Facing Real Life

Abstract

This year’s Russian Booker shortlist provoked more than the usual amount of controversy: the list excluded some of Russia’s best-known writers, including Dmitry Bykov, Viktor Pelevin and Mikhail Shishkin. Defending their choices, one of the jurors explained that the shortlist was defined by ‘the priority of real life. Our life is now such that fantasy writing is unnecessary.’ In Index’s file on Russia and its future, fantasy and surrealism abound in the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin and the anonymous author of Street Trash. So what is ‘real life’ in Russia now? With voices from within as well as those who left decades ago, Index explores the political realities and social mood of a country where there are more abortions registered than live births, life expectancy for men is 58, bribery is endemic, and the state is back in force. Anna Politkovskaya believes Russia is again a tsardom and needs to stop talking like big brother to the ‘colonies’; Geoffrey Hosking thinks many Russians associate democracy and the rule of law with insecurity and poverty, and support the dictatorship of law under Putin. Defiance of authority may be ubiquitous in Russia, according to Masha Lipman, but cynicism, apathy and self-interest rule. And in becoming more established, the Russian Orthodox Church has lost its spiritual leadership, leaving some to find spiritual comfort in cults, while Islam, younger and more dynamic, is appealing to more and more students. Catherine Merridale tells us that, as women’s prospects have changed, new Russian commerce has ‘woken up to the power of the female purse’. Alexei Simonov retains some hope in regional publishing ventures, but sees a government, apparently advocating freedom for the media, bringing owners and journalists into line by a battery of legal and civil suits. The journalist Grigori Pasko tells of brutish life in a Russian jail. And what of the future? There is a little optimism, much pessimism and some disagreement – over the significance of money, religion, nationalism, war. Yevgeny Yerebenkov believes the outcome of the next elections might be decided not in the polling booths but by powerful youth groups fighting on the barricades. Zinovy Zinik reflects that reports on the death of Soviet Communism are ‘premature in the extreme’. Igor Pomerantsev pictures a Russia in 2050 where identities and ethnicities are merged and a bizarre authoritarianism reigns. The horrors of the war in Chechnya are graphically described by Juan Goytisolo. Yet despite everything Chechen writers have continued to write. Index publishes some of their work, which unsurprisingly has war as an ever-present theme. The new generation includes a large number of women; in reportage and fiction, these writers offer a different, and deeply moving, view of their country. q E D I T O R I A L