the stink
"Every second Putin is allowed to have his leg dance on TV, people die."
Another writer in my MA program recently asked me what my writing process is like. You know, that’s the stuff we, nerds, typically talk about after class, chugging our five-pound pints at a pub called The Duck or Queen’s Head or Marlborough Arms.
As flattered as I was, it was a shame to say that, no, I don’t have a process. Or I do – if you could call a jumble of notes scattered around my flat (sometimes, on napkins and toilet paper!) that somehow turn into posts but otherwise are scrapped completely – a process.
Though I do try to sit down to write a semi-confessional essay every Tuesday morning and then I do spend the day editing it, hoping it will be more than just narcissistic navel-gazing. Then, occasionally, a reader or two would email me during the week and say, “Wow, thanks for your honesty. I can totally relate to what you’re saying…” and I’d start trembling like a leaf from the realisation that OMG, someone is actually reading this. It’s funny how online writers do our best work when we trick ourselves into thinking nobody will read it. And then, when somebody does, you feel like you want to jump off Hammersmith Bridge.
There are times when I sit down and know exactly what to say. At times like these, I’ve usually had a whole week to think about it, practice on my friends, start conversations with something along the lines of, “Have you ever found it weird…” and then ramble until someone tells me to shut the fuck up.
There are also Tuesdays when I sit down and stare at the white screen and have to convince myself that just because I haven’t written anything in a week, it doesn’t mean I am incapable of writing anything anymore. Writing is like talking; you say what you must; there’s nothing more to it. The romanticism surrounding writing and writers is toxic. Don’t buy into it. Just write.
And then there are rare occasions when I’ve had a few good ideas of what I wanted to talk about, and I even wrote them down, but something happens that makes it impossible to stay quiet. In such times, plans can wait because I need to get something off my chest. And where else, dear reader, if not in this outlet that I’ve self-created for this purpose?
Yes. I am talking about the Tucker Carlson / Putin interview, of course.
I am hesitant to say anything on this matter for many reasons. One is I deliberately try not to touch these sorts of things in this newsletter – after all, I am not a historian, politician, or even a journalist, even though I have done journalism in the past. There are people much smarter than I am who have better things to say. I already said my share in the first year of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, and I hope I made my position clear. It hasn’t changed. I still think that Putin is a vicious murderer, and Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have my complete support. I haven’t been home in years, but if I were to go to Russia, a place where I was born and lived the better part of my life so far, I would probably go to jail for the things I wrote and said in the first year of the full-scale war.
With that said, some things that simply can’t be ignored. Especially the things where I feel I can add to the conversation.
Because it’s easy to assume that everyone is operating from the same level of awareness as you do. But I must constantly remind myself that some people don’t know things you take for granted. Some people don’t understand why this war is so dangerous. Or why Putin’s words shouldn’t be trusted, analysed, or even taken seriously. (As one Russian writer said, “Anything Mr Putin says should be construed as a KGB operation in dis-information”). Or why it matters why he does certain things rather than what he does, including the timing of this Tucker interview, during the ongoing US election, where Republicans have a high probability of winning, and when Putin doesn’t have much support from the world but is hoping to play his hand right and gain control over half of the planet, yada-yada.
But, as I said. The best thing I can add to the conversation is not political analysis or anything of the sort but rather my perspective. Perhaps even answer the question I was asked recently by one of the readers of this newsletter, “What does it feel like to be Russian?” The Carlson / Putin interview is a good excuse to put the answer in today's context.
Several years ago, when I was at university in Boston, someone asked me whether it was Kyiv or Moscow that was the capital of Russia. It was 2015. In Friends, Phoebe’s physicist boyfriend is flying away for a year to do research in the “major Russian city of Minsk.” (Spoiler alert: Minsk is the capital of Belarus.) And that was after 1991 when the USSR collapsed, and people didn’t have the excuse of calling USSR Russia interchangeably. But we’re all ignorant about things that don’t affect us directly, and that’s okay. Ask me about the geo-political landscape of South America over the past several years, and I would hesitate to answer.
Timothy Snyder wrote a brilliant – honestly, one of his best – essay on all the points on how and why Putin is wrong, which I highly recommend you read. Truth and reliable sources like academics with long-standing track records serve as that vaccination shot against propaganda and bullshit. Get vaccinated.
But as someone born in Russia but very hesitant to say that out loud to people, I feel many things at once when I look at the bald, ageing, botox-filled lunatic that is Mr Putin today saying ridiculous things on TV that (for him!) justify the mass-killings of a country I love and have many dear friends from.
1. I feel fascination – the kind you feel when you see a schizophrenic person genuinely believe he is Abraham Lincoln.
2. I feel anger because this schizophrenic is allowed not only to exist openly in society he is a threat to (instead of being put in a mental asylum) but also control vast parts of it, destroying and otherwise affecting millions of people’s lives, including my friends and family that live in both Ukraine and Russia.
3. I feel (ridiculous and irrational) hope that something might change soon. I would be able to go back and walk the streets and inhale the air of my teenage years and the city that was home for so long, but, more importantly, hope that the war will soon be over and people will stop dying in Ukraine. The problem with wars is that they start with grand ideas about territory or idealism, but all end the same. Territories change, countries spring up and cease to exist, but ultimately, people – the ordinary folk – always pay the price. Often with their lives or the lives of their loved ones. That’s something important to remember when watching the bald, ageing, botox-filled lunatic that is Mr Putin today. Every second he is allowed to have his leg dance on TV, people die.
4. And finally, I feel disgusted when I realise that nothing will ever be the same; the blood and shit and dirt of Putin’s actions will follow all Russians for the rest of our lives, that the damage has already been done, and people’s lives have been ruined; and there’s no way of going back.
So – to answer the question, what is it like to be Russian with all this going on?
It feels like being the child of serial killers who keep getting away.
You know your “parents” are pieces of shit; everyone else knows that, and yet, there’s nothing you can do about it.
It’s embarrassing. It’s painful. It stinks, literally, and everyone feels it a mile away.
Moments like Carlson’s interview remind me that no matter how far I run away – Bali, the US, London – the stink will always be there.
And it’s just something I, and many other Russians, whether they believe it or not, whether they support the war or not, will have to accept and live with.
I have many friends who refuse to subscribe to this notion. They either distance themselves entirely from the country of their birth and pretend it doesn’t affect them, or they outright try to “be good”.
I did it, too. For the entire first year of the war, I wrote many articles online for various publications, trying to scrub the stink off of myself.
Others are trying to be seen as victims. Which, funnily, is the same game Putin is playing. Being a fascist and waging a genocidal war, he still manages to find a way to justify it to himself by playing the victim. “Russians are misunderstood and pure and innocent and are just trying to get what’s rightfully theirs!” is his way of coping.
And I get it. It’s hard – impossible, probably– to know you’re a bad person and keep living with it. If my parents were criminals, I would do everything in my power to distance myself from them. But still, that wouldn’t change the fact.
Children of criminal parents are not responsible for their parents' wrongdoing, but that changes nothing. Yes, Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin, no matter how much he believes the contrary. But no matter what passport I get, languages I speak, countries I live, I will always be Russian, because that’s where I was born and that’s my first culture and language. And no matter how hard I try to appease myself or support the rights vs. wrongs, Russians will be seen by people as part of the genocide and crime for decades and decades in the future.
The sensible, brave, mature, and wise thing to do is not to run away from this fact but to accept it as one of life’s brutal realities. And try to be a decent person individually, Russian or not Russian. Then, perhaps, and hopefully, what says on your passport is of less importance.
– S
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