But Not Without Fear

I have a long history with the Russian Federation, where I am primarily known as the lifelong friend of the late writer, poet and radical political leader Eduard Limonov. I also have a reputation as a prolific translator of Russian prose and poetry. Over the years I have been invited to numerous literary festivals all over the country and befriended many of the authors and poets that I have translated, most recently the late novelist Albert Likhanov. 

Until this past autumn, I had not visited Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine war. Following my last visit in late 2021, I had heard that the state grip on culture had tightened. I knew that stringent laws had been passed aimed at countering “disinformation” and libeling the army, and that several people, mainly in show business, had been handed heavy fines and hard time behind bars, mostly early in the war. But I wasn’t sure what to expect as I left Paris in early October for three months of travel in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and Belgorod, a city daily bombed by Ukraine 20 miles from the border.

The first hint I heard about censorship and the repression of dissenting voices came at the 50th jubilee of the literary journal “Friendship between Peoples,” hosted by State Duma member Sergei Chargounov at the headquarters of the publishers and writers’ association in central Moscow. The literary journal has a long history dating back to the time of the USSR, when it was a nest of Soviet cultural dignitaries. In 1988, it reached a print-run of 800,000 copies; today, it hovers at around 6,000. At the event, literary prizes were given to a number of mostly apolitical writers. One of them, an acquaintance of mine who did not wish to be identified, seemed lukewarm and looked pale. At the cocktail following the event, a glass of white wine in his hand, he told me, “I’ll celebrate this behind bars.” The short story that had earned him the prize, he said, would eventually catch the attention of the law and get him into trouble. He looked concerned, but still held a literary evening a few weeks later at the Eltsin Center in Ekaterinburg, a “liberal” hub where they sell the works of subversive thinkers such as Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol. When I left Russia in late December, the writer was still a free man. 

The next day, I read the short story that had earned him the prize. It was the tale of a writer living in the boondocks, who went into shock after hearing that a war had begun, leaving him unable to write. The story wasn’t particularly anti-regime, it didn’t choose a side and it was hard to fathom how this could lead to a prison sentence. Intrigued, I turned to a friend, Limonov’s former literary secretary, who is far from a liberal. Well, he said, you’d better beware — which I took personally — and listed off examples of everyday people who were jailed and fined at the beginning of the “Special Operation” in Ukraine. One middle-aged cleaning woman had been sentenced to five years of hard time for expressing her disapproval of the war on social networks. The regime was then sending a message, allowing the fear to simmer and work its way into everybody’s mind. If the threat still hovered in the air, there had been very few arrests lately. American movies were still advertised in the biggest film theaters in Moscow, wild parties still thrown in the show business milieu. As I spoke to more writers that opposed the war yet continued to publish and travel freely — if not without fear, carefully avoiding direct comments about Ukraine — it seemed the key was to understand where the line was, and to show restraint.

The singer Pougatcheva, for example, a Soviet and Russian legend, had fled to Israel in a gesture of defiance to the Russian regime on the first day of the conflict, but has since returned a couple of times. So, too, the Berlin-based writer Ludmila Ulitskaya, a fierce critic of the war whose books were still on sale in Russian bookstores. “I’m against the special operation in Ukraine, but I still go to Russia from time to time,” the famous Paris-based painter-sculptor Mikhail Chemyakin told me. “They don’t forgive anybody, except me.” 

All right, I thought, it’s a matter of privilege. But I would learn this was only partly true. If liberal actors, directors, journalists and literary agents were still running the show business industry, and gay clubs hadn’t been closed — “The money has to flow, no matter what,” one writer told told me — there are still laws against disinformation and libeling the army. And this is where it gets tricky. The laws can be interpreted in many ways, according to the whims of the officials. 

A week later, a blond poet — whom I’ll call Irina — told me in a hipster’s bar in central Moscow of her state of shock when Russian troops first entered Ukraine. She had been in a Northern port city at the time, attending a literary festival where she had received a prize for her work. The event was unrelated to anything political, which only added to her crushing depression. She remembered wandering the seaside docks, looking for any ship to flee the country where she thought she would be held prisoner, forever, ashamed to communicate with her Ukrainians friends. Finding no ship ready to leave shore in the dark harbor, she returned to Moscow and declared on social networks, “The regime has found a way to spoil my day of glory.” She immediately became the target of an onslaught of hate messages by enraged patriots. She quickly withdrew the comment.

In early November, I traveled to Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, where none of the employees at an Eltsin Centre bookstore were willing to talk to me, despite my having held several literary evenings there in 2015 and 2018 as the French translator of the famous local poet, Boris Ryjii. A few days before my arrival, the Centre had to cancel the appearance of Nina Khrushchev, the U.S.-based granddaughter of the Soviet leader, because she had been denied entry in Russia. The people at the Centre took this as a sign of an imminent shutdown; that much they were ready to tell me. So far, it hasn’t happened.

I found a similarly mixed picture on the other side of the spectrum, with the antiliberal crowd, during a short visit to Petersburg. There, I spent time with Daniel Orlov, a fiction writer and founder of the “24 February Union,” a gathering of writers who “couldn’t stay idle” in the face of a major threat to the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine. He shows his dedication to the cause by providing “humanitarian help” to the ethnic Russian Donbass population, as well as mine detectors and bulletproof vests to the Donbass militias that are not yet fully integrated in the Russian army. On his first trip to the region, a 22-hour drive in his SUV, he had brought only violins for the Donetsk music school. He showed me a spy device — a “tracker” — that had been planted on his car to help Ukrainian drones blow it to pieces. Each and every time he stops at a gas station, he said, he conducts a thorough search to see if another has been placed on his vehicle. He kept the tracker for good luck. 

One morning, he introduced me to his pal, Igor Polonski, a tall and burly rock musician with a patch of yellow hair on top of his skull. The first “counter-cultural” guy I met on the “patriotic” scene, Polonski reminded me of the singer for the Exploited, a punk band I liked in my youth. One of his many claims to fame was being arrested, at the end of perestroika, for distributing anti-Soviet leaflets. He and Orlov tell me about the obstructing flak they receive from Russia’s Union of Writers, despite their 24 February Union being on the “good” patriotic side. The Russian Union of Writers acts in strict obedience of the regime, and any deviation from this is seen as subversive, including the left-populist leanings of the 24 February Union. Orlov and Polonski felt suspect, and used a phrase I heard many times during my travels: “The hunt for hidden liberals.”

Orlov and Polonski support the war, but not the regime. While it sounds strange in the West, there is a vibrant opposition to the oligarchs’ rule among the patriots. And these guys were genuine patriots living ordinary lives. (As in any war, Russian supporters of the cause are known as noble “patriots,” while the sleazy warmongering foes are “nationalists;” a rhetorical distinction used by both sides in the ongoing conflict). This tendency was exemplified by Limonov, who in 2014 adopted the awkward stance of supporting the Russian invasion of Crimea, while opposing the regime in almost every other facet. 

I next traveled to Belgorod, close to the Ukrainian border, a city in the warzone that is bombarded constantly by missiles or drones, and routinely infiltrated by the Ukrainian army to plant mines. There I met with Gennady Alekhine, a retired Russian army colonel and veteran of the three Caucasian wars. More recently, he has achieved fame as a media icon on Belgorod local TV, in several national military magazines, and even appears regularly on the national Channel Russia One. A serious military analyst, he has never shied away from heavily criticizing the Ministry of Defense whenever he thinks it justified. And he often does. 

As the sirens started blaring one day during my visit, and we heard the first nearby explosions, we went into the hotel basement that doubles as a bomb shelter and makeshift cafe. On Christmas Day in 2023, he told me, a hit on the central square killed 70 people, although the “official number” was 23. The powers-that-be wouldn’t admit to being so vulnerable, said Alekhine. He also laughed at the notion, once aired in the media, that Russia had lured the Ukrainians into a trap in Kursk. Hell no, they sensed a weakness and pounced, he insisted. Alekhine also dissented with the official explanation of the Kherson retreat in 2022 as the strategic move. It was impending defeat, nothing else, he stated. 

So far, he still hosts three shows a week on local TV, and never minces his words. An army man to the core, Alekhine has very few competitors who could rival his level of expertise. He openly laughs at the so-called TV “experts,” and is widely popular in his region and nationally. As opposed to what is believed in the West, the regime does not demand total allegiance, but tolerates and even encourages dissent at times.

Later in the week, after I had learned to run zigzagging to the nearest bomb shelter when the sirens blared, I met with Alekhine’s friend, Sergey Berejnoï, a former military intel analyst turned journalist. He has written a book titled “Contract With Death” relating how poorly prepared the Russian offensive was in the beginning, resulting in columns of trucks and tanks subjected to numerous attacks on their unguarded flanks. Berejnoï described how many Russian units lacked radios to communicate and coordinate the initial attack. Because the Ukrainian army had shut down the local cell towers, mobile phones were not an option. Berejnoï and his friends made a special trip to Belgorod and distributed 20 radios to the troops. 

If people like Berejnoï and Alekhine can still talk freely, and publish books critical of the war’s management, it’s because they are respected as professionals, even by the regime, and are appreciated for their assessments. That was why, after the Kherson retreat in the fall of 2022, figures like Semion Piegov, an acclaimed Russian war correspondent, and Andrey Kartapolov, president of the Parliament’s Defense Committee, had been allowed to criticize the regime and demand answers on Russia One’s prime-time news show. “We need to stop lying,” Kartapolov said. “Our people are not stupid.”