‘I am. I think. I will. My hands. My spirit. My sky. My forest. This earth of mine. What more must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.’ At what point does this list from Ayn Rand’s anthem to human freedom transform, subtly, into an anthem to private property? The transitional word would appear to be ‘sky’. The forest and the earth can be ‘mine’ not only in that I sometimes feel, in particularly happy moments, like part owner of all the world’s beauty, but in the more banal sense that one can own an acre of land. With the sky, at least for the moment, it’s more complicated: the sky can belong to a government, but it can’t belong to an individual or corporation. Then again, progress awaits.

My initial renunciation of copyright in 2003 was a spontaneous response to what appeared to be a new bourgeois-authoritarian paradigm in Russia, in which the chaos of the 1990s was replaced by a normalization that combined bourgeois ‘rules of the game’ with authoritarian rule, political conservativism with economic neoliberalism. Cultural production was to be reserved for the de-politicized middle class, which was to sigh with relief that the 1990s did not spill over into another revolution, and to sit with their hands folded, ‘doing their thing,’ as they say, and believing, as per late Soviet stereotypes, that art and political engagement were incompatible. In this situation I felt that some strange symbolic gesture was needed, to declare – however paradoxically – my independence.

The roots go back even further. In the 1990s, Russia experienced the terrible privatization of that which had previously been held in common. The factories, the oil wells, even the work of Soyuzmultfilm (the main Soviet cartoon studio), which had been built by generations of men and women working collectively, out of a belief that work for the common good was the highest purpose of mankind – all of this was sold on the cheap to a small group of private individuals. This was a colossal national trauma, and it is natural that all subsequent attempts on the part of the Russian intellectual class to find itself again should not avoid (and yet, sadly, often have avoided) addressing it.

Now, as for intellectual ideas. Postmodern philosophers have expended a great deal of energy demonstrating that collective structures are more significant than individual ones. (Poets and musicians may find that they are drawn to a much older notion, that the best works are those that seem to be pulled from some kind of social unconscious, a pre- or supra-individual source.) And yet the more we have refined the concept of the ‘death of the individual author’, the more powerfully and even limitlessly the rights of the author – or whoever could buy those rights from the author – have come to be represented in the economic sphere, to the point where Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, could declare in 1982 that intellectual property rights were the same as rights to any other kind of property. Indeed, even poets and musicians tend to find that their wonderful notions about collective art generally fade into the background as soon as one starts talking about their individual bank accounts.

In the case of poetry, of course, it may be better to speak not of a mystical universality but of a deep connection with folkloric tradition. A song appears, changes, goes from mouth to mouth, and the more successful, organic versions of it remain. One person sings this song so as to be at the centre of attention, another so as to attract a sexual partner, another to call people to revolt, yet another to earn a little money on the street. It doesn’t matter whose song it is, yours or someone else’s; all that matters is how well you sing it here and now. This is normal and natural.

Then someone comes along and buys the rights.

Ever since we formed the Free Marxist Press, which only publishes texts without copyright, I have come to view my renunciation of copyright as all the more logical. I believe that I have a moral right to publish international leftists on a non-commercial basis without copyright. In exchange, I give foreign publishers the right to publish me without copyright. If someone is willing to pay me, good; the Free Marxist Press also pays for work, when our resources allow. This is the sphere of moral decisions. That is to say that in my case we are only talking for the moment of shifting the relations around intellectual property from the legal to the ethical sphere; we are talking about a freer attitude towards a set of rights that is, let’s face it, far from the most important among human rights.

But of course a change in attitudes toward these rights must begin first of all with a change in attitude toward one’s own property.

You might say that a renunciation of copyright in this case is not a political gesture as such but rather part of an ethical transition to communism.

I understand the problem of small producers, including intellectual producers, who want to defend their property and their income from thieves and large corporations. But, as has been proved many times already, in the end there is no defence of property that does not find itself employing repressive measures, bans and prosecutions. Do you, as a poet or writer or musician, really want to go the way of prohibitions, fences, barbed wire and guard towers to defend texts and music the way some would defend private cottages, private forests, private fields and private earth?

I don’t want to go this way. I am someone who has produced a fair amount of intellectual property, as well as working in the publishing business, and I do not believe that the rights of small property owners need to be outlined explicitly. I believe that we should offer a basic income to all; despite the fact that it would be elitist for citizens of only a few super-developed countries to gain a basic income, a move in this direction would still be a progressive one. And beyond that, there are many opportunities for the accumulation of both symbolic capital (developing one’s reputation, earning ‘likes’) and real capital – by raising funds for projects and so on. This is an organic extension of the natural competition which is in many ways the motor of progress, including in the arts. Economic competition, by contrast – the uncontrolled battle of the subjects of a market economy to multiply their property and the rights to that property – is destructive and pulls us back into the past.

In terms of technology, we could now achieve that which Marx spoke of in the Grundrisse: a world where life processes are controlled by the universal intellect (that is, the sum of our knowledge, creative achievements and discoveries) rather than by private interests intent on capturing the fruits of our collective output. Everything is ready for a world where large corporations do not buy up patents to medicines, cutting off affordable treatment to millions of people; where oil lobbies do not hamper the development of ‘green’ technologies; and where texts are available for free to everyone in both virtual and physical libraries. Naturally, the defeat of the dictatorship of intellectual and other large property-holders will not come about without political effort and political will. Extravagant ethical-aesthetic gestures like mine only make sense within the context of these efforts. In John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, the soldier says, ‘Now brother, you don’t understand. There are two classes, don’t you see, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.’ Today, as I hope you understand, there are two possibilities: the sky will either be public, or it will be privatized.

The post Copyright appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Russian by Amanda Love Darragh

The first anniversary of the Maidan protests fell shortly after the declaration of the ‘second’ Minsk ceasefire, on 12 February. This ceasefire, like the previous one, was ushered in to the roar of exploding missiles. Not along the entire frontline this time, admittedly, but at certain points where the separatists had planned their advance. President Poroshenko made a brief but significant appearance on a dark, damp evening in Kiev – on Institutskaya Street, which is still closed to traffic, and which not so long ago ran with the blood of protestors killed by snipers – and then a symphony orchestra played Mozart’s Requiem. The whole country seemed to be standing still, with tears running down her face.

A year has passed. Those who were killed during the Maidan protest became Heroes of Ukraine (posthumously). Many of those who survived went to Donbass as volunteers, to defend the country’s territorial integrity. Many are still fighting. During the course of the conflict some even decided to become professional soldiers or police officers. Just as military operations began in Eastern Ukraine the country began to implement a programme of reforms, starting with the police force. The police reforms are being spearheaded by a young Georgian woman, Eka Zguladze, who has been appointed First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs. She is the one credited with successfully tackling corruption in the Georgian police force at the beginning of Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. Saakashvili, now the former President of Georgia, is also here in Ukraine, tasked with overseeing reforms. But progress is slow and subtle, while the ‘eastern front’ endures continual military operations day and night, with scant regard for the ceasefire. The fighting, the bombing raids and the funerals of those killed in the conflict make it all but impossible for many Ukrainians who took part in Maidan or sympathised with protestors to look back and see things clearly: how far has Ukraine come this past year? What has been achieved?

If you ask people during the course of a conversation what they think about Maidan now, it usually takes them a while to reply. ‘Maidan’ is history. It has been ‘pushed back’ – first by the annexation of Crimea, then by the unsuccessful attempt to incite armed uprisings against the government in Kiev throughout the south-east of the country, from Donetsk to Odessa and Pridnestrovie, and finally by the gradual deterioration of the situation in Donbass to a state of war – a war that wouldn’t be happening were it not for the tens of thousands of tons of Russian missiles and mines making their way into Ukraine, were it not for the volunteers, the mercenaries, the regular and reserve army officers, coming from all over Russia to fight in Ukraine.

It’s impossible to predict how and when Putin’s war against Ukraine will end. Every now and then European leaders promise not to ‘abandon’ Ukraine, but they don’t want to ‘abandon’ Russia either; they are already suffering from the economic sanctions they themselves have imposed. At the same time European politicians understand that if Putin manages to destroy Ukraine – both economically and politically – he won’t stop there.

Today, when I ask people in Kiev if they would have gone to Maidan in 2013 if they had known where it would lead, they pause before answering, but most of them say yes. ‘We had no alternative!’ they explain. ‘Yanukovych had already sold Ukraine to Putin, and that’s why he turned his back on Europe! Yanukovych used the threat of rapprochement with Europe to blackmail Putin. If Maidan hadn’t happened, then we would no longer have an independent Ukraine.’

I have my own vivid memories of Euromaidan. Not of the tragedy it became and on account of which it ultimately succeeded, but rather of the spirit of the Ukrainian people, their desire to influence the fate of their own country and their readiness to take action.

Now the word ‘Maidan’ has acquired new relevance – there have been calls for a third Maidan protest, with the aim of overthrowing the new government. Next there will be calls to take direct action against the war, against mobilisation, against everything that the new President and Cabinet of Ministers are doing. The new government is responding to this threat by attempting to introduce internet censorship and stricter control over the content of political talk shows on TV. But even Yanukovych was unable to subject Ukraine to the Russian model of total control over society through censorship and the judicial system. The majority of Ukrainians know perfectly well who stands to benefit most from a third Maidan; on this basis a third Maidan seems considerably less likely than a third ‘Minsk ceasefire’.

The fact of the matter is that a third ‘Minsk ceasefire’, which will be possible only after the second ceasefire is officially acknowledged to be defunct and the country suffers several more months of bloody and devastating warfare, will say less about Ukraine than about her Western comrades-in-arms – the European Union and the United States. It will be a verdict on their indecision, on their reluctance to take more effective economic, financial and diplomatic steps to stop the Russian Federation sending arms, men and machinery to Donbass, without which military operations would never have begun.

Andrey Kurkov’s book Ukraine Diaries, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our bookseller partner Foyles.

Amanda Love Darragh’s translation of The Diary of Lena Mukhina is also available through Foyles.

The post Maidan: one year on appeared first on English PEN.

Part of Voloshin’s appeal lies in his steadfast refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. One of the slogans most often repeated by Putinites today is ‘Whoever is not with us is against us’. Such thinking was anathema to Voloshin. A famous poem titled ‘Civil War’ ends:

And from the ranks of both armies
I hear one and the same voice:
‘He who is not with us is against us.
You must take sides. Justice is ours.’

And I stand alone in the midst of them,
amidst the roar of fire and smoke,
and pray with all my strength for those
who fight on this side, and on that side.

Born in Kiev, Voloshin spent much of his childhood in the Crimea.  In the early 1900s he moved between Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, but from 1907 he again spent much of his time in the Crimea, finally settling there in 1916. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a ‘House of Creativity’ for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that became a central part of the Soviet cultural world.

Voloshin published five books of poems. The last, Poems on the Terror (1923), was published only in Berlin, but these and other post-1917 poems circulated widely in hand-typed copies, loved by both the Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, within and outside Russia’s borders.  The poems are uneven, but there is much that is incisive and moving.

Nadezhda Teffi’s Memories (an account of her last journey across Russia, before emigrating) includes this portrait of Voloshin in Odessa in 1919: ‘Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers and gaiters. Reciting his poems, he was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors – and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry  and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, ooh-ing and ah-ing; in blissful horror they would let out little nasal squeals. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys – Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. The dense, even hum of bardic declamation would then start up again, audible even through the closed door.’

After an account of Voloshin saving a woman poet from execution, Teffi ends: ‘In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum – or boom – of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.’

During the Red Terror following the evacuation of the White Army from the Crimea, Voloshin showed still greater courage. His belief in the power of his words – what Marianna Landa, in her article ‘Symbolism and Revolution: on Contradictions in Voloshin’s Poems on Russia and Terror in the Crimea (1917–1920s)’ (SEEJ, Summer 2014), refers to as ‘his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word’ – seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events – and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is astonishing.

Terror

The working day started at night.
Denunciations, papers, certificates.
Death sentences signed in a hurry.
Yawning, drinking of wine.

Vodka, all day, for the soldiers.
Come evening, by candlelight,
time to read out lists, herd
men and women into a dark yard,

remove shoes, clothes, underwear,
tie the stuff in bundles, pile
it up in carts, take the carts away,
share out rings and watches.

Nightfall, men and women forced
barefoot, naked, over ice-covered stones,
into waste ground outside town,
in wind from the north east.

Rifle-butted to the edge of a gully.
The lantern light wavering.
Machine-gunned for half a minute;
finished off with bayonets.

Into a pit, some not quite dead.
A covering of soil, in a hurry.
And, with a broad-flowing Russian song –
back into town, back home.

At dawn wives; mothers; dogs
made their way to the same gullies;
dug the ground; fought over bones;
kissed the flesh they held dear.

(26 April 1921, Simferopol)
tr. Robert Chandler

• The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, is available to buy through our bookseller partner Foyles.
• On 17 March, 7pm, Robert Chandler will be appearing at the London Review Bookshop, reading from The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Please see here to book tickets.
• On 19 March, 5.30-7 pm, Robert Chandler will also be appearing at the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Anthony’s College, Oxford.

The post The Red Terror and Maximilian Voloshin appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

It’s not exactly the height of elegance to quote from your own book. But I will do it here anyway.

‘You speak such good German,’ said a boy to Sascha, the heroine of my first novel, Broken Glass Park, whom he had just met. ‘Thanks,’ she answered angrily, ‘so do you.’ She was born in Russia and lives in a Russian ghetto in a German city. The boy she’s talking to is German by birth and lives in a fancy villa; he’s actually trying to say something nice to her.

This little exchange isn’t made up. It happened to me in reality on many occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like my protagonist I moved from Russia to Germany at thirteen. Ever since I was fourteen I’ve been congratulated on my German. I can no longer remember the moment when I stopped feeling pleased by the compliments.

I belong to the subset of authors who write books in a language that is not their native tongue.  Not long ago that still made me quite exotic in Germany. Now it is hearteningly common – every year you read about gifted debut authors who were born abroad, emigrated as young children or teens, and who published in the language of their new country and are already dusting off all their literary prizes. And yet, the compliments about how well I speak German are still the first thing I hear from audiences at my readings. At 36, I’m still treated as some kind of language wunderkind.

Unfortunately I’m not one, and never have been. I’m not even particularly good at languages. It’s just that I, like hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated with my family at an age when the infamous ‘language window’ had yet to close. Which is why I sound like a native speaker – with the exception of the occasional linguistic slip-up that only very alert listeners notice, and which those people like to point out to me. The assumption that I must be exceptionally musical – as a result of how well I speak German – is also not true. And how I would love to be able to speak better English than I do, not to mention French and Italian.

I don’t want my books to be assessed like compositions in a foreign language class. It makes me feel like a dancer with a wooden leg: as if the applauding room isn’t captivated by the show of artistic prowess but rather by the supposed handicap. So I ask you, dear readers and reviewers, please judge the contents and the word choices, the plot and characters, the metaphors and punch-lines. Complain about inconsistencies and slips of the pen that escaped the eyes of the editor and proofreader. But please don’t be any more merciful in those judgments and complaints with an immigrant author than you would be with an author writing in his or her native language. You’re not really anyway, and we wouldn’t have deserved the leniency.

No reader falls in love with a book out of political correctness or as a sop to a linguistic minority. I’m happy about that. If something in one of my novels doesn’t look right to you, then you can in good conscience toss it in the corner. And if on the other hand my writing intrigues you, it has nothing to do with the fact that I learned the Cyrillic alphabet before I learned the Latin alphabet. All authors want to be valued based on their imagination, their talent, and their perseverance, not because of school vocabulary lessons from some distant past.

After more than twenty years, I can say that German has become my natural writing language. Even though I love my native language of Russian, I speak a version that’s probably already somewhat outdated and anachronistic. I’m asked time and time again whether I also write in Russian. No, I don’t, at least not beyond emails. I don’t translate my own books, either. I’d prefer to write new ones – in German.

Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and just published Just Call me Superhero.  The Daily Beast calls Bronsky ‘an exciting new voice in the literary world.’

Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

You can buy Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero via our book partner Foyles.

Read more about Alina Bronsky at her author profile at Europa Editions.

The post You speak such good German appeared first on English PEN.

Its title and length give Life and Fate a somewhat nineteenth-century air, and Grossman is not a writer who sets out to dazzle the reader with stylistic innovations.  Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps simply because Grossman was never – like Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn – caught up in international political controversy, literary critics have been slow to give him his due. In the Anglophone world, it has been a historian, Antony Beevor, who has done most to bring him to the attention of readers.  And in this respect, at least, things seem similar in Russia; the best talks at the Moscow conference were those given by historians.

Oleg Budnitsky (from Moscow), spoke about Grossman’s wartime notebooks.  Historians, he said, are usually trained to make as much use as possible of official documents. Soviet documents, however, can be misleading. Documents relating to medals awarded for bravery often mention the number of Germans killed by an individual Soviet soldier; if one adds together the numbers from all these documents, one arrives at a total far higher than the number of soldiers in the entire German army…  Budnitsky sees Grossman’s notebooks as an important historical resource, and he hopes to bring out a new, and more complete Russian text of them within the next 2-3 years.

Jürgen Zarusky (from Munich) spoke interestingly about For a Just Cause, the first of Grossman’s two long novels centered on the battle of Stalingrad, saying that this and Life and Fate should be considered as two halves of a dilogy. The fact that Grossman managed to publish For a Just Cause in the Soviet Union has – at least in the eyes of Western readers – counted against it. The only real difference between the two novels – Zarusky argued convincingly – is that in the earlier novel Grossman had to ‘encode’ certain themes. Official Soviet antisemitism made it impossible, in the last five years of Stalin’s life, to mention the Shoah overtly. Grossman, however, has one of his Russian heroes walk into the centre of Kiev – just before the city falls to the Nazis – along precisely the route that the Jews, soon afterwards, would be forced to follow on their way to Babi Yar, the ravine that was the site of one of the worst of the Nazi massacres. Each street of this route is named.

One of the conference’s several sponsors was the human rights organization Memorial. Irina Sherbakova, the educational director of Memorial, pointed out that, other writers, when begging the authorities to allow their work to be published, often made self-centered statements along the lines of ‘You are destroying me as a writer’; Grossman’s emphasis, however, was different. In his letter to Khrushchev after the confiscation of Life and Fate he wrote, ‘Give my book to the reader!’ He genuinely believed that the collective historical memory embodied in the novel could help people make sense of their lives.

Grateful though I am to all these historians, I would have liked to hear more about the artistry of Grossman’s very last works, Everything Flows and the short stories he wrote in the three years before his death. I was pleased therefore when Irina Sherbakova, talking to me during a coffee break, mentioned the story ‘Mama’. This is based on the true story of an orphaned girl who was adopted in the mid-1930s by Nikolay Yezhov and his wife. Yezhov was the head of the NKVD between 1936 and 1938, at the height of the Great Terror; Russians often refer to this period as the Yezhovshchina. All the most prominent Soviet politicians of the time used to visit the Yezhov household. These figures, including Stalin himself, appear in ‘Mama’, but the reader sees them only through the eyes of the orphaned girl, or of her good-natured but politically ignorant peasant nanny. Grossman leads us into the darkest of worlds, but with compassion and from a perspective of peculiar innocence – the nanny is described as the only person in the apartment ‘with calm eyes’.

‘Mama’ is one of Grossman’s most laconic and perfectly written works. What Sherbakova emphasized, however, was the almost prophetic intuition Grossman had shown by homing in on the first chapters of a life story so painfully emblematic of Russia today. Natalya Khayutina (the real name of Yezhov’s adoptive daughter, who is still alive and living in the region of Kolyma, in the far north east) has remained fiercely loyal to a father she remembers as kind and indulgent. She has petitioned several times, so far unsuccessfully, for his official ‘rehabilitation’. The adoptive daughter of Stalin’s chief executioner, she sees herself as the daughter of one of Stalin’s victims – and there is, of course, truth in her view. Yezhov, like most high-ranking NKVD officers, was eventually executed himself.

Many, many Russians, if to a less extreme degree than Natalya Khayutina, can be considered the children of both victims and executioners. We should not be surprised that it is proving difficult for the country to come to terms with its recent past.

Robert & Elizabeth Chandler’s translation of ‘Mama’, along with eleven other of Grossman’s short stories, his 1944 article ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ and much biographical information, is included in The Road (MacLehose Press, 2011).

You can buy Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler, through our book partner Foyles.

For more information about Vasily Grossman, please see his author page at Random House.

The post Life and Fate Redux appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Amanda Love Daragh

On 26 August, on the day when Petro Poroshenko met with Vladimir Putin in Minsk, the capital of Belarus,  Ukrainian forces captured an armoured personnel carrier and ten Russian paratroopers. The Russian government, which has been denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory on a daily basis, was slow to respond but eventually came up with an explanation: they had taken a wrong turning. The paratroopers were captured 20 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border. In a televised interview the paratroopers themselves said that they had been given orders to advance 70 km into Ukraine territory, which is precisely what they were doing when they were apprehended by Ukrainian armed forces. These paratroopers are lucky, really. They are still alive.

Other Russian paratroopers are being buried in secret – in the village of Vybuty near Pskov, in Bashkiria and in other towns and cities across the Russian Federation. No official information about these burials has been released, but Russian journalists arriving in Vybuty to find out more were met by men in civilian clothing, who attacked them and damaged their car. The journalists were told to leave the Pskov area immediately, or they would end up in one of the local marshes and their bodies would never be found.

Russians are gradually coming to realise that it is not only local separatist rebels fighting in Donbass, but also a great many Russian citizens, including conscripts, who have been sent there by military command. The mothers of dead and missing Russian soldiers have compiled a list of 400 names and are demanding answers from the authorities regarding the whereabouts of their sons, who only joined the army in the first place because they had no choice.

But while the Russian government is trying to find answers – or rather, choosing to remain silent – Ukrainian troops are finding more and more mass and unmarked individual graves in territory reclaimed from separatists. One of the latest burial sites was discovered by Ukrainian guardsmen in the middle of a field in the Luhansk Oblast. There were around twenty graves marked with little signs saying ‘Soldier No.7’, ‘Soldier No.9’ and so on. These signs bore no names, no dates of birth or death, because the Russian soldiers and officers lying in these graves are officially still alive and on active duty at various military bases within Russia. Nothing will be done to investigate these graves while the conflict is still ongoing, which means that those who are buried there might remain on the list of ‘missing’ residents of south-east Ukraine and Russia indefinitely. Incidentally, the list of missing Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers is also growing.

Several days ago I went with my wife and children to our country house, in a village 90 km outside Kiev. We were filled in on the local news as soon as we arrived, and it was not good. A report had come through from the anti-terrorist operation zone that three local men had died after being drafted into the conflict zone, but only two bodies had been sent home for burial. The wife and relatives of the third dead man had simply been told that he had died during an artillery raid and his remains could not be moved.

At the same time people there seem to somehow accept what is happening. My old friend Viktor, who used to be the local telephone engineer and lives on the street next to ours, said that he is expecting to be called up to fight any day now, so he wants to finish sorting out the heating at home. We have a cold winter ahead of us. Chances are that it will be a winter without Russian gas. Many people living in rural areas are converting their boilers to run on peat and firewood as well as gas. Viktor has already converted his boiler and is currently insulating his single-storey brick house with foam rubber. He would ideally like to brick up one of the windows before winter too, because it is particularly draughty. Viktor has two children, and his priority at the moment is to provide them and his wife with a decent environment in which to spend the winter.

I heard from another neighbour that some villagers have already stocked up on antifreeze. Yet there is no sense of panic. Everyone is calm. People are digging up potatoes from their allotments, drying them out and storing them in their cellars. Everyone is thinking and talking about the immediate future, about winter, about the gas supply, which is bound to be cut off or at least severely restricted. Hardly anyone in the Ukrainian countryside even mentions Europe or the prospect of a European future for Ukraine. Right now the prospect of the coming winter is more tangible and significant.

Another date has recently been occupying the attention of a large sector of the Ukrainian population: 1 September. Apart from updates on the military situation in Donbass and Russia’s latest incursions into Ukrainian territory, the subject most discussed on the radio lately has been the start of the new school year. Due to a combination of the military situation and the economic crisis, which has itself been exacerbated by the military situation, the cost of school uniforms, textbooks, exercise books and other school essentials has increased by as much as 30-50%. Salaries, however, remain the same and in some cases have even decreased. But the parents interviewed on the Ukrainian radio and television try not to complain about their predicament. It would be inappropriate to complain about personal problems when their country – Ukraine – is facing such serious problems of her own. Refugee families in towns and cities across Ukraine spent the month of August frantically filling in school paperwork, trying to secure places for their children. Seventeen new children have already joined School No.92 in Kiev. In total, over a thousand children from the Donbass region started school in Kiev on 1 September. Most are children of the regional elite, whose parents can afford the higher cost of living in the Ukrainian capital. Establishing relationships with their new classmates may present a particular challenge for Kiev’s schoolchildren, since many of the Donbass refugees hold Kiev and its inhabitants to blame for the tragedy currently unfolding in eastern Ukraine.

The militarisation of life in any country also militarises the way people think, and this applies especially to children. The first lesson of the year in all Ukrainian schools was devoted to patriotism and the territorial integrity of the state . Which meant that the school day began on 1 September with a discussion about war, about a war that, for the immediate and foreseeable future, is going to be part of our lives, day and night.

Ukraine Diaries by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our book partners Foyles.

You can read more about the book at the Random House website.

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Today, the Olympics have again turned into a huge Potemkin village: newly painted and front-facing our foreign guests, and showing a dirty backside to its own people.

The Games haven’t even started yet and already the moveable ‘Feast of Sport’ has become the immovable feast of embezzlement, the festival of irresponsibility, and the visiting card of the Putin regime.Someone had whispered in Putin’s ear about holding the Winter Olympics in the subtropics of all places – and so here he is, the Father of the Nation, a stone’s throw away from Greece, building his own eternal Olympus! And the cost doesn’t matter. The money is coming from the pockets of pensioners, teachers and doctors. The real Sochi winners will be those Russian officials and oligarchs who populate in their dozens the rich-lists of the world. The cost of constructing these Olympics is twice as much as the world average. Half of the fantastical $50billion now sits in the offshore bank accounts of the officials in charge. This means that more has been stolen in Sochi than the previous cost of all Winter Games combined. Here we should remind ourselves that these multi-billion-dollar efforts are disposable. These monster edifices will fall into decay and end in ruins…

The official propaganda, as before, celebrates the Olympics as ‘a Feast of Sport’. And as before, we are being told: ‘Sport is beyond politics!’ In the Soviet Union sport was always politics. Of course, it’s natural to root for sportspeople from your own country. But how can I root for the victory of a country of which I’m ashamed? Does this sound unpatriotic to you? But what does it mean – to be a patriot in Russia?

In the past, in our inside-out country, the attitude towards patriotism was also inside-out. We were against the Soviets, and on the side of the Czechoslovakian hockey team, because their democratic ‘spring’ had not so long ago been crushed by the tracks of our tanks. Now those times have indeed returned.

I wish I could be proud of my country, root for its sports team. But how can sport be ‘beyond politics’ if when the Russian teams win, the old Stalinist national anthem will be sung worldwide? The anthem that was reintroduced by Putin: the anthem of dictators and slaves.

The athletes and politicians now preparing for their journey to Sochi should keep in mind that they will all be playing a part, as ‘backing singers’ for the global PR campaign of the regime, that the Sochi ‘Feast of Sport, Peace and Friendship’ is intended as a personal feast for the Supreme Skier and is being used by his teammates as a way to transfer public money into their already bulging pockets.

This gang of criminals falsified the elections and they usurped state power, taking the whole country hostage. To participate in the Olympics means to show solidarity with the dictator, to help him make the Games a triumph and legitimise his regime. In 1980, democratic countries boycotted the Games in Moscow, showing solidarity not with the regime but with its victims. Though we all appreciate that the Olympics are an opportunity for any sportsperson, boycotting the Games means showing solidarity with those who are being held hostage.

Do you really believe that the long Olympic torch relay was a celebration for the country? When people were driven together under the threat of punishment to meet the policed cortege carrying the torch with its constantly dying flame, it evoked nothing but feelings of shame and humiliation. In Saratov, manholes were welded shut and rubbish bins were removed from the torchbearer’s route. To prevent people from throwing away rubbish in the usual places, policemen were placed there instead. In accordance with the old Soviet tradition, ruins were covered with colourful facades glorifying sport. As in 1980, only the houses with dirty entrances and holes in their roofs were repaired. It’s all painfully recognisable – again, they’re putting a golden crown on a decaying tooth! And all this useless window-dressing is done by local authorities for a single man in the Kremlin. Again, it is the clammy fear of an official – scared of not satisfying the boss – that governs the country.

And now the Games are becoming a real disaster for the population of Sochi. They feel discriminated against and robbed. Some people’s land and property has been seized, some people have been forced out of their homes. Their protests have been brutally suppressed. Just read some of the blogs coming out of Sochi: the local population already execrates the Olympics.One can only get into Sochi with a special permit – the so-called ‘fan-passport’. Human rights activists who apply for one are simply turned down. The city has turned into a ‘zone’: going south by car one sees along the highway, starting soon after Rostov, large banners saying ‘Sochi is closed’. Who are the Olympics for then, if not for the citizens of the country?

And who will be responsible for the barbarian destruction of nature in Krasnaya Polyana and the whole unique Mzymty valley? Meanwhile the regime is busy prosecuting protesting ecologists…

The clemency that’s been given to other political prisoners before the Games doesn’t exonerate the regime – instead, it anticipates new arrests and new imprisonments once the Games are over. And then the only hope will be for more clemency before the football World Cup, to be held in Russia in 2018. This gang has already spoiled the Olympics. Will they spoil football for us as well?

I don’t know who’ll win medals, but the Russian population has already lost the Games. One can sum up the Winter Games even before they have started: the regime, with help from the Olympics, has raped the country yet again: Russian déjà vu.

But now there arises one more analogy: after the 1980 Olympics, the USSR lasted only a decade. How long can Putin’s Russia last?I hope that Russia can change. It is such a great feeling not to be ashamed, but proud of one’s country. It is only in a future democratic Russia that sport will, at last, be beyond politics.

About the author
Born in 1961 in Moscow, Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature, and is the only author to have won all three major Russian Literary Prizes. He divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland and Germany.

Additional information
For more on Mikhail’s criticism of the Russian government, please see his interview with the New York Times.

Read reviews of Mikhail’s novel Maidenhair, available at Good Reads.Mikhail Shishkin’s latest book, The Light and the Dark is published  by Querus and out now.

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When I began working on my book The Sky Wept Fire, my friends would often ask if it was wise to write about all this so candidly. I agreed with them, it wasn’t wise, but added that it was something I had to do. It wasn’t wise in terms of my own safety, but I had to do it. It was a duty of honour. While I was undergoing that never-ending hell of war, I filmed and photographed everything I could, yet remained aware that all the footage and photos could go missing. And that is just what happened. I was left with nothing but my memories. And it wasn’t a hankering after fame that motivated me to write a memoir. Writing about myself simply seemed more honest, more truthful, because you didn’t need to rely on other people’s sources. And what’s more, writing in this form allowed me to loosen ever so little the red-hot chains of the memories of that hell. To survive a war doesn’t mean you know how to live an ordinary civilian life. You become painfully, profoundly aware of an abyss between you and the world. People don’t understand you, and you have difficulty understanding them. And this abyss cannot be bridged, neither by you nor by them. That’s why it was so important to tell people that we are the same as them. Or we were, at any rate, before our souls were chewed up by the war…

We shared the same joys and dreams, the same hopes for love and domestic warmth. We were defending not just our principles, our right to our dreams, but also the right of all people everywhere to have them, and we paid with our dreams, with our messed up fates. This isn’t an attempt to reproach peaceful civilians in their peaceful lives. It’s an attempt to offer a hand to the world across the abyss of alienation. We didn’t choose the war. But the war chose us, chose our generation. And so our generation had to dive into its fiery crater at the turn of the century.

Steering clear of the politics, I tried to focus on the war itself. Or rather on the transformation undergone by a peaceful and apolitical person. Looking deep within yourself helps you see that metamorphosis better, understand it more clearly. In war, a person is forever poised between the human and the diabolical, between cruelty and mercy. And your choice, your ability not to lose your humanity is what determines your duty for the rest of your life. Your knowledge of your own self. When you write about war, it is so very hard to be objective. At moments like that it’s important to remember you’re no longer a warrior, you’re a journalist now; an impartial chronicler and witness. And then you have to remember that even in the hell of the concentration camp, you came across humans, true human beings. But it’s simply impossible to be impartial in the proper sense of the word.

Here in exile you cannot get used to living simply for life’s sake, to a life without the usual circle of friends, without your beloved albeit dangerous work. It’s hard to adjust to being merely one among thousands of immigrants. Without any name, experience or education, without a motherland; with a dark and suspicious past and a shaky, nebulous future. It doesn’t matter if in reality you are experienced and educated … The initial intoxication of freedom passes. Then you sober up. And you find yourself drowning in a swamp of depression. Yearning for everything that you can never get back. For your motherland, who rejected you merely because you had principles that you were willing to defend. And then you involuntarily return to that life where you meant something to yourself and to the world. Where you did something needed by the people and the motherland. Something we believed in.

So what is this duty of honour? It is the chief, perhaps the only reason why I took up writing – the duty I owed to my fallen brothers-in-arms. We were idealists; our only aim was freedom. We learnt to believe in God during this war. To believe genuinely. For belief helped keep insanity at bay. This writing was what my comrades had wanted me to do more than anything. And it was why they tried their hardest to help me survive. Often risking their own lives. This was their dying wish. It was important for me to get through to people: None of us sought war for war’s sake or for the sake of glory. War cripples the souls and breaks the fates of everyone, including those doing the fighting. This should never happen again, not in any land. We will only be able to call ourselves rational beings when we learn to understand one another. And so my writing is an attempt to talk candidly about that hell, to help people understand us. It is not just my own story, but that of all those who will never be able to tell theirs.

About the author

Mikail Eldin worked as a journalist, before taking up arms himself in the conflict with Russia. He eventually left Chechnya in fear for his life and secured political asylum in Norway, where he now lives. His most recent book is The Sky Wept Fire.

About the translator

Anna Gunin is a Russian literary translator. Along with poetry, film and theatre translation, she has translated authors such as German Sadulaev, Denis Gutsko and Pavel Bazhov. Her most recent translation is The Sky Wept Fire by the Chechen poet and journalist Mikail Eldin.

Additional information

Mikail will be appearing at the ‘Writing in Conflict’ event at Woolfson & Tay, on 26 November, from 7pm.

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