Oleg Kashin: Fardwor, Russia!

you can just about see the metal rod the first man is holding, hidden in a bouquet of flowers, on the surveillance tape as he follows Oleg Kashin near the writer’s home in Moscow. As Kashin approaches a gate, a second man appears, and the two proceed to beat him violently for a solid sixty seconds. The flowers fly off, exposing the metal rod. There’s no sound in the grainy black-and-white footage of Kashin’s attack, just an image of him writhing on the ground, trying to roll away from his pursuers and shield himself with his hands, then crawling unsteadily forward after the men leave him, alone in the dark, and tumbling onto the pavement.

The attempt on Kashin’s life on November 6, 2010 was unmistakably provoked by his work at Kommersant , then Russia’s top daily newspaper; symbolically, the two men worked over his hands, as if to ensure he couldn’t write anymore. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/europe/09russia.html Kashin lost the tip of his left pinky finger in the attack and spent several days in a coma with a concussion, multiple fractures, and a broken jaw. It was only the latest of dozens of attacks on journalists in Russia over the past few decades, an act that has become all too commonplace—as has the inevitable cover-up. Intrepid reporters anger government officials by exposing wrongdoing, and those same officials then order the assaults and manipulate the justice system they control to avoid punishment.

At the time, Russia was undergoing a period of restrained optimism. Dmitry Medvedev, then playing presidential understudy to Vladimir Putin, had pledged to improve the rule of law and ease political constraints. In an essay titled “Forward, Russia!” published in September 2009, Medvedev criticized the “chronic corruption” and “primitive economy” plaguing modern Russia, a state that “unfortunately combines all the shortcomings of the Soviet system with all the difficulties of contemporary life.” [2] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/5413 The solutions he proposed went little beyond vague calls for “modernization” and an end to a “quasi-Soviet social contract,” but they encouraged many liberal-minded Russians, even if they weren’t entirely sure Medvedev was the one really calling the shots. Kashin’s beating was a test for Medvedev. He condemned the attacks and demanded the arrest of the assailants; later, he told Kashin he “wanted their heads torn off.” [3] https://www.rt.com/politics/medvedev-wants-heads-torn/

For five years, nothing happened. Investigators made no arrests. No leads on the identity of the men behind the hit came through. Medvedev meekly stepped aside to let Putin return as president in 2011, prompting massive protests that Kashin helped organize. Lawmakers in the rubber-stamp parliament busily set about rolling back Medvedev’s legacy, in some cases only months after having voted for parts of it. The glimmer of hope that had accompanied his presidency— Dozhd , a liberal news network founded during his tenure, even called itself the “optimistic channel”—flickered out as Putin cracked down on dissent, muzzled the media, ramped up nationalist sentiment, and started a war in Ukraine. As it swung firmly behind Putin, Kommersant forced Kashin out; he largely abandoned reporting in order to focus on opinion pieces, and moved to Switzerland, where his wife had found a job. Eduard Limonov, a legendary novelist who leads a neo-fascist opposition party, told Kashin that he and liberal Russians like him were “pale losers [with] misery written all over their faces […] eternally doomed to defeat.” [4] https://www.facebook.com/eduard.limonov/posts/377419295711741

Then, on September 7, 2015, Kashin wrote a post titled “Three million and three hundred thousand rubles” (about fifty thousand dollars at today’s exchange rate, but double that in 2010) on his website, kashin.guru. [5] http://kashin.guru/2015/09/07/tri-milliona-trista-ty-syach-rublej/ “I’ve known for a long time that I’d write this piece one day,” he said in the post. “I just needed two names—three if you count the driver. Now I know the names.” The men who beat him were Daniil Veselov and Vyacheslav Borisov, security guards at a factory in St. Petersburg. Another security guard, Mikhail Kavtaskin, had driven them there. All three were arrested. Investigators suspected Alexander Gorbunov, their boss, had organized the hit. The factory where they worked belongs to Andrei Turchak, governor of the rustic Western province of Pskov. Kommersant , Kashin’s old paper, reported that investigators believed the attack was revenge for Kashin calling the governor “fucking Turchak” and telling him to “go suck a dick” in a blog comment. [6] http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2805047 Turchak, astonishingly, replied hours later: “Young man, you have twenty-four hours to apologize,” he commented. “The time has come.” [7] http://web.archive.org/web/20100820130424/ , http://kashin.livejournal.com/2795518.html?thread=20870654

It was an extraordinary twist to the case: a sitting governor had ordered a journalist beaten half to death for a throwaway insult on a blog. But soon, things unraveled in depressingly ordinary fashion. Investigators let Gorbunov out of jail and failed to file charges against him. Nobody so much as thought to interrogate Turchak. Kashin, furious, wrote an open letter to Putin and Medvedev, excoriating them for covering it up:

You’ve decided to side with your Governor Turchak; you’re protecting him and his gang of thugs and murderers. It would make sense for somebody like me—a victim of this gang—to be outraged about all this and tell you that it’s dishonest and unjust, but I understand that such words would only make you laugh. You have complete and absolute control over the adoption and implementation of laws in Russia, and yet you still live like criminals. Every time, it’s something above the law. Consider Inspector Sotskov, who’s been handed my case and is now dutifully tearing it apart. Busy rescuing Turchak and his partner Gorbunov, Sotskov put it elegantly when he said recently: There’s the law, but there’s also the man in charge, and the will of the boss is always stronger than any law. Put bluntly: he’s right and that’s reality. Your will in Russia is stronger than any law, and simply obeying the law is an impossible fantasy. [8] Global Voices translated Kashin’s letter into English: https://globalvoices.org/2015/10/04/a-letter-to-the-rulers-of-russia-from-oleg-kashin/

The scandal over Kashin’s case is ongoing as I write this, and not likely to be resolved by the time this essay is published—or, indeed, after that. Nor is it likely to offer us direct insight into Fardwor, Russia! , which Kashin completed two months before his beating. Reading his grotesque satire of contemporary Russian life while knowing about the grotesque violence, corruption, and bureaucratic obstruction in Kashin’s own, however, offers us a penetrating and unsettling picture of what Russia has become fifteen years into Putin’s rule: a place where, as Kashin puts it in the same open letter, “even obvious questions about good and evil have become impossible.”

Kashin’s novel holds a funhouse mirror to this era, and draws heavily from the topics he wrote about while at Kommersant . His style is conversational and almost completely unpolished. The effect, together with the numerous references to Russian politics, history, and high and low culture, is often like reading one of his myriad columns. A notorious graphomaniac, Kashin has been known to crank out as many as eight pieces in a week, all the while tweeting prolifically, lifting language from news articles without attribution so frequently that it can be difficult to tell what is in his own voice. (“IF I WRITE BULLSHIT, IT’S A QUOTATION,” he once explained. [9] https://twitter.com/kshn/status/104576971538841601 )