Serhii Plokhy's Reading List

"Until recently Sergei taught at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, which is a top and very liberal institution. He had a blog at the same time. I understand that that job was taken away from him, but the blog part is still there. At the time of the decision of the jury, we didn’t have that information, that happened later. It’s really unfortunate that he’s lost his position—unfortunate is maybe the wrong word, unfortunate to me means something that happens that you can’t control. But it looks like there are people at the top who don’t like what Sergei says, who don’t like his analysis, and who contributed to him losing his job. The book is amazing. It’s just the wonderful writing, but most important are the thought and argument that went into this book. It’s a collection of essays or standalone chapters. I will be talking about the other books on the shortlist; Sergei’s book stands at the top of the pyramid of the other books. The shortlisted authors discuss different aspects of Russian or Soviet culture and history—or even go into the future, with environmental studies like Kate Brown’s—but Sergei’s book brings this all together, it brings in history, it brings in politics, it brings in culture. In that sense, it really brings together the best of what we’ve got on the shortlist. “Russia is only now trying to make sense out of what happened in the last 30 to 50 years, with the loss of empire, the loss of messianic ideology” Sergei is a deep thinker. With his knowledge of sociology, of political psychology, of history, he deals with the question, which is very important today—and I would say very important to the world of the last maybe 100 years—of Russia as a post-imperial state. Russia is going through post-imperial struggles, something that maybe other countries and nations that had empires went through before. Other countries went through transformations in the 1960s with social upheavals. Russia is only now trying to make sense out of what happened in the last 30 to 50 years, with the loss of empire, the loss of messianic ideology. Sergei remains optimistic, but his diagnosis is not great in the sense that Russia, at this point, doesn’t have a clear sense of itself or a clear vision for the future. It’s stuck in the past and visions of a grandiose Soviet or imperial past, which is one of the factors that pushes it toward all this adventurism and expansion and a lot of blood in the Russian neighbourhood, but also outside of the post-Soviet space. Again, it’s done in a very, very erudite way. It really brings up knowledge from different disciplines to tackle the question that all of us have today, ‘What is happening in Russia? How do you explain that?’ And he does that on a very deep level, going beyond your normal explanation of, ‘Okay, there is Putin, or the Kremlin, or there is this advisor or that advisor.’ He is talking about the society and saying that people at the top are really using certain insecurities, certain features that are in the society already, to come to power, to secure their power, and then also advancing those insecurities and probably making them worse. So, from that point of view, it’s a very important book. Exactly. What is being reflected, projected and articulated by the current regime are the current uncertainties but also the longer tradition of Russian political history—and political history is one of the subjects that Sergei specializes in. The argument that there is this authoritarian trend in Russian history, and that Russia really has difficulty going outside of that trend, is something that Richard Pipes, a historian who worked at Harvard, was promoting in the 1960s and 70s. He was considered an archenemy by the Soviet establishment. But then, when Putin came to power, people like Vladislav Surkov invited him and there was a translation of his books. They said, ‘Okay, you’re absolutely right. Historically that’s how we function and we can’t function otherwise.’ And Pipes unwillingly became a justification for the new authoritarian regime and its authoritarian tendencies. What I’m trying to say is that Sergei is really trying to deal with issues that have been noticed by others before, but he does that through the prism of current developments, and the country’s unhealthy fascination with its great power past. The biggest or founding myth of today’s Russia, I might add, is the myth of the Great Patriotic War. That’s one example of society being deeply rooted in the past and having difficulties breaking away. Absolutely, and that’s a quality you don’t see so much. I hope Andrew Jack will maybe see this interview and correct me if I’m wrong—he possesses the institutional memory and knowledge of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize like nobody else—but it seems to me this is the first book translated from Russian that won the prize. In my previous incarnation as a judge a few years ago, I remember that we looked at a translated book and weren’t sure what to do with it. We created a separate category for that book. This time it was different, there was no positive or negative inclination for translated books. Return of the Russian Leviathan is very well translated . Translated books should have the same prominence for the prize because, exactly as you said, they provide that absolutely unique perspective."

"This book about the Bering Strait is one of two books on the shortlist that deal with environmental studies or environmental history. There are clear connections with Kate Brown’s book on Chernobyl. Floating Coast is about the environment and what modern society does with it when we come to this land at the end of the world. What is unique about the book is that she looks at this from both sides of the Bering Strait: American and Soviet, comparing the two archenemies of the Cold War . The regimes had completely different ideologies . They were both messianic in their own right: only they had the right way to deal with the issues of environment, development, and indigenous population. And, indeed, they came with their own playbooks. But the most striking and maybe depressing, conclusion is that they came to the same results. Whatever the policies are, the result is the same, which is a bit disheartening. But that’s also a way to think about us as a world community and what we do with our environment, despite our differences, because it looks like, whatever the differences are, we end in the same place. We are destroying and exploiting the environment by our attempts to civilize it, to turn it into a productive force. There is a connection in this book between Russia and the outside world which is very, very important. With the Cold War, there is a tradition of looking at Russian or Soviet history as kind of sui generis , completely different, completely separate from the rest of the world. Integrating the Soviet and Russian experience into the global one not only helps us to understand things that we didn’t understand before, but also to figure out how we can move forward. Well, it’s probably not as bad as in places where ‘civilization’ came earlier so I wouldn’t push that too far. It’s also not that bringing the benefits of the modern science and technology to the region didn’t bring any benefits, but that came at an enormous price. And that, especially in our current situation with climate change, is a key issue that we’re dealing with today. Going back to your question of whether the books have to speak to what we are living through today. They don’t have to, but it looks like we tend to pay attention to books that resonate with today’s concerns or fears or insecurities, or questions that we have today. This is one of those books and it’s an international perspective which is maybe not absolutely unique, but quite rare. That is one of main contributions of the book."

"Probably quite a few people who will read this interview have watched the HBO and Sky miniseries on Chernobyl . The best way to think about Kate Brown’s book in my mind is that it tells the story of Chernobyl that was not there at all in the miniseries. It’s interesting and intriguing. It’s a book about the people and the environment that were left after the HBO cameras stopped rolling (Or, as cameras don’t roll anymore, when the digital cameras… ran out of digits?) What Manual for Survival also has in common with the book on the Bering Strait, Floating Coast , is that both books are written, to some extent, from below. Both authors use their expertise as historians, they go to the archives, but they combine that with their expertise as anthropologists and go and interview people. Kate Brown takes very seriously what people who lived through Chernobyl think about themselves, about the experience, about their health, about the environment. As academics, we always—or maybe often—come with a certain type of attitude that comes with our education and when we look at the local perceptions or knowledge we think, ‘Okay, this doesn’t make sense. We did this survey, or we did this health check, and it doesn’t show in your blood. What you’re saying is irrelevant, an element of folklore or something like that. Somebody else can study that.’ Kate Brown goes to those people and that’s where she starts. She listens to them and then she follows those leads. And those leads very often end up in the same archives, but allow her to ask different questions, the ones she would not ask otherwise. The book tells us a very different story about Chernobyl, one that we didn’t know when we were looking top down. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The title of the book is really powerful. What she’s trying to do is learn from that experience. By using local knowledge and local perspectives, she also tries to challenge some of the already established, prevailing stereotypes about Chernobyl. One of those is the question of what happened to the environment. People who go to Chernobyl, to the exclusion zone today say, ‘Okay, the wildlife is back. It’s flourishing. It’s better than it was when we were there.’ And yes, there is a point to that, in the sense that the worst thing that can happen to the environment is that we, humans, come there. Everyone else disappears. But there is also something that we don’t think about and this is the fact that not all the animals returned and those animals that did return are not as healthy as we think they are. There are major changes that are happening there. And she looks at the research done by scholars who don’t have that big microphone in front of them, who were marginalized by the field as a whole, and raises these questions. She’s very brave because she is trained as a historian, but she goes in and tries to understand and explain nuclear medicine, biology. She has been attacked for that, but her position is a very, very reasonable and important one. She says, ‘Okay, I’m raising these questions. Yes, maybe you who are trained in biology know more than I do. But, please, try to answer them.’ Again, it’s about the Soviet experience, but it’s also about taking Chernobyl away from saying, ‘Okay. It’s ideology, it’s the Communist Party, it’s a particular type of reactor that caused that’ and placing it in a different column and saying, ‘Ok, this is actually something that is global. This is something that we have to deal with.’ With nuclear energy in particular, with global warming, it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s go nuclear.’ Kate Brown’s position is, ‘Just hold your horses. Slow down. Let’s talk about this. Let’s think about whether this is indeed the best way to deal with the crisis that we face now.’"

"In terms of grouping things, the last three books are all biographies , done very differently. In a sense they’re all attempts to understand some of the same things in Russian history and society that Sergei Medvedev talks about. What unites them is that they are about the Soviet experience, but they represent different threads, so to speak, of the Soviet trajectory. Stalin’s Scribe is about Mikhail Sholokhov, the Nobel Prize winner—who is in a very different column from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel Prize winner . Sholokhov is a beloved child of the Soviet system, to a degree. An Impeccable Spy is about Richard Sorge, who was a spy for the cause. This Thing of Darkness is about a cinematographer, Sergei Eisenstein and deals with Stalinism and authoritarianism while making a deep dive in the Russian history. With Sholokhov what is interesting is that he’s a man of many mysteries. It’s about the question of lies and fake news, but in a different way than we deal with it now. He’s someone who becomes the ideal Soviet writer. But his official biography has a lot of lacunas. Certain things are hidden, and other things are actually exaggerated and Brian Boeck goes through that. Sholokhov is a man who wrote so much and was politically exceptionally important, but this is the first comprehensive biography about him. It’s a political biography, but not only. There are questions, like whether his best known and most brilliant work, And Quiet Flows the Don , was stolen or not, whether he really wrote it or not, what his relationship with Stalin was. In my reading, it’s about a talent being subdued and corrupted. So a talented person who goes into the service of the Leviathan that Sergei Medvedev writes about. It’s an excellent piece of work by a historian. Boeck goes and consults the archives, some materials for the first time. He was going on an almost yearly basis to the area from which Sholokhov comes, the Rostov-on-Don area in southern Russia. It is not exactly like Sergei Medvedev, but it’s the work of a Western scholar who is really very immersed in his subject and in the psychology of the place that he writes about. He brings so to speak local knowledge and sensibilities to a history of one of the top Soviet intellectuals. I would say that’s right, though Stalin’s tastes changed depending on the politics and political situation. With Sergei Eisenstein, Stalin loved the first part of his film, and then crushed the second part. But yes, in terms of Sholokhov, that would be a fair characterization of him and his relation to Stalin. This is despite the fact that, especially early on, he would write letters to Stalin about the collectivization and the famine that hit the Don region at the time. Stalin considered him important enough to write to him and point out his “mistakes”. This is someone who really had the ear of the dictator. For Brian Boeck it’s not about liking or not liking Sholokhov, the key is understanding him and giving him the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the day, it seems to me that Boeck comes, on the one hand, to a balanced, but on the other hand, a very worrisome verdict not only on Sholokhov, but on the society that created him and that he helped create in turn."

"Yes, it is. Like quite a few of the books that ended up on the shortlist it’s multi-disciplinary. On the one hand, it’s history . On the other hand, you can’t write the book without understanding cinematography and the particular context in which the film was being made, as well as the 16th century. It’s literature, it’s cinema, it’s history, it’s a little bit of psychology: all of that comes together. And these are complex issues. If you look, for example, at what Eisenstein does in terms of the set decoration it’s mind boggling. You really have to take a course to understand what is there and the symbolism and why it is important and what he is trying to say. When Joan was working on the book (I happen to know the author and have listened to her presentations at academic conferences), I thought it would be a wonderful book, but that the number of people who would read it might be very limited. But Joan did a very good job of really presenting it in a way that appeals to a broader audience. “It’s amazing how many good books are out there” Again, the question is the same one that Brian asks in his book. Here is an artist at the court of a dictator. As an artist he depends on that dictator, even more than Sholokhov does. To make a film you need funding, you need infrastructure, all sorts of things. Eisenstein is also an artist who is really married to the cause, with Battleship Potemkin and other films. He is a symbol of Soviet cinema, making films about the revolution, promoting it and legitimizing it. He really does a lot of things that Stalin likes. But he remains an artist. I interviewed Joan and I said, ‘It’s about subversion, maybe?’ and she said, ‘No, it’s more than that. Everyone talks about subversion.’ In the second part of Ivan the Terrible , more than in the previous part, he really struggles with issues of authority, power, corruption of power, and so on and so forth. And eventually the film is shelved. They don’t show it. From that point of view, it’s a trajectory different from Sholokhov’s. Sholokhov was never really shelved. It’s another trajectory of how a talent functions and tries to survive being dependent on the dictator, but also being in opposition to the dictator. No, it wasn’t destroyed. It was shown again. It’s a different personal story but, again, it is about the relationship of an individual and a regime. It’s the subject of most of the books on our list and part of Sergei Medvedev’s personal story."

"It’s one more trajectory in this same story that I have been talking about. Sorge’s talent was lying without making much of an effort and loving it. He put this talent in the service of the larger good, the way he understood it. Normally people don’t like liars—it’s not good being a pathological liar—but if it’s a good lie, if you lie for the salvation of society, then, suddenly, you become a much, much more likeable person than you would be otherwise. The book is also about the appeal of communism and the ideas of communism in the first half of the last century. It attracted not only people captured by the regime, by the system, who had no easy way of escape like Eisenstein or Sholokhov, but also people from outside of the interwar equivalent of the ‘iron curtain.’ Communism at the time is about an international experiment, a new, bright future for mankind. It is the time of the spread of the communist movement all over the world. And the promised land is the Soviet Union. Sorge had deeper roots in the Russian Empire than some of the Brits and Americans who came to the Soviet Union to build the new future, but he certainly belonged to that same category and he served the regime abroad. It’s a story of Russian imperial industrialization, where you have Baku and its oilfields and experts coming from all over the world. Sorge spoke Russian and German. He’s a spy , so it’s a complex identity, but I think of him as mostly German. He certainly didn’t have to serve the cause or go back to Russia or the Soviet Union, or to think in patriotic terms. He could, but he didn’t have to do it. The big controversy about him is his spying for the Soviets in Japan and informing the Soviet authorities that Japan would not attack in 1941. This allegedly allowed Stalin to move divisions from the Far East and save Moscow. So it’s a big thing, but there is a lot of mythology. The question is whether anyone really paid any attention to what he reported, as the Soviets had other sources of information. He was right, and others were right about the Japanese invasion. That brings us to the saga of the American invasion of Iraq and questions about how the authorities treat intelligence; what you do with that intelligence and the mythology associated with it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The author, Owen Matthews, deals with the biography of Sorge in ways others haven’t. He goes to the sources; he goes to the archives. It’s a contribution in that sense. But it’s also one of the first books—along with Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor —in the genre of serious research but popularly written biographies of Russian spies. The majority of what is written about them is written in Russia, and now with Putin in power for close to 20 years, this is a very popular genre. It presents the Soviet intelligence agents as heroes. Owen Matthews’s work is much more balanced. It has bigger questions, about the character of the person, about the political landscape, about the choices that he made, about the state using intelligence but ignoring the information that came from it. That’s the kind of approach you don’t find in 99.9% of the books about the Soviet spies. In that sense, it’s an important book. The Oleg Gordievsky book by Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor , is maybe the first one of that kind, but it’s different because he couldn’t go to the KGB archives and ask for the documents. He had access to the person, who is alive and was prepared to talk. That’s a different angle. The books are maybe broadly in the same box, but they are also very different."

"In terms of books, this is Paul D’Anieri’s first one that deals with Ukraine-Russia relations. Before that, he studied the internal processes in Ukraine and to a degree in Russia—and that’s what he brings to the table. This book is more than just international relations theory or diplomatic history; Paul D’Anieri actually knows a lot about both countries. He starts in the late the 1980s and goes up to when the book was published in 2019, so when the war had already started, and the first stage of the war had passed. His argument is basically twofold. Firstly, that the roots of this story are in the history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and how it fell apart. He stresses the importance of Ukraine in that process, something I was just talking about. “What we see is the process of disintegration of one of the last world empires” His other big argument is that the war became almost inevitable because of a different political track chosen by Ukraine and Russia, in particular the issue of nation-building and the creation and consolidation of state in Ukraine. Ukraine becomes a democratic state; Russia moves in an authoritarian direction. This automatically puts Russia’s relations with Europe in a difficult position and issues of security become very important. He is very good at documenting and providing a chronology of how matters of security have affected Russian-Ukrainian relations since the 1990s, into the 2000s and the arrival of Putin and after. He gives a good explanation of the war and its background, not looking for some sensationalist explanations or looking at the personalities, but at the structural reasons. He is a political scientist, and the book is very well organized and well written. It explains a lot about the two countries and their political development, the choices that were made in both cases, and how those choices eventually led to this clash, the current confrontation. Yes, indeed—and he really brings this point home."

"Exactly. It’s part of an Oxford University Press series, ‘ What Everyone (supposedly) Needs to Know .’ The first edition appeared in 2015 and was called The Conflict in Ukraine . It was done almost like a catechism: he collected all these questions that were out there and explained what they meant. The book was exceptionally important given that the war that began in Ukraine and still goes on is a hybrid one: it includes disinformation, false narratives, false flag operations, and so on and so forth. The book did a very good job of explaining whatever claims there were in the media. Was the Ukrainian Maidan protest fascist? What was happening with Crimea? What is the attitude of the population of Donbas? This is a revised and new edition, which also, according to the title, is a broader book. If people are interested in the subject, that’s where I suggest they start. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His argument in explaining the war goes against the Kremlin’s narrative. In the media, one can read that Ukraine is in a civil war, that the country is divided between east and west, and these people speak Russian, and these people speak Ukrainian. He argues that this is not an issue. Yes, the languages are different, but Ukrainians have mobilized across linguistic lines. A good many of the soldiers who are fighting today on the front speak Russian. The Russian language doesn’t automatically mean Russian identity and loyalty to Russia. In the 2020 edition, he brings in more recent developments, including the Trump impeachment trial, Paul Manafort and the claims about Ukrainian interference in the American elections. It’s a book that deals with all these issues and arguments that have appeared in the media since the start of the war. The book is for a broad audience. He recently advertised the new edition saying, ‘the book is out there. It is not for my Facebook friends because you probably know all of it, but please recommend it to your friends.’ It’s an ABC of the current conflict and the war, written by a very good historian."

"At the start of the war, Russia violated a lot of treaties. One of the key ones was the Budapest Memorandum, signed in December 1994 with the United States, United Kingdom, Russia and Ukraine. There were also separate agreements that were signed with Kazakhstan and with Belarus. According to the agreements, these republics gave up the nuclear arsenals that they had inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for, not guarantees, but ‘assurances’ by the three other powers of their sovereignty, the inviolability of their borders and so on. In 2014, Russia, one of the countries that gave those assurances—and to whom Ukraine transferred its nuclear arsenal—violated its territorial integrity and occupied Crimea. It is in that context that Kostenko writes this book, which is half memoir, half based on all the documents that he accumulated. It’s a really, really interesting story, almost unknown in the West. Ukraine was very reluctant to give up its nuclear arsenal, over which it had physical, but not operational control. Kazakhstan and Belarus were much more agreeable. Once again, Ukraine was a troublemaker, if you look at it from a Russian perspective. But everybody took the position that it was a good thing, a great success of denuclearization. “It was a miracle there was no major war or bloodshed” Kostenko provides a different perspective. It’s the first work in English with so much detail that goes against the mainstream, Western interpretation of that story. His argument is not that Ukraine should have kept nuclear weapons, but that Ukrainians were forced to give them up without getting proper guarantees of the country’s independence or adequate financial compensation. Nuclear weapons were Ukraine’s security, and they gave it up because the US and Russia were working together. This is a perspective that has received very little attention in the West and it is especially interesting because it comes from the mouth of someone who was right there, in the middle of the denuclearization process. You could also say, ‘Thank God the war now is not nuclear—because it could have been, if there had been no Budapest Memorandum.’ But one way or another, our understanding of the Budapest Memorandum and what is happening today is absolutely incomplete without this very important book. No, and that wasn’t his position in the 1990s. He was involved as Minister of Environmental Protection and Nuclear Safety; he also dealt with Chernobyl . What he is saying is that Ukraine was cheated out of its nukes. The price was wrong. The price should have been either membership in NATO or something else that was actually meaningful—that would save Ukraine from Russian aggression. What has happened to Ukraine since it was disarmed has and will have a negative impact on the global story of denuclearization. Countries are going to think twice next time someone comes along proposing to give them a piece of paper in exchange for their nuclear weapons. It’s a huge disincentive to denuclearize. That’s the global importance of this story, beyond just the current crisis."

"Yes, in Ukraine he is probably the leading novelist; outside of Ukraine, I think Andrey Kurkov is better known. Both Kurkov and Zhadan wrote on this current war. Andrey Kurkov’s book is Grey Bees . I didn’t include it because I want to read it, but I haven’t yet. The Orphanage is an extremely interesting book. Serhiy Zhadan comes from Eastern Ukraine and during Maidan was taking part in the clashes in the second-largest Ukrainian city, Kharkiv, which is now under the threat of possible attack. He is a multi-talented person: he has his own band and sings, he writes novels and poems, he draws. To me, it’s a brave book because it’s talking about the things that one was not supposed to talk about during the war. The war says, ‘This is us, and we are in the right. We’re the heroes, and the other guys are everything that is the opposite of that.’ And certainly we are Ukrainians, Ukrainian patriots. But in the novel he writes about a guy, Pasha, who has this post-Soviet identity. He is ethnically Ukrainian but is not really Ukrainian or Russian. Exclusive identity is not his. That’s very much the story of the Donbas, which is now outside of Ukrainian control, and many parts of Eastern Ukraine as well. The national identities are not really formulated. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Pasha is a teacher and is not taking sides in the conflict, in the war. But he has a nephew who happens to be on the other side of the dividing line, in the area controlled by separatists. He feels he has to go and get the nephew and bring him back to the family. In the process of travelling there and travelling back, he realizes where his home is. That is also a big, important thing: the war shapes Ukraine and Ukrainian identity. It leads to attachment to a nation that maybe wasn’t there before in those eastern parts of Ukraine. It’s a story of discovering where you belong, on which side of that divide. Again, I was saying that it was a brave book, because if you read about this guy, you sympathize with him. The novel is a kind of explanation of this blurred identity that is neither here nor there and which, of course, opens up all these possibilities for manipulation. The novel is also very well done. It reads well. It’s almost a photographic portrayal and presentation of this society where the war is taking place, without an attempt to somehow ideologically paint it one way or another, or pretend that it is not what it is not. In that sense, it is a very honest book as well. This is another part of the coping mechanism in Ukraine, that people just stopped listening or watching. It’s a form of denial, but it’s also a form of coping with the situation. Will Putin attack today or not? Or maybe tomorrow? A person can’t live like that for four or five or six months. Right now, in Ukraine, I understand there is no panic. Everything that is normally in the stores, is there. People are not stocking up on toilet paper, like we did when Covid came. Everything is in abundance. The only thing that is not there are hunting weapons and guns that people can buy. That’s the only thing there’s been a run on. It’s interesting, the way society reacts. For whatever reason, they’re not stocking up on anything except the weapons, which means they want to stay and resist. They want to be able to protect themselves. The point is to finish unfinished business from 2014. His goal is either to make Ukraine pro-Russian or dismember it. He didn’t succeed in 2014. He grabbed part of the Ukrainian territory but it mobilized the rest against Russia. In Ukraine, the number of people who want to join NATO went up by three times. Ukraine became closer to the West: conducting joint military exercises with NATO and so on and so forth. It’s the absolute opposite of what he wanted to achieve. So the plan now is to come back and threaten the Ukrainian government, to create internal crisis, to grab more territory—basically, the goals are the same. Yes, between 13 and 14,000. Also, in these kinds of wars, it’s not the military who are the most vulnerable, but the civil population. It’s the average citizens who suffer from the bombings and airstrikes the most."