Review: Igort “The Russian notebooks: On the trail of Anna Politkovskaya”

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He has been involved in Japan, India, Russia and Ukraine, and has published several comic biographies of American cultural icons such as Fats Waller, John Belushi and Frank Sinatra. Many of his books take the form of “notebooks” – quaderni – and approach the material in fragmentary form.

This year’s Norwegian publication, “The Russian Notebooks” in Astrid Nordang’s good, sober translation, is about the intrepid Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaja and her Putin-critical engagement, particularly centered around the Chechnya conflict. As many will remember, she was shot in 2006, on Putin’s birthday, in the elevator of the block where she lived in Moscow.

This was one of the spectacular executions carried out by “perpetrators unknown” under the Putin regime, and marked a stark warning to critical voices. Eight years after the murder, five Chechens were convicted of it, but who sent them has not been properly mapped.

Executed

What kind of things had she written about that enraged someone so much that they simply executed her? We get good insight into that from Igort, who in a selection of cases she worked on shows the kind of war crimes that took place in Chechnya.

We get an insight into almost bizarre forms of torture, arbitrary mass arrests, destruction of buildings and the terrible massacre in the Dubrovka theater in 2002. We get historical flashbacks to past battles between Caucasians and the Russian gentry. Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are present, and it is a good reminder that Russians are so much more than the KGB, GRU and Stalin. In between, there are interview sequences with Politkovskaya’s friend and translator into French, Galina Ackerman. She contributes to a personal portrait of the journalist and her methods.

Consequence of the war

“The Russian Notebooks” was originally published in 2011 and is a sequel to “The Ukrainian Notebooks” from 2010, published in Norwegian in 2022. The fact that these books are coming out now is, of course, a consequence of the war raging on the north coast of the Black Sea. A great many books on Russian and Ukrainian history, from recent times and from ancient times, have been published in recent years. Both written in Norwegian and translated: good overviews in non-fiction, gripping novels. Most Norwegian publishers strive to find publications to offer an audience that yearns to understand more of the bloody chaos.

It is Pax publishing house that is behind the Igort publications, and they have therefore dug up more than ten year old publications. Is that a disadvantage? No, it actually isn’t, but that’s mostly thanks to the shape. The material about Ukraine’s suffering during the Stalin era and later is quite well known. Likewise the story of the execution of Anna Politkovskaja.

Trembling from Russia

Russian oppression

It is nevertheless far from a waste to evoke the memory of these aspects of brutal Russian oppression of the peoples in the fringes of the empire in Igort. Especially now, when a possibly similar apparatus is at work in the Ukraine conflict. The varied idiom lends itself perfectly to commemorating these brutalities. The drawings he uses to present his material can be lingered on for a long time, both what is in the drawings and what lies in a kind of haze on the pages, with only hinted figures and landscapes.

The narration itself is also well-founded. We don’t get any overall presentation, no calculated dramaturgy. The notebooks are precisely notes, fragments picked up, cross-cut with facts and interviews. In this way they mirror the human path to knowledge of the world, our dependence on obtaining loose details to try to piece together an understanding of things no one has full access to.

This has nothing to do with the contemporary relativization of facts – on the contrary, it is a modest reflection of the mechanisms of cognition. Masterfully executed.