«I understood very well that things were getting worse and worse, but, right up to the end, up until the invasion of Ukraine, I thought that something might still be changed, we might still win some freedom, despite the repression, so many people in prison, the weather was getting tougher. Then, on February 24 of last year, I clearly perceived that the last way out of this situation was now closed. At that point I realized that my family and I had to leave. I wanted my three children to grow up in an open world. I was born in 1969 and I remember well how closed the reality in which I grew up was».
On the eve of his arrival in our country to participate in the Libri Come festival at the Rome Auditorium – the meeting with readers will be today at 4 pm in the Sala Ospiti alongside Giorgio Zanchni -, Valerij Panjuškin answers from Riga the questions of the manifesto. From that tragic February 24, she understood that he wanted to try to stop Putin’s war on Ukraine, or at least tell with the tools of his job as a reporter the tragedy of which the civilian population of the invaded country is the victim. Even if the consequence would have been having to leave his own country, Russia.
Journalist, writer, radio author to whom we owe some of the most significant investigations that have arrived from Moscow in recent years – in Italy and / or has already published Putin’s Olympus e 12 who said no -, Panjuškin gives voice in The Hour of the Wolf (and/or, translation by Claudia Zonghetti, pp. 230, euro 18) to Ukrainian refugees and their stories of pain, suffering, resistance, at the same time highlighting how many, even in Russia, have tried to lend them a hand.
There’s Alla who worked as a scientist in Kharkiv and until the end didn’t believe that the Russians were really coming, there’s Vladimir who sells shutters in Odessa and on February 24, regardless of the danger, he goes out to go to a business appointment . And there’s Viktoria who on the day of the invasion is in a hospital in Kiev next to her fifteen-year-old daughter who has to undergo a delicate surgery. Figures we meet, know in their normality and then follow in a desperate attempt to survive and bring their loved ones to safety following the arrival of Russian soldiers.
This, while in Moscow a thick pall of propaganda spread over everything, making it impossible even in the family to speak freely, evaluate what was really happening, to the point that “the Russian language has become the language of lies: in Russia it is forbidden to say the truth and not even war can be called by its name”.
The book was born out of an urgency, almost out of a necessity: when did you decide to collect the stories of these refugees?
From the beginning of the invasion I felt terrible, I mightn’t believe what was happening. I have many friends in Ukraine and both my first wife and my current wife are Ukrainian, so it seemed impossible to me. So I started calling the editorial offices of the newspapers I worked for in the past to find out if I might be sent to Ukraine as an envoy. But they replied that I’m too old to be on the front lines, where you have to run, snap when something happens. Yet I felt that I might not watch all this passively: I had to do something to stop this war. Or at least to tell what happened. Thus, speaking with a journalist friend who now works for the Kiev government, a Ukrainian of Afghan origin, Mustafa Nayyem, I understood that I might make a contribution by telling the stories of those who had had to leave everything and flee.
How did you come into contact with the people whose stories you tell and, although they are all heartbreaking, is there one story that particularly struck you?
Ironically it was quite easy. Meanwhile, I was reading what many of these people were saying on social media and I contacted them in the same way. Then I met those who were arriving in refugee camps on Russian territory. At least for the first few weeks, it was easy enough to enter these camps and talk to those who had been forced to flee the Ukraine. Today it would be impossible because the intelligence has taken control of the centers and would never let a journalist approach them. As for the story that struck me the most, I have no doubts: it is that of the child from Mariupol. While the column of cars is leaving the city, we realize that a five-year-old boy is missing, but they have decided not to stop, because it is too dangerous. He was frightened and went to hide among the ruins of a bombed-out house, so when they set out they mightn’t find him anymore.
In a reception center in the Czech Republic Alla meets a woman who has been on the run since 1994 when she left Chechnya. Is what is happening in Ukraine the last chapter of a story that for Russia has opened up in the Caucasus?
I fear it may not be the last chapter. And I think this story didn’t start with the war in Chechnya, but much earlier, in Afghanistan and, going even further back in time, in Prague and Budapest when the Russian tanks arrived. Even today I cannot explain why Russia intervened in Afghanistan. As for the Chechen wars, during the first I was still a student, at that time I was studying in Florence, while the second one I remember well and yes, it looks a lot like the one being fought in Ukraine. Basically I believe that for Russia it is always the same reason, especially since the 1990s, following the end of the USSR, there has been a desire to somehow reaffirm the lost greatness of the country. I and many other Russians don’t give a damn regarding any of this, but the military, for example, has always talked regarding nothing else.
More than twenty years following he came to power and following all the wars and repression he imposed on the Russians, what is responsible for the consensus Putin still enjoys?
I don’t know why and I can’t tell you the deeper reasons, but for many Russians it is almost impossible to feel independent, to perceive themselves first and foremost as individuals. They need to feel that they are part of something bigger, more important. I think of my father, who I talk regarding in the book. He needs to express his trust in something that he considers relevant, meaningful. He doesn’t want to feel different or just an individual with his own particular path. Russia is huge, from Moscow to Vladivostok it takes eight hours by plane, but there is only one language, there are no dialects and the same can almost be said for the cuisine, apart from the fact that there are no regional dishes in the Caucasus or Tatarstan , when in Italy it is enough to travel one hundred kilometers and everything changes. Let’s say that Russians don’t know how to live together being different: to live together we must be at least in many respects the same. Thus, Ukrainians who are different implicitly also become enemies. I think all of this is a legacy of the Gulag era when people and communities were forcibly displaced or forced to give up any specificity.
She tells of how the war has also divided affections in Russia, starting with what happened between her and her father. How deep is this division?
I can’t say what those who live in small towns or in the countryside think, but in Moscow this division is palpable, it runs through families, affections, every bond. Here now there is a new way of saying that illustrates the situation well: “I called my mother, but I spoke to the TV”. And it really is. I talk to my father and he replies with propaganda words, as if he didn’t even recognize me. And this is not an isolated case.
Alongside the account of the pain and losses that the Russian invasion has inflicted on the Ukrainian population, you describe many examples of individual, spontaneous, but also organized solidarity towards the refugees who have registered, and sometimes even in Russia, at least at the beginning Of the war.
I think it all has to do with what I said at the beginning: these are people who felt, as I felt too, that they had to do something because the very idea of this war was unbearable. For this reason, many forms of solidarity started immediately: there are those who welcomed the refugees, those who hosted them, those who bought them tickets to reach the destinations they had chosen, for example the Baltic countries. For normal people, doing all this, concretely expressing this solidarity was the only way to survive in the midst of a society, the Russian one which instead seems to have gone completely mad. Sure, it’s not as dangerous as fighting alongside the Ukrainians, but at least it doesn’t make you feel like shit.
He left Moscow when he realized that this book might not be published in his country. Now how do you see the future of Russia?
I believe that Putin will lose the war in Ukraine and that once that happens Russia may be heading towards a season of civil war. In the country there already exists a private army, Prigozhin’s Wagner, and a local one, Kadyrov’s Chechen army, and following the defeat many in Russia understand that the idea of reviving the USSR doesn’t work, similar forces will multiply. we will see the appearance of Gazprom’s army and that of Rosneft: all once morest all and in addition some of the contenders will be able to have atomic weapons. A real disaster that I can’t even imagine. But it is certain that as long as Putin and his regime remain, I will not return to my country.