Come on, I’m not an imperialist. How Russians cope with war guilt

“This book is a confession. I was guilty of not noticing the signs much earlier. I too am responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine. Just like my contemporaries and our ancestors. And the Russian culture, which made all these horrors possible, is also to blame ,” Mikhail Zygar begins his War and Punishment, in which he addresses Russians and Ukrainians from the time of the Cossack commander Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the 17th century to the aggression of 2022.

He combines the historical narrative with his own reports and interviews, which he conducted in Russia and Ukraine as a reporter for the independent Internet TV station Dožď. The Kremlin ordered Russian cable and satellite networks to disconnect the station critical of Putin’s policies ten years ago. Zygar was facing a long sentence for so-called spreading rumors about the Russian army, so he disappeared to Germany.

His book was written in exile there, in which the author sees the only hope for Russia: to wake up from dreams of Russian exceptionalism and imperial glory. Zygar notes that it will hurt a lot and it will be a tough withdrawal. When reading, one remembers the movie Matrix, where the main character Neo wakes up from a contented and peaceful but virtual world to reality and his eyes hurt. “You never used them,” his colleagues tell him.

Mikhail Zygar does not see the war as Putin’s, as the whim of one aging man, eager to enter history as a victor. According to him, this was made possible by a large part of Russia, which shares his ideas and methods with him. “Many people are still drugged, intoxicated by the splendor of imperialism. We smoked this drug for centuries, we fed our own vanity. The myth of greatness was stuffed down our throats, injected into our veins. We ran from reality, did not see what was happening around us, we have lost compassion and humanity,” Zygar writes.

“Come on, I’m not an imperialist”

There is a historical parallel with the German politician Willy Brandt. He did not agree with Hitler, suspected that it would be a disaster, and fled to Norway in 1933. He did not blame anything only on Hitler and his immediate entourage. He recognized that many Germans bore the guilt and that it could not be easily removed. Brandt later became the West German chancellor and in 1970 he made a memorable powerful gesture: he knelt in front of the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The time when a Russian politician will kneel in Buch or other places in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have been murdering is probably far away. Zygar mentions nothing of the sort, but believes that Russia will wake up one day, much like Germany once did. “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will be amazed how such archaic arrogance could take over the minds of people in the twenty-first century. And they will not follow the same path if we, their ancestors, carry our punishment today,” he thinks you are

Zygar mentions his Ukrainian friend Nada, who is from Buča. After the atrocities committed by the Russian soldiers there, she also stopped communicating with Zygar because he is Russian. With the book, he tries to prove to her that all Russians are not the same. “Come on, I’m not an imperialist and I’m writing this book so that others aren’t either,” she addresses her former friend.

In War and Punishment, which was published in the Czech translation by Kristýna Jánská by the publishing house Pistorius & Olšanská, there are remarkable details that are still unknown to local readers. For example, where did the origin of the Russian propaganda fairy tale that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is addicted to drugs come from. His predecessor Petro Poroshenko was the first to come up with it during the presidential election campaign in 2019. The Kremlin readily accepted it.

The fate of Putin’s close adviser and confidant Dmitry Kozak is also worth noting. As one of the few people around Putin, he doubted the war against Ukraine. It cost him his job, he lost access to Putin and the Kremlin.

The Middle Ages beyond Moscow

Jelena Kostučenková, author of the book My Russia, has a similar fate to Zygar. She worked for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta before it was banned by a court a month after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She too left the country, fearing for her safety and freedom. She first fled to the Czech Republic, then moved to Germany.

In the book, translated by Libor Dvořák and published by Argo, Kostuchenkova tells about her childhood in Yaroslavl. As she read about the fight against the fascists, she watched the movies and imagined how she would one day fight them herself, even though she was a girl. This eventually happened in adulthood – she just did not count on the fact that the opponent would be fascists from her own nation. Russians.

Jelena Kostučenková presented the book My Country personally in Prague. | Photo: CTK

“It is impossible to prepare for the fact that we are fascists. I am absolutely unable to digest something like that,” she wrote on the day she set out to write a war report in the shelled Ukrainian Mykolaiv. In a recent debate at the National Library in Prague, she told readers that she hopes for a revolution against Putin’s regime, although it is hard to imagine such a thing.

“I believe that sooner or later it will happen. Some people believe in a coup within the current regime, but I don’t, this regime cannot be reformed. It will be difficult and it will go slowly, but all of us who reject fascism in Russia must of their strength and ability to contribute. I participate in the functioning of the network that gets men from Russia to fight against Ukraine. I can’t say more, but it costs money a person around a thousand dollars,” said the author.

In the book, he describes the huge differences between Moscow and the Russian countryside, the brutal destruction of the environment in northern Russia’s Norilsk, the conditions in Russian hospitals and social institutions, or the fears of people of minority sexual orientation from violence and repression. And he writes about his editorial colleagues, shot or beaten to death for their writings.

“It is impossible to talk about the war or the occupation of Ukraine in Russia. People are afraid that every conversation can turn into a conflict or that someone will report them. That is why there has been a great silence in Russia – people are either silent or talking about the weather,” he states to the current situation.

He describes the differences between Moscow and the village harshly. Just a few tens of kilometers outside the metropolis, people live as in the European Middle Ages. “Forest fires are being extinguished with buckets of water in the Ryazan region. My mother lives on the border of the Yaroslavl and Kostroma regions in a village where there is no road and no mobile signal,” Kostuchenkova said in Prague.

In one chapter, he addresses the village of Ust-Avam in Siberia. “There is no sewage system in the settlement. Everything needed is put into buckets and then thrown straight out onto the street, as far as possible from the entrance. There is no water supply in the settlement either. Water can either be taken from the river or bought from a cistern,” he explains.

In contrast, Kostučenková contrasts the world of Moscow, where people talk about modern art, drink champagne, and build parks and luxury apartments. “But it was terrible behind Moscow. There was hunger and omnipresent violence,” he recalls of his reports.

The Belarusian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, who herself is already living in exile in Germany, recommends the book My Russia. He calls her a guide to the monster that is leaving its mark on Ukraine and that makes the world fear the future.

Jelena Kostučenková: My Russia – News from a lost land
(Translated by Libor Dvořák)
Argo Publishing House 2024, 344 pages, 488 crowns