Sankya

FOREWORD

FOREWORD

I didn’t read Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya until later, when those who Prilepin writes about were released from Russian prisons and those whose arrival he foretells were jailed.

In the Russian literary tradition, the “foresight of the writer” is very important, and Prilepin’s foresight would make Tolstoy and Dostoevsky burn with envy.

Consider the story of the “Primorsky Partisans”, a group of young people from a small town in the Far East who waged a real war against the government and could only be put down by a large-scale military operation. It is hard to believe that Prilepin’s book — this book — foretold such events with such precision.

Prilepin has not merely turned inside out the consciousness of the entire post-Perestroika generation of politicized young Russians and laid it bare, but he also, in large part, predicted the patterns of development of radical political groups and the government’s strategy in combatting them.

This very post-Perestroika generation will play a huge role in the history of Russia, not least because there are so many of them — this is the last wave of the Soviet “baby boom”, and following on its heels is a demographic abyss. And it is very important that they be understood — easier said than done even for those of us whose native language is Russian.

Prilepin’s works provide innumerable insights on this count. Probably only a provincial writer with such an insane biography (a former special forces police officer who served in the Russian military in the rebellious Chechen Republic and who became one of the leaders and instigators of a banned radical political party and, at the same time, one of the most famous and successful authors in the country today) could understand what’s going on in the minds of people stuck between eras. They do not remember the Soviet Union and the planned economy, nor do they see capitalism as offering equal opportunities for all. For them, capitalism means the former head of the local party organisation is today the city’s chief entrepreneur and the richest man in town.

Even in Moscow, the Russian political process — with its so-called systemic opposition and its Putin-approved lawful methods of political competition — is perceived as total hypocrisy and political prostitution, but in the regions described in Sankya it manifests itself as an unbearable daily existence preventing anyone with even a modicum of human dignity from becoming involved.

There have been several attempts to turn the novel into a movie, but every time the government successfully foils these attempts by banning the film’s financing. Thugs, a brilliant play by Kirill Serebrennikov based on Sankya, has faithfully conveyed the spirit of the book, enjoyed huge public success, and been awarded the Golden Mask Russian theatre prize of 2012. The tickets aren’t easy to get, and it is quite amusing to watch the standing ovations the performance receives from representatives of the Moscow establishment, who should — one would expect — be squirming in their seats, threatened by the action unfolding on stage, by the unnerving predictions of the book, and by the cheering audience, clearly sympathetic to the perishing young revolutionaries.

For me personally, Zakhar Prilepin is not just a biographer of Russia but also an active politician with influence over the hearts and minds of young Russians. In fact, he and I got to know each other while starting a political movement together — and I can assure you that this guy really knows what he is talking about. If you want to feel the real raw nerve of modern Russian life, what you need isn’t Anna Karenina — what you need is Sankya.

Alexey Navalny

Moscow, September 2013