Russia | In the meat grinder of history

"Now all the maps of the world are outline maps on which we mark the arrows of new suffering every morning," writes Russian writer Alexander Ilichevsky about the period after February 24, 2022. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, shock and speechlessness initially prevailed among opposition Russian writers. This, too, this search for words, for a language appropriate to the events, is what Ilichevsky describes. It took time for the war to reach literature.

But now there are numerous literary debates about the new reality. In the anthology "No! – Voices from Russia Against the War," author Sergei Lebedev has compiled a selection: short stories, poems, stage plays, and reportages by authors living in exile or still in Russia who contributed their texts under pseudonyms. There's even a fairy tale in which Baba Yaga, the witch of Slavic mythology, is arrested for spreading fake news about the Russian army.

The war is always present in these stories, but it usually remains in the background. They primarily focus on life in exile and the current situation in Russia, on propaganda and repression, on dealing with relatives who believe the propaganda or even volunteer for the "special operation." Even small acts of solidarity are described, such as laying flowers on graves with Ukrainian names in Russian cemeteries.

Few words are found for the war itself, but there are words for what it is doing to Russian society. The story "The Festival in the Village" by Alissa Ganiyeva is particularly memorable. Using a village in Dagestan as a starting point, she depicts a state in which only the truth of government propaganda prevails. Children in school are indoctrinated into believing they are "warriors of a vast country that is fighting alone against fascism."

When a child refuses to participate in the village festival's march honoring the "special operation," the teacher threatens to call the FSB, the Russian domestic intelligence service. Finally, the children, dutifully dressed in army uniforms and carrying flags, stand ready to cheer on the veterans. One patriotic speech follows another, and the museum director, Akhmedov, is also scheduled to speak to celebrate the occasion, but as he waits for his turn, he feels increasingly anxious. He knows what phrases and slogans are expected of him. But they won't leave his lips; he doesn't want to be part of the grand concert of lies. Does he have a choice?

What happens when you don't go along is the subject of the story "The Darkest Night" by Russian-Azerbaijani author Yegana Dzhabbarova. She describes how unreal it feels to realize that someone has denounced you. For the young woman, "denounced" wasn't a word that belonged in her life, but rather in history books: "It seemed to me that I had literally been thrown into the meat grinder of history." What follows is what many government opponents can tell stories about: fear, escape, problems with visas, "ticket prices, and other normalities of homelessness."

The volume concludes with the essay "#LOSTLINGUAL" by Tatar author Dinara Rasuleva. She adds an important decolonial perspective to the collection. Rasuleva recounts the loss and rediscovery of her native language, Tatar. Until the age of six, she spoke fluent Tatar, but as soon as she started school, she left the language "like slippers at the door." Only Russian was spoken in class, and anyone with a Tatar accent was considered a country bumpkin.

Rasuleva only later realized "that I was ashamed of my own culture and proud of my assimilation into a foreign one." The oppression of indigenous languages in Russia has a long tradition and continues to grow. Rasuleva is not content with this. In 2022, she began to re-educate her native language and wrote poems in Tatar, just as she remembers the language of her childhood, with all its mistakes and gaps in vocabulary. She wants to make a small contribution to preserving and reviving her culture and concludes her reflections with the hope that if many re-educate their native language, one day "the cultures and languages of the oppressed indigenous peoples will reach the level of the cultures and languages of the colonizers."

The anthology brings together less big names, i.e. authors already well-known in Germany, but rather many very different voices and perspectives, often from authors who are being made accessible to a German-speaking audience for the first time.

There's much new to discover in this book, which is also an attempt to counter the propaganda and violence of the Russian state with the written word. "The word doesn't heal wounds, doesn't resurrect the murdered, doesn't punish the criminals," Lebedev writes in the foreword. But the word is nevertheless significant, for "it's no coincidence that the Russian state so doggedly persecutes all those who dare to speak the truth, who dare to contradict."

"No! – Voices from Russia against the War," edited by Sergei Lebedev. Rowohlt Verlag, 384 pp., hardcover, €28.