The Russia That Was: Author Ksenia Buksha on Leaving Russia
“The Russia That Was” by Ksenia Buksha
Translated by Anne O. Fisher.
Translator’s note: Russian writer Ksenia Buksha sent me this piece in late March 2022, after she left Russia with her four children. My translation wasn’t ready until late April. When I asked about publishing it after such a long delay, Ksenia replied that “after Bucha and Mariupol, thinking about all of this (Russians, their role, their feelings, other unnecessary stuff) has become pretty much totally inappropriate”. Although I see her point, I also feel that her piece, written as a response to a war that was then just in its first month, is worth reading.
In 2008, the satirist Leo Kaganov wrote a poem about corruption that started like this:
For years, we all, from young to old,
quit everything to sit, deaf and dumb,
beneath the bastards, just in case
their dirty dealings left us crumbs.
The top brass shoveled in the cash;
lieutenants lined their pockets with bills;
and the rest of us, the little guys,
grabbed whatever the big boys spilled.
That nails it. But to elaborate: Russia is one gigantic income disparity. A disparity so big you almost can’t wrap your head around it. Our modest bonuses are nothing compared to the mind-boggling scale of theft going on (a 75-billion-ruble yacht!!). Still… but really, how were we supposed to not grab the crumbs?
Take me, for instance: a modest resident of Russia, with no connections to power or privilege, a person of almost libertarian convictions. Yes, I lived under Putinism. And yes, I “did okay.” A single parent of three, then four children, I was able to provide for them all just fine while working from home. Writing. Not literature, of course; our author’s fees are pathetic. (For example, you write a novel and get 500 euros for it.) Things like non-fiction ghost-writing, landing pages, interviews, and so on. I write a lot, and fast, and I made “a good Moscow salary.” Without having to go into an office. The Perekrestok grocery store delivered groceries for free. I didn’t think about how much food cost! My apartment always had heat. It didn’t have meters for water or heat. Nobody cares about saving on energy costs in Russia. Natural gas cost kopeks. I didn’t have to think about utilities at all. For summer vacation we’d go on car trips to Europe, staying at campsites and sleeping in a tent. A family with a lot of kids and just one adult, but we did okay. When the kids needed a doctor, I took them to a private clinic. My older son went for free to an excellent public school. My youngest daughter went for free to a public music school. My adopted daughter D. went to a school that wasn’t free, but it wasn’t expensive (120 euros a month), a back-to-basics school that didn’t follow a structured system of classes and lessons, where the teachers talked to her one-on-one to explain the material. So yes, I did really well; and I did it without any special privileges, all by myself, using my own brain to earn this reasonable amount of money; but I still somehow knew, with utmost clarity, that I was doing something bad. What was it? What was bad about it? Nothing concrete, maybe, but something metaphysical; maybe just my participation. Just my being there.
Or take, say, the M11 highway from Petersburg to Moscow. Every time I took it I couldn’t help but think of the Khimki Forest that was destroyed to build it, or the human rights activist Mikhail Beketov who was beaten half to death for protesting it, beaten so badly he couldn’t walk for years afterward, and then he died. And still I drove on it, at a hundred and eighty or two hundred kilometers an hour, glad to be saving the money on train tickets. I had a choice: take the high-speed Sapsan train (where the four tickets to Moscow for me and my kids cost at least ten thousand rubles) or pay for gas. The gas was cheaper.
What’s interesting is that I had Putin’s number. I understood who and what he was, always. As soon as he cropped up. Earlier, even—after the incident in 1999 when that “Ryazan sugar” blew up in Moscow apartment buildings. I had no illusions about him, not for a second. He was scary back then, too, but at first he was sort of hesitantly or furtively scary. I remember a protest in 2001 where we handed out free speech coupons. We had written words on each coupon: “Putin,” “Chechnya,” “bribes,” “governor,” and so forth. I’ve been going to protests for all these twenty years, including the ones that happened on the 31st days of the month (to defend Article 31 on the freedom of peaceful assembly) and including the massive white-ribbon marches of 2011-2012 when rivers of people flowed from Nevsky Prospect to the Field of Mars. I posted anti-United Russia flyers in the metro, parodies of the party’s logo that had a rat instead of a bear. In 2018, when protesting got more expensive (higher fines; more and longer detainments), I went out at night and spray-painted “Puck Futin” on the walls of buildings. For me, protests were both a form of collaborative coexistence and an attempt to have my say, to vote in the only available way. My friends sat at voting locations as observers, trying to prevent the ballot-stuffing and carousel voting. A few of them tried to get on the municipal ballots themselves so they could change something. But what could you change, and how could you change it, in a country that had never gone through lustration, a country where people affiliated with the government had already grabbed all the big money? A third of Russia, or half of it, or more, felt like it didn’t belong in its own home.
When the “scoundrels’ law” banning foreigners from adopting Russian children was passed in December 2012, something inside me clicked. I had been thinking for a long time about adopting, and so nine-year-old D. legally became my daughter. (I dismissed the idea of fostering: that compensated option would’ve meant depending on the state in yet another way.) My friends adopted several children. Some mothers I know chose children who were invalids, who were in wheelchairs, who had severe diagnoses—and this in Russia, where we have neither accessibility for the disabled, nor an adequate system of developmental support. They chose these children at their own peril, knowing that neither state nor society would offer any help.
Last year it got—let’s just say it got way more interesting to go to protests. One time I ran away from OMON riot police with my newborn in a chest sling. People told me, “That’s too much, child protection can say you’re not providing a safe environment for your child.” But it’s not like I’m some kind of super-activist. I’m just a regular conscientious citizen. There are lots of people like me. Almost every conscientious citizen in Russia has been fined, or seen the inside of a police van, or gotten roughed up while being detained. I know people who have seen much more than that, people who have been persecuted and tortured. And so here we are now, in March of 2022, when people at anti-war protests are being picked up for a blank sheet of paper, or for a sign that has asterisks instead of letters. The laser focus on euphemism is interesting: the right number of asterisks, or even just a blank piece of paper, is all it takes. Everything can be a euphemism. Absolutely everything. Like in a delusion: all anything does is signify. Everything screams at you about that one thing. It’s not that the words are actually saying it, it’s that everything turns into it. This always happens in Russia at critical moments.
How did we end up creating a Russia that was almost autonomous from “all that”? “A good liberal school, there’s no portrait of him hanging in the principal’s office”; “A pediatrician who doesn’t prescribe Arbidol”; “We don’t have a TV at home.” And that’s what’s precious: a community of help, a group of people who send each other money to fill the institutional vacuum. Kids and adults aren’t getting treated; difficult teenagers aren’t getting support; but we will give them what they need. We find one hole here, another hole there, and we make our own paths around and through. Our Alternative Russia gradually started finding a place for itself and attracting more and more people, but everything we were building was on sand, without the foundation or the approval of official Russia; we all had, and have, the status of people who are foreign to that foundation, who are hostile to it, a fifth column, traitors to the country. But we continued what we were doing, because you have to build something. Now this foundation is collapsing, thank goodness, but our jury-rigged constructions are going down with it. Russia had too many levels, it was too unsteady, too overheated, in too many different ways. Right now I’m talking not about the financial stuff, or rather, not only about it, but about the meanings and modes of living, about habits, hopes, agendas. We were doing very important things, but ones that can’t grow without a foundation. We couldn’t use the extant foundation and there wasn’t any other.
I’m one of those neighborhood weirdos who saw the war coming. I was always telling my kids that one country can’t have it both ways, can’t have cappuccino and coworking spaces and hipster barbershops alongside state psychological clinics with rusty wire-spring beds. It’s a monstrous disproportion in taste, meaning, and sensibility. Although I knew the descent would be harsh (no way around it), I’d been hoping it would be tolerable. But no. Everything’s coming down at breakneck speed and with great destruction. Because blood’s being spilled, and the more blood is spilled, the faster Russia will fall. Can this really be what we’re collectively responsible for? Maybe we did something wrong in making our own separate paths? But what should we have done instead? Demand everything all at once? Demand it from who? How?
Where I lived in Petersburg the sirens went off a lot. First there’d be a quiet warning: “Attention. Attention. This is a test of the electronic public warning system.” Then they’d start blaring. They also went off for anniversaries of the Blockade (the beginning, the breach, the end). The sirens had an exceptionally strong effect on me. Whenever I heard the sound, I felt a surge of high-power hate for what was in store. The howling reminded me that sooner or later that son of a bitch was going to set off a war, it was just a matter of time. And he did.
On February twenty-second, the day after that crazy speech from the patient of the Russian Federation*, I went to the bank and closed out all my accounts. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, as the news announced the beginning of the war, a friend of mine called and asked whether she should buy euros. I told her she should sell rubles. “But what at what exchange rate?” “At any rate you can get.” In the morning I stood in lines; in the evening I went to anti-war demonstrations. At the same time, almost immediately, I ordered an expedited foreign travel passport for my youngest daughter (she didn’t have one yet because we hadn’t gone anywhere during Covid) and bought tickets to Yerevan.
My departure was a privilege: it’s what people did who both wanted to leave and could. The people who stayed either couldn’t leave, or hoped to keep on doing whatever they were doing in Russia. I think the people who chose to stay are brave, but that doesn’t mean that we, the ones who left, are cowards. It’s just that everybody has a different situation, different possibilities.
Many Russians from Alternative Russia are now worried that nobody will want what we’ve been doing anymore – our medical work, our educational work, our cultural initiatives. We’re even more worried about the sick children and adults who could die in Russia due to a shortage of medicine (obviously the guilty party here isn’t the sanctions, but the person because of whom the sanctions were imposed). And these worries are meaningful and understandable. But first Russia needs to stop the war and quit killing people in Ukraine. It has to happen in that order. For a long time we did the right things in the wrong order. But we can’t do that anymore.
March 23, 2022
Yerevan, Armenia
* In 2020, Putin famously avoided saying the name Aleksey Navalny, instead calling him “the patient of a Berlin clinic.”
Poet and fiction writer Ksenia Buksha was born in Leningrad in 1983. Trained as an economist, she has worked as a business journalist, copywriter, and day trader. In 2014, when she was just 31 years old, her novel Zavod “Svoboda” (The Freedom Factory) won Russia’s National Bestseller prize; she was the youngest woman ever to win. To date, she is the youngest writer ever to have been shortlisted for Russia’s Big Book prize, and one of only two writers—and the only woman—ever to be shortlisted for the Big Book twice before the age of 40. Ksenia Buksha left Russia with her four children after Russian forces invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Anne O. Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Read more here.