Interviews by Andrew Jack, founder of the Pushkin House Book Prize
How did you end up working in Australia?
I was born in Russia and left in the early 2010s for a mix of professional and personal reasons. As much as I liked Russia, I hated the long winter. I also somehow knew that I would probably live abroad – in an English-speaking country. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, I had a feeling that something was not right and that the situation would only get worse, including for gay people, for freedom of speech, etc. So I got a research scholarship and moved to Australia for a PhD at the University of Melbourne. It was a very good choice, looking back. After completing my PhD, I faced a choice between a traditional academic career with its inevitable precarity, and a job outside academia that provided a stable income and gave me time to continue doing research. I chose the latter. The profession I chose made me eligible for Australian permanent residency and ultimately citizenship. I’m passionate about what I do, and I really want to present the results of my research to as many people as I can, especially outside academia. I know that most people find it very difficult to read academic books, and the overwhelming majority cannot afford to buy them either. It is very sad that there is so much interesting, vital information that sits either behind a paywall or somewhere in a university library and is not making the impact it should absolutely be making.
What’s the story of your book?
The idea came to me in 2015-2016. I was watching an interview with Vadim Pokrovsky, Russia’s top AIDS specialist, who sadly passed away recently. He said he personally knew a lot of high-ranking and influential people in Russia who had HIV, but nobody talked about it and the problem was still ignored. Pokrovsky’s words struck me, and I started looking at the materials that I had. I even wrote a first draft. I pitched it to a couple of Russian publishers. Some ignored me, while others said that the topic was interesting but would have a very niche readership and little commercial value. I shelved the project. I finished my thesis which I turned into a book. Then I wrote Red Closet and Gay Lives in Brezhnev’s Russia. In 2024, reading about the rising HIV rates in Russia, I decided to return to the book project and re-write it in English. Manchester University Press accepted the project with enthusiasm.
What is the key message?
Ignorance, complacency and lies can be deadly when we are dealing with new diseases and epidemics and other threats that may seem insignificant at first – like Covid. I am not saying that only Russia was ignorant, complacent and deceptive during the HIV crisis. Many other countries displayed some combination of these traits, but Russia’s case is an excellent illustration. It’s a subject that has rarely been examined from a social, human, historical and, most importantly, queer perspective. I think the title of the book conveys its central message well. First, the USSR sought to deceive the world by claiming that AIDS was a biological weapon created by the United States. When AIDS eventually reached the Soviet Union, it triggered despair. Finally, there was hope: in a society notorious for suppressing human rights and civic activism, ordinary people – and even the beleaguered queer community – mobilised and took matters into their own hands, realising that they could expect little help from the Soviet leadership busy with perestroika. I am very happy that this book was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Award. I hope it will help bring this research to a broader audience and draw more attention to Russia’s HIV crisis, which, unfortunately, remains profoundly underestimated and is not given proper attention.
What surprised you during your research?
I was surprised to discover that gay and HIV activism existed in the late Soviet Union, despite the fact that the country was far less politically free than the United States. Even under the real threat of criminal prosecution, activists organised campaigns and worked to raise awareness about the emerging AIDS crisis. What struck me most was that, although there were fundamental differences between the Soviet and Western experiences, there were also remarkable similarities. Ultimately, we are all human: people responded to the epidemic with the same fear, resilience and determination to survive. I was also shocked by some of the stories the book tells. One that really stayed with me was about a Soviet sex worker who is believed to have been the first person in the USSR to die of AIDS. After her death, her photograph was published in a Soviet newspaper, which I found quite shocking. I was also struck by how little sympathy many Soviet doctors had for people living with HIV, although I am sure they were not unique in that regards and similar examples could be found elsewhere.
What is your view of how HIV is handled in today’s Russia?
Under Putin, it’s a completely different story. At the beginning of this century, Russia had neither the money nor the political will to deal with the epidemic. People living with HIV went to doctors and begged for modern antiretroviral therapy, which had already been widely available in the West for years. They were often denied treatment. There was even a popular song by Zemfira at the time: “You have got AIDS, and it means we will die.” Activists and international pressure eventually forced Putin to recognise HIV as a national priority in 2006. Things improved: funding was allocated, research expanded and access to treatment gradually increased. But in 2012, when Putin decided to return for a third presidential term, he completely reversed course. Determined to stay in power at all costs, he introduced the so-called “gay propaganda” law, cracked down on NGOs, and made HIV prevention work increasingly difficult. Today, the situation is even worse because of the war against Ukraine. The Russian government has shown a shocking disregard for the health and lives of its own citizens, sending many of them to war with little concern for whether they live or die.
What is your next writing project?
It’s a book with the tentative title Non-Prozac Nation: How Russia Fell in Love with Antidepressants. It’s the story of how Russians came to embrace antidepressants after rejecting them for many years. I’d rather not say too much about it just yet, as it will be published later this year. But it explores one of those neglected topics that practically screams for attention. Despite its importance, almost nothing has been written about antidepressants as a social and cultural phenomenon in Russia.
Why did you decide to write this book?
In 2012, the last time I went to Chechnya, I visited the cemetery with my mother’s grave. It was completely empty. That's where I made a promise to one day write down our story. It was enlightened revenge. It was quite obvious following her murder that there would be no proper investigation. I realised the only way for me to make sure her legacy exists is to immortalise her in literary form. It was very important, because when there's no justice, when the murderers are walking free, you feel so helpless and impotent. Writing was reclaiming that power and making sure hope triumphs over despair. The book is a way of telling the story of Chechnya through the eyes of a child who becomes a teenager, and depicting a mother-daughter relationship that was unique. I wanted to weave in the history and the political context of our bond and mix it all together, because our lives were so intertwined with what was happening at the time.
What happened in the investigation of her death?
They know exactly who's responsible. At first they were following the correct leads. But then the official version changed completely and they found this militant who very conveniently was eliminated several months after my mum's murder. It was a complete setup. It would be impossible for her murder to not be authorised by Ramzan Kadyrov directly. I believe that one day we'll find out the truth. And I'm planning on living a very long life and seeing justice come to fruition. But in the meantime, I'm doing everything in my power to make sure that my mum's legacy exists and that her life is not just remembered as a tragedy, but also a triumph of humanity.
How did you go about writing?
The book is a memoir and not a precise biography. I started off with my own memories and jotted down the stories that jumped out: living without electricity, lugging all the buckets of water to the tenth floor, the shootings and going to school while soldiers were checking for mines on both sides of the road. I was aided by our family photographs. Then I started involving my mother's colleagues and friends from Memorial and other human rights organisations. After that I started using more secondary materials including my mum's articles. It was really important that the human story was my starting point. I had this wheel in my head to balance all of the personal memories and my perception of what was going on and my mum's work, and then adding the historical and the political context. I had to make sure the wheel kept turning. On one page, I'm trying to find out how to download music illegally and to find the names of my favourite band without access to the internet. On another, it's my mum interviewing victims of torture. So it's a bit morbid probably, but that's how life is in a war zone.
What was your life like in Chechnya?
The biggest challenge wasn't the lack of electricity or water, because when that's your reality that's what you operate in. The trickiest thing was this lack of stability. Our lives were so chaotic that one week my mum would come in and say, "Okay, you're going to the village for a week” and obviously my education would be disrupted. Having a routine is quite important for a child. That's something I had to make up for in the coming years. When living in a war zone is the only thing you know, you adapt very quickly. Sometimes we would leave to go to Moscow or other villages where my relatives lived that had electricity and had water. But then I had to go back to Grozny, which didn't have these amenities, and it was just like coming home and it really felt quite normal. This chaos and the lack of stability made me very adaptable but definitely had some long-term consequences.
How dangerous was life for you?
I knew that we lived in danger. One day in 2001, in Grozny, my mum and I were coming back to our neighborhood after visiting someone. It was already dark and we were walking past a checkpoint when the “federals” – Russian soldiers – were getting drunk as they did every night because there was nothing to do apart from killing people and drinking. Suddenly they started shooting at us. I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember bullets hitting right in front of us and going everywhere. My mother stopped in her tracks and turned to them and started screaming, “Stop it. Stop it. I have a child with me. Stop it, you bastards.” They just thought it would be fun to scare us or kill us. The older I got, the more I understood how mum put herself in the firing line. This realisation came properly was she accompanied our friend and her colleague Anna Politkovskaya to an interview with Ramzan Kadyrov in 2004. My mum describes how he tried to abuse her and even threatened to kill her. The more power Kadyrov gained, the more danger my mother was in because he really made a point of silencing his critics.
How do you feel about your mother?
She was full of surprises. I really wanted to depict her not just as this martyr but as a human being who had her own flaws and bad days. She didn't always know what she was doing, and she was very chaotic and disorganised and could be very short-tempered. I wanted to capture that complexity. But I kept being hit with these stories that made me think in many ways she was a saint. She lived quite an ascetic life. We didn't really have much money. She liked dressing up and simple pleasures like planting flowers and home decor, but she really put other people's needs above hers. Whether it was going to a mountainous village in the middle of the day to record a testimony of a family member of someone who was kidnapped, or giving away some of my old toys without my permission to an orphanage, or most of her salary to someone she thought was in greater need. She thought she had to solve every problem. We often talk about big cases she was involved in and how she was not afraid to confront officers. She was so empathetic and selfless that she didn't think twice, even when it was dangerous.
What was her legacy?
The most upsetting thing for me is that I won't even know half of the things she was involved in. I still have people tell me how she helped them file a lawsuit and how they got a compensation for a missing family member or helped to save someone who was illegally detained. She was doing everything in her power to fight impunity, like the handful of Russian soldiers who faced persecution for their crimes. Sometimes she managed to rescue young men from illegal prisons. At the heart of it is her attempt to fight against this machine that was grinding down human lives with no consequence. She made everything her responsibility. She had a team of colleagues, comrades and friends around her. She didn't let all this injustice and violence go unnoticed. She wanted the world to know about what was happening in Chechnya and she wanted the world to do something about it. How do you qualify the impact of one person? There are a lot of people who are alive now because of her, or who gained some sense of closure and justice.
How do you compare the federal actions with those of the Kadyrov regime?
I don't agree with the characterisation of his regime that you sometimes see in the independent Russian media, as if it's something completely separate from the Kremlin. There's this orientalist thinking that people in the periphery have a capacity for a special sort of brutality. Kadyrov’s ascent to power was a direct policy of the divide and rule strategy that Russia has used historically. Find someone on the spot to do the dirty work for you and then outsource to them. Kadyrov and his kind switched sides and enjoyed all the perks of their association with the Kremlin and received a huge budget they spent on themselves. They inherited and reused all the illegal sites to carry on that brutality. Of course, there was a local flavour he brought to this repression, like the principle of collective responsibility: they would kidnap the whole family of someone accused of being a terrorist and torture them and burn down their houses.
Do you still follow the situation in Chechnya?
If you don't live there, it's really impossible to grasp the extent of this open-air prison that it has become. I haven't visited for many years and it's a completely different place to the one I left back in 2009. That’s why I was focusing on capturing that almost fleeting moment. So much has been written about the first war. I really wanted to capture what it was like living in the consequences of those wars, watching this traumatised society that never got any respite then flung into this horrible dictatorship where human lives had no significance. Is anything fundamentally going to change for Chechens after Kadyrov goes? While someone like Putin is still in power, they'll find another Kadyrov and I believe these repressions will carry on. There's a whole line of other people who will be happy to take over and carry on what he was doing, just adding their own flavour to it.
Do you feel afraid yourself?
I anticipate some threats coming my way. But I live somewhere safe. There's nothing in my book or that I say which I want to backtrack on. I speak openly about who I found responsible for my mother's murder. The last thing I would want is to be silent. I know my words have consequences, but I also know I have a duty to tell the truth. When I think about who's in real danger, it’s those journalists who are uncovering Kadyrov's current crimes as we speak, not his past crimes.
What are your current plans?
I've been involved in the human rights sector in my own way, working for an organisation that defends media freedoms. I’m currently taking a break because I have two small children. I've been working on a novel for younger audiences inspired by Caucasian mythology, about a girl who has to save the world. It’s another way of preserving and celebrating my culture while taking a break from some heavier context and focusing on the power of my imagination. The greatest gift my mother gave me was teaching me how to read. Even when there was shooting at night or we didn't have electricity, I would just lie in bed with a book of fairy tales. I gave myself permission to explore that greatest passion of my childhood.
What is your background?
I’m a Russian journalist. I switched to writing about Russian political life in the late 1990s after the financial crisis of 1998 got me interested in politics. I started writing for various publications. From 2008 till 2010 I was editor of Russian Newsweek. From 2015 to 2017 I was editor of the Moscow Times. I joined TV Rain news network when it was launched in 2010, during the Medvedev thaw. Since then my wrap-up end of the week show became its flagship programme. In 2022, after TV Rain was banned by the state within days of the invasion of Ukraine, I had to flee Russia with my family. First we went to Baku, then Israel, and then Amsterdam, where Rain is now based and continues to broadcast on YouTube. I’m classified as a “foreign agent” and under criminal investigation by the Russian state since June 2026.
Why did you decide to write your book?
When Nemtsov was murdered in 2015, it was a moment of deep shock and sorrow for everyone who knew him. A moment like that that stays with you forever. I knew Nemtsov personally, politically I supported him, and because I have covered Russia’s politics since the end of 1990s it was natural that I was invited to make a documentary about him. The film that we made together with director Vera Krichevskaya was very well received. Amazingly it was even released in some theatres across Russia in early 2017. Afterwards, someone suggested putting the film onto paper. I thought it would take me a couple of months, so ‘why not? It ended up taking me five years! I remember clearly that I started in 2017, during the May holidays and worked on it till it went into print in February 2022, two weeks before the invasion. It took so long because I decided to unpack every pivotal moment of Russia’s history in which Nemtsov took part, from the late 80s until he was murdered. And there were many. Why did the coup of August 1991 happen? Why did Yeltsin take the tanks to the centre of Moscow during his stand-off with Supreme Council in 1993 and then start the war in Chechnya? We all know the basic details of these events but what is behind them? So together with Nemtsov I embarked on a journey through Russia’s history. The main question in my head was ‘what happened?’ Why did Russia fail so badly? In the book, I don’t provide definitive answers about where Russia went wrong or who is to blame. History is not a kind of a 'Back To The Future' series, where if you had a time machine you could go to a specific moment and fix everything. But I hope my exploration helps understand what really happened.
What is the key message?
That Nemtsov’s life is the story of Russia. His fate was Russia’s fate. The idea was to make this journey through Russia’s political history, starting with inspiring moments of perestroika and the liberation from communism. That provided Russia with a few years of real absolute freedom that it never had before, but which did not convert into institutionalised democracy. So, the first part of the book explores these moments during the Yeltsin era. The second half explores the consequences. After Putin came to power, there were no more turning points. Russia’s fate was set. Since then, we were carried along by the hardening autocracy that Putin started to build. Nemtsov owes his rise to political prominence to perestroika and liberation. His ascent to power, being so close to the very top of the Russian government, and then his fall, embody the drama of Yeltsin’s years. His move into opposition – of harassment, victimisation and finally murder – is what happened to Russia afterwards. This incredible arc of life was a vehicle to explore Russian history.
What surprised you as you conducted your research?
Nemtsov was human. He made mistakes. His career and political rise was so fast in the 1990s as the golden boy of the Yeltsin era. He lost his sense of reality at the top of power. He struggled with it, as he admitted afterwards. We all knew Nemtsov as an open, honest political person but when he was alive there was always a sense that he was not to be taken seriously. The moment he died, everyone realised how wrong that was, how unique he was. We didn’t pay attention, but he was the only member of the democratic old guard who emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s who managed to stay in politics. He reinvented himself with such a downshift, to claim political victories 20 years later in the Yaroslav regional election. The story shows how a political personality matures with time. When he was at the top, he was politically unwise. When he was in the regional assembly, he was much better in what he thought and did. That’s the tragic irony of his political story.
Could he have become Russia’s president?
It’s possible he wouldn’t have been able to in any eventuality. When he lost his bid to be Yeltsin’s successor in late 1997, it was due to the political struggles within the Russian government and the Kremlin, when the young reformers were targeted by the oligarchs and wasted their political capital. But regardless of how that affected Nemtsov’s chances, life was already starting to become different. The frustration was beginning to show. The winds that brought Nemtsov to political prominence had already calmed. Maybe in 1998 he was already too free and liberal for the times. Does that mean the Russia he represented was doomed from the very beginning? My answer is no: Russia didn’t need to end up with the worst-case scenario of authoritarian rule. In my updated English language version, my book finishes with the invasion of Ukraine, which makes the story complete. Nemtsov represents a Russia that could have been, that emerged on the ruins of Soviet rule. That Russia was persecuted during Putin’s years and then died with his war. Of course, the primary victim is Ukraine, but Russia is a victim too. Nemtsov became a victim of the early phase of the war that Putin started. Then, a few years later, Russia was murdered too. It makes the story complete.
Was the current outcome for Russia under Putin inevitable?
Under Putin – yes. A moment that is quite dramatic is when Nemtsov learns that Putin will be Yeltsin’s successor. He’s shocked. For him, it’s hard to imagine a bureaucrat could be named as president. They are so different. Nemtsov is informal, unbureaucratic, tall, handsome, charismatic and anti-Soviet. Putin is small, uncharismatic, a clerk with a KGB background. Unlike Nemtsov – or many others around Yeltsin, for that matter – he had no experience of public political process. A career bureaucrat, he never took part in a debate or an election and never acted as a political person. That’s the major difference between Nemtsov and Putin in 1999, when Yeltsin made his choice. Everybody knows Nemtsov; Putin is virtually unknown to anyone. He’s a pig in a poke. What stands behind Putinism is not any great idea. His only goal was power and his only platform was control. The worst-case scenario that Russia ended up with is not the result of any particular “higher goal” that makes tyrants clamp down on their nations and unleash horrific wars. Putin is an opportunist. He doesn’t have a plan, a strategy, a big idea, a religion, or a belief in anything except his need to stay in power and control. What makes him so brutal is not fanaticism, but a disregard for human life and dignity. As a clerk, Putin does not treat people as people – but as numbers from the memos on his desk.
What was Putin’s reaction to Nemtsov’s assassination?
The killing was solved in two to three days. The head of the FSB came to the Kremlin with the findings. Putin knew everything very quickly. I concluded that Putin was not behind the murder and didn’t order it – unlike with Navalny. What happened is that Nemtsov fell victim to Putin’s war. He was so vocal and loud in his protests against the annexation of Crimea and Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechen soldiers joining the fight in Ukraine that he drew attention to himself. So after Nemtsov was murdered, Putin faced a choice: either to accept this monstrous archaic gift of the head of his enemy on a silver platter – or to reject it. Any choice would have consequences. If he chose the former, he would have to deal with Kadyrov’s regime and dismantle it. If he accepted it, he shared responsibility. We know what choice he made.
Is your book available in Russia?
I never believed the Russian edition would make it to the bookshops, since it went into print two weeks before the Ukraine war started. But it was put on sale and became a bestseller, with tens of thousands of copies sold until the constantly tightening laws against foreign agents made it close to impossible last autumn: the bookshops now mostly refuse to sell it. We have reprinted it outside Russia, and I have updated the English version: it now ends with the invasion of Ukraine.
What is your next project?
While writing this book, I spent months in the archives, in Moscow and in Nizhny Novgorod. I traveled across Russia, and interviewed hundreds of people. It is now impossible for me to get this level of access inside Russia. I cannot go back, so my possibilities have narrowed, and to come out with a project of a similar scale would be much more challenging. This book changed me as a journalist and as a person. Now I feel I understand much better what happened and how political life develops. I hope I’ll experience that once more and make a similar deep dive into something, but I have no specific plans yet, as I have a new life to which I still have to adapt.
What is your background?
I graduated from the law department of Moscow State University in Soviet times and worked in the Supreme Court, so I know the system from the inside. It was extremely boring. But the system worked better than now under Gorbachev: it was less politicised, and I was not ashamed to be part of it. I wrote a dissertation and then decided to be a journalist, which was at a very interesting time. I had close ties with the circles of Gaidar, Chubais and other economic reformers. My brother was a speechwriter for Gaidar and Chernomyrdin, which allowed me into the secret life of the authorities. I worked for Izvestiya and Ogonek, wrote as a columnist for main business newspapers of that time Segodnya and Vedomosti. All these years I was writing books, primarily on Soviet and Russian political history. I joined Novaya Gazeta 15 years ago. Then I had a very interesting proposal from Carnegie and spent nine years as a senior fellow responsible for domestic politics. The centre was closed after beginning of the war, and I was named a foreign agent. I continued my work in Moscow and was part of the team of the Berlin Carnegie Moscow centre, until it was named an undesirable organisation – cooperation with which means inevitable prosecution. I decided to stay in Russia, and I was hired again by Novaya Gazeta.
What is your status in Russia now?
I was labelled a foreign agent. That means I don’t have full civil rights, although that contradicts the constitution. It’s my right to work, so I continue my research attempting to describe and analyse the current situation. I don’t pay too much attention to restrictions, but I follow some rules. Novaya Gazeta doesn’t have a media licence so it is blocked in Russia, but it can publish on the website, Telegram, YouTube and so on. We had a massive search on the premises for unexplained reasons and our investigative journalist Oleg Rodulgin was arrested (now he is under home arrest). The situation is very dangerous for us, although the reputation of Dmitry Muratov at Novaya Gazeta maybe helps us to continue.
Why did you decide to stay?
I don’t want to leave my country. It is still mine. My family, some of my children, grandchildren and the graves of my parents, brother and grandparents are here. Up until now, I still see opportunities to operate inside Russia, to write and analyse. It’s more an emotional than a rational decision, but I clearly understand that if I follow other colleagues who have left, I have no chance to return. It could be forever. No one knows how long the regime could last but I’m here while it is still possible. I know for sure that my work from inside Russia is a consolation for those who are here. Sometimes people, who read liberal press or watch YouTube broadcasts, come up to me, and say simply ‘thank you’. It inspires me.
What rules do you need to follow in your writing?
It’s better not to use the word ‘war’. It’s used by top officials freely but there are very bad cases of it being used leading to criminal prosecution, even imprisonment. We use substitutes like the ‘special military operation’. I try to avoid using it even in western media. It doesn’t help to understand the essence of the events, but it could make my personal life harder. Everyone understands what ‘full scale invasion’ means. We don’t use non analytical words. It’s better to explain what it means and to still have a connection and live in today’s Russia. One more very sensitive topic is how to describe military losses. But again if you dare to work and write and broadcast you can still do it.
What is the key message of your book?
The main idea is that Putin couldn’t launch his special operation without ideology. It was important for me because the idea that he was someone with messianic ideas was not so evident at the very beginning of his first term. I wrote in 2000 comparing him with Mussolini, ideologically and politically: it looked like he would be an authoritarian moderniser. As we know, that ends up not with modernisation but with authoritarianism. And the driver of this hand-made catastrophe was Putin’s obsession with the messianic role of Russia, its so called thousand-years history, and his desire to be seen as the tsar of the recreated Empire, equal to the leaders of the great powers. He failed to assert himself as a trendsetter in the world using soft power, so he has chosen the military way.
What was the turning point for him?
The first real suspicion that everything would go wrong was when he restored the Soviet anthem in 2000. Then during the re-election in 2003, we saw the failure of the democratic process and the arrest of Khodorkovsky. In 2005, he talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, followed by his 2007 Munich speech which provided a roadmap. In 2012, society demonstrated it want more than simply Medvedev – it wanted the luxury of democracy. Putin saw the enemy, and decided to destroy it. When he returned to the Kremlin in 2012, he began this process of returning Russia to its so-called traditional values and to a real dictatorship. The peak was the annexation of Crimea. For me, one of the main events was the liquidation of Memorial. At the cornerstone of his ideology, it was extremely important to destroy national memory, to cancel the knowledge of the dark pages of our history.
How significant is his interference in the education system?
It seems that Putin wants eternal life, nearly literally. So it is extremely important for him to nurture the next generation of supporters and voters, since formally we have elections and democracy. He wants a new generation which must be loyal, supporting and serving him including militarily. The educational system has been adapted to this goal, especially in history textbooks. There is the takeover of university education with the “fundamentals of Russian statehood”: what was Soviet scientific communism has now become scientific Putinism. It’s important for the regime to isolate the younger generation from western education, so it named different US universities as ‘undesirable’. As a result we have pure dystopia. The younger generation is very different. Some are making careers inside the system. Some are aggressively loyal, some are not loyal but follow the rules. A lot – mainly boys – are trying to avoid conscription. Not everyone can be indoctrinated. In my years in university, not so many people seriously accepted Soviet ideology. Some were and are partly indoctrinated, with a critical attitude. It’s the same today.
What will be Putin’s legacy?
It looks like he’s a person with a mission. Maybe he sincerely thinks he’s returning this greatness to Russia. Everything he doing is not about greed and money, but also about ideology. He cares about his legacy but using an abnormal approach. This regime doesn’t have an image of the future at all. It has problems with goal setting and legacy. Generally, people say they want to live normally, with a return at least to 2021 when there were direct flights to the west, western goods and no war: an authoritarian regime but with a market economy. Maybe this is something like a national idea: don’t think that people want to live in the traditionalist isolated “paradise” constructed in the Putin or Dugin-like brains of an Orthodox secret serviceman.
What happens after Putin?
There are a lot of people who share his view on the place of Russia in the world. The special services are becoming more and more influential. History demonstrates that in personality-based regimes, the disappearance of the original leader changes a lot. For instance, after the death of Stalin, his closest official began liberalisation almost overnight. I’m reading a lot now about transition periods in different countries including in Portugal and Spain. It looks like anything is possible if there is a revolution from above, and the impulse from above coincides with the desire for changes from below. For the moment from below, people don’t feel influential enough to demonstrate discontent – the level of political repression is higher than under Brezhnev. Discontent from above is more or less evident, but elites are paralysed by fear.
What’s your view on Russia’s place in the world?
Putin tries to imitate the Soviet Union but this is not the Soviet Union. He’s losing his empire, and is obsessed by the idea of restoring it. He insists on a multipolar world, but he’s not the most influential pole and fails to use the Brezhnev doctrine in the current circumstances. Trying to restore spheres of influence, he has achieved the diametrically opposite result: he’s losing Central Asia, he’s lost the Caucasus. He’s not so mighty to be equal with the US. We saw how he was in a great hurry to meet Xi just after Trump’s meeting in order to demonstrate that he’s equal to the most influential leaders. He wants to establish new rules for the new world order, but for the moment he’s not a trend setter. He’s more a world spoiler.
Are you optimistic about the future?
I’m a historical optimist. For the moment, we don’t see an exit. Putin will not reform this country or liberalise the system, so we have to wait for the end of the story more or less passively, trying to do something – cultivating our own garden but not more. This hot phase will not continue forever because of insufficient resources. A cold phase is coming. The only thing he can suggest to the population is confrontation with the West. That can continue. To rally round the flag, you must have external and internal enemies: suppression inside, by fighting traitors, undesirables and foreign agents; and outside, through permanent hybrid war. In these circumstances the strategy could be based, according to Antonio Gramsci’s formula, on the pessimism of reason but the optimism of the will.
How did you go from Akademgorodok to University College London?
I owe my career path to Mikhail Gorbachev, who opened up the Soviet Union; George Soros and Teodor Shanin who funded and organised summer schools for Soviet sociologists; Tatiana Zaslavskaya, Inna Ryvkina and Anthony Giddens for academic guidance. I had been raised in Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, a Khrushchev thaw project, constructed after a visit to a Midwestern campus. It was deep in Siberia, boasting a nuclear accelerator, placed strategically away from Moscow in case of a nuclear hit. There were a lot of scientific exchanges, CERN among others. We had contacts with sociologists in Hungary and Poland. There were samizdat translations of academic literature. I realised that Akademgorodok was very similar to Cambridge structurally, with botanic gardens, 30 research institutes and a university where the teaching staff were scholars themselves - which was not true for the rest of the Soviet Union. When I got to Cambridge in 1990, I felt at home and ended up with an MPhil, a PhD and a postdoc there. In 1999, I saw a job advertised at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. It mentioned Russia, informal networks, informal economies – everything I researched then. I got the job and moved to London.
Why did you decide to write this book?
The story is slightly traumatic. In 2013 I published Can Russia Modernise?, what I thought to be my last book on Russia. It was the end of a trilogy on the workings of informal networks. It was a shock and a disappointment to see Putin returning for his third term as President in 2012. Since the annexation of Crimea, I have effectively withdrawn from Russian Studies. I started something new, the Global Informality Project, during my fellowship at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies. The project now covers five continents, over 100 countries and 600 researchers. It’s a massive endeavour designed to map how informal networks operate in the world: hidden practices, unwritten rules, open secrets: the know-how that all insiders know and all outsiders have no way of guessing. Placing Russia in this context has been eye-opening. My Russia trilogy might convey the message that Russia is unique. The three massive volumes of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, based on the network expertise of scholars around the globe, reverse this message. Russia is not unique or exceptional. Specific – yes. But so is every other country, when it comes to tackling complexity and finding shortcuts for problem-solving. The challenge of this new book is both to embrace the universality of patterns of informal power and show their specifics, as well as do so in a concise format and with clarity suitable for students.
Why do you use the metaphor of the pendulum?
The word has been used before me – in boxing, in academic analyses, in the 1919 book called The Russian Pendulum. The idea of the pendulum swinging to return is very helpful to imagine a historical trajectory that is not that straightforward. Kondratieff wrote about long-wave cycles. His model did not work when tested on big data, but one can see the intuitive value of the metaphor. The collapse of the Soviet Union took place in 1991, and 30 years on, the Russia–Ukraine war started, closing the era of openness and integration. Russia has become isolationist, and it might take another 30 years or so before a new opening up will happen in Europe. However, pendulums are supposed to be predictable, which is not the case. The title of the book is also a paradox: Russia’s pendulum is actually unpredictable. Every chapter offers a pattern you need to bear in mind to capture Russia’s unpredictability in politics, the economy, and society. They say the only predictable thing about Russia is unpredictability. I suggest the chaotic logic of double pendulums at the subnational level, in Russia’s regions, to illustrate their complexity. I include some key concepts from Russian scholars which might be useful to shift attention away from Moscow or Putin and look at Russia in a longer term.
Will the Russian pendulum continue to swing forever?
This is the point of this book: to identify patterns that need to be transformed. Whenever people oppose Putin’s regime, want him out or state that there is no one else who could take the job, they seem to forget that Putin was once an unknown, and he was once the right person for the job before turning into someone entirely different. There are examples of similar transformations in history. Mikhail Gorbachev famously concluded that there is only so much an individual can do from inside the system, even in a position of leadership. The system shapes and moulds you in a certain way and if you are not compliant, it will kick you out. That's going to be the fate of Putin too once he's perceived as a threat, which is now starting to happen. It’s not just about changing those in charge. The very foundations of the system, associated with the informal power of security services and informal financial flows that serve informal agendas, should be the target. Personalised attacks are not really effective. Systemic tackling of corruption is a rarity. Effective anti-corruption campaigns are successful in relatively small societies of up to 5 million people, best placed on an island, like Singapore or Hong Kong. Russia is a huge country. It's very hard to tackle something nationwide if only because of the scale and regional variety. Of course, the power transfer is essential for development, and changing the person in charge will bring a new impetus, and even direction, to the pendulum. Yet without articulating and challenging the fundamental patterns of Russia’s informal governance, good people will do bad things and step on the same rake of the ‘system made me do it’ logic.
Why did you make the book free to download?
That was intentional. It's not a long book to read for a policy maker or for a think tank, and in a sense, it is a manifesto, a challenge, an appeal to the leadership after Putin. To make it accessible to the wider audience and to students who might not have money to buy it was logical. The UCL press does a great deal to make ideas accessible around the globe. There is a lot of talk about equality, diversity and inclusion, but much of the academic literature is not accessible for the global south. I discovered that all three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (in open access from the UCL Press) achieved 250,000 downloads, and are very popular in India – an extraordinary outreach for an academic book. The universal patterns of informal power tackled in Russian Pendulum will be of interest to all those interested in the inner workings of political and corporate regimes around the globe, not only Russia. Open access is important so it's available for everyone.
Explain the art you show in the book:
I created my first work, The Inner Circle, in 2016. A perfect example of informal power, an inner circle is empirically determined by the outsiders’ inability to penetrate it. Insiders enjoy direct access to the centre of power, via a private entrance, elevator or phone. Insiders block outer contacts, filter information and monitor each other. The artwork depicts the paradox of how one’s trusted people, belonging to the circle of trust, cannot trust each other and cannot turn one’s back on the rest. The leader’s position is ambivalent: does one lead the pack or follow the pack to make sure everyone is trustworthy? Moving the agenda forward while being locked into informal agreements and obligations, both within and outside the circle, presents a challenge. The paradox of informal power is that the leader is the key broker of the system, but also its hostage. The key driver for art was the complexity of data in the Global Informality Project. Every day I read entries from all over the globe, and it was so varied and nuanced that I felt I needed a shortcut to hold it together for myself. That idea of a pattern – shared by multiple practices around the globe – has emerged and gradually transformed into the collection of the invisible dimensions of informal power, without much design or thinking about exhibitions. I have used the technique of objet trouvé and assemblage: the objects that seemingly have lost their use in modern society, and which I found at brocantes in southern France, actually captured what it is to be human and how relate to others, especially in the era of the pandemic, polarisation and post-humanity. I was lucky enough to present my art in the parallel programme of the Venice Biennale in 2018 and to have a personal exhibition in Paris. That was very exciting. I never thought of myself as an artist, I worked on the visualisation of the invisible, an informal power that pervades human societies. Later on I discovered that there aren’t so many artistic visualisations of informal power, despite its pervasiveness. So I continue my artwork on the informal ways of making things work.
Explain the music in the book:
The music was composed by Benjamin Woodgates, my son-in-law who is a composer. I discussed my text with him to see if abstracting the patterns into music might serve as a shortcut to understanding, or at least feeling them. He was doubtful at first, but then, when I showed him my art, he really got hooked on the idea. The way the instruments – two marimbas – bring out all these complex structures and undertones is amazing. Some patterns you can hear at the surface level, others are more camouflaged but contribute to this deep, almost unconscious sense of sistema. So we have music that one can hear, feel, understand and that is hopefully transformative and reflects the idea of ambivalence. It was really in the stars. It’s not that I believe in magic, but there was a constellation of the music, art and text – and now the Pushkin House Prize shortlist!
What are your future plans?
My next project is on exit. With my husband, we are going to co-produce a project on exit, hoping it might be an exit for us, respectively, from academia. For me of course, the focus is on exit from the system. I keep trying to help people who leave the system, to find a new purpose, a new way of being. I think the lens of ambivalence, used in the book, highlights the obvious: an exit is also an entry. The informal pattern of revolving doors has a negative connotation but it also conveys an important wisdom: when one door closes, another opens. My new art exhibition, scheduled for the end of May 2027 in Paris, will coincide with the end of Macron’s time as French President. So there will be many exits.
How did you become interested in Russia?
I have no Russian background at all. My family is English and French, but I grew up in Manhattan among a lot of people who had immigrated as small children with their parents from the former Soviet Union. I became enchanted by Russian poetry and particularly Mayakovsky, so I started learning Russian on a whim when I was in college. I also had an interest in public health and after I graduated, I ended up on a volunteer exchange programme in Irkutsk, where I spent a couple of months working at the Red Cross. The main medical issues were frostbite, HIV and other issues related to injecting drug use. That set off a very intense interest in Soviet and post-Soviet history, culture and public health. I ended up working in that field for several years, mainly focusing on Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Then I wanted to really learn Russian fluently. I managed to get a Fulbright grant and lived in Ukraine for several years – so I learned a very Ukrainian-inflected Russian. I eventually did a PhD in Slavic studies; my thesis was on the cult of Pushkin in the transition from communism, as a bridge that helped Russians maintain a sense of integral cultural identity amid the instability of the 1990s.
What was the inspiration behind writing The Oak and the Larch?
I'm always thinking about Russia, but also about climate change, which is an even bigger question that affects all of us. It struck me how little writing there is about Russia in relation to climate. A lot of especially foreign language writing about Russia is very intensely focused on Moscow and on great men – which is understandable, of course. But my interest has never stemmed from the metropolitan centre. I've always been lurking, whether literally or metaphorically, on the peripheries of Russia. There are capacious and fascinating realms – geographically, historically and thematically – that are almost never covered in English-language writing. I kept coming back to Andrei Sinyavsky’s “Tenants,” a short story which I first read in grad school. It’s about characters from Russian folklore who have been forced to flee from the forest and countryside and are now stuck in a communal apartment, with a supernatural twist on all the problems that arose in real kommunalki. One of the tenants is a leshii, a forest spirit. That story inspired me to explore the centrality of the forest in Russian culture. It’s so integral that it can be hard to notice, the way we don’t notice that the sky is blue unless it’s been grey for a long time. I realised how entwined that quiet forest backdrop was with many of the central threads of Russian history and culture, and the central questions about Russia’s evolving, conflicted conception of itself over the centuries.
How would you summarise the key message of the book?
The forest had an intensely ambivalent role in Russian history. On one hand, it was an essential source of fuel and building materials, of meat, of lucrative furs, of honey and berries, of refuge from invaders or persecution. Symbolically, it was the threshold to another world, one that promised both danger and fantastical rewards. It was the provider of so many things that were good and necessary for Russian life. The Soviet novelist Leonid Leonov wrote that the forest accompanied Russians along every step of their life, from providing the wood for their cradle to the cross above their grave. The forest shaped Russian life and Russian character; Leonov warned against deforestation, saying that Russia would not be itself without the woods. But the forest was also an enemy. To clear the forest to make a field for agriculture took backbreaking labour, and the forest was liable to creep back and overtake these once so-called civilised areas. In that sense, the forest could be a reminder of how quickly human advancement could be erased. More recently, there’s been discussion of “aggressive forests” that are swallowing up Russia’s abandoned rural settlements. That ambivalence is essential to the Russian understanding of the forest.
Do you see parallels with the US view of forests?
Certainly. Russia and North America have a lot of geographical and ecological similarities. The experiences of settler colonialism, of westward or eastern expansion and conflicts with indigenous peoples are in many ways comparable. In Russia today, as in the United States, some people cherish a fantasy of returning to the forest. Sometimes it’s about escaping from the state, no longer being a subject. But sometimes it is also about returning to an essential Russianness that is uncorrupted by urban life or globalisation. In that iteration, it resembles eco-fascism or eco-nationalism. It’s especially curious when it happens in Siberia, which of course is a colonised place – but this is another parallel with the United States.
Do you see other resonances with Putin’s Russia?
As I understand, Putin doesn't even go outside anymore – so although he used to be photographed riding horseback with no shirt or flying with the cranes, that that sort of outdoorsy, frontiersman iconography has receded. But I think it is quite central to a lot of conservative thinkers who are to the right of Putin himself. Someone like Zakhar Prilepin, the novelist turned warlord, makes much of the fact that he lives in the countryside, close to the forest; he styles himself as a warrior and also a frontiersman, renewing the colonial project in Ukraine. The Izborsky Club published a manifesto about the Russian ark and Russia as a place that guards conservative values. This concept can manifest as an urge to leave Moscow or St Petersburg for the countryside, for traditional wooden architecture, for life among the fields and trees, in an effort to connect with previous generations. This is a long tradition in Russia – centuries ago, the Old Believers began to flee to the woods to protect their way of life. For Russian hermits, the forest was a crucial place of holy solitude – the Russian version of the Biblical desert.
How did you carry out your research?
I had spent quite a lot of time in Russia before the war. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine pushed me to do more of my research on the periphery, which was extremely productive. I spent time in Finnish Karelia with these wonderful wolf researchers who I encountered by chance. In Karelia, certain species only exist on the Russian side because there has been so much less exploitation of the forest, because of the far more chaotic nature of Russian forest management and of the size and scale of the forest. Russia's chaos has a great cost, but it can sometimes have positive effects in relation to biodiversity. I also went on an amazing horseback riding expedition in northern Mongolia, trying to get as close as I could to the densely forested mountain where Genghis Khan was born; that forest, according to The Secret History of the Mongols, was what saved him from being killed as a youth. The forest as a refuge from enemy invaders would end up becoming quite important to the Slavs when the Mongols were invading.
What about the role of the environmental movement?
Even now, when you can be arrested for holding a blank sign in Moscow, there still seems to be some space for environmental protests. Last winter there was a protest in Irkutsk against clearcutting the protected forest on the edges of Lake Baikal, which is bad for the forest and also for the lake. That rally was part of a quite large-scale protest of scientists, environmental activists, and ordinary people who were not afraid to complain in the press. Some politicians even voted against the law that would allow clearcutting. I think that comes down to the fact that the forest, like Lake Baikal, is still seen as patrimony. So it’s not necessarily acting against the government to protest in favour of protecting these areas; it can be spun as a form of patriotism, in fact. Some of the last really successful protest movements in Russia were about ecological protection. Any type of protest in Russia now is dangerous, but there is a bit more space perhaps for ecological and forest-related protests.
What is your next writing project?
I have some smaller essays that I'm working on as I mull over my next book project. I'm getting more and more interested in Central Asia, partly as a result of this project – especially in the use of art and architecture as a kind of global currency. I’m curious about the yoking together of art and economic development and tourism. How do art and economics, how do beauty and freedom, relate to each other, and how do these projects relate to the past?