“The core of Putinism is the belief that the world is rotten, everything is for sale, and anyone who says otherwise is lying, probably because they are being paid to do so,” writes Masha Gessen in a recent New Yorker essay on Lyubov Sobol, an aide to jailed dissenter Alexei Navalny. Like other autocrats, Putin comes across as a representative of his country’s bruised and maligned psyche, someone who takes the brunt of what the last 100 years of blood-letting seem to have proven about our craven nature and applies that acidic perspective into exploiting what’s left. So long to the Marxist notion that history comprises the inevitable progress of human self-realization.
Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Georgia in 2008 were both spectacular events that applied a salve to Russia’s wounded identity as an empire. But its pending takeover of Belarus apparently will be less flamboyant, “an annexation hiding in plain sight” as described by one observer. NATO and the Biden administration have applied sanctions to the Belorusian petroleum industry in response to border tensions with Lithuania, repression of the democratic opposition, rigged elections, and the arrest of Belorusian journalists. In July, the Belorusian Justice Ministry shut down PEN Belarus.
Born in Minsk in 1984, novelist Sasha Filipenko doesn’t see a gap between the depredations and mass murders of Stalinism and the exploitations of Putin. The latter recently penned a 5,000-word op-ed in which he asserts that Russians, Ukrainians and Belorusians share “a common history, faith and destiny.” But what is the actual history and how does it pertain to current events? Published in Minsk in 2018, Filipenko’s novel Red Crosses features two main characters – 30-year old Sasha, a soccer referee who has come to Minsk with his daughter – and the nonagenarian Tatiana Alexeyevna whose memory is fading. Sasha is moving into her apartment building; they meet in the hallway where Tatiana has painted red crosses on the doors to help her find her way to her rooms. Initially, Sasha has no patience for her errant chatting. But that soon changes.
Like millions of Belorusians, the young Tatiana was enlisted by the Soviets – in her case, to work for the NKID, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. She witnessed Stalin’s mass purges in the Great Terror of 1937. During the war, her husband disappeared while serving in the army – and then, his name turned up on a list of captured troops. For Stalin, to be captured indicated a lack of loyalty to the People. I won’t spoil your reading by saying more about Tatiana’s experiences and travails — except to note that divided loyalties and the ambiguities of morality color everything that happens to her, all the way to the Gulag.
The narrative pivots between Sasha’s remarks on her tale and his daily life in Minsk – the moment of the telling seems to be around 2001 – and Tatiana’s ongoing revelations. “Recalling everything my neighbor told me,“ he says at mid-story, “it seems that the value of a human life will never increase. It’s the cheapest commodity there is. The arrangement may change, but the motif stays the same. Blood will flow as it always has because that’s human nature.” The question for Sasha, as well as for the reader, concerns how to sustain our lives during oppressive circumstances. Reflecting on the Gulag, Tatiana says, “For Soviet people, the real prison was not the elaborate penitentiary system – it was their own fate.”
The Belorusians are trapped, then and now. During World War II, 500,000-600,000 Belorusians were killed while fighting for Stalin – while tens of thousands supported the Germans. It was a choice between avoiding the Gulag or Buchenwald. Stalin liquidated as many as 250,000 Belorusians during the purge of 1937-1941, including most of the country’s intelligentsia. So today, when Putin says the Belorusians and Russians share a common fate, it is up to dissenters like Sasha Filipenko to advocate for his people’s independence. But he is a novelist after all, not an op-ed writer – so while Tatiana maintains that even though “Dehumanization takes only a second!” she could never denounce anyone, Sasha responds, “If humans have really accomplished anything, it’s the ability to negotiate with their own conscience.” The crosses, stained red by Russia, mount everywhere throughout Red Crosses.
[Published by Europa Editions on August 24, 2021, 196 pages, $22.00