is neither a “Russian prize”, nor a “prize for Russian literature”. This is a prize for rethinking literature written in Russian. It is a prize that will open up new routes to literature and literary life outside antiquated ideas of nationhood. It is a prize for everyone who writes and reads in Russian regardless of their passport or country of residence. The Russian language does not belong to dictators but to world culture. The current discourse around post-imperialism and the decolonization of literature needs to become a practical action—the Dar Prize makes it possible to transfer words into action.

The prize is one of the tools for a new start. Now is the time for the foundation of a new kind of Russian-language culture, a kind of culture that has never been seen before, a culture free from the curse of territory and from Russian “patriotism”. It is time to establish a new Russian-language culture, one that does not belong to the medieval era of the Golden Horde, but to world culture. It is very important that people united by the Russian language are able to take part in our competition from all over the world including Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. Entrants include Sasha Filipenko (from Belarus), Armen Zakharyan (originally from Armenia), and among members of the jury we have Mikhail Gigolashvili (originally from Georgia). It is very important that Ukrainian authors who write in Russian take part in the contest. Sergei Solovyev has already agreed to take part with his novel Smile of Shakti (he writes in Russian, has a Ukrainian passport, and lives in Germany).

Dar could become a unifying platform for the scattered Russophone diaspora. It is a chance for the international Russian-speaking community to prove itself, and to show that it exists in a world without borders, and is productive and worthy in its own right. The aim of the prize is to give this diaspora the chance for a new beginning, and most importantly, to show support for young writers for whom the opportunity of being translated and published by Western firms is now gone. The main prize is a grant for translation into English, German and French. In this way we also support Western translators from Russian, who find themselves in difficulties at this time.

What Russophone authors should we be reading now?

Lots of talented authors write in Russian but are, alas, unknown in the West. I hope that by creating this new prize we can help to bring these authors to the Western reader. But in any case, I need to talk about those authors who do not need to be either translated or published in the West. These are authors like Zakhar Prilepin who openly support the Putin aggression and who call for the killing of Ukrainians. By purchasing their books, Western readers are giving their money to the war, to fund the rockets that kill the inhabitants of Kharkiv and Odessa at night.

The same goes for writers who do not openly condemn the war but who support it through their silence. For example, Eugene Vodolazkin, who is well known in the West. At present he remains a member of the President’s Council for Culture and Art and the Patriarchal Council for Culture. In February 2024, after two years of war, Vodolazkin was awarded a medal by the Russian Orthodox Church—an organization that encourages Russia’s war against Ukraine. Such writers support the war in their name, and absolutely understand that. This makes them war criminals too.

You have spoken and written much about the power of words. In reality, what can literature achieve in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine?

When a war begins, literature always loses. Books are useless against guns and missiles. None of my books, nor the books written by my colleagues over the past twenty years, could have prevented the tragic situation in which we now find ourselves. During a war, you need ammunition, not novels. But every war ends eventually. And that is when you need culture, literature. A huge chasm filled with death, pain and hatred has opened up between Russia and Ukraine. And with every rocket that falls on a home, this chasm is growing, and continues to grow. But sooner or later the war will end, and we will need to build bridges over the chasm. Most likely not to our generation, but to the next, or the one after that. The first people to build this bridge will be people of culture—writers, artists, musicians. It is these people who will take that first step towards one another. It is for this future bridge that we need to preserve the dignity of Russian-language culture.

translated from the Russian by Sarah Gear

We are his hope now

By Mikhail Shishkin.

“The Guardian”, 19.02. 2024

The candle that cast at least a little light in Vladimir Putin’s darkness has been snuffed out. The official report claims Alexei Navalny “died”. Between “he died” and “he has been murdered”, there is a difference the size of Russia. My country no longer exists.

A Russia that so casually destroys its finest is not a country you can live in. In a land you can live in there is no space for this kind of criminal regime. The state that goes under the name of the Russian Federation, which visits death and malignancy on those who live in it and on the world at large, simply should not exist.

It had to murder Navalny. Dictatorship calls for a sullen population and nationwide jubilation at the least word from its leader. The regime recognised the threat this man posed. It tried to silence him by sentencing him to more than 20 years in jail. It tried to poison him, but failed. So now it has finished the job.

Officially, there is no death penalty in Russia … only, there is. Here is the proof, and this is only the beginning. The criminal regime cares not a fig who it murders – Ukrainians, the young people mobilised for its “meat-grinder assaults”, its political prisoners. The Red Wheel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about is again on the move.

Today, after two years of slaughter in Ukraine and with the opposition in Russia totally routed, it seems scarcely credible that only a few years back Navalny could participate in the race for the presidency and be heard at election rallies throughout the land. What kind of president would he have been? I have no idea. He might have been brilliant, he might have been hopeless. The only way to find out would have been for him to win a free election, but for that you need free citizens. Fundamental to democracy are voters conscious of their duty as citizens. Democracy is founded on human self-respect. How much of that will we find among the majority of the Russian population?

I well remember how, after an election rally in a provincial Russian city at which Navalny spoke, someone came up to him and said: “Alexei, I like the way you speak and what you say. I like you as a person, but first become president. Then I will vote for you.”

Everyone speculates as to why he went back to Russia, when he must surely have known he would be thrown into prison. And, of course, he was; but he was a fighter, a soldier, and knew this had to be seen through to the end. He was no self-sacrificial lamb going to the slaughter – Navalny intended to win. He believed he would, and converted people near and far to that belief.

In Russia, those who have overthrown the regime have invariably previously been its prisoners. That was true of the revolution of 1917. It was true also of the end of the Soviet regime, which seemed so unassailable, but which collapsed to the accompaniment of the books of ex-convict Solzhenitsyn. To have experienced prison is always an advantage for a Russian politician: someone familiar with imprisonment identifies better with the “voting masses” whose life is permeated by prison “culture”.

Navalny misread the political situation. No Russia exists of which he could have become president. He did not truly know the land to which he devoted his life. He grew up and became a politician after the collapse of the USSR, during a brief period when freedom came to Russia, a period that saw social and political life emerging, and political parties and a free press appear. For him, that was his country, a place where anything was possible. His style was that of a western politician who believes you have to fight for votes, to be in the public eye, to be transparent, and take responsibility for what you say.

That is simply not the way in Russian politics, where you fight for power not in elections, which, after all, can be manipulated. Power has to be sought where real power lies. It has long and rightly been said that in Russia, the political contest is a fight between bulldogs under a carpet. Navalny could not and would not be one of those bulldogs. He believed that people in Russia would follow him, which was very naive.

He judged people by the standards he set for himself. He supposed that if, for him, what mattered most in life was the rights and freedom and dignity of the individual, then that must be what mattered most to others, too. He believed people could be persuaded, inspired and led – and indeed his followers, mainly young, wonderful men and women, numbered in the tens of thousands. But Russia was moving in the opposite direction.

The regime’s great aspiration is to resuscitate the USSR. Russia is ruled by people who made their careers and lived their lives within the Soviet KGB. Their dream of restoring the country of their youth is being realised before our eyes. It is a land where the population obediently lays its head on the executioner’s block, sighing that, of course, the tsar knows best. It is a land where there is no place for a Navalny, or for young people who want to live their lives not in the gulag, but in freedom.

If Alexei had known what was to come after his arrest, that the opposition would lose hands down, that the regime would instigate a shameful war against Ukraine – with a majority of the population supporting that ignominy – would he have taken the same decision, returned to Russia to be imprisoned and allowed himself to be murdered? I do not know the answer, but I think he would. There have always been, are now and ever will be, people who hold some things dearer than life itself.

He has given support to all of us. By existing, by refusing to give in, by making that supreme sacrifice, he has given us all hope. We are now his hope.

Mikhail Shishkin: Putin’s regime doesn’t need culture at all now

The Kremlin wants Russian people to be ‘silent, obedient slaves’, says writer

By Marc Bennetts

“The Times”, 10.04. 2023

It’s a long way from the rolling hills of northern Switzerland to the savage battlefields of Ukraine, but it is here amid the pine trees and the winding country roads that Mikhail Shishkin, often called Russia’s greatest living writer, grapples with his nation’s guilt and the future of its centuries-old culture.

Shishkin, 62, is the only author to win Russia’s three major book prizes, receiving the awards between 2000 and 2011 for his richly textured and deeply philosophical novels. In the past decade he has emerged as one of President Putin’s biggest critics in the Russian literary world.

In 2013 he refused to represent Russia’s “corrupt, criminal regime” at an international literary event. Outraged by Russia’s actions in Ukraine, he has not visited his troubled motherland since 2014, the year that the Kremlin annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas.

“Putin’s regime doesn’t need culture at all now,” Shishkin tells me, when I visit him at his home in a small village near the Swiss border with France. “It needs obedient, silent slaves.”

No one could ever accuse Shishkin of staying quiet. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he has spoken out frequently against the war, including helping to pressure the Swiss government into dropping its policy of neutrality and support sanctions against Moscow. His new book, My Russia: War or Peace?, traces the roots of his homeland’s willingness to submit to despotic rule and its eternal search for a “real tsar”.

His novels have been translated into dozens of languages but the atrocities carried out by Putin’s forces in Ukrainian towns and cities such as Bucha have forced him to question the sense of not only his life’s work, but also that of Russia’s rich literary tradition.

“I’ve had very solid ground under my feet all my life. This was Russian culture, as a part of world culture. And all at once this was blown away,” he says. “Because if there is Russian culture, if there is Tolstoy, if there is Rachmaninov, and so on, then how was Bucha possible?”

“This means that all the books that I wrote, and that my colleagues wrote over the past 20, 30 years . . . we are just losers. What did we write them for, if this catastrophe is possible?” He pauses. “I feel an incredible sense of shame, even though I know I am not to blame for this war.” He accepts, though, that the war would not be possible without the complicity of millions of Russians, including those heading to the battlefields to kill and be killed: “Putin is the symptom, not the illness.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has led to culture being repressed at home, with those artists, musicians and writers who have not yet fled under huge pressure to publically support the war. For Shishkin, Putin’s evisceration of Russian culture is a culmination of a long struggle between his country’s writers and the Kremlin tyrants that have always sought to crush all critical voices.

“The only thing that can counter this silence is the word. That’s why in Russia, a poet is more than a poet, and a word is more than a word. Russian culture has fought the regime for generations and has always lost, and now it has lost completely. We always lose, but we keep fighting,” he says.

He retains hope, however, that Russian culture can survive in exile and eventually begin the slow process of healing relations between his country and Ukraine.

“After the war, there will be a moat, a pit, between Ukrainians and Russians that is filled with corpses, hatred, blood and pain. I understand very well that Ukrainians will hate everything Russian. But sooner or later, new generations will come along, and bridges will need to be built. And it is people of culture who will build them.”

For now, he is on a mission to restore dignity to the Russian language. “I want to show the world that Russian is not only the language of killers,” he says. “That this language does not belong to Putin. That it is also a language of culture.”

It is, he admits, an uphill task. Even among the millions of Ukrainians who speak Russian as their first language, including soldiers on the front lines, there is a visceral loathing of the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

“What can we say to Ukrainians whose houses were destroyed, whose family and friends were killed?” Shishkin says. “That there are wonderful Russian writers and that the Russian language is beautiful?”

He rails against what he describes as the mixture of greed and naivety that saw some western countries attempt to maintain relatively normal relations with Putin’s Russia in the years before the war. The 2018 World Cup that was held in Russia was, he says, seen by Putin as evidence that the West was largely indifferent to Ukraine’s fate.

“Putin understood this as consent to his annexation of Crimea and thought, ‘we will take Kyiv and they will swallow it’. The door to February 24 was opened at the World Cup,” he says, referring to the date last year that Putin launched his invasion.

His opposition to Putin’s regime has seen him receive threats, including one recent message that read: “Shishkin is a traitor. Death to traitors.” But he insists that he will not back down. “What should I do? Stop, shut up and join this humiliating silence? But what then would be the meaning of life?”

The World at One Highlights

“Only culture can make bridges over hate” says Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin

BBC 4, 30.03.2023

The west is trying to quietly forget the war in Ukraine. It does so at its own peril

Even if Vladimir Putin does eventually falter, Russia’s power structure means another Putin will follow, and then another

By Mikhail Shishkin

“The Guardian” 21.08.2022

“On the front page – war, on the back page – the crossword.” A line from my novel The Light and the Dark sprang to mind as I travelled on a train shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sitting across from me, a passenger was reading the paper: on the front page, there was the war; on the back page, the crossword. Time has passed since then, and the daily atrocities have started to disappear from the headlines, despite the battles growing more savage each day. But no one in the west wants to hear about war any more – people are tired of horror and solidarity. They want peace, no price rises, a quiet life and a nice holiday.

It’s not the first time my writing has sounded the alarm over horrors to come. Before the annexation of Crimea, I used an analogy with the Russian folk tale Teremok to describe Europe’s uncertain future. Once upon a time, there were some forest animals who lived together in a cosy little house – a teremok. One day, a frog knocks on the door. “Knock, knock! Who dwells in this teremok? Let me in, I’d like to live here with you.” The animals let the frog in, and everyone agrees that it is a happy and cosy home. They even let in Kyward the hare and Reynard the fox – there is room for everyone in the teremok. But then along comes Bruin the bear. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t fit into the teremok. The bear flies into a rage and sits down on the house. And that’s the end of the teremok – and of the fairytale.

But no warnings were heeded. In 2014, shortly after the annexation of Crimea, I wrote, with increasing urgency, that “in the 21st century there is no such thing as a distant, localised war any more. Every war is now a European war. And this European war has already begun.” I warned that Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea would “create a wave of patriotism. Sooner or later, this wave will break, and then Putin will need a fresh wind.” I wrote of how years of chronic instability in the Balkans would create cripplingly high levels of migration to European countries, with an “inconceivably greater wave of refugees from Ukraine”.

Back then, there was still a chance to stop the aggressor. Yet European politicians closed their eyes to reality in an effort to curry favour with voters. Voters wanted peace then, too; jobs, no price rises and nice holidays. Corrupt Russian experts insisted that we should understand Putin’s point of view and make concessions.

And now, here we are: in the middle of a European war, facing an unprecedented wave of refugees from Ukraine, and wondering how our politicians could have been so blind. No one listens to writers. The only true lesson we can draw from history is that history teaches nothing.

In Germany, intellectuals have collected thousands of signatures on a petition demanding their own government stop delivering weapons to Ukraine, because it could lead to a third world war. “We want a policy of peace, not war,” they write. But the third world war has already begun. It started in 2014. How can you cure someone’s blindness, if they want to be blind?

The question now is, how and when will this war end? The war against Nazi Germany didn’t end with Hitler’s death, but with a devastating military defeat. Putin’s death one day is inevitable, but Russia’s defeat is not.

The answer boils down to authenticity. Some tsars are real, some are fake. If Holy Russia expands its territory and other peoples bow before the autocrat in Moscow, the vassalled population that toils and struggles and heroically sheds its blood for the sacred fatherland thinks it is a blessing from God. And then it doesn’t matter very much how the tsar came to power or how he rules over his subjects. He can butcher them in their millions, destroy thousands of churches and execute the priests – all that matters is that the tsar is real, for then the enemy will tremble and the Holy Land will extend. That’s how it was with Stalin.

Conversely, military failures and the loss of even a small part of the Holy Land will be seen by the tsar’s subjects as a clear sign that the tsar is not blessed – that he is an illegitimate fake. Did he botch the war with Japan? Did he fail to subjugate the Chechens? If so, that man on the throne is a con artist posing as a tsar. That’s how it was with Nicholas II and Boris Yeltsin.

Putin legitimised his presidency by regaining Crimea, but his legitimacy is evaporating with his inability to win against Ukraine. The next tsar will, in turn, have to prove himself by achieving victories in the war against the world. And if, for this Putin, threatening to deploy tactical nuclear weapons is merely one aspect of hybrid warfare, for the next Putin deploying them may become a necessary tool in his effort to secure power.

The next Putin, too, will be nothing more than an actor who cannot change his role. His role will be pre-written by the entire Russian power structure, which doesn’t worry about how many people will die in Ukraine or Russia or wherever; it isn’t concerned about the resources it spends, the number of weapons it deploys or the level of military casualties. And if the Russian quality of life deteriorates? So be it – the regime never did care much about the happiness of its own people.

Anyone who is part of this power structure is not afraid to attack the west. After all, who should they be scared of? If a rocket lands on a Nato member’s territory, what then? More meetings, statements, declarations, calls for peace? It’s high time the free world realised that it is not fighting a mad dictator but an autonomous and self-regenerating aggressive power system.

The Russian autocracy’s ancient social structure has been preserved by the storehouse of history for centuries, and sheds its skin only to return in a new guise: as the Golden Horde’s Khanate or the tsardom of Moscow, as the Romanovs’ empire or Stalin’s communist Soviet Union, and most recently as Putin’s “managed democracy”. And now the Russian Federation is shedding its skin once more. What will emerge from the undisturbed foundations of the undefeated military dictatorship? Could it be a free constitutional democracy that willingly forgoes nuclear weapons? Does this sound likely to you?

Before the second world war, too, people wanted peace, no price rises and nice holidays. The voters hoped that their own democratic governments in France and Britain would pursue a policy of peace with Hitler rather than one of war. What followed is history, encompassed in Winston Churchill’s ruthlessly honest and tragic message to voters: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Sooner or later, similar promises will have to be made – instead of nice holidays, European voters must steel themselves for great sacrifice, struggle and hardship, because that is the price we must pay for peace.

Don´t blame Dostoevsky

I understand why people hate all things Russian right now. But our literature did not put Putin in power or cause this war.

By Mikhail Shishkin

“The Atlantic”, 24.07.2022

Culture, too, is a casualty of war. After Russia´s invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainian writers called for a boycott of Russian music, films, and books. Others have all but accused Russian literature of complicity in the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The entire culture, they say, is imperialist and this military aggression reveals the moral bankruptcy of Russia´s so-called civilization. The road to Bucha, they argue, runs through Russian literature.

Terrible crimes are being committed in the name of my people, in the name of my country, in my name. I can see, how this war has turned the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy into the language of war criminals and murderers. What does the world see of “Russian culture” today but bombs falling on maternity hospitals and mutilated corpses on the streets of the Kyiv´s suburbs.

It hurts to be Russian right now. What can I say when I hear that a Pushkin monument is being dismantled in Ukraine? I just keep quiet and feel penitent. And hope that a Ukrainian poet will speak up for Pushkin one day in the future.

The Putin regime has dealt Russian culture a crushing blow, just as the Russian state it has done it to its artists, musitions, and writers so many times before. People in the arts are forced to sing patriotic songs or emigrate. The regime has in effect “cancelled” culture in my country. Recently a young protester faced arrest for holding a placard that bore a quote from Tolstoy.

Russian culture has always had reason to fear the Russian state. In the saying commonly attributed to the great 19-th-century thinker and writer Alexander Herzen, who was sent into internal exile for his anti-czarist sentiments – and reading “forbidden books”, as he put it – “The state in Russia has set itself up like an occupying army.” The Russian system of political power has remained unchanged and unchanging down the centuries – a pyramid of slaves worshiping the supreme khan. That’s how it was during the Golden Horde, that’s how it was in Stalin’s times, that’s how it is today under Vladimir Putin.

The world is surprised at the the quiescence of the Russian people, the lack of opposition to the war. But this has been their survival strategy for generations – as the last line of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov puts it, “The people are silent.” Silence is safer. Whoever is in power is always right, and you have to obey whatever order comes. That makes the Russian tsar sacred. And whoever disagrees ends up in jail or worse. And as Russians know only too well from bitter historical experience, never say, This is the worst. As the popular adage has it: “One should not wish death on a bad tsar”. For who knows what the next one will be like.

Only words can undo this silence. This is why poetry was always more than poetry in Russia.

Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camp when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyewsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

The Russian state has no use for Russian culture unless it can be made to serve the state. Soviet power wanted to give itself an air of humanity and righteousness, so it built monuments to Russian writers. “Pushkin, our be-all and end-all!” rang out from stages in 1937, during the Great Purge, when even the executioners trembled with fear. The regime needs culture as a human mask – or as combat camouflage. That’s why Stalin needed Dmitry Shostakovich and Putin needs Valery Gergiev.

When the critics say Russian culture is imperialist, they are thinking of Russia´s colonial wars, and they mean that its artists justified the state´s expansionist aims. But what they do not account for is Russia´s internal imperialism: Before anything else, it was a slave empire where the Russian people were forced to endure and suffer the most. The Russian Empire exists not for Russia’s people, but for itself. The Russian state’s only purpose is to stay in power and the state has been hammering the “Russki mir” (“Russian world”) view into people’s brains for centuries: the Holy Fatherland an island surrounded by an ocean of enemies, which only the Tsar in the Kremlin can save by ruling its people and preserving order with an iron hand.

For Russia´s small educated class, the eternal questions – the “cursed questions”, as the 19th-century intelligentsia knew them – were those framed by two great novels of the period: Herzen´s Who is to blame? and Nikolai Chernyshevsky´s What is to be Done? But for millions of illiterate peasants, the only question that mattered was, “Is the csar a real or an impostor?”

If the Czar war true, then all was well with the world. But if the Czar proved false, then Russia must have another, a true one. In the minds of the people, only victories over Russia´s enemies could resolve whether the Csar was real and true. Nicholas II was defeated by Japan in 1905 and in the First World War. A false Czar, he lost all popularity. Stalin led his people to victory in the “Great Patriotic War” (World War II), so he was a real Czar – and is revered by many Russians to this day. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, lost the war in Afghanistan and the Cold War against the West, and he is still despised.

Through his triumph in 2014, easily annexing Crimea, Putin achieved the popular legitimicy of a true Csar. But he may lose all that if he cannot win this war against Ukraine. Then another will come forward – first to exorcise the false Putin and then to prove his legitimacy through victory over Russia´s enemies.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the “imperialist” way of thinking.

The civilizational gap that still exists in Russia between the humanist tradition of the intelligentsiya and a Russian population stuck in a mentality from the Middle Ages can be bridged only by culture – and the regime today will do everything it can to prevent that.

The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression – the denunciations or book bans against Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Platonov; the executions of Nikolai Gumilev, Isaak Babel, and Perez Markish; the driving of Marina Tsvetaeva to suicide; the persecution of Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms; the hounding of Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The history of Russian culture is one of desperate resistance, despite crushing defeats, against a criminal state power.

Russian literature still owes the world another great novel. I sometimes imagine a young man who is now in a trench and has no idea that he is the writer, but who asks himself: “What am I doing here? Why has my government lied to me and betrayed me? Why should we kill and die here? Why are we, Russians, fascists and murderers?” Who’s to blame? What is to be done?” That is the task of Russian literature, to keep asking those eternal, cursed questions: “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?”

Russian Author Mikhail Shishkin Says Country Needs ‘Deputinization’

By Erin Brady

Newsweek, 3/31/22

One of Russian’s foremost contemporary authors is speaking out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Mikhail Shishkin, whose books have won the prestigious Russian Booker Prize and the Big Book Award, spoke to U.K.’s Channel 4 about his opposition to the invasion. He has been frequently critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, having opposed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and writing an open letter in The Guardian detailing the importance of Russian-Ukrainian solidarity. In his Channel 4 interview, he further expressed his views.

“I feel horrible,” Shishkin said, “because Russian soldiers are destroying cities and killing people and children, and I’m Russian, So, in my name, such horrible crimes are committed.”

He went on to say, “We have very complicated history. And you see in Russia, we didn’t have the Destalinization. We didn’t have the Nuremberg trials for the Communist Party. And as a result, we have now a new dictatorship. And the nature of dictatorship is to have enemies and to have war. Now we are all in this war. How can we stop this? We need this Deputinization, we must have this national recognition of guilt.”

Although Shishkin does not currently reside in Russia, he told Channel 4 that he still keeps in touch with friends and family who do. He gave a stark insight into how Russians are coping under the increased crackdowns on dissent and protests.

“It’s the sense of the end of the world, just apocalyptical,” said Shishkin. “In regarding to Russians, it will, after this war, be in ruin. [Economic] ruin, but first of all, mental ruin. How exactly will Putin leave us? No idea. I think nobody knows, but this war will bring the Putin solution to the end.”

Although he spoke critically of Putin, the president was not the only target of his ire. He also condemned efforts by Western countries to ban Russian media of all kinds, not just ones that promote content made by the Kremlin.

“I think if a person supports Putin, if they support Putin’s regime, it means they support this war, and a boycott [of these people] is not enough,” explained Shishkin.

“But if some people appeal to boycott [Alexander] Pushkin, [Leo] Tolstoy, the theater pieces of [Anton] Chekhov, the music of [Dmitri] Shostakovich,” the author continued, “it is absolutely stupidness, and Putin’s propaganda is just waiting for this, so people who want to boycott Russian language and Russian culture, they work for Putin’s propaganda.”

This interview was not the first time that Shishkin had expressed anger toward Putin and disapproval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He recently wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian saying that Putin is the reason he feels afraid to return to his home country.

“The regime’s crime is also that the stain of disgrace has fallen on the entire country,” wrote Shishkin in his essay. “Now Russia is associated not with Russian literature and music but with children under bombardment. Putin’s crime is that he has poisoned people with hate. Putin will go away, but the pain and hate may linger in people’s souls for a long time.”

‘I am Russian… in my name such horrible crimes are committed’

Interview with Mikhail Shishkin

By Krishnan Guru-Murthy for Channel 4, 31 Mar 2022

Neither Nato nor Ukraine can de-Putinise Russia. We Russians must do it ourselves

A new, democratic Russia is impossible without a change of national mindset – and an acknowledgment of national guilt

By Mikhail Shishkin

„The Guardian“, 28.03.2022

Bombed-out Ukrainian cities and the corpses of children are not shown on Russian TV. Brave young people in Russia who protest against the war are being beaten up and arrested, while most people remain silent – there are no mass protests, no strikes. It hurts to see that many of my fellow citizens support the war against Ukraine: they put the Z on their windows at home and on their cars.

Russian television now repeatedly shows an interview with the famous actor Sergei Bodrov, a cult figure in Russia. “During a war one cannot speak poorly of one’s own,” he says. “Even if they’re wrong. Even if your country is wrong during the war, you shouldn’t talk poorly about it.” And that’s what people do, willing to support “their own” even if they are shooting at Ukrainians.

The modern world is separated from most Russians by a revolution, humankind’s most important: the transition from the supremacy of the collective consciousness to the priority of the individual. People identified with the tribe for thousands of years and were completely dependent on the pack leader – the chief, khan or tsar. Only in the last several centuries did a fundamentally different human social order begin to emerge, one in which the individual is free. Before the famous text that begins with the words “We the people” could be written, a new humanity had to emerge and it had to be aware of its human dignity.

This huge gap in civilisation has not yet been bridged. This is the drama of my homeland: a small number of my compatriots are ready for life in a democratic society, but the overwhelming majority still bow before power and accept this patrimonial way of life.

If, over the course of generations, everyone who thinks for themselves is wiped out, the only qualities that will prevail will be silence and satisfaction with the authorities. But can you blame these people if that was their only survival strategy? Where do those who don’t remain silent end up today? They go to jail. Or they need to emigrate before it’s too late.

Two attempts to introduce a democratic social order in Russia have already failed. The first Russian democracy, of 1917, lasted only a few months. The second, in the 1990s, lasted a few years with great difficulty. Every time my country tries to build a democratic society by establishing elections, a parliament and a republic, it finds itself in a totalitarian empire.

Do a dictatorship and a dictator give birth to a slave population or does a slave population give birth to a dictatorship and a dictator? The chicken and the egg. How can this vicious circle be broken? How can a new Russia begin?

Hitler’s Germany found its way out of the vicious circle of dictatorship. Germans learned a lot about dealing with the past and coming to terms with guilt, and were able to build a democratically oriented society. However, the rebirth of their nation was predicated on total, crushing military defeat. Russia needs this zero hour, too. A new democratic start in Russia is impossible without paying a price and acknowledging national guilt.

There was no de-Stalinisation in Russia and there were no Nuremberg trials for the Communist party. Now Russia’s fate depends on de-Putinisation. Just as the “ignorant” German population was shown concentration camps in 1945, so “ignorant” Russians must be shown destroyed Ukrainian cities and the corpses of children. We Russians must openly and courageously acknowledge our guilt and ask for forgiveness.

The German writer Georg Büchner wrote this in a letter to his bride in 1834: “What is it that lies, murders, steals in us?” Only that question can accelerate this most important revolution of humankind in Russians: the realisation that the responsibility lies not with your superiors, but with you.

Neither Nato nor the Ukrainians can de-Putinise Russia. We Russians must clean up our country ourselves. Are my people up to the task? After the war, the world will help Ukraine to rebuild. But Russia will be in economic ruins. The collapse of the empire will continue in full force. Other peoples and regions will follow the Chechens towards independence. The Russian Federation will disintegrate. But the centrifugal force of the peoples and regions in the world’s last empire can be purifying and rehabilitating as well as destructive. The Russian consciousness must learn to accept that there can be several states with Russian as the state language. The empire must be removed from minds and souls like a malignant tumour. Only then can new states push through reforms.

But can a democracy establish itself without a critical mass of citizens, without a mature civil society? “The beautiful Russia of the future” (this is Alexei Navalny’s motto) should begin with free elections. But who will carry them out, and according to what rules? The same tens of thousands of terrified teachers who carried out the rigging in the country’s Putinian elections? And can one be sure that in truly free Russian elections, the “national traitor” from the democratic opposition will win, and not the “patriot” who fought against the “Ukrainian fascists”? A population hoping for a benevolent tsar cannot be turned into responsible voters in an hour. And who will implement democratic reforms? Officials who have become tainted with corruption and crime under the Putin regime must not be allowed to build a new state. And they are all tainted.

The world is calling for a “Russian Nuremberg”. But who in Russia will organise and carry out these legal proceedings? Who will make this great reappraisal of the past? Who will uncover the crimes and punish the guilty? The criminals themselves? One can remove and replace Putin, but how can one suddenly replace millions of corrupt officials, mercenary police officers and compliant judges?

A long, painful rebirth is the only way forward for Russia. And all these sanctions, the poverty, and the international outcasting will not be the worst thing we encounter along the way. It will be more terrible when there is no inner rebirth for the Russian people. Putin is a symptom, not the disease.

My dear Russians – the Ukrainians are fighting Putin’s army for their freedom, and ours

The real Russia is a country of literature and music, not the bombardment of children. Putin’s war brings disgrace on us all

By Mikhail Shishkin

“The Guardian”, 7.03.2022

I’m a Russian. Vladimir Putin is committing monstrous crimes in the name of my people, my country, and me. Putin is not Russia. Russia is hurt and ashamed. In the name of my Russia and my people I beg the Ukrainians’ forgiveness. Yet I realise that nothing being done there can be forgiven.

This war did not begin just now but in 2014, with Putin’s seizure of Crimea. The western world refused to understand the gravity of this and pretended nothing terrible was going on. All these years I’ve been trying in my statements and publications to explain to people just who Putin is. It hasn’t worked. And now Putin himself has explained it to everyone.

Whenever one of my articles is published in the press in Switzerland, where I live, the editors receive letters of outrage from people at the Russian embassy in Berne. They’re silent now. Maybe they’re packing their bags and applying for political asylum?

I want to return to Russia. But which Russia? In Putin’s Russia it’s impossible to breathe. The stench from the policeman’s boot is too strong. I will return to my country. As I wrote in an open letter when I refused to represent Putin’s Russia at an international event back in 2013, before Crimea was annexed: “I want to and will represent another Russia, my Russia, free of impostors, a country with a state structure that defends not the right to corruption but the rights of the individual, a country with free media, free elections, and free people.”

The space for free expression in Russia was restricted to the internet long ago, but now even there we see military censorship. The authorities have announced that all critical statements regarding Russia and its war will be considered treason and punished according to martial law.

What can a writer do? The only thing he can: speak out clearly. Silence means support for the aggressor. In the 19th century, rebellious Poles fought Russian tsarism “for your freedom and ours”. Now the Ukrainians are fighting Putin’s army for their freedom and ours. They are defending not only their own human dignity but the dignity of all humanity. We must help in every way we can.

The regime’s crime is also that the stain of disgrace has fallen on the entire country. Now Russia is associated not with Russian literature and music but with children under bombardment. Putin’s crime is that he has poisoned people with hate. Putin will go away, but the pain and hate may linger in people’s souls for a long time. Only art, literature, and culture can help overcome this trauma.

Sooner or later, the dictator’s foul, useless life will end, but culture continues as it always has and as it will after Putin. Literature does not have to be about Putin. Literature does not have to explain war. War can’t be explained. Why do people order soldiers of one nation to kill those of another? Literature is what opposes war. True literature is always about the human being’s need for love, not hate.

What lies ahead? At best, there will not be a nuclear war. I fervently hope the madman will not be allowed to press the red button or that one of his flunkies will refuse to carry out this final order. But this is seemingly the sole good thing in the offing. After Putin, the Russian Federation will cease to exist on the map as a country. The process of the empire’s collapse will continue. Chechnya’s independence will be followed by that of other peoples and regions.

A struggle for power will ensue. The populace will have no wish to live in chaos, and the demand for a firm hand will strengthen once again. Even in the freest elections – if there are any – a new dictator may come to power. And the west will support him because he will promise to watch over the red button. And who knows? One day this may happen all over again.

”How Russians lost the war”

What does Victory Day mean in a country that has enslaved its people?

By Mikhail Shishkin

“New York Times” 9.05.2015

Russia, Ukraine and Europe have been into Vladimir Putin’s black hole of fear

The formula for saving any dictatorship is universal: create an enemy, start a war. We are back in Soviet times of total lies

By Mikhail Shishkin

“The Guardian” 18.09.2014

I remember that as a child I read about black holes in a popular science magazine about space and it scared me. The idea of our world being sucked into these breaks in the universe kept bothering me until I realised that it all was so far away that it would not reach us. But then a black hole tore our world very close to us. It started sucking in houses, roads, cars, planes, people and whole countries. Russia and Ukraine have already fallen into this black hole. And it is now sucking in Europe in front of our eyes. This hole in the universe is the soul of one very lonely ageing man. The black hole is his fear.

TV images of the demise of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi were messages that fate sent him from exotic countries. Protest rallies that gathered hundreds of thousands of people in Moscow ruined his inauguration and signalled approaching danger. The disgraceful flight of Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych earlier this year set off alarm bells: if Ukrainians could oust their gang, it could serve as an example for the brotherly nation.

The instinct of self-preservation kicked in immediately. The formula for saving any dictatorship is universal: create an enemy, start a war. The state of war is the regime’s elixir of life. A nation in patriotic ecstasy becomes one with its “national leader”, while any dissenters can be declared “national traitors”.

Before our eyes, Russian TV was turned from a tool of entertainment and misinformation into a weapon of mass destruction. Journalists became a special part of the arsenal, maybe the most important one, more important even than missiles. The desired world view formed in the infected minds of a zombified nation: Ukrainian fascists wage a war to annihilate the Russian world on orders from the west.

“There are no Russian soldiers in Crimea,” Vladimir Putin claimed to the world with a wry grin in the spring. The west could not understand: how can he tell such blatant lies to his nation’s face? But the nation did not take it as lies: we ourselves understand everything, but deceiving the enemy is not a sin, rather a virtue. The fact that “Russian soldiers were indeed in Crimea” was later admitted with such pride!

We are back to the Soviet times of total lies. The government renewed the social contract with the nation under which we had lived for decades: we know that we lie and you lie, and we continue to lie to survive. Generations have grown up under this social contract. These lies cannot even be called a sin: the power of vitality and survival is concentrated in them. The government was afraid of its nation, which is why it lied. The nation participated in the lies, because it was afraid of the government. The lies are a means of survival for a society built on violence and fear.

But just violence and fear cannot explain such an all-encompassing lie.

Why did the father of the Russian paratrooper who lost his legs in Ukraine write on Facebook, “My son is a soldier; he followed orders, which is why, whatever happened to him, he is right and I am proud of him”?

He keeps his mind off the idea that his son went to kill brotherly people and became disabled not defending his motherland from real enemies, but rather because of an insipid colonel’s panic-stricken fear of losing his power, because of the ambitions of a clique of thieves swarming around the throne. How can he admit that his country, his motherland is the aggressor and that his son is the fascist? Motherland is always on the side of good. This is why when Putin lies in his nation’s face, everyone knows that he is lying, and he knows that everyone knows, but the electorate agrees with his lies.

When Putin tells blatant lies in the face of western politicians, he then watches their reaction with vivid interest and not without pleasure, enjoying their confusion and helplessness. He wants Kiev to return on its knees, like a prodigal son, to the fatherly embrace of the empire. He is sure that Europe will boil with indignation, but eventually calm down, abandoning Ukraine to brotherly rape. He offers the west the chance to join the social contract of lies. All it has to do is say that Putin is a peacekeeper and agree to all the terms of his peacekeeping plan.

The sanctions imposed by western states against Russia represent a timid hope that economic hardship will make Russians resent the regime and nudge them towards active protests. Alas, it is an idle hope. Russians have a proverb: beat your own so the others fear you. It is hard to imagine officials in Berlin or Paris summarily banning food imports. The entire nations would burst in indignation that same day.

In contrast, in Russia such a move boosted the ruler’s already sky-high rating. Putin knows the difference between the power he enjoys and the power of European democracies. Democratic governments are liable to their electorate for the people and their future, whereas under a dictatorship, one is only liable to follow orders. Every dictator hopes he is immortal, but since it is impossible, he is ready to drag everyone he despises into the black hole. And he despises everyone – both his own people and everybody else.

Putin knows that the west cannot cross the red line that he himself has long crossed and left behind. The red line is the willingness to go to war. It is hard for a human mind to switch from a postwar to a prewar time. The means of mass informational terror in Russia helped Russians to make the switch. Moreover, Russia is already in a state of war, an undeclared war against the west. Coffins with fallen Russian soldiers have started coming to Russian cities from Ukraine. Europe has fallen behind; it is still enjoying the relaxed prewar peace.

Europeans are not ready for the new reality that has set in. Leave us alone! Return everything to the way it was: jobs, gas, peace! No supplying weapons to Ukraine! One cannot start an armed conflict in the age of nuclear weapons because of some Mariupol! Should the world perish in a catastrophe because Ukraine was to be part of Europe? It is just because the Americans want to cause us to quarrel with Russians! It is all the fault of US imperialists and European bureaucrats! Why do we need sanctions that would hurt us too? The French are ready to take to the streets to protest at the American ruling that forces France to abandon the sale of Mistral warships to Russia. Moscow just protects its interest in Ukraine! And maybe fascists are indeed in power in Kiev? It may have started as a public uprising, but then a Nazi junta took over. Then why should we support them and fight with Russia? Putin offers peace! We want peace!

Putin’s calculations are proving correct: it is more likely that citizens of western states, scared by economic woes and the possibility of war, would elect new governments, replacing Putin’s enemies with more amenable politicians, than Russians would start to protest because of devastation and rising food prices.

Putin offered Europe his social contract. And with every new person willing to accept it, the black hole will grow and expand. One needs to realise: postwar Europe is already prewar Europe.

Sochi Olympics: Russian Writer Mikhail Shiskin Holds His Applause

To Mikhail Shishkin Russia today, under President Vladimir Putin, resembles too closely the Russia of old

“Wall Street Journal”, February 14, 2014

Poets and Czars

From Pushkin to Putin: the sad tale of democracy in Russia

By Mikhail Shishkin

“The New Republic” 1.07.2013

It was only a century ago that Russia was the center of world literature. Writers streamed from all over the world to Yasnaya Polyana to bow before Tolstoy, like pilgrims to Jerusalem. And in Russia the authority of this writer was so great that, should he, the great writer, have decided, say, to be elected czar, it is doubtful that Nicholas II could have held on to his throne. The snag is that Tolstoy didn’t consider power to be worth a brass farthing—and that it is impossible to be elected czar: in Russia, legitimate power is derived only from God. It is also impossible, I should add, to be elected a great writer. But where did this power of literature come from in Russia?

At the time that Shakespeare was penning Hamlet’s monologue in the West, in Russia there were no poets or writers to speak of. There were only czars and holy fools. God gave the Russian people the king-emperor and the fool-in-Christ. The former held sway over the lives and deaths of his subjects, the latter was the only one who could speak truth to the tyrant. Recall the famous scene in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when the holy fool exclaims: “It is forbidden to pray for Czar Herod, the Holy Mother forbids it!” The counterweight to the sanctity of power was the sanctity of Christian conscience.

Back then, the Russian atlas of the world looked something like this: the holy Fatherland in the center of the world, the only truly Christian country, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of enemies. Centuries-old servitude to the czar meant a confiscation of body and will and mind, but in exchange it elevated the soul and conferred a righteous purpose on existence. What looked to ambassadors from the banks of the Rhine like Russian despotism and slavery seemed on the banks of the Moscow River a committed participation in a common fight, in which the czar was the general and everyone else was his child and soldier. The absence of a private life was compensated for by the sweetness of dying for the homeland. The stretch of the Fatherland across geography and time was the down payment for personal salvation; the unconscious slavery was bitter for the body but life-sustaining for the spirit. Russia, like Noah’s ark in the flood, fulfilled the mission of saving sacred life on Earth.

But everything changed with Peter the Great. He wanted to “cut a window to Europe,” but instead he cut a hole in the Russian ark. Russia’s regular historical paradox is that its rulers want one thing but the result is often something entirely different. Peter the Great wanted to strengthen the empire, but instead he placed a bomb beneath it, which destroyed it. In our time, Gorbachev wanted to save communism and instead he buried it.

The point of Peter’s reforms was to obtain military technology from the West in order to do battle against that very same West. In the eighteenth century, a torrent of Gastarbeiter came to Russia from enlightened Europe. The Russians had invited engineers and specialists, but those who came were people, and they brought with them European ideas of individualism, personal rights, and human dignity. Modern technologies demand education, and education inevitably brings with it the concept of personal freedom. And that is how Russia got its intelligentsia.

Many have tried to define the Russian intelligentsia, and none have been able to convey the full constellation of nuances in this very curious phenomenon. Most likely, the Russian intellectual is he who, having read plenty of books and seen plenty of Russian life, exclaims, as Pushkin did, “Why the devil was I born in Russia, with brains and talent!”

Poets appeared in Russia in the eighteenth century. They wore officers’ uniforms and mostly wrote odes for the accession of German empresses onto the Russian throne. In a country where life was lived according to the wartime principle of unity of command, everyone including poets served the government, which was personified by the autocracy. But everything changed with Pushkin. Born in a country where serfdom was only the formal expression of a deep internal psychological slavery, he achieved the most important Russian coup, the greatest Russian revolution: in opposition to the pyramid of power, at the head of which the Czar administers the fates of individuals and nations, he created an alternative pyramid, at the head of which stood the poet. The juxtaposition of the czar and the holy fool—the old divided paradigm of authority—was exchanged for the juxtaposition of the czar and the poet.

Against the omnipotent traditional Russian system—for which a person was, in the words of Peter I, “a soldier of the Fatherland,” and in the formulation of Stalin’s executioner Beria, “concentration camp dust”—Pushkin posited another, as yet unknown power in Russia: the power of a free, artistic spirit. The hierarchy of the imperial consciousness, where everything depends on rank, now had a rival hierarchy, legalized by no one, but recognized by all, including the czar:

I’ve set up to myself a monument

not wrought by hands. The public path to it

will not grow weedy. Its unyielding head

soars higher than the Alexandrine Column.

Those lines of the poem Exegi monumentum became the poet’s declaration of independence, his appointment of himself as head of another Russia. The state in Russia fears the poet because, beginning with Pushkin, he (or she) is a power independent of the state and insubordinate to the state, a power just as sacred—the representative of another country, but one that falls within the borders of the same empire. The resulting duality of power led inevitably to conflict: how can two powers, both appealing to a higher divine authority, coexist in one totalitarian state? This was the ultimate question of Russian literature, to which every generation of Russian writers painfully sought an answer: should the poet be with the czar, or against him? Pushkin’s muse was a tyrant-fighting muse, or, to use the contemporary terminology, a terrorist muse. The poet was exiled by the czar’s edict to his family’s estate. His poem The Dagger was copied and passed around among the Decembrists, officers who had carried out the unsuccessful plot against the new czar, Nicholas I, in December 1825. Among those planning the regicide were some of Pushkin’s friends.

The new czar summoned the exiled poet to the Kremlin on the occasion of his coronation, and asked him: with whom would he have sided that December day? Pushkin answered honestly that he would have been with his friends. It was the moment of truth for Russian literature. The czar could have destroyed the poet with one stroke of the quill. But Nicholas sensed that czarist power in Russia could not exist without the blessing of the other supreme power. The wise Nicholas was forced into a compromise and named himself the First Reader of the First Poet. That discussion in the Kremlin between the poet and the czar was the beginning of the diarchy in Russian culture and consciousness. The young Pushkin, author of The Dagger, ceased to exist. He was replaced by a mature Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. The former praised violence as the path to freedom. The latter knew that violence led nowhere.

Pushkin gave an answer to the “cursed” Russian question that occurs to every Russian born in an empire that is constantly waging war against foreigners and against its own people: how should one view this government and these people who are constantly waging these wars? The study of Russia’s history, the history of its czars and its popular uprisings, as well as his own healthy understanding of reality, led the poet to the conclusion that the worst that could happen in Russia is revolution, a “pointless and merciless” uprising, and that the government is “the sole European in our country.” Pushkin saw that in Russia the choice between dictatorship and democracy was beside the point: the only choice was between bloody chaos and ruthless order. He grasped that a weak Russian government would not bring about a grassroots democratic system, but only anarchy, and that its first victim would be culture. He also foresaw that the restoration of order would become the task of an even stronger and more ruthless dictatorship. It’s as if Pushkin had intuited what would happen in Russia in the twentieth century. It was this logic that informed the decision of Russia’s first national poet to choose the side of the czar and his strong hand, which became the guarantor of both private life and culture. Pushkin studied the history of the Pugachev peasant revolt, the brutal popular uprising in the eighteenth century, and he understood that, in a Russian revolution, the first things to burn will be the libraries.

Russia had a strange situation on its hands: one territory now contained two nations, completely different in spirit and culture, though they both were Russian and both spoke the same language. One part of the people, millions and millions strong, lived in the provinces, poor, uneducated, slowly drinking themselves to death, and mentally still residing in the Middle Ages. The other part was concentrated in the two Russian capitals. They were educated, well-off, well-traveled, and with a European understanding of the democratic organization of society. For one set, only the czar-father and his iron fist can bring order to Russia. For the other, the entirety of Russian history is a bloody swamp, from which Russia must be pulled into a liberal European system. What was happening in Pushkin’s Russia, in sum, is extraordinarily reminiscent of what is happening in Putin’s Russia. In my country, we are still playing the same game with the same rules for three players: a people that (in Pushkin’s words) “exude silence,” a nascent society that demands “Swiss” democracy and declares war against the government, and a government that is left with two options: to retreat or to tighten the screws.

Czarist Russia retreated in the face of democratic Russia to the point that the pyramid of government power disintegrated. In February 1917, Russia experienced a bloodless democratic revolution: the “other” Russia had won. But the chances of survival for this newborn civil society were nonexistent—after all, they were in the middle of a world war. So the first Russian democracy existed for only few months, during which the country sank into chaos.

The capricious muse of history used the communist ideology to rebuild the old patriarchal order under its guise. But compared with Stalin’s dictatorship, the old czarist “prison-house of the nations” came to seem like a gingerbread house. The “other” Russia was destroyed in the most literal physical sense: millions of people emigrated, millions more were eliminated in the Gulag. And the national atlas looked once again like it had in the Middle Ages: the sacred Fatherland with the one true communist ideology at the center of the world, surrounded by an ocean of enemies.

From the times of Pushkin and Nicholas I, it was no longer enough for the earthly czar to be anointed by God; the ruler had also to be sanctified by Russian literature, the second sacred Russian power. That is why Stalin’s regime was so concerned with perpetuating the memory of the classic Russian writer. If Orthodox czars based their right to own the bodies and souls of their subjects on heavenly law, the Communists legitimized the dictatorship of the party with “scientific” theses such as, “The teachings of Marx are omnipotent because they are the truth.” But the real sacred figures who could sanctify the state were Pushkin and Gogol—the poets and the writers.

When the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, “to throw Pushkin overboard the steamboat of modernity.” They could not raise their hand against that which is most sacred for the Russian soul. So this prison state built monuments to Pushkin everywhere, trying to seem righteous in the people’s eyes.

The result was that it seemed that Pushkin and the other classic writers were made to support, at least symbolically, the transformation of the entire country into a Gulag (though it would hardly have stopped the Leninist “humanists” from executing Tolstoy, had the old man lived a little longer). From Pushkin comes the Russian literary tradition of keeping as close as possible to the First Reader. Generations of Russian authors, like moths blindly rushing toward the flame, flew toward those in power. And there was not a single case in which it ended well. It is enough to recall the death of Pushkin in a duel, or the suicide of Mayakovsky.

The other Russian tradition for how a poet should comport himself toward the state was formulated by another great Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky: “If you were fated to be born in an empire, it’s better to live in a distant province by the sea.” An extreme example of this code of conduct was Tolstoy’s last run. And Brodsky’s own life was a textbook case: exile to the north in his youth, an internal inability to compromise with the regime, and emigration to a “distant province by the sea.” With his move, Brodsky made this New York province by the Atlantic the capital of Russian poetry. The “other” Russia is not a geographical concept. It exists where there are “other” Russians. And so it was that over the course of several generations, the “other” Russia, the Russia of poets and writers, the Russia of culture, destroyed in the Soviet Union, was preserved underground and in emigration.

The empire built by Stalin could have lasted much longer, but a miracle happened. One after another the supreme slaves died, and the country-jail simply fell apart. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, my people got a unique opportunity to build their lives differently, to make their own choices. I remember that marvelous feeling when the Soviet era was ending and, for the first time, I could proudly consider myself a citizen of my country, responsible for its future. Twenty-five years ago, we went off to protest against the regime, to defend our honor and dignity, and to say to the government: we are not slaves! Happy is the generation that was lucky enough to experience this.

My new Russia has to begin with the kids, I decided, and with the launch of perestroika, I went to work in a school. In Russia, unlike in Germany or Switzerland, a school is at the very bottom of the social ladder, likely because there is nothing to steal there. In those years, I began to believe for the first time that something depended on me. I wanted to change my country, and working at a school was exactly the way to change it. Suddenly I felt that I was in the most important place at the most important time. It seemed that, finally, life according to prison rules—the strongest gets the best bunk—was ending in Russia, and a new one was beginning, lived according to one central rule: the law of protecting human dignity. It seemed to me that it was I who was changing the country. The totalitarian system was molting into a democratic one before my eyes. It was an astonishing feeling: we had been raised to be obedient slaves, and then, all of a sudden, you were taking responsibility for all that was around you.

August 1991 and the failed coup against the reformers became the boundary, the border, between the nauseating Soviet past and—as it seemed then—the bright future, full of hope. We believed that over the course of a violent century the country had sated itself with enough blood, and that a dignified human life was beginning—and that, most importantly, there would be no more blood. The fact that the failed putsch did not cost thousands of lives seemed symbolic. The country’s freedom was bought with the lives of three young men. We went to their funerals. And it was also symbolic that one was Russian Orthodox, one a Muslim, and one a Jew. At their funerals it was said that these three youths had given their lives for our common freedom, for a new and free Russia.

I, too, believed that theirs would be the last blood spilled in my country. But alas, it was but the first blood of the new Russia. The time of hope ended and the time of disillusionment began. In October 1993, the new “democratic” state was the one shelling its own people in Moscow. Blood ran in the streets of Russian cities in endless criminal conflicts. In 1994, the Chechen war broke out. Through the veil of democratic rhetoric, one could again discern the outlines of old, eternal Russia.

In 1991, we were able to free ourselves of Communist rule, but we were unable to free ourselves from ourselves. We had been naïve. Everything had seemed simple and clear: our country had been hijacked by a band of Communists, and if we could just chase out the party, the borders would open and we would return to the global family of nations living according to the laws of democracy, freedom, and respect for individual rights. They were like the words of a fairy tale of an unattainable future: “parliament,” “republic,” “constitution,” “elections.”

For some reason, we neglected to remember that we already had all these words. We had Stalin’s Constitution of 1936, which was “the most democratic constitution in the world,” and we were regularly mobilized to vote in elections. We forgot that all the good words crossing our borders lost their original meanings and began to mean anything other than what they were supposed to mean. Who would have thought that the Communist Party would leave but we would stay, and all the best words—“democracy” and “parliament” and “constitution”—would become just the billy clubs in the eternal struggle for power and money in the new, free Russia?

The guards proved impossible to chase out because each of us was our own best guard. Even if you don’t quash the rebellion in the prison yard, it will eventually end on its own, and in the prison yard of our country it ended with everyone returning to their barracks. We had to live, after all. And order returned on its own, the very same order because no one in Russia knows a different one. The best bunks again went to the strongest, who had consigned the weakest among them to sleep by the latrine.

Russia’s second attempt at democracy was over. The empire had shed its skin, but what came through on the other side was painfully familiar to those who had lived in “the good old days.” In the course of twenty years, it became clear that democratic re-education in Russia had been debased as mere words that hid the gangster organization of society and the government. The Mafia, as it exists in other countries—that is, parallel to the government—does not exist in Russia. In Russia, the Mafia is the government, the arch-enemy of law and society.

People feel duped. They were robbed to the tune of democratic slogans. A gang of former party and Komsomol functionaries divided up the country’s natural resources, and are rushing to sell them off to get rich today, not thinking about the country’s tomorrow. This is how the overwhelming majority of the population views the reforms of the 1990s. Once again Russia’s eternal constants glow vividly amid the masquerade of the twenty-first century: a bunch of thieves, bureaucrats, and oligarchs appropriating the wealth of the country as an indigent population drowns itself in booze. The money from the pilfered resources flows to the West instead of being invested in roads, schools, and hospitals in Russia. The vast portion of government resources allocated to social needs never reaches its target, and is diverted instead to bureaucrats’ pockets. A marvelous example is the Winter Olympics, which are being held in the subtropics on the whim of the country’s supreme skier. The sum being spent on these games is greater than what has been spent on all the previous Winter Olympics combined.¹

The twentieth century locked Russian history into a Mobius strip. The country tries to build a democratic society, to introduce elections, to create a parliament and a republic—and once again it ends up an empire. The perestroika dreams of Europeanizing the country collapsed. Once again it has been confirmed that Russia is a wonderful country for scoundrels, and for those who battle scoundrels. (The latter do much less well, though.) This empire is not designed for “normal” life. If, by your nature, you are neither a fighter nor a scoundrel, and you merely want to live your life with dignity, working honestly for your family’s bread, you still have no choice: every day pushes you toward one or the other. You don’t want to be a scoundrel like the rest? Then become a fighter, tragically ready to sacrifice everything, even your family, for the sake of the fight. You don’t want to be a hero and rot in prison, or be beaten to death in the lobby of your building? Then line up with the scoundrels. So what should ordinary people do if, on the one hand, they do not want to be part of the criminal superstructure—for all of life in Russia has become a vast criminal machine—and if, on the other hand, they do not wish to march in the revolution? If all they want is a dignified human life? Today, as in the past, these are the options: “internal emigration,” or alcohol if you do not have the ability to leave, or actual emigration from the country. In the last twenty years, millions have left Russia. The first to leave are the highly educated—the intellectual and entrepreneurial bloom of the nation, the foundation of the middle class, which is born in the big cities, but which the government will not allow to get up on its feet.

Czars, general secretaries, presidents—in Russia they change, but Pushkin remains, and each regime bows to the poet, hoping to derive from him a spiritual legitimacy. “Pushkin is our everything!” was the slogan that boomed from every rostrum in 1937, the year of the worst terror and the most pompous celebration of Pushkin’s jubilee: the entire country, from both sides of the barbed wire, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.

It is not surprising, then, that the post-Soviet regime supported the tradition of celebrating Pushkin. The bicentennial of the poet’s birth, in 1999, was celebrated with pomp and grandiosity that eclipsed even Stalin’s public rites. All this happened with the war as a backdrop, a war waged against its own people in Chechnya. And again “Pushkin is our everything!” sounded everywhere. But these mythical times when Nicholas I was Pushkin’s First Reader, and Stalin personally read the books of the winners of the Stalin Prize, are long gone. The poet cannot align himself with this usurper of the throne, not least because this despot doesn’t read. It is impossible to imagine Putin, the gray little KGB colonel, with a book in his hands.

The new authoritarianism in Russia could not care less about literature; its priority is to control the electorate through television. For most of Russia’s population, television is the main source of information. In the twenty-first century, the “zombie box” presents its audience with the same painfully familiar picture: the holy Fatherland—though now without any ideology—surrounded by an ocean of enemies led by the United States, and only the father of the nation can save the country from its foes.

But new times call for new measures, even from dictatorships. The government no longer destroys the “other” Russia physically; it simply squeezes it out, toward emigration. After all, the borders are open. Those who are dissatisfied with the regime are labeled foreign agents. (“Whoever doesn’t like it here can go on back to America, to your masters!”) The question of freedom of speech is solved in a purely technical manner: the dissatisfied are banished to the Internet ghetto. On opposition websites you can mostly still rail against the government all you like, but not one anti-government statement will make it past the state censors on television.

The falsifications of the Duma elections in December 2011 were a fuse, and society, first in the big cities, indignant at the outrageous machinations of the authorities, exploded. Protests spilled from the Internet ghetto into the streets. In just a few days, it was as if Russia had woken up and become a totally different country. Suddenly it turned out that the people who did not want to live in the corrupt system that Putin had built were not a marginal minority. There were a lot of them. In Moscow, they were even the majority. The feelings that had given people wings twenty years ago reawakened: “It is our city, it is our country, and we care!” What is happening in Russia now, before our very eyes, is the emergence of a civil society from a patriarchal order. The counterweight to the totalitarian mentality of the state and the population is, for most Russians, a new conception of man and a life worthy of the human image.

The events of the last few years have split the country. So far, the war between the criminal empire and the educated population is largely a cold one. But each arrest of an opposition figure, each draconian new law passed by an illegitimate Duma, only radicalizes this resistance. A “tightening of the screws” has ceded all power to the criminal gang of oligarchs and bureaucrats, and the protest movement once again finds itself displaced into the Internet ghetto.

No one in Russia wants the barricades of revolution. We have too much bad experience of revolution behind us. Yet it is impossible to keep living in the constricting and humiliating space that is Putin’s empire. There is only one option: information. The opposition’s best weapon is information. For no one really knows what Russia is today. The sociological data are too unreliable. If you hold an election there on any given Sunday, who will win? The number of people whose brains have been cleansed by Putin TV may be a majority. Only free information, only free access to the sources of free speech, can change them, and make them other than what they are now—citizens of the “other” Russia.

The second Russian democracy, at the beginning of the 1990s, lasted longer than the first, which ended after just a few months with the October coup. Now Russia has a third chance. Will it let it slip away again?

Mikhail Shishkin is a Russian novelist who lives in Moscow, Berlin, and Switzerland. His novels have won all the major Russian literary prizes and been translated into twenty-eight languages. This essay was translated from the Russian by Julia Ioffe.

Milhail Shishkin: A revolution for Russia’s words

The leading writer and maverick reflects on the ties between literature, freedom and the state he left behind

“The Independent”, 22.03.2013

As it creates reality, language judges: it punishes and it pardons. Language is its own verdict. There is nowhere to appeal. All higher courts are non-verbal. Even before he has begun writing, the writer is like Laocoön, pinioned by the language snake. If he is to explain anything, the writer must be freed from language.

It was quite a while after my move from “Pushka” to the canton of Zurich before the bizarre sense of the unreal, the carnival quality of what was happening to me, was gradually replaced by the tentative and amazed confidence that, indeed, this was no illusion. The trains were not toys, the landscape not painted, the people not planted.

Immediately following the change of scenery, I tried to finish writing the novel I had begun in Moscow, but I got nowhere. The letters I had traced out there had an utterly different density here. In the end, the novel was about something else. Every word is a high step for you to trip over.

Borders, distance and air do wonders with words. A combination of Russian sounds that was so obvious and natural on Malaya Dmitrovka Street, with the Chekhov Casino raging outside my window, won’t make it through customs here. Words stripped of all independent existence there acquire residency permits here and become not a means but a subject of verbal law. Here, any Russian word sounds completely wrong and means something completely different. Just as, in a theatre, the meaning of a phrase shifts when uttered after a change in scenery.

It is as if there were a different center of gravity on the banks of the Limmat, and any word coming out of a Russian inkwell weighs far more here than in its country of origin. What in Russia suffuses the atmosphere, is strewn in sediments and across human snouts, in “the cadet Grushnitsky”, in the war in Chechnya and in “Christ has risen from the dead”, here it is all concentrated in every word of Cyrillic script – pressed, crammed into every last “Ы”.

As it slips further from reality with each passing day, the fatherland seeks out new carriers and finds them in the squiggles of an exotic alphabet. Russia has gathered all its belongings and taken up residence in a font. Letters have been consolidated, just as apartments once were, to accommodate new residents.

My departure from the language, the loss of Russian murmuring in my ears, forced me to stop, to be silent. On the rare occasions when we meet, writers from Russia are amazed. “How can you write in this boring Switzerland? Without the language, without the tension?”

They are right – the atmospheric pressure in Russian letters is heightened. And the language is changing rapidly. My exit from Russian speech forced me to turn around and face it. Work on my text came to a halt. Just as there are rests in music, so are there silences in a text. Perhaps they are its most important part.

What is the language I left behind? What did I take with me? Where do the words go from here? A labour of silence. If I was to go further, I had to understand where the essence of writing in Russian actually lay. Being at once creator and creature of the fatherland’s reality, the Russian language is a form of existence, the body of a totalitarian consciousness. Daily life has always muddled through without words: with bellowing, interjections, and gag lines from film comedies. It is the state and literature that require coherent words.

Russian literature is not a form of existence for the language, but a way of existing in Russia for the non-totalitarian consciousness. The totalitarian consciousness has been amply served by decrees and prayers. Decrees from above, prayers from below. The latter are usually more original than the former. Swearing is the vital prayer of a prison country.

Edicts and cursing are the nation’s yin and yang, its rain and field, phallus and vagina; the verbal conception of Russian civilisation. Over the generations, prison reality produced a prison consciousness whose governing principle was that the strongest gets the best bunk. This consciousness was expressed in a language called up to serve Russian life, maintaining it in a state of continuous, unending civil war. When everyone lives by prison camp laws, the mission of language is a cold war between everyone and his neighbour. If the strong must inevitably beat the feeble, it is the mission of language to do this verbally. Humiliate him, insult him and steal his ration. Language as a form of disrespect for the individual.

Russian reality produced a language of unbridled power and abasement. The language of the Kremlin and the prison camp slang of the street share one and the same nature. In a country that lives by an unwritten but distinct law – the place of the weakest is by the slop bucket – the dialect suits the reality. Words rape. Words abuse. Had the borders always been under lock and key, there would be no Russian literature.

Literary language arrived in the 18th century, along with the idea of human dignity. Until then, we had no words for that language. The first century of our national literature consists essentially of translations and imitations. There was no verbal instrument to express individual consciousness; it first had to be created. Russian was taught as a foreign tongue, and the missing concepts were introduced: obshestvennost (“the public”), vlyblonnost (“being in love,”), chelovechnost (“humaneness”).

The Russian literary language, which in Russia is a form of existence – a body – for human dignity, squeezed through a crack between the shout and the moan. Russian literature wedged its way into an alien embrace. From words it constructed the great wall between the Russian state and the people.

It was a foreign body. It was a colony of European culture on the Russian plain – if, by European colonisation, we mean the softening of manners and defending the rights of the weak before the mighty, and not the importation of Prussian gunners.

As has happened on other continents as well, the colony overtook the center in its development. Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – these are colonists whose texts transferred literature’s capital from the Old World to Russia. They took the best from a thousand-year legacy and called, Go east!

But something is rotten in the Russian empire and, from time to time, the state and the people tear into one another, and this is disastrous for foreign bodies. Writers’ bones crack in these embraces, and they either die or slip away.

The familiar events of the 20th century returned the indigenous population to its former literary routine: decrees from above, prayers from below. Some “colonists” returned to their traditional homeland; those who remained had their tongues cut out by the barbarians.

The invented language of the Soviet utopia was also its very embodiment. Socialism’s invented, lifeless reality existed only in the suitably lifeless language of the newspapers, television, and political meetings. In the 1990s, when the regime disappeared together with the language that served it, prison camp slang rose to the top and filled the vacuum. Once again, the state and the nation are speaking the same dialect and “whacking the Chechens in the toilet”, to borrow the president’s words.

The totalitarian consciousness survives in the language of television, where the main principle of dialogue is to shout down the other guy. It is the language of newspapers turned sickeningly yellow. It is the language of the street, where swearing is the norm.

The language of Russian literature is an ark. A rescue attempt. A hedgehog defense. An island of words where human dignity might be preserved. When I left Russia, I lost the language I wanted to lose. The changes in modern Russian are a molting. The fur feels different, but the colouration is the same, and painfully recognizable at that. This language, which is meant to debase, reproduces itself with each generation of Russian boys and girls. In and of itself, the literary language does not exist; it must be perpetually created anew, and in solitude.

There is a legend about a prisoner sentenced to a life of solitary confinement. He spent years scratching out the image of a boat on the wall with the handle of a prison spoon. One day, they brought him his water, bread and gruel as usual, but the cell was empty and the wall was blank. He had climbed into the boat on the wall and sailed away.

The novel is a boat. Words must be revived in order for the boat to be genuine, so that I may climb aboard and sail out of this solitary life to a place where they love us and are waiting for us all. Save myself. And take all of my characters with me. And the reader too.

Translated by Marian Schwartz.

Mikhail Shishkin refuses to represent ‘criminal’ Russian regime

Author pulls out of US Book Expo showcase in light of ‘pyramid of thieves’ returning his country ‘to the Middle Ages’

By Alison Flood

«The Guardian» 7.03.2013

One of Russia’s most important contemporary authors, Mikhail Shishkin, has pulled out of representing Russia in a major international literary event because he does not want to be the voice of “a country where power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime [and] where the state is a pyramid of thieves”.

Shishkin, who has won Russia’s three main literary awards including the Russian Booker, travelled with the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications to be part of its showcase of Russian writers at Book Expo America in 2012, one of the biggest publishing events of the year. A return to the book fair in 2013 would have cemented relationships with American publishers, readers and booksellers.

Shishkin initially accepted the invitation, but has now changed his mind, “not because ‘my schedule doesn’t permit it’, but out of ethical considerations”, he has written in a letter to the agency.

“Russia’s political development, and the events of last year in particular, have created a situation in the country that is absolutely unacceptable and demeaning for its people and its great culture,” writes Shishkin. “What is happening in my country makes me, as a Russian and a citizen of Russia, ashamed. By taking part in the book fair as part of the official delegation and taking advantage of the opportunities presented to me as a writer, I am simultaneously taking on the obligations of being a representative of a state whose policy I consider ruinous for the country and of an official system I reject.”

He wrote that “a country where power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime, where the state is a pyramid of thieves, where elections have become farce, where courts serve the authorities, not the law, where there are political prisoners, where state television has become a prostitute, where packs of impostors pass insane laws that are returning everyone to the Middle Ages – such a country cannot be my Russia”.

Shishkin wants instead to represent “another Russia, my Russia, a country free of impostors, a country with a state structure that defends the right of the individual, not the right to corruption, a country with a free media, free elections, and free people,” he wrote in his letter.

The move, he said, was his alone, and had not been made in consultation with other writers invited to New York.

Yesterday, the author elaborated on his decision via email, saying that “the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications (‘the ministry of propaganda’) wanted to buy me (by inviting me to the book fair in the US, which is very important for me as a writer) to be their ‘human face’. I refused because I don’t want to support this regime in any way.”

Shishkin’s UK publisher Quercus, which has just released the first of the author’s novels to be published in the UK, The Light and the Dark, after acquiring it at last year’s London Book Fair, said it supported his stance “absolutely”.

“It’s a question of conscience to him and his withdrawal is a serious act as it means he will no longer be promoted as one of their outstanding writers – despite the numerous literary prizes he’s been awarded,” said spokesperson Nicci Praca. “He’s lucky because after many years of trying he’s finally found both an American publisher as well as a UK one … but had he not secured publishers in the two most respected markets he would effectively be doing himself a disservice. And the question needs to be asked – what happens to those who don’t have the luxury of having US or UK publishers and who are trying to break out into the English market?”

Authors’ rights organisation International PEN also supported Shishkin’s move. “Mikhail Shishkin’s clear, thoughtful and principled stand highlights the challenges and choices writers face in Russia today. PEN International stands in solidarity with his desire to see ‘another Russia’, one that respects freedom of expression,” said executive director Laura McVeigh.

To the Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications and the International Office of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center

February 27, 2013

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your invitation to take part in the activities of the official Russian delegation at BookExpo America 2013, the international book fair in New York being held from May 30 to June 1 of this year.

I understand how important participation in this kind of book fair is for a writer and for promoting his books in America and other countries. This is a unique opportunity to make contact with American publishers and readers, since the English-language book market remains virtually closed to writers from countries like Russia. Especially since all expenses for traveling to and staying in the United States (and this is no small sum) are taken on by the official Russian side.

Nonetheless, I am declining. Not because “my schedule doesn’t permit it,” but out of ethical considerations.

I have accepted similar proposals from you several times in the past and have participated in international book fairs as part of the Russian writers delegation, but in the last year the situation has changed.

In any self-respecting country, the state, through various foundations and organizations, supports the advancement of its writers abroad, pays for translations, invites writers to participate in international book fairs, and so on. For example, in Norway this is done by Norla; in Switzerland, Pro Helvetia. Naturally, by taking part in an official delegation, the writers represents not only himself personally and his books but also his country, his state.

Russia’s political development, and the events of last year in particular, have created a situation in the country that is absolutely unacceptable and demeaning for its people and its great culture. What is happening in my country makes me, as a Russian and a citizen of Russia, ashamed. By taking part in the book fair as part of the official delegation and taking advantage of the opportunities presented to me as a writer, I am simultaneously taking on the obligations of being a representative of a state whose policy I consider ruinous for the country and of an official system I reject.

A country where power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime, where the state is a pyramid of thieves, where elections have become farce, where courts serve the authorities, not the law, where there are political prisoners, where state television has become a prostitute, where packs of impostors pass insane laws that are returning everyone to the Middle Ages—such a country cannot be my Russia. I cannot and do not want to participate in an official Russian delegation representing that Russia.

I want to and will represent another Russia, my Russia, a country free of impostors, a country with a state structure that defends the right of the individual, not the right to corruption, a country with a free media, free elections, and free people.

Naturally, this is my personal decision and has not been made in consultation with other writers invited to New York; each is free to act in accordance with his or her own notions of ethics and reasonability.

Respectfully yours,

Mikhail Shishkin