Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

Introduction

you can just about see the metal rod the first man is holding, hidden in a bouquet of flowers, on the surveillance tape as he follows Oleg Kashin near the writer’s home in Moscow. As Kashin approaches a gate, a second man appears, and the two proceed to beat him violently for a solid sixty seconds. The flowers fly off, exposing the metal rod. There’s no sound in the grainy black-and-white footage of Kashin’s attack, just an image of him writhing on the ground, trying to roll away from his pursuers and shield himself with his hands, then crawling unsteadily forward after the men leave him, alone in the dark, and tumbling onto the pavement.

The attempt on Kashin’s life on November 6, 2010 was unmistakably provoked by his work at Kommersant, then Russia’s top daily newspaper; symbolically, the two men worked over his hands, as if to ensure he couldn’t write anymore.[1] Kashin lost the tip of his left pinky finger in the attack and spent several days in a coma with a concussion, multiple fractures, and a broken jaw. It was only the latest of dozens of attacks on journalists in Russia over the past few decades, an act that has become all too commonplace—as has the inevitable cover-up. Intrepid reporters anger government officials by exposing wrongdoing, and those same officials then order the assaults and manipulate the justice system they control to avoid punishment.

At the time, Russia was undergoing a period of restrained optimism. Dmitry Medvedev, then playing presidential understudy to Vladimir Putin, had pledged to improve the rule of law and ease political constraints. In an essay titled “Forward, Russia!” published in September 2009, Medvedev criticized the “chronic corruption” and “primitive economy” plaguing modern Russia, a state that “unfortunately combines all the shortcomings of the Soviet system with all the difficulties of contemporary life.”[2] The solutions he proposed went little beyond vague calls for “modernization” and an end to a “quasi-Soviet social contract,” but they encouraged many liberal-minded Russians, even if they weren’t entirely sure Medvedev was the one really calling the shots. Kashin’s beating was a test for Medvedev. He condemned the attacks and demanded the arrest of the assailants; later, he told Kashin he “wanted their heads torn off.”[3]

For five years, nothing happened. Investigators made no arrests. No leads on the identity of the men behind the hit came through. Medvedev meekly stepped aside to let Putin return as president in 2011, prompting massive protests that Kashin helped organize. Lawmakers in the rubber-stamp parliament busily set about rolling back Medvedev’s legacy, in some cases only months after having voted for parts of it. The glimmer of hope that had accompanied his presidency—Dozhd, a liberal news network founded during his tenure, even called itself the “optimistic channel”—flickered out as Putin cracked down on dissent, muzzled the media, ramped up nationalist sentiment, and started a war in Ukraine. As it swung firmly behind Putin, Kommersant forced Kashin out; he largely abandoned reporting in order to focus on opinion pieces, and moved to Switzerland, where his wife had found a job. Eduard Limonov, a legendary novelist who leads a neo-fascist opposition party, told Kashin that he and liberal Russians like him were “pale losers [with] misery written all over their faces […] eternally doomed to defeat.”[4]

Then, on September 7, 2015, Kashin wrote a post titled “Three million and three hundred thousand rubles” (about fifty thousand dollars at today’s exchange rate, but double that in 2010) on his website, kashin.guru.[5] “I’ve known for a long time that I’d write this piece one day,” he said in the post. “I just needed two names—three if you count the driver. Now I know the names.” The men who beat him were Daniil Veselov and Vyacheslav Borisov, security guards at a factory in St. Petersburg. Another security guard, Mikhail Kavtaskin, had driven them there. All three were arrested. Investigators suspected Alexander Gorbunov, their boss, had organized the hit. The factory where they worked belongs to Andrei Turchak, governor of the rustic Western province of Pskov. Kommersant, Kashin’s old paper, reported that investigators believed the attack was revenge for Kashin calling the governor “fucking Turchak” and telling him to “go suck a dick” in a blog comment.[6] Turchak, astonishingly, replied hours later: “Young man, you have twenty-four hours to apologize,” he commented. “The time has come.”[7]

It was an extraordinary twist to the case: a sitting governor had ordered a journalist beaten half to death for a throwaway insult on a blog. But soon, things unraveled in depressingly ordinary fashion. Investigators let Gorbunov out of jail and failed to file charges against him. Nobody so much as thought to interrogate Turchak. Kashin, furious, wrote an open letter to Putin and Medvedev, excoriating them for covering it up:

The scandal over Kashin’s case is ongoing as I write this, and not likely to be resolved by the time this essay is published—or, indeed, after that. Nor is it likely to offer us direct insight into Fardwor, Russia!, which Kashin completed two months before his beating. Reading his grotesque satire of contemporary Russian life while knowing about the grotesque violence, corruption, and bureaucratic obstruction in Kashin’s own, however, offers us a penetrating and unsettling picture of what Russia has become fifteen years into Putin’s rule: a place where, as Kashin puts it in the same open letter, “even obvious questions about good and evil have become impossible.”

Kashin’s novel holds a funhouse mirror to this era, and draws heavily from the topics he wrote about while at Kommersant. His style is conversational and almost completely unpolished. The effect, together with the numerous references to Russian politics, history, and high and low culture, is often like reading one of his myriad columns. A notorious graphomaniac, Kashin has been known to crank out as many as eight pieces in a week, all the while tweeting prolifically, lifting language from news articles without attribution so frequently that it can be difficult to tell what is in his own voice. (“IF I WRITE BULLSHIT, IT’S A QUOTATION,” he once explained.[9])

Much of the humor in the novel comes from the wry repurposing of snippets from the news. The title comes from Dmitry Medvedev’s bumbling attempt to bring the Kremlin into the digital age by enthusiastically signing up for Twitter—only to misspell his own slogan in his very first tweet. An account mocking his tweets, @KermlinRussia, quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers. The novel’s basic conceit—a mystical elixir that makes midgets grow—is an obvious metaphor for the entire Medvedev era. The corrupt self-interest and wave of violence it inspires are all too familiar from contemporary Russian life. In its provincial petty criminality, the attack on the shed where the protagonist, the scientist Karpov, is experimenting on pigs, echoes the past of Turchak, who, Kashin claims, once drove around the factory shooting at stray cats from his car window. Several characters are obvious stand-ins for or composites of prominent political figures in the Medvedev era. Arkady Magomedov, the shadowy banker, gets his names from Arkady Dvorkovich, a top Medvedev aide, and the Magomedov brothers, university classmates of Dvorkovich’s who rose to wealth and influence during his tenure. Close to Zero is a brazen stand-in for Vladislav Surkov, the master of the Kremlin’s smoke-and-mirror politics, who once wrote a novel, Almost Zero, under a pseudonym. Others, like the host of the trashy chat show Let Them Talk, are transposed straight into the novel. Kashin rips details straight from the headlines about Olympstroi, the company accused of misusing state funds for the Sochi Olympics, and goes on for several pages.

Rewriting the realities of contemporary Russia as science fiction allows Kashin to draw out some of the era’s absurdities. In genre terms, the novel is a perversion of the Soviet science fiction tradition, which told stories of heroic Soviet scientists facing down threats either from capitalists or suspiciously capitalistic alien races. The novel’s plot is borrowed from Patent AB, a 1948 novel by Lazar Lagin, set in the fictitious capitalist country of Arzhanteiya. Steven Popf, Lagin’s main character, is an idealistic young scientist who, like Karpov, comes up with an ingenious new way to make objects grow in the hope of increasing meat production. However, Popf quickly runs into resistance from Primo Padrale, Arzhanteiya’s top capitalist, who wants to use his invention to monopolize the market. After Popf refuses to sell it, Padrale steals it and has Popf jailed on false murder charges. Though Arzhanteiya’s communists help Popf get out of jail, he loses his laboratory and control over his invention. By changing the setting but leaving the essential details of the plot untouched, Kashin turns a didactic Soviet warning of the evils of capitalism into a comic indictment of Russian culture—where the Soviet Union itself was the greatest science fiction project of all—and the rapacious greed undercutting it. Medvedev’s concept of “modernizing” Russia in top-down, Soviet-style fashion without touching the country’s entrenched, retrograde bureaucracy, is mocked through the concept of a “modernizational majority,” a play on “Putin’s majority” his spin doctors created from the disenfranchised losers of the capitalist transition. Kashin would go on to indict the marriage of communism’s Big Lie to gangster capitalism in his letter to Putin and Medvedev:

Ultimately, provincial gangsterism subdues the novel’s liberal characters and is revealed to pervade the entire state itself; the narrator calls it a “scum of stagnation” that envelops them all at the novel’s end. “Big systems always have logistical problems,” he jokes. Elena Nikolaevna, the institute director in Fardwor, Russia!, is only interested in Karpov’s invention as a means to climb the bureaucratic ladder. The narrator describes Nikolaevna’s plan as “simple: she had to have something when she went to Moscow. She didn’t have that ‘something,’ but Karpov did. She didn’t care why he was occupied with that ‘something,’ but it would be useful for the institute to have an idea—any idea—one that sounded good, whether or not it could be realized, something based on any sort of laboratory experiments.” The other characters see Karpov’s invention as a means of self-enrichment or (literal) growth, rather than a scientific contribution to society. Once the truth about the serum gets out, Medvedev’s own real-life health minister, Gennady Onishchenko, is dispatched to cover it up with an absurd explanation about its real uses. The regime standing in for Medvedev’s eventually exhausts itself and is swept off by the rotten core of the system it failed to improve. The narrator explains that “the project for the accelerated growth of the modernizational majority would be recognized as a mistake and would lead to some high-profile resignations in the Presidential administration and in the United Russia political party.” Meanwhile, “a modernizational majority would form all by itself, and would vote in the 2012 elections for that national leader of the two whom the leaders themselves would pick in a simple game of drawing matchsticks.”

Events in the Russia of real life transpired in much the same way as in Fardwor, Russia!, although this offers the author little solace. The novelist Vladimir Sorokin described the prophecies of his 2006 novel Day of the Oprichnik, in which a future Russia is ruled by an isolationist, reactionary tsar strikingly similar in rhetoric and culture to the Kremlin’s inhabitants a decade after the book’s publication, as a cause for despair. “Honestly, it all made me depressed. As a writer I’m satisfied, but as a citizen I’m really not,” he told interviewers in 2013. “Still, there’s a difference between literature and life. Fortunately,” he added.[10]

For Kashin, a writer whose fiction draws so closely on real life and whose work as a reporter saw him become part of the story himself, that minimal difference offers him little protection. The most horrifying and grotesque details come from everyday life. “That’s always what seemed the most interesting thing to me,” Kashin wrote in the blog post exposing his attackers, describing a photograph of one of the security guards. “Obviously, they’re not people from some kind of hell; they’re ordinary citizens who walk the same streets as you and me, wear shirts, eat grapes and sausage, smile for photographs, go to the movies with their girlfriends, enjoy life and consider themselves happy. I don’t see anything in that photograph that would show us that he’s some sort of particularly nasty person who could grab an iron bar and beat the crap out of my head fifty or so times. I still haven’t understood this, so I’m going to look at that photograph some more and think (with that same head, smiley face).” Kashin’s novel forces readers to confront that same problem. Is his Russian grotesque actually all that horrible? Or is the real life behind it more grotesque still?