Oleg Kashin: Fardwor, Russia!

THEY FLEW TO MOSCOW early the next morning; Marina slept, and Karpov looked back and forth, first at her, then at the clouds, and smiled. During those days spent locked up, he discovered that he could see into the future, and he knew everything now:

Becky would stay in London; she would marry some Hindu and stop dreaming about headlines.

The project for the accelerated growth of the modernizational majority would be recognized as a mistake and would lead to some high-profile resignations in the Presidential administration and in the United Russia political party.

As a result of those resignations, at least two bright and shining new leaders would appear among the ranks of the nonsystemic opposition who, however, would also fail to increase the political influence of oppositional organizations in any fundamental manner.

The Federal Target Program “A Well-Fed Russia” would ultimately become a huge corporate scandal, as a result of which just one person will end up behind bars, the corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Elena Nikolaevna Gorskaya, who, however, would be amnestied quickly thereafter in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Great Victory.

The big children to whom Close to Zero had given his lectures would never be seen again, and the assisted living facility Soyuz would again open its welcoming doors to the laborers of the oil and gas industry for whom, in fact, it had been built.

Nadya Chernenko, even before that, within a week, would end up in a mental asylum and really would lose her mind, but in that order—first, she’d get there, then she’d lose it.

Kirill Magomedov would unexpectedly agree to head up the Olympstroi Corporation, even though he knew it to be an unfavorable proposition for him, and would lead it for a record amount of time—up until the 2014 Olympics.

The Olympics will take place in Korea—the International Olympic Committee would review its own decision due to the worsening situation in the region of the Russian–Georgian conflict.

During the time that the situation would be worsening again in the region of the Russian-Georgian conflict, the newspapers would write about a strange occurrence in the Georgian city of Gori—how soldiers who had gone astray from the Russian contingent attacked a toy store, brutally murdering a salesgirl and a security guard and, returning fire, retreated to the separation line, but then it would turn out that nothing had been stolen from the store but a stuffed Kopatych doll.

A modernizational majority would form all by itself, and would vote in the 2012 elections for that national leader of the two whom the leaders themselves would pick in a simple game of drawing matchsticks.

And that no one would ever remember any of this.

When the plane touched the ground, the passengers applauded and Marina woke up. At this airport, instead of ramps they used telescopic tubes with ads for Sberbank with a new logo—Marina saw it for the first time and, stopping, tried to think of how it was different than the old one.

“Hey what’s with you, go on,” Karpov lightly pushed her in the back. “Go on,” he repeated. “We’ve arrived.”

Marina turned and kissed her husband, and the scum of stagnation closed in over their heads.

Born in 1980 in Kaliningrad, Russia, OLEG KASHIN is one of Russia’s most famous journalists and political commentators. A former navigator in the Russian Navy and current opponent of Putin, he was severely beaten nearly to death by assailants connected to the Russian government in November 2010, two months after he submitted Fardwor, Russia! to his publisher and two months before it went to print. In 2012 he received the Paul Klebnikov Fund Journalism Fellowship, which supports a period of professional development in New York City. Kashin is widely published in the U.S.; he regularly writes for The New Republic in English and has also written for The New York Times . He has been profiled in Foreign Policy and Open Democracy , among other English-language outlets. Fardwor, Russia! is his first work of fiction. He now lives in Switzerland.

MAX SEDDON is a correspondent for BuzzFeed News. He has reported widely in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union.

WILL EVANS is the executive director and publisher of Deep Vellum Publishing, a not-for-profit literary publisher of translated books based in Dallas, Texas.

Copyright © 2010 Oleg Kashin

Introduction copyright © 2015 Max Seddon

Translation copyright © 2012 Will Evans

First published in Russian as Roissya Vperde: Fantasticheskaya Povest by Ad Marginem, Moscow, 2010

This edition published by Restless Books, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-63206-027-3

Cover design by Rodrigo Corral

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/europe/09russia.html

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/5413

https://www.rt.com/politics/medvedev-wants-heads-torn/

https://www.facebook.com/eduard.limonov/posts/377419295711741

http://kashin.guru/2015/09/07/tri-milliona-trista-ty-syach-rublej/

http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2805047

http://web.archive.org/web/20100820130424/, http://kashin.livejournal.com/2795518.html?thread=20870654

Global Voices translated Kashin’s letter into English: https://globalvoices.org/2015/10/04/a-letter-to-the-rulers-of-russia-from-oleg-kashin/

https://twitter.com/kshn/status/104576971538841601

http://www.gq.ru/magazine/featured/54702_kak_sorokin_predskazyvaet_budushchee_rossii.php