“What happened to Russia” – with this question, one of the most famous Russian writers, Dmitry Glukhovsky, begins the introduction to his book “Stories from the Motherland”. He refers not only to Putin’s attack on Ukraine, but also to the previous period – when the demons of war roamed almost unnoticed through the Russian power apparatus and Russian society, he writes “Mother well“.
Russia: violence and oppression
The twenty stories of “Stories from the Fatherland” have been written in the last 13 years. The period during which Russia traveled the road from “limited democracy” to a country of totalitarian aggression. In Russian, the latest edition of the book came out in 2020, even before the world got confused. Now the work is also published in German. With his bestseller “Metro 2033”, Glukhovsky proved to be a terribly accurate prophet (in the book series “Metro” he talks about how after a nuclear disaster people live in subway stations, which is very reminiscent of the footage from Kiev and Kharkiv ). Also for this reason his lyrics now take on a different meaning.
Most of them are a mix of acute social satire and fiction reflecting the absurdities and weaknesses of Russian society over the past two decades: there we meet, for example, a woman who dreams of having sex with Putin and becomes pregnant just thinking about it. ; in another story – a guest worker from Tajikistan, who in the brutal metropolis of Moscow falls into the grip of the mafia with human organs; another of Glukhovsky’s characters is an investigator who is withdrawn from the corruption cases he investigates and finds himself forced to resort to self-mutilation with the most drastic methods; or the story of a geography professor who discovers the entrance to a cave in Siberia to discover, in fact, that a state-owned gas company has long been doing business with the dark forces of the underworld.
Behind Glukhovsky’s texts are visible the structures of violence and oppression, the tradition of the most shameless use of the weak and powerless, the supremacy of the corrupt state and its allies at all levels of society, economy and average. The brutal reality in today’s Russia – the brutal war against the people in Ukraine and the destruction of its own population with Putin’s declared partial mobilization fits terrifyingly into this whole puzzle.
Banned from the homeland
But the personal story of the author himself is also dramatic: after Glukhovsky condemned the attack on Ukraine with the utmost firmness, in Russia he was declared a “foreign agent” wanted by the authorities. Among other things, he is accused of spreading “discrediting information on the Russian army”. The writer somehow managed to leave the country and now lives in Berlin. “If I go back to Russia, I will be sent to a penal colony,” 43-year-old Glukhovski told Deutsche Welle.
As long as Putin is in power, nothing will change in Russia, the writer is convinced. The country is deeply at fault for a collective crime. “The war against Ukraine and its reflection in Russia is not a conflict between truth and lies. It is clear to everyone what the truth is: we Russians, who have always appreciated peace and have talked a lot about our fraternal relations with the Ukrainians, now we are bombing Ukrainian cities and massacring Ukrainian civilians. It is quite clear that we are all on the side of evil, “says the writer.
However, Glukhovsky calls for a more differentiated view of Russian society: “There is resistance to war, more than 16,000 people have been detained by the police for their participation in the protests. This is the largest number of arrests in recent Russian history. Thousands of them. intellectuals, writers, artists and scientists have signed open letters, but all this has not produced results “, recalls the author.
Glukhovsky is convinced that one day normality will return to Russia. But the road to get there will be very long and painful. The parallel with post-Nazi Germany seems more than obvious.
