Angels, Mafia and Pushkin

The Angel of Grozny:

Orphans of a Forgotten War

Åsne Seierstad (Basic Books, $25.95)

Either Åsne Seierstad is seriously brave or seriously insane. In 2006, despite a ban on foreigners traveling without government sanction and escort to Chechnya, she disguised herself as a Chechen (which, for a Norwegian, involves dark hair dye and long, well-pinned scarves) and, with the help of friends, smuggled herself into the war-torn republic – one of the most dangerous war zones on Earth.

Seierstad is no stranger to war zones. Her bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, recounts life in Afghanistan through intimate portraits of a middle class family, gained through her living incognito in that milieu. And her more recent A Hundred and One Days looked at life in Baghdad on the eve of the American invasion.

In this instance, Seierstad is on a quest to meet the Angel for whom this book is named – a Chechen woman who grew up an orphan in the Soviet system, a self-appointed caretaker for the orphaned children of Grozny (the second war, by UNICEF’s account, created 25,000 orphans). But, more fundamentally, she feels called to Chechnya, which she visited frequently in the 1990s, during the first Russo-Chechen war:

The trips to Chechnya changed me. When I went back to Moscow to recuperate, I became depressed, had lost my drive. I just wanted to go back again. Real life was in the mountains, where people were waging a life-and-death struggle. Little by little I became almost anti-Russian, from being captivated by the poetry, the music, in search of ‘the Russian soul’, I became aware of the racism, the nationalism, the corruption of senior government officials, the ignorance, the bleak history; as Anton Chekhov put it: ‘Russian life is like a thousand-pound stone, it grinds a Russian down till there’s not even a wet patch left.’

And so she dons her disguise, readying to fly to Vladikavkaz.

The dark brown scarf is knotted firmly at my neck.

‘Now you look like one of us!’

Two women from the North Caucasus, one a native, the other disguised as one, are going to board an aeroplane. Scarves on their heads, full skirts, clicking heels.

‘But most important of all: don’t smile all the time, and stop looking around as you usually do. Your open expression gives you away immediately. Keep your head down, frown and look unfriendly.’

There’s no turning back now. A few pages on, after they have landed in Vladikavkaz and passed uneventfully from Russia into Ingushetia, their driver replies to her request to slow down with a fact Seierstad admits to having known, namely: “Anyone who’s afraid shouldn’t go to Chechnya.”

And so people like Seierstad go for us, suppressing fear with bravery or insanity (or a mixture of the two). The result, in Seierstad’s case, is a moving and insightful portrait of a forgotten war in a forgotten corner of the Russian empire, of the people whose lives intersect with the Angel (Hadijat) and with the author’s. Seierstad spent several months in this “post-war” Chechnya, living in Hadijat’s orphanage and learning the children’s heartbreaking stories. She also returned there officially, as a guest of the Kadyrov regime, which she portrays in all its bombast and ignominy. 

Seierstad tells human stories that we all need to hear, shorn of politics. She travels with a perceptive eye and has a Chekhovian gift for literary journalism, for telling stories with meaning, for capturing the ink lines of character and bringing them to the printed page. This promises to be one of this fall’s best books.

Investigating the Russian Mafia

Joseph D. Serio (Carolina Academic Press, $35)

After eschewing the term “mafia” to label Russian organized crime activity: 

My preference is to avoid using the word ‘mafia’ altogether because it simply failed to do what language is meant to do: communicate specific meanings through words… the word ‘mafia’ in the former Soviet Union represented a phenomenon far broader and more diverse than that understood in the West, and, ultimately, is meaningless.

…Serio must relent. The book title employs the term, and he throws the word about throughout the book, repeatedly bemoaning its inaccuracy. It’s kind of like that old knife in the kitchen drawer you have been meaning to throw away for years, because it’s so ugly. But you can’t bring yourself to do it, because no other knife in your arsenal cuts a tomato as well.

The fact is, as Serio points out, Russia does not have, nor has it ever had a mafia, in the sense of a monolithic, centralized clan structure that pulls the levers of society. It has had many criminal groups, many of which could be labeled mafia-esque, be it in their modus operandi, attire or affectation; it has had a mafia-like government; it has had a legal and societal structure that encourages nothing so much as thievery and duplicity. But using the word and the idea we associate with mafia clouds the real picture, and that is that modern Russian crime “sprang forth from the fabric of Russian society and culture, the environment of survival.” As Serio quotes the Russian head of Interpol, Yuri Melnikov: “I don’t know what the fuss in the West is about the Russian ‘mafia.’ We’ve always been this way. It’s just that you’re finally fining out.”

Serio was present at the creation, embedded in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in the early 1990s as a liaison with U.S. law enforcement bodies. And this book, meant to be an introduction for businessmen and criminal justice types, bears the fruit of that experience, peppered as it is with fascinating first-hand anecdotes from the undersides of countless Russian rocks. This book should be required reading for anyone spending any time in Russia – certainly journalists and business people posted there, and students as well.  Aside from the well-documented account of the lawless 1990s, it offers a rich history of Russian criminal life, from the times of Ivan the Terrible through to the Vory v zakone.

Young Pushkin

Yury Tynyanov (Overlook, $35)

Thanks to a fluid translation by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, English readers for the first time have access to this wonderful piece of historical fiction by Yury Tynyanov (1894-1943). First published in the 1930s and 1940s in serial form, this is a beloved biography of Russia’s greatest poet in novel form. Bursting with a vast array of characters and buzzing with historical detail, this is a vibrant view of the Golden Age of Russian literature, with young Sasha Pushkin, the impetuous genius, whirling at its center.

The Pearl

Douglas Smith (Yale, $35)

She was a beautiful young serf with a near perfect operatic voice. He was Russia’s richest aristocrat. Together, they shared an illicit love that defied the mores of their age and eventually led to tragedy.

As a quick plot summary, this sounds a bit like cover copy for a bit of pulp fiction. But life is always more interesting than fiction. The extraordinary story of Count Nicholas Sheremetyev and Praskovia Kovalyova does read at times like a bit of pulp fiction, what with the unbridgeable chasm between their social classes, his perennial life-threatening illnesses, the intrigues at court, the depravity of the aristocracy. But Smith recounts the tale not as a novelist (though you sense him fiercely resisting the urge), but as a gifted historian, reconstructing the couple’s private lives from the archives, filling in ample historical background (we do, after all, want to read about Nicholas’ unwitting involvement in Paul I’s assassination) about what it meant to be a noble in Catherinian Russia, about travel in Russia, about theater and the arts. It is a profound love story, well told, while at the same time a valuable contribution to Russian social and political history.

History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800

Nikolai Findeizen (Indiana University Press, $60 per volume)

This monumental work took Findeizen 40 years to compile and write. Finally published in Soviet Russia in 1928-9 at the time of the author’s death, it has been the cornerstone for serious Russian musical history for 80 years. And now, thanks to IU Press, it has been translated into English and handsomely presented in a two-volume set. 

Findeizen traces the origins of Russian musical instruments, culture and composition back to the Scythians, stopping along the way in Pagan Rus, Kievan Rus, Novgorod, and Romanov Russia. Meticulously indexed, it includes relevant musical scores as appendices and is wonderfully illustrated with everything from images of instruments to skomorokhi. There are copious tables of little known musical terms, samples of chastushki, synopses of operas, lists of published works and famous musicians and composers… If it took place in Russia from 1 AD to the end of the 1800s and had to do with music, you are likely to find something in here about it. An invaluable reference work.