When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs.
Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German organisation set up to give fallen soldiers marked graves. His job is to exhume and rebury the remains of those killed near Pskov in the second world war. In the 1980s, as a young man, Sergei volunteered to fight in Afghanistan. Now that Russia is at war again, his support for the invasion comes as no surprise: ‘We beat them in the past, we are beating them now and will beat them in the future.’ He is referring to the tanks supplied by Germany to Ukraine, but it’s easy to imagine ‘them’ being extended to the rest of the world.
Another chapter sketches the history of the flax industry, once thriving, now extinct. Its workers relied on the state until the end. It came in the early 1990s, when ‘shock therapy’, a measure expected to help Russia transition from a planned to a market economy, brought ‘immense human suffering in the form of hyperinflation, unpaid salaries, job losses and uncertainty’.
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