Tag: Russia

Book: Alex Bellos “Can You Solve My Problems?”

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I’ve said more than once that I’ve loved all kinds of logic puzzles since childhood. For example, back when I wrote a review of Gareth Moore’s Lateral Logic five years ago. To solve puzzles like these, you really just need to understand the general approaches, break the setup down into its components clearly, and be able to build logical chains. I got lucky: in school I was taught that by a wonderful math teacher, and later I kept solving things like that myself, whatever I could get my hands on.

Sometimes video games include puzzles like this too. For example, in Dishonored 2, in one episode a gate is locked with a code, and you can figure it out by solving a logic puzzle. The developers also give you a workaround — you can use force or stealth to get the hints from other characters and skip the brainteaser. But I couldn’t resist and spent almost 40 minutes solving it: to my own delight, once I did, I entered the code correctly on the first try. For that I got a separate achievement in the game, but the main pleasure was the solving itself.

But let’s get back to the book. Can You Solve My Problems? by Alex Bellos is another book by a lover of this kind of puzzle, who collected them into a book not with some goal of teaching people to think outside the box (as in the Gareth Moore book mentioned above), but simply to entertain the reader.

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Book: “Is It True?”

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This book first caught my attention with its cover—styled like a Soviet newspaper—and then with its blurb, which promised an analysis of a whole bunch of dubious “facts” in modern social and classical media, carried out by “Russia’s most famous team of fact-checkers.”

A lot of people really are used to believing everything they read or hear from supposedly competent sources. But we know that in politics, there’s never the whole truth—even if nobody is lying on purpose. You can still tell only part of the truth and emphasize the facts you need. And if propaganda doesn’t even have the goal of not lying, then pretty much any method “goes.”

That’s why even when you’re just reading something online, it’s always better to at least double-check that the alleged fact is real. Otherwise, you’ll sometimes read some nasty thing and, in righteous anger, come down on someone—or start spreading the news yourself. And then it suddenly turns out it was a fake, and you helped it spread. Awkward, if your conscience isn’t just an empty word.

So reading about fakes—and about things that only seem like fakes—along with a solid breakdown by fact-checkers (which is basically a new profession: checking whether a news story is lying) sounded like an insanely interesting idea.

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Book: Sergey Nikolaevich “Status: Free. A Portrait of the Creative Emigration”

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Almost four years ago, Russia attacked Ukraine. Because of that, many families were forced to flee Ukraine to escape the war. But at the same time, inside Russia it suddenly became dangerous to condemn the war—and even to call it a war. And those who didn’t want to fall silent were forced either to go to prison or to leave, branded in their own country as traitors, “foreign agents,” and even terrorists. (Many Belarusians went through a similar path after the 2020 protests, but that isn’t really related to the book I’m talking about.)

Russian journalist Sergey Nikolaevich also left Russia after the war began. And then he decided to interview members of the creative intelligentsia—people whom their homeland no longer considers its own—and turn those conversations into a book. That’s how Status: Free. A Portrait of the Creative Emigration came to be.

Nikolaevich focuses specifically on people in creative professions. Among the subjects of his interviews are Kirill Serebrennikov, Renata Litvinova, Chulpan Khamatova, Maxim Galkin, and others.

Based on the blurb, I expected to hear conversations with those who left about how and why they had to go, what the main trigger was, what they’re doing now, and how they’re coping morally—when they’re both enemies to their own country and hated by many Ukrainians, for whom there are no “good Russians” right now.

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Songs: Mark Bernes – “Where Does the Motherland Begin?”

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Despite all the triumphalism that has been built around Victory Day in recent decades, there are things I continue to love. One of them is the wartime songs by Mark Bernes. One of my favorites is “Where Does the Homeland Begin,” which plays over the credits of the four-part film “The Shield and the Sword” about the Russian intelligence officer Alexander Belov / Johann Weiss.

Incidentally, the film itself is also one of my favorite war movies. Yes, in some ways it can be considered propaganda, and not all episodes made sense to me even as a child, but I still love it madly and rewatch it every few years. The book on which it is based, on the one hand, reveals the characters better, but on the other hand, it’s quite heavy and tedious. The film turned out much better. And it was the first film in which the very young Oleg Yankovsky starred, by the way.

In modern Russia, one of Mark Bernes’ songs, “Do the Russians Want War,” has been banned. This says much more about the memory of real history than all the showy veterans and parades.

And the song “Where Does the Homeland Begin” remains one of the best to this day and is constantly playing on my playlist.

Here is that song in the closing scenes of the first episode of the film:

Songs: Rabfak ‘God Save the Tsar’

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Usually, in my blog, I write about songs that I like for some reason, songs that I recommend. The song “God Save the Tsar” by the band “Rabfak” is not exactly a masterpiece, and I won’t be listening to it repeatedly. But it correlates so much with my feelings about everything happening with the rock scene and the so-called “fighters against the regime” from back in the day.

Рабфак Int — Боже царя храни

Book: Boris Akunin “The Destruction and Resurrection of the Empire”

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Originally, when planning his series on the history of the Russian state, Boris Akunin intended to stop at 1917, with the fall of the Romanov dynasty, as he believed that beyond this point, it was no longer the history of the Russian state but of an entirely different country.

However, some time after completing the series, he unexpectedly announced the release of the 10th volume covering the Lenin-Stalin era. Moreover, this volume became the first that was not published in Russia, as when the book was almost ready for print, Boris Akunin was declared a terrorist in Russia, closing off access to publishing in his homeland. So the book was printed abroad.

While the revolution and the last tsar always felt distant to me, despite having lived during the Soviet Union, the events of the Soviet state itself were always closer. I studied this history in school and believed that I lived in the best country in the world. Therefore, I was very eager to see how Boris Akunin would recount this period.

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Song: Vasya Oblomov “Now Far Away from Here”

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The death of Alexey Navalny in prison still hasn’t left the news feeds for a second week now—alongside the war in Ukraine and the fighting in Israel. First, Leonid Kaganov wrote a set of deeply piercing verses. And then Vasya Oblomov set them to music, and that’s how the song was born. Very sad (as a lot of Vasya’s work is), but at the same time honest—and somehow, it even gives me a new kind of hope.

The song is in Russian, but on YouTube you can turn on auto-generated English subtitles—they do a decent job of conveying the meaning overall.

Vasya Oblomov (music) / Leonid Kaganov (lyrics) — “Now Far Away from Here”

Book: Dmitry Glukhovsky “Outpost”

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I hesitated for a long time before picking up this book, because I have mixed feelings about Dmitry Glukhovsky, shaped by his Metro series. On the one hand, it’s genuinely a very interesting concept and execution; on the other, while I liked the first novel, Metro 2033, the second—and especially the third—mostly surprised me, and even disappointed me.

And even though I’d heard plenty of feedback about Outpost, I only got around to it after the war with Ukraine began, when almost everyone started saying that Glukhovsky had “seen it all coming” back then. That’s when I got genuinely curious: what exactly was it that Dmitry Glukhovsky supposedly predicted?

The novel opens by showing us a small settlement near a bridge across the Volga, by what used to be Yaroslavl. And now this is the very border of the state. Because at some point, a war broke out in the country, the mutiny was put down, but everything beyond the Volga can no longer be called inhabitable land, since some kind of weapon made it unfit for life. And the people at the outpost on the border are tasked with watching this single route into the cursed lands—just in case, so that no kind of nastiness crawls out of there.

And the lion’s share of the first volume is taken up by a description of life in this settlement—the remnants of all of Yaroslavl, where, judging by the description, only a few dozen residents are left alive, scraping by, somehow living, and even raising children. But the way this everyday grind is described, in my opinion, is drawn out too much. The plot moves very slowly, and all these abundant domestic details feel depressing at first.

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Book: Maxim Katz “The History of the New Russia”

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Russian history—past, present, and future—is being discussed a lot right now, and in completely different terms. I’m also interested in how exactly we all ended up at the point we’re at now. Boris Akunin wrote an entire series about the history of the Russian state from ancient times all the way up to 1917. Alexander Yanov tried to make sense of the history of the ‘Russian Idea‘. And the blogger and politician Maxim Katz constantly discusses current events, projecting them into the future, while still keeping historical realities in mind.

You can feel differently about Maxim Katz, but he’s definitely a pretty interesting storyteller. I respect his opinion, even though he’s often overly wordy, suffers from heavy self-repetition in his blog, but at the very least he tries to be objective and not lean too hard into emotions (which, for example, I’m very far from always managing).

Recently, Maxim released a book, The History of the New Russia, in which he laid out his view of how the Russian Federation developed starting from the late Soviet Union.

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Book: Alexander Yanov “The Russian Idea: From Nicholas I to Putin”

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In recent years I’ve often come across discussions about what exactly the “Russian idea” is — what Russia’s mission is supposed to be. And with the start of the war in Ukraine, this question began sounding from absolutely everywhere. And suddenly it turned out that there is a major scholarly work by Alexander Yanov devoted specifically to this topic — an attempt to explain what this “Russian idea” actually is, what it consists of, and how it has shaped and continues to shape Russian history.

First, a few words about who Alexander Yanov was. Alexander Lvovich Yanov was a Soviet and later American historian, political scientist, and publicist. Having received a history degree in 1953, he simultaneously began working as a journalist, traveling around the country and writing for many magazines, including Novy Mir, Molodoy Kommunist, and others.

He was deeply interested in Slavophilism, defended a dissertation on it, and later wrote a monumental work on the history of Russian opposition. By his own account, he was essentially pushed out of the USSR, and in 1975 he emigrated to the United States, where he continued developing his favorite subject while teaching at various universities.

For decades he debated (often in magazine columns) many prominent figures — for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Dugin. Many of those polemical texts later became parts of his books.

So the history of the Russian idea, and Slavophilism more broadly, was his core topic for many decades.
Between 2014 and 2016, the publishing house Novy Khronograf released his four-volume work The Russian Idea: From Nicholas I to Putin, in which he set out to explain how the very concept of the Russian idea emerged, how it evolved, how it clashed with alternative views, and how all of this influenced the history of the Russian state — and even its neighbors. In the later volumes he increasingly reflected on where the current regime was heading, essentially describing and explaining why Russia rejects the idea of an independent Ukraine.

Yanov died on February 18, 2022 — one week before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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