Understanding Putin’s language with Mikhail Shishkin

“It hurts to be Russian. The language of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Tsvetaeva and Brodsky, has become the language of war criminals and murderers.”

Thus begins the preface to a book entitled Russki mir: War or Peace?. It is published by the small Modena-based publisher 21lettere and written by Mikhail Shishkin, born in 1961, one of the most important living Russian writers. He continues: “In recent years I have been tormented by a sense of shame for my country”. Translated into thirty languages, and the only writer to have won his country’s three most prestigious awards – the Russian Booker Prize, the Russian National Bestseller and the Big Book Prize – Shishkin publishes articles in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Independent. In 2022, he won the European Strega Prize for Vanishing Point. He has been living in Switzerland since 1995.

Not surprising. This delightfully hybrid text – part political essay, part memoir (“my mother was Ukrainian, my father Russian”) – cares little for the form it takes but much for the direction it must take – that of clarity, always – is entirely incompatible with the possibility, for its author, of living undisturbed in a country whose nomenklatura he condemns, page after page, without the slightest reservation. With a conversational yet extremely rigorous approach, Russki mir reconstructs an entire historical and political trajectory, right up to the formation of what Shishkin today describes as ‘a criminal police state’ that emerged following a war between factions from which Vladimir Putin emerged as yet another unchallenged ruler of the country – his resistible rise is recounted in a chapter entitled Prostrate. Putin’s poison, Shishkin explains, has seeped into the Russian people, who are now accustomed to systematic suspicion towards the rest of the world. According to the regime’s repetitive narrative, in fact, the Enemy is constantly lying in wait, and, armed with Russophobia, is eager to pounce on the country. Who is the Enemy? Anyone who serves the script (always the same, yet always different). “Putin’s wish list is the country’s true Constitution,” writes Shishkin, whilst portraying a Russia systematically plundered by a regime willing to spend sums with endless zeros on war, especially hybrid warfare. A war “which the West has already lost”.

The most topical chapter is precisely the one that recounts Western collusion with the Russian regime – and the pervasive nature with which these ties have been cultivated and built up. The ‘Young Marmots’ handbook bears the signature of Valery Gerasimov, who in 2013 published an article entitled ‘The Value of Science is Foresight’. The Chief of the Russian General Staff set out, point by point, the ‘strategy of chaos’ – the notion that actual warfare is merely the final phase of a longer and more complex war, which involves weakening the Enemy’s structures through constant flanking manoeuvres consisting of fake news, distorted information repeated ad nauseam, narrative manipulation, smear campaigns, corruption, and all those measures that Gerasimov refers to as ‘non-military’, which must be ‘used in conjunction with the population’s potential for protest’. In other words, a country that does not allow its citizens to demonstrate aims to use the right to free speech granted by the Enemy against it, after having turned it into a loaded gun. “Democracies have underestimated the challenge posed by Moscow,” writes Shishkin. “The corrupt Moscow regime forms metastases that spread throughout the world and brazenly corrupts sections of the elite. Billions in criminal funds end up in Western banks. Politicians and businesspeople are ready to betray Ukraine for personal economic gain.”

A war with its own techniques and strategies: the propaganda claims that ‘behind every demonstration of discontent lie the Western secret services’, and the strategy is one of intimidation. “To frighten politicians, journalists and the military into believing that Russia is ready for a military confrontation with NATO. Moscow is banking on the West always backing down and not risking a Third World War over Narva or Donetsk. The Kremlin’s strategists think like common bandits: it is not the strongest who wins, but the one willing to see it through to the end.”

Aware that Russia’s future depends on its ‘deputinisation’, Shishkin calls on intellectuals to fulfil their duty to ‘show the world that there is another Russia’. Not all Russians have supported this war, which is not a war between Ukrainians and Russians. It is a war between human beings who speak both Ukrainian and Russian, and inhuman beings who speak the language of lies and are prepared to carry out criminal orders. Putin’s crime is to have poisoned people with hatred’.

And politics with its cult of domination. “Russia lives by a single law: the boundless power of the Kremlin. Democratic terms in Russia are empty words, devoid of meaning, which have no effect whatsoever,” warns Shishkin. “In the West, governments are judged on the basis of the terms they use; in Russia, only by their façade, and everyone in Russia knows that behind it lies a void.”

One of the book’s most interesting reflections is precisely that on language. One’s thoughts turn to some of the images that have most helped us understand the vile nature and grotesque excesses of Putin’s excessive power: those of the arrest of numerous people who, in March 2022, were holding up placards with no writing on them. (It was the early days of the war, when the word ‘war’ could not be uttered, but now everyone uses it – including Peskov and Lavrov – and who on earth will ever tell those still locked up in prison for having held up a blank sheet of paper four years ago?). Taking censorship as his starting point, Mikhail Shishkin examines the relationship between words and meanings in the Russian world, where ‘words serve a different function: they are a cover. What may seem like a lie to an outsider contributes to general understanding within the Russian context. It is not a paradox; it is the Russian reality of words. When Putin claims to be telling the truth to his country, everyone knows he is lying, and he himself knows that everyone knows it. This is what happens: fake voters take part in fake elections for a fake Duma. Western media and politicians try to judge the Moscow regime by its statements, but these statements have no meaning: the Russian truth is a lie. Marxist dogmas were taught at school, but in the staff room they were mocked behind closed doors. Russia has returned to the Soviet era, to endless lies.”

The writer recalls how, during rallies, it was claimed that the USSR was the greatest bulwark of peace, whilst at the same time it was sending its own tanks to crush the uprising in Hungary in a bloodbath. On television, the fulfilment of the five-year plans was joyfully celebrated, yet the supermarkets were being emptied. “We lived in a country where socialism had triumphed and everything belonged to the people, but we had nothing, and people wiped their bums with clippings from Pravda proclaiming that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. An extraordinary country full of slaves.”

During the harshest years of the Soviet era (Shishkin describes them thus: “Class struggle served as the moral cover for the exercise of violence, whilst the romantics of communism were forced to step aside, usually with a bullet to the head”), in those dark and humiliating years, literature proved to be essential. “Books such as The Wind Blows, and Then Returns by Vladimir Bukovsky were a turning point for my conscience. At sixteen, I had two dreams: to become a writer and to travel the world.”

Dreams that had to wait, because after the fall of the Wall the nomenklatura reacted, and on the morning of 19 August 1991 a State of Emergency Committee announced on television that it was forced to take responsibility for the country because Mikhail Gorbachev had fallen ill. And it brought tanks into Moscow. “Swan Lake was shown repeatedly on television. It felt like a funeral march. That was the coup. I’d never felt so awful in my life,” confesses Shishkin, “like a prisoner who’d escaped from prison, already hoping to be free, before being recaptured.”

Hope was called Europe. The dream of a dignified life. But it was a time of disappointments because, after Mikhail Gorbachev – who was no reformer; indeed, ‘perestroika was a special operation by the Communist nomenklatura to convert its absolute political power into immense private wealth’ – a brutal war broke out between business clans. And following a settling of scores, chaos and lawlessness, “the desire for a more orderly world took the form of nostalgia: the Soviet Atlantis was idealised after its demise, just as tsarism was idealised during the Soviet era”.

Even under Boris Yeltsin, Russia had already attempted to use war as a means of reclaiming its identity. The declarations of independence by fourteen former Soviet republics were particularly galling, so Minister Pavel Gracëv literally (and publicly) promised Yeltsin: “Grozny in two hours, with a handful of paratroopers”. The war lasted two years, claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and ended in Russia’s defeat. The country was plunging into a repeat of its own history: provocations, electoral manipulation, bribery, dirty political tactics, poisonings. Vladimir Putin won the election by blaming Chechen terrorists for a number of bomb attacks. And he concocted a pretext for a second Chechen war, whilst “the frightened population enthusiastically welcomed the war on terrorism. A year earlier nobody knew him; now Putin was the saviour of the nation”. And although – Shishkin adds – “his men were caught red-handed with explosives in a basement in Ryazan”, unspecified military exercises were cited as the reason. “MP Sergei Yushenkov and journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, who called for a public inquiry, were killed. The former was shot outside his home; the latter was poisoned.”

Also worth reading is the section concerning the escalation of lies that led to the war of aggression against Ukraine, aka the ‘special military operation’. It all began with the annexation of Crimea, seen as compensation for Ukraine’s drift away from Russia, and naturally presented as a blatantly Russophobic American plot. “Television implanted in people’s minds the idea of Crimea’s return as a sign of restored greatness,” says Shishkin. “That drunkard Khrushchev had given it away to the Ukrainians, and now historical justice had to be restored. Militias were sent in to destabilise the region.” Only to deny it, and finally admit it. The point is that “Ukraine was never forgiven for the Maidan”. It is interesting to note that, at the time of the Euromaidan, people in Russia expressed admiration for the Ukrainians’ courage. And that a certain unmentionable envy even crept in. In fact, the revolution “was immediately smeared by Russian television” and it was claimed to be a NATO conspiracy “attacking Moscow via Ukraine. When Maidan then triumphed, the television changed its rhetoric yet again: the Ukrainians were Nazis, admirers of the SS, and it was time to save oneself from the genocide they were set to carry out. Unidentified troops occupied Crimea, and the annexation sparked hysterical jubilation’. The victory over the United States, Europe, the West and the whole world was celebrated, Shishkin recalls. ‘Many took up arms voluntarily, believing they were going to fight fascism. The resurrection of the Empire was declared the supreme meaning of existence’.

Mikhail Shishkin, a true writer – his splendid novels are all published by Voland, and in this writer’s opinion, "The Capture of Izmail" ranks amongst the finest pages read in recent years – does not spare the West a few well-deserved slaps on the wrist either. And he reminds us of the need to reinvigorate the European dream. “It is more likely,” he wrote in Russki mir in 2022, “that Westerners, alarmed by the chaos and the possibility of war, will re-elect their governments, replacing anti-Putin figures with pro-Putin allies, rather than Russians rising up in rebellion.” A prophecy that we hope will prove wrong – and soon.