Day of the Oprichnik

"The Oprichniki were the henchmen of Ivan the Terrible. So it’s a 16th-century Russian theme transposed into the future. It’s a dystopian novel—following in that Russian tradition of dystopian writing of Zamyatin etc.—and is quite clearly a political satire of the Putin regime. It’s funny, it’s iconoclastic and it’s terrifying because although it was written in 2006, it seems to me that it’s describing what Russia is now becoming. I’m haunted by this book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the book, Russia is a closed system. There’s a great wall which separates Russia from the rest of the world. Although the Oprichniki are Russian, it’s clear that they are serving some distant sovereign in China and that Russia exists as a vassal state of the Chinese. The purpose of Russia is to pipe oil and gas to China and everything it consumes is imported from China. Russia is effectively a Siberian wasteland with a big pipe running through it. It’s astonishing that Sorokin should have written this in 2006. At the time, you could see there was a problem over Russia’s oil and natural resources dependency, but nothing to make you think that Russia would end up, increasingly, looking like something out of this book. I find it quite frightening as a vision of where Russia is going. It is violent. It’s got gang rape, it’s got murder. The Oprichniks live in luxury: they drive around in their ‘Mercedovs’ and everyone has a Jacuzzi. It’s this blingy Moscow world. But they’re carrying out all sorts of atrocities for some unknown entity, His Majesty. A bit like Stalin in The First Circle , the power is distant. This book is just one day in the life of an Oprichnik, like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . Everything is compressed into a blitz of orgiastic depravity, murder, sodomy, the whole lot. It’s all in there. At some point later in his reign Ivan the Terrible retreated and surrounded himself with this new caste of people, the Oprichniki. They were given substantial land but were isolated from the rest of the landowning classes and the boyars. They were there as a security force, a bit like Stalin’s NKVD, for which the Oprichniki were always seen as the historic parallel. Eisenstein’s film about Ivan the Terrible makes those references fairly explicit. The Oprichniki rode around on horses with the broom as an emblem of sweeping out the enemies of the people. So there are a lot of references in the book to the discourse of ‘enemies of the people,’ ‘parasites’ etc. So it’s a very powerful, futuristic dystopian novel, but with all these references to Russian history, going back to Ivan the Terrible and probably before. It’s a depressing read because it makes you think nothing in Russia ever changes. It’s all just this recycling of different modes of repression, of extraction of the country’s wealth, of enslaving the population, of structuring power through these lawless servitors. I wanted to do a relatively short, accessible and enjoyable volume of history from the earliest times, and I thought it was important to do it in a way that exposed the driving ideas and ideologies of Russian history. Because certainly after 2014, it struck me increasingly that the way the Russians understood their history was very different from the way we would understand their history, especially those bits of history that connect with ours, like the Cold War . That disconnect needs to be understood because if we’re going to deal with the Russians now, we need to understand where they’re coming from. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I wanted to say something about Russian historiography and the myths that they have woven around their own story. There are some recurring themes. There’s the Tsar or ruler as a sacred figure, a god on Earth whose authority is sacralized and who is a national savior. That’s the story of Alexander Nevsky, of Alexander I, of Stalin in World War II. These are stories of the sacred, godlike leader who saves the country from hostile forces abroad. It’s only when you begin to look at it from that point of view that you can understand the strength of autocratic modes of thought, and why propaganda of an authoritarian, nationalist, anti-Western persuasion can make sense or get a grip on the national consciousness. That’s all about the narratives of history. It’s historical. It’s not about a mindset, or psyche, or DNA, or any of the rather cliched stereotypes people use to try and explain why the Russians are like the Russians. You have to unpack it historically which does, as you say, involve looking at those moments when it could have gone another way. Why it is that certain ideas recur and get mobilized in certain situations to reinforce an autocratic state system? And why it is that those same ideas can become subversive and revolutionary? So that was the idea for the book, though I didn’t think it was going to be quite so timely."