Interviews by Andrew Jack, founder of the Pushkin House Book Prize
What first made you interested in Russia?
I grew up during the Cold War, and as a US citizen whose father served in the Air Force, Russia was “the evil empire”. I liked modern languages, and in college for the first time I came across Russian, which seemed exotic and forbidden, so I started studying the language, which became my major. I decided to go to graduate school and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the “show” in early Soviet show trials, looking at theatricalised justice in drama and cinema. Performance studies was just taking off at the time, and I have continued to pursue topics that are more or less related through the element of performance. I also enjoy studying things that are not typically deemed high art.
Why did you want to write this book?
I was planning to write a book on early nineteenth-century Russian theatre, but when I put together a panel with a friend who works on Gulag Studies, we had to come up with a topic we could work on together. We looked at the cult of personality of Vladimir Putin, at the time when photos of him swimming topless in Siberia were just coming out. We really enjoyed ourselves and ended up publishing an article that combined our research and got much more attention from scholars and journalists than anything I had published before. As we continued to come up with similar panels, I discovered a red thread linking all of my research to the performance of gender and sexuality in Putin’s Russia, and colleagues began asking when I would write a book on the topic.
How did you carry out your research?
I watched a lot of junk on the internet! I’m very grateful to colleagues who shared an outrageous video or an over-the-top meme they found online, since this is where pop culture resides. Russian Style is the first project for which I didn’t have to go to Russia for chunks of time to cull through libraries and archives. Although Putin has methodically clamped down on the internet over the past twenty years, anyone with reasonable internet skills inside of Russia can still create a VPN to access forbidden material, and many private communities have developed on encrypted platforms like Telegram. Despite this, many people inside the Russian Federation have begun self-censoring, and a lot of the material I included in the book has since disappeared from the internet.
What are your findings?
Despite all the rules and regulations that Putin has imposed to make Russians more “traditional” – men as more manly, women as more feminine – Russians have lived a rich life of their own in pop culture. They have found venues to try on, dispute and push against increasingly narrow norms for gender. Nonetheless, archetypal Russian masculinity and femininity have become forms of hyper-gender, which in essence is a form of drag. Putin himself does a drag performance when he, for instance, saves a TV crew by shooting a Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun. The sinister side of all of this is the Russian government’s attempt to increasingly control people’s behaviour so that they conform to gender extremes, which have become straighter and straighter in the past twenty years. The book also explores how Russians now police their own intimate desires to construct a hyper-gendered self and project ideals that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to meet, for example, tough Russian men who join biker clubs or women who don traditional Russian Orthodox headscarves.
What are the links to the Soviet era?
Neo-traditionalism in Putin’s Russia certainly has roots in the Soviet period. Right after the USSR was formed, there was tremendous enthusiasm for free love, the absolute emancipation of women and the right to work for all. In practice, many of these so-called rights were obligations to the state. For example, Stalin’s constitution guaranteed equal rights for women, but the obligation to work meant they had to hold down full-time jobs, raise children and look after their husbands all at the same time. Male homosexuality may have been decriminalised in Russia in 1993, but when Putin came to power, he began instituting policies that rejected the freedom of the 1990s to make Russia more and more “traditional”.
Can you give some examples?
In late 2000s, there was a whole movement of self-improvement courses and books for women promising to turn them into “bitches” – very sexy women who dress to the nines to attract men. However, the basic premise of becoming a “bitch” was that to fulfil your feminine desire, what you really need is a good man. Thousands of women bought into this idea, which tells us just how unliberated Soviet feminism was. Just like elsewhere, Russia also has a vibrant drag culture. But commercially successful drag queens in Russia don’t look very queer; much like the pantomime dame, the gender they perform isn’t truly transgressive. And once again, this type of drag, just like the “bitch” movement, makes men the ultimate arbiters of femininity. Russia has produced a handful of movies depicting gay men and lesbians, and there has even been a Russian web series about gay men coming out and falling in love, but the day after I finished watching this series with my students, it disappeared from YouTube.
What explains the clampdown?
Any dictator who aspires to authoritarianism needs two different enemies: one external and the other internal. Putin has very cleverly found an enemy in the West who dovetails with Russia’s internal enemy: the queer community. LGBTQ+ has become the perfect internal enemy because this supposed malaise from the West can lurk beneath anyone’s performance of hyper-gender at the same time that it sanctions Putin’s hypermasculinity. I argue that Putin represents a type of cis-gender drag. However, he’s now aging out of the manly drag that worked so well when he was a young, virile, muscular man in the 2000s. He has timed out of all the strategies he used to construct his hypermasculinity, and now all he has left are the missiles and bombs battering Ukraine.
What does the future look like?
One of the goals of the type of gendered regime Putin has created is to make Russians political disengage, a strategy that has been stunningly successful. It’s not clear to me what will ultimately turn that tide. Protesting Putin and his regime has become increasing difficult, but people in Russia have found ways to protest beyond the reach of Russian regulators, for example, in the burst of queer poetry in the Russophone space in recent years. The artistic world has quite a bit of ferment, but it doesn’t yet seem to have traction in the political sphere. I personally can’t go to Russia for the time being for both moral reasons – I object in no uncertain terms to Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine – and reasons of personal safety. My scholarship and person both qualify as “gay propaganda”, something that Putin notoriously banned in 2013. I hope we reach a day when Putin and his hideous, hateful regime are no longer in power and I can return to Russia.
What’s your next project?
I don’t yet have another book project, but I’ve been working on a small overhang from this one. I’m looking at a novel published in 2022, Summer in a Pioneer Tie, written by two women about two young boys who fall in love at a late-Soviet pioneer summer camp. It created a cultural tempest that ultimately led to ramping up the “gay propaganda” law, and I’m trying to figure out how a best-selling young adult romance could unleash such a firestorm.
Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism is available to purchase here.
What made you interested in Russia?
I grew up in a small town in Canada, and went to the Soviet Union as a high school student in 1974 on a trip organised by our teachers. I was good with languages and thought I’d teach myself some Russian in advance. Solzhenitsyn had just been expelled and we found the Intourist guides very hostile when we asked about him. The first thing I did when I came back was grab a copy of The Gulag Archipelago. It was my introduction to Soviet history. I studied Russian language and literature at the University of Toronto. I was a gay activist in the 1970s and '80s, and became interested in LGBTQ+ history, which became a big focus of my academic work.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I had started my academic career as a historian of Russian and Soviet homosexuality and gender dissent. In order to become a historian of homosexuality in Russia, I studied Soviet medicine and law. In my previous book I looked at queer life in the Gulag camps. It was a problem for camp commandants and doctors. Their mission was to colonise the Far North, and in these remote places there was a gender imbalance. The Gulag created a mostly single sex environment which facilitated homosexuality and gender crossing behaviour. I was drawn to look more closely at the world of medicine in the Gulag this way.
How did you carry out your research?
The State Archive of the Russian Federation was opening up the official records of the Gulag in the 1990s and early 2000s. That material offered a mirror to the work of Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov and Ginzburg who had presented the prisoners’ perspective on the Gulag; what we didn’t have before was the perspective of the administrators and the rationales they expressed for what they were doing. I also had funding to go to the cities built by the Gulag – Ukhta, Pechora and Magadan – and talk to the curators and historians in local museums and archives, which gave me a lot of access to personal documents, interviews, memoirs and biographical data.
What surprised you in your research?
First that medicine was so extensive in the Gulag. You think of it as a place of ubiquitous death, illness and ill treatment but its medical service had 10,000 employees for 2.5 million prisoners and a larger ratio of doctors and hospital beds to the population than outside the camps. Second, the idea that relationships between prisoner doctors and freely hired doctors could actually function. Two-fifths of doctors, nurses and paramedics were prisoners, and often the free staff knew far less about medicine than the senior professors and clinicians who were imprisoned on fake political charges. Gulag contract doctors were often recent graduates, and would rely upon these much more experienced prisoners for medical advice and mentorship. The usual hierarchy of free-versus-prisoner staff was inverted. Camp commandants frequently went behind the barbed wire to look for prisoners to treat them and their families rather than rely on staff doctors who barely knew one side of a sticking plaster from the other.
What was the rationale behind medical treatment to prisoners?
It’s a puzzle historians have shied away from trying to answer. The Gulag was a police colonial project to build industries and new towns across the Far North of the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Prisoner labour was ubiquitous in the time of Stalin. The Gulag was very different from Nazi concentration camps: it was much more embedded in the Soviet economy, lasted much longer and was closely tied to the economic development of the country. To do that, you need to preserve prisoner longevity. It was not a Hippocratic medical vision but a Soviet one to preserve ‘labour capacity’ and productivity, to accomplish the tasks set by the Five Year Plan.
Did a greater share of political prisoners die?
The statistics of the Gulag are hard to rely on and hard to get. The local camps hid death rates systematically, because they were held accountable for excess mortality and the failure to hit their Five Year Plan targets. Commandants also needed politicals’ education and skillsets, so we see the survival of engineers, medical personnel and technicians; but also actors, singers, football players and musicians because of the varied needs of this growing colonial project. By the 1940s, you have big Gulag theatre companies, and commandants competing to have the best Gulag opera, football teams and so on. The budget for entertainment was justified as spurring prisoner productivity, and building a cultural life when prisoners were released, but forced to remain in these towns because of passport restrictions.
Were there medical experiments in the camps?
Yes. It was very different from Nazi camp medical research. I focus on two studies. One was on the mental health of prisoners. The commandants thought prisoners faked madness to escape hard labour, but the system forced them to warehouse mentally ill inmates rather than release them. A prisoner psychiatrist running a Gulag mental hospital, Lev Sokolovsky, argued in 1944 that forced labour made prisoners mentally ill, through exhaustion, malnutrition and starvation. His classified research was a surprisingly frank discussion. The other study by Yakov Kaminsky, a prisoner-radiologist from Odesa, promoted the idea of a radium water spa in Ukhta. Many prisoners and free workers were made ill with radiation sickness. It’s a tragic story that remains little known even in the region.
How is access in Russia today?
I haven’t been back since 2014. It just seemed impossible for me to go as someone who had a track record in LGBTQ+ history of Russia. I felt it was increasingly dangerous. The last few lectures I gave in Perm and Ekaterinburg had to be prefaced with warnings that anyone under 18 had to leave the room, and there would be non-traditional content. Now such lectures wouldn’t happen.
There are still westerners going into the Russian archives. I find that puzzling and even morally questionable. Cold War 2.0 is going to look different from version 1.0. Visa access is already getting harder. A new list of US scholars was just banned by Russia’s foreign ministry. That’s one way that the new Iron Curtain will be built. But in a digital environment we have a lot more material that’s accessible. Russians have understood what was coming, and long ago started preventative scanning and digitisation of rare non-state materials: memoirs, testimonies, biographies.
Is there a resonance from your book with contemporary Russia?
One thinks immediately of the death of Alexei Navalny: the delays around releasing a medical explanation of cause of death, handing the body to his family, and so on. There’s a long history of mistreatment through neglect in the Gulag medical service. Only about 85 per cent of Stalin’s prisoners survived: 3 million of 18 million people did not, with most deaths enabled by systematic neglect. Political prisoners were outcasts from Soviet society, and the Gulag thought that if they couldn’t survive and meet the labour requirements then they were no loss. The distinction of political and regular criminals was there in the past and is still there now.
What’s your next book?
I’ve only just finished this book and I need a bit of a breather! But I’m currently learning Georgian. I have an idea for a book about Georgia’s cultural history. I’m intrigued by the relationship between Russia and Georgia, by the way the two nations have spent the past two centuries circling around each other, locked in a symbiotic embrace. In the present day this relationship continues to puzzle observers: it’s a very acute and interesting problem right now in Georgian politics balanced between Europe and Russia. I want to investigate the roots of that puzzle.
Join Dan Healey on 29 May, where he will be discussing his shortlisted book with Polly Jones.
The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps is available to purchase here.
Why did you decide to become a journalist?
I became a journalist before I decided to be one. I’m from a very poor family and had to start work aged nine, mostly washing floors. In high school I joined a class with a local newspaper, which promised to pay for every published article. I decided it was easier than washing floors. I was right. The paper was totally under the control of the local administration. It was what I knew, I didn’t see anything wrong. Then I bought Novaya Gazeta, and read an article by Anna Politkovskaya on ethnic cleansing in Chechnya. It didn’t really fit my picture of the world, my understanding of Russia. I realised I wanted to do the same thing – to connect people with reality. I was fourteen, and at seventeen I joined Novaya Gazeta as a trainee, the youngest reporter they had. I’m also inspired by Svetlana Alexievich. The way she listens to people, and how she works with direct speech, is fascinating.
How do you choose the subjects of your articles?
I love to write about invisible people and invisible cities, people and locations which are never on the map: small towns and villages, women recruited into prostitution, drug addicts, field policemen, northern tribes, gay people living hidden lives. These are invisible communities, people on the margins. I believe that if you want to understand the system, you need to talk not with those who are incorporated in the system but those who are excluded from it. In Russia we lived in a bit of post-apocalyptic space after the fall of the Soviet Union. In many places the state exists only formally. The unspoken and unwritten laws are most important.
How did you decide which pieces to include in this book?
It’s not just a selection of past articles but includes a personal narrative uniting them. I used past and new writings to answer my main question: how is it possible that Russia came to fascism which ended up with a big war? Why, being a reporter for seventeen years and studying Russia in detail, haven't I seen what was coming? I found some answers, although I don’t like them.
After the Donbas war started in 2014, I didn’t understand why the relatives of Russian soldiers were not protesting to defend their loved ones. I tried to find their families, which was not easy given it was a secret war and Russia didn’t admit to being involved. I met a woman in a small village in the south. The only way to find a job for men there was to join oil companies in the north or the army. Her brother enlisted, was sent to Donbas and was killed there. She wasn’t allowed to see his body, just to bury the coffin. She tried to find the truth about his death for months. But then she became silent. I asked her why. She told me there were two things she loved: her brother and her country. Her brother was dead, there was nothing she could do to bring him back to life. But if she blamed our country for his death, she would lose this love too. And she didn’t want to be empty inside. She wanted to love her country.
My own love for my country gave me so much strength to work but it also blinded me in the end. This is a book about love. But it is also about the fascism that is slowly growing in our soil. It is hard to see forest for the trees. Fascism in your own country is hard to realise and hard to admit.
How did you learn such good English?
I was attacked in 2016 and had a brain trauma. I couldn’t really write afterwards, it was hard to read. My doctors tried everything for a year, and then said I should immerse myself in another language to build new connections between my neurons. I ended up in the US, as a journalist in residence at the City University of New York and Columbia Journalism School. It was intense but it worked. I could work again. My English and strangely my Russian got better. I don't think I was reprogrammed culturally but it was useful to see the American media system from the inside. Before, I thought we were kind of cursed and the US media should be the ideal, though they have freedom of speech, freedom of information and money. But freedom and money are always issues.
Why did you leave Russia?
I’m very envious of people who decided to stay or to leave, but I didn’t do either. I was sent to Ukraine to cover the war, and while I was there, Russia changed the legislation. My work became a crime. My writing would cost me up to fifteen years in prison and all the people who helped me. Then I found out my life was in danger. Sources contacted my colleagues and said I was about to be killed on the road to Mariupol by Russian soldiers. All I had from my old life was a bulletproof vest, a helmet, a few pairs of trousers and socks, and my mom’s sweater for good luck.
What will happen in the war against Ukraine?
It’s hard to answer because I still have so much hope that I don’t see the future clearly. I hope Russia will lose. If we win, our fascism will grow stronger – and this war would not be the last one. That would be an endless nightmare and we will be destroyed as a nation. We need a revolution to change the regime, to stop the war, to win the future. We have to reconsider what we think about ourselves, our deeds, who we want to be. As a reporter I saw revolutions, it is blood and terror. I would never wish it for my country, but right now we are already in hell.
What is your next book?
It’s going to be based on a real event, with the idea that no crime can be hidden: it will become known later, sometimes in strange ways. I’m trying to decide where the border between non-fiction and fiction should be in it. I like Isaac Babel’s approach in Red Cavalry: he used his notes with real names and events but also invented some characters and played with reality. I hope I will start writing this summer.
I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country is available to purchase here.
Why did you become interested in Russia?
I did a first degree in photography film and TV, and began travelling in Eastern Europe. I was very into long distancing walking as a means of travel to find out about these places, mostly the Balkans. I then worked for two years as a local reporter in Norwich, but I had this dream to become a foreign correspondent. I thought I’d better get smart first so I did a masters at the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies. Russia is Russia, a huge country with a Security Council seat, so I went to Moscow looking for a job. I began as a copy editor, then freelanced and became a stringer and a reporter.
What drew you to the Caucasus?
From 2002 I started going to the North Caucasus to report on the Islamist insurgency that had spread from Chechnya across the region. I wrote about how Russian security forces were killing, kidnapping and torturing people as they tried to stamp out the militants. And I became very enamoured with the human rights activists who lived and worked there for Memorial, compared with the chicanery and cynicism of politics in Moscow. I was seduced by the landscape, the hospitality and the food.
What inspired your book?
When the school siege at Beslan happened in 2004, it was a thousand times worst for anyone directly involved but it was also quite distressing for me as a reporter. I had a recurring nightmare for several years afterwards of a woman I saw collapsing near the hospital after she was told her child had been killed. I struck on the idea of trying to walk across the North Caucasus, perhaps as a
way to come to terms with what I’d seen, diluting it with some more positive impressions and experiences; and, in an almost contradictory way, to drill down and find the roots to the violence from which Beslan had grown. I thought it would be a way to paint in the gaps compared with being a reporter parachuted in for a few days and only using a tenth of what you find.
Was it successful as therapy?
Yes. I’m a bit suspicious of the idea of a pure nature cure. But there was an aspect of sheer exhilaration from being in the mountains in warm sunshine. And walking is a method of discovery. You have to engage with people, use your charm and sometimes your guile. It’s not like being in a car where you just jump in and disappear. You have to make yourself vulnerable. That worked, and I came back with a much fuller picture of the North Caucasus.
Did you have any security problems?
I was detained a couple of times. Once in Abkazhia by the security services, who accused me of being a spy, kept me all day and took my possessions. But they’d left me my phone and I managed to get the mobile number of the foreign minister and called. I was let go the next day. I was also stopped by a guy who styled himself as a partisan, who called me a snake in the grass. But it ended happily. In
Dagestan, the people in the villages were overwhelmingly helpful, kind and took me in for the night. But some officials were quite suspicious. It’s unusual to be there with a rucksack if you are not a militant or a soldier. There is a trekking tradition especially around Mount Elbrus from Soviet times, but it had faded perhaps because of Islamist violence.
What did you learn from your walk?
I didn’t really go about this as a journalist might, as a quasi-political scientist. If so I would have probably looked at why young men are vulnerable to Islamist recruitment and so on. What I did learn about especially was the historical traumas. I hadn’t realised how much those are still remembered, and thought of constantly: the mass exodus, deportations and genocide. These things are still so deeply felt and have a very long lasting, pernicious effect. They have not really been processed on a national scale, and continue to cascade. One man remembered the exact number of animals his family had to abandon, and how many sacks of potatoes. Remembrance is part of survival, of a small nation and its shared pain. People are quite cautious and have varied views on the government. Some in private are very condemnatory about Moscow especially because of Chechnya and how they carpet bombed Grozny. Others say Ramzan Kadyrov is very brutal and does terrible things, but Grozny has been mostly rebuilt, and they prefer it to when the bombs were raining down. The price was very high. Putin allowed Chechnya to become a total feudal dictatorship, a new brand of violence and trauma.
What were views in the region towards the Beslan siege?
However bungled the rescue operation, forty-odd Islamist militants did seize the school and were very largely to blame. People detest them but they are also angry about how the whole situation was handled by the authorities, using tanks and heavy weapons when hostages were still inside. No-one gets off the hook. People are furious that the North Ossetian authorities were warned about an
imminent attack, but precautions were not taken.
What are the links between Russia’s war against Chechnya and Ukraine?
Whatever you think about the disgusting way in which the war in Chechnya was waged, there was a certain rationale in Russia trying to prevent the secession of an internal republic. Ukraine, by contrast, had been a sovereign nation for more than thirty years when Russia attacked in 2022. What unites the two conflicts is terrible brutality towards civilians. Ironically, a lot of young men from the North Caucasus have gone to fight in Ukraine. It’s not easy to find work in republics like Dagestan and the local authorities are glad to demonstrate loyalty to Moscow by recruiting them. That’s tragic, although our greatest sympathies must of course be with the Ukrainian people. This war is absolutely monstrous.
What are your future plans?
I cherish the day I can go back to the Caucasus. I feel very sad I can’t go back to the northern part, in Russia, maybe for decades. It’s some solace I can go to Georgia to walk. I’m keen now to do more long form writing. I’m interested in the circumpolar boreal forest. I was inspired by reading about Vladimir Arsenyev’s journeys through the taiga forest of the Russian Far East in the early twentieth century. He wrote very exciting frontier tales.
Join Tom Parfitt on 21 May, where he will be discussing his shortlisted book with Luke Harding.
High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland is available to purchase here.
Why did you decide to write this book?
The idea came from my publisher and my agent, who said people would like to read what you have to say. I said no. It was emotionally not the time, and professionally not appropriate for historians to write about what is happening in front of our eyes. A few weeks later, in Vienna, I got into the subway thinking no, and exited knowing how I was going to write it. Emotionally it gave me a project
where I was in control while things were falling apart; and professionally I was already seeing so many themes I had been writing about developing in front of my eyes, such as the idea Putin was pushing of Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same people. To adapt Churchill: historians are the worst commentators on contemporary developments, except everybody else.
What was the writing like?
I really started to admire journalists to a degree I didn’t before. Historians already know the end and we try to solve the equation to which we already have the answer. But what it means to pass a judgement on something happening today was a very humbling experience. I relied very much on the work of journalists reporting in real time. The task was to figure out what would be important the day after, with a more historical perspective. I discovered an enormous source base we historians didn’t have before: social media. Normally we work in a situation without enough sources. We have memoirs which are different from diaries, but then reactions and thoughts in the moment are different again. I was denied my usual sources, but it was quite liberating.
Is it difficult to be objective given your connections to Ukraine?
I don’t think as a historian practicing my profession that I could take any other position. Am I biased? This is quite a unique war, probably the first since World War Two where it’s so clear who is the aggressor and the victim. It’s so clear-cut that I can’t imagine really taking other positions. Consider works written about Nazi Germany: it’s very clear that almost everything we see is “biased” in its moral clarity, but it’s good history.
How did the book change your views?
In the first part of the book, I was in the traditional role of historian, looking at the fall of the Soviet Union. I knew the outcome: the war in 2014 and 2022. Previously, I wrote about certain things more as a theoretical possibility, like the implications of the 1994 Budapest memorandum. Now I realise the damage that was done by the way it was produced: it solved a problem in the short-term, but created a larger one in the long-term. By removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine, it created a power vacuum in the centre of Europe that would suck in all sorts of revanchist forces, and yet nothing was done to fill that vacuum. If the response to Russian actions in Chechnya, Georgia or the invasion of Crimea had been at least on a par on what later happened then we would not be here today. These were all missed opportunities to stop aggression.
What are the lessons for historians from this war?
You know history, but you always hope for the better. We somehow believed history came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what happened in the interwar period couldn’t repeat itself because now we are so much smarter and more educated. But history didn’t end. We are potentially in a more dangerous place than in 1939 because of nuclear weapons. That’s a big shock, and an invitation for me as a representative of the historians’ guild: we have to do a better job at explaining history and sharing what we know. Things can actually get worse. An aggressor can be stopped, and appeasement didn’t work then, and doesn’t work today.
What will be the outcome?
I’m optimistic in the long-term and very concerned in the short-term. We know what happens with the fall of empires. History is on the side of Ukraine and international order. But it doesn’t happen on its own; it happens because particular decisions are made. The disintegration of empires can go for a very long period, create enormous suffering and lead to new wars. The sooner we stop the aggression, the less is the cost to us all. The war was an attempt to create Russia as a pole in multipolar world. Instead it’s recreating a bipolar world between the US and China, although the Chinese economy is not doing well and the complete dysfunctionality of American politics raises the question of whether it can be one of the poles. The US is the biggest concern, but as Churchill said, you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they've tried everything else.
Whatever happens, Russia looks to be weakened, isolated from Europe and turned towards China. Ukraine will emerge much more united in identity, culture, as a state. Outcomes are decided on the battlefield. A peace treaty that would recognise the changed borders of Ukraine is impossible. An armistice is possible wherever the frontlines end up being, but it would be nothing more than that, as long as the current Russian regime is in place. But the act of resistance on its own from Ukraine – whatever happens next – is already historically a win.
What do you think about the reaction of the Russian intelligentsia to Putin’s regime?
I was surprised to the extent that part of Russia’s cultural elite really was prepared to take responsibility for the Russian aggression and not just criticise and dissociate themselves from what the regime has been doing. Historically that’s quite unique, compared to what was happening under the Tsars or Stalin, for instance. This is the first time I see people taking responsibility and it’s a very positive sign. It’s one of very few silver linings in this war. The message is that it’s not just the problem of the regime, but you need to accept that there is a bigger, broader problem with the society that produces it. They are on the right track, but this is a long-term game.
What is your next book?
I had to write about the war, but I couldn’t write any more about a story with no ending. I looked for something I could really focus on. Chernobyl Roulette, which will be released in early September, is about the 35 days of the Russian occupation of Chernobyl in 2022. It’s an extraordinary story on so many levels, not just about the war but about the continuation of Chernobyl, the safety of our nuclear plants, the debate on global warming, and how the war is pushing countries back to nuclear energy at a time the largest plant in Europe is under occupation. It’s about the people who found themselves on this island of a nuclear power plant, trying to decide for themselves where their loyalties are, whether they should resist or not. A failure to resist could mean the betrayal of their country, while resisting could endanger the world with another nuclear disaster. The Chernobyl engineers did the impossible and kidnapped the kidnappers by threatening them to unleash the nuclear radiation if the occupiers mistreated the nuclear plant’s personnel or occupied their city.
Serhii Plokhy's book The Russo-Ukrainian War is available to purchase here.
What is your connection to Russia?
I was born a Soviet citizen, an Estonian forced to live for 13 years in the USSR with a typical Estonian family history. My grandfather was sent to the Gulag in Kolyma, and my father as a young boy was deported with his brother and mother to southern Siberia. When my granddad was released, they could join him in Kolyma. However, they were not allowed to return home for another five years. My father, who got a “clean passport” by mistake, was able to come back earlier. He became an author and travelled a lot. He took me to Buryatia and other places, which raised my curiosity about other cultures. This is why I went to study anthropology at the University of Tartu and continued with doctoral studies at Cambridge.
How did you become interested in the Nenets?
I dreamed of going to Africa but I couldn’t find the money to do so. Instead, I ended up going in the opposite direction! As an undergraduate, I met a poet from the Nenets community, and asked him if he could show me his region. He took me to his childhood tundra where I met people on a typical reindeer-herding collective farm. He then told me about another unique group 500km further east who had never been collectivised and had been hiding from the authorities. Obviously, I became very curious. I first went there in 2000 and have since returned seven times, staying for a full year in 2006–7 for my doctoral research. It’s such a remote corner of the country, and my book is about this non-Russia.
What is the Nenets' relationship with Russia?
These independent Nenets are vastly different from most other citizens in Russia. They often say, “We do it this way, while ‘they’ over there in Russia do it another way.” That’s not a conscious political statement, it’s just their way of seeing their life. This area was once a Gulag region and later became a military zone, with geologists also wandering around. To get cash, rifles and other necessities, the Nenets engaged in illegal trade, selling valuable Arctic fox pelts to geologists, the
military and others.
How did they avoid being collectivised?
There was an uprising in 1943 when reindeer were confiscated, children taken to boarding schools and men were drafted to the Front, leaving families without breadwinners. The Nenets were furious and refused to be in the collective farms. They were harshly repressed, but some managed to evade the system due to the area being divided between different, fragmented regimes across administrative borders. This allowed them to remain more or less “invisible”. When confronted, they would claim to be from another region. It was hide and seek.
How distinctive is their lifestyle?
The Nenets nomads are one of the very few fully nomadic societies still vibrant in the Arctic. Despite numerous challenges – the oil and gas industry, climate change, and increasing competition for land – they’ve managed to preserve their way of life. They live in conical tents, moving on every few days or weeks, typically with one or two families at each campsite. It’s a rather solitary lifestyle, as your next-door neighbour is 15 km away. They travel hundreds of kilometres every year as the reindeer require fresh pastures.
How did you go about your research?
It’s a fascinating setting for an anthropologist. In the south, you might rent your own place, but in the Arctic, where temperatures plunge to minus 50 degrees, that's not an option. You’re invited to live in their small tent, shared by the parents and six to eight children. It’s a unique setting for fieldwork because you become deeply integrated into their daily lives and participate in the chores. They don’t see a scholar as doing something particularly important. I was often told to stop writing and come out to help with shifting sledges, harnessing reindeer, or going after firewood and water. With the Nenets, you can’t be a free rider. I learned to lasso reindeer, but identifying the right one was tough – I almost always got the wrong one! I had my own reindeer harness, but navigating alone in the snowy tundra plains remained really challenging.
What did you focus on?
I was studying the missionary encounters and the Nenets’ conversion to evangelical Christianity, which prohibits alcohol. The converts abandoned drink, illustrating the power of religion to be more effective than Soviet anti-alcohol campaigns. In many other areas in the north, alcoholism remains a huge problem. The missionaries are mainly Baptists and Pentecostals, some of Ukrainian origin, who moved to the Soviet north and brought along their religion. Some congregations emerged from the Gulag, thanks to Volga German Mennonites and others. These missionaries are very conservative fundamentalists who take the Bible literally. They kept a low profile during Soviet times but began proselytising in the tundra in the mid-1990s.
Why did Christianity spread so quickly?
It sounds counterintuitive: the people who avoid the Russians at all costs suddenly embrace their religion. One explanation is that it helps them deal with alcohol, which everyone understands is destructive. There are stories of people who have lost all their reindeer due to binge drinking and are forced to just “sit” fishing or move to the settlement, which is seen as the worst kind of life imaginable. Also, there is a certain logic in the role of words and silences – hence the title of my book. Missionaries come with powerful words and bind people to them. Those who don’t want to convert stay silent to avoid being compelled by these outsiders’ words. The Nenets aren’t used to the intense talking of missionaries, who tell them to burn their “idols”, stop drinking reindeer blood, singing epic songs and so on, leading to a complete rupture with their past lifestyle.
Does the conversion trouble you?
I was a constant target of conversion, which was psychologically demanding but also rewarding: I know what it means to be targeted. As an anthropologist your aim is to try to understand what's happening without passing judgment. On one hand, it’s sad to see their traditional world vanish. On the other, this is a global phenomenon which is poorly understood and needs to be studied. And it’s not just about religion but has broader implications. For example, this form of Christianity tends to be hostile toward the environment, with the view that God has given humans power to govern all other beings. In contrast, the animists have a much subtler relationship with their landscape and to the sentient beings around them. If they collect bird eggs, they always leave one in the nest; they don’t shoot swans because they believe they were once humans; they avoid fishing in certain lakes because that’s where the spirits live. They show immense respect for the environment.
What about the effects of climate change on their lifestyle?
That’s a huge challenge now. You get mid-winter rainfall which creates impenetrable ice sheets on top of the snow layer, which means reindeer can’t dig through to reach the lichen they need to survive, resulting in mass deaths. Communities have lost tens of thousands of reindeer, forcing many to relocate to a village, which for most would be a catastrophic end. Additionally, there is also a
problem with the shrinking size of pastures as the oil and gas industry expands along with pipelines and roads. These all take a toll.
What is your next project?
I’m working on an edited volume on Arctic Christianities, trying to understand what’s specific when Christianity reaches the north. I very much hope that in my lifetime, I can return and continue my fieldwork in Russia. However, for that to happen, Putin’s regime must collapse.
Words and Silences: Nenets Reindeer Herders and Russian Evangelical Missionaries in the Post-Soviet Arctic is available to purchase here.