Pain passed down: a portrait of Russia and the war that dare not speak its name
From our UK edition
Long before Asne Seierstad arrived at the bookseller’s house in Kabul, she studied in Moscow. ‘I tried to be one of them,’ she says, gently scathing of her young self. ‘In all earnest, I sought out the Russian soul.’ Decades spent writing about the post-Soviet world have stripped away her early romanticism. Her new book on Russia has an antihero as its central figure: Andrei Medvedev, a thief, alcoholic, hired thug and mercenary who fought in Ukraine then defected, escaping over the border to Norway. As she follows his story across Russia in 2023-24, encountering the full gamut of oligarchs, angels, monks and drunks, it’s Russians’ own self-image that often feels wilfully blind.
