Sankya Read online

  SANKYA

  SANKYA

  ZAKHAR PRILEPIN

  Foreword by Alexey Navalny

  Translated by

  Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker

  with Alina Ryabovolova

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  www.disquietinternational.org

  SANKYA

  Sankya was first published in Russian in 2006 © Zakhar Prilepin Agreement by www.nibbe-wiedling.de.

  English Translation © Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker, 2014 Foreword © Alexey Navalny, 2014

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2014 by the DISQUIET imprint of Dzanc Books Design by Steven Seighman

  ISBN: 978-1-938604-51-5

  The publication of this book is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund’s Transcript program.

  Printed in the United States of America

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  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 organization 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 theater 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

  GLOSSARY

  Black Hundreds – A violent right-wing faction of ultranationalists that adamantly opposed the Russian Revolution of 1905 and shared anti-Semitic, monarchist, and Orthodox views.

  Brest Fortress – The site of a fierce World War II standoff between Red Army soldiers and German forces in Brest, Belarus.

  Caucasian – Refers to populations originating from the Southern Caucasus region.

  Collectivization – A Stalin-era policy whose goal was to convert and consolidate privately owned farms and plots of land into collective agricultural producers.

  Elektrichka (s.) / Elektrichki (pl.) – Local or regional trains that travel shorter distances than the national railroad. They are also ticketed differently: Whereas one must give one’s name and passport when buying railroad tickets, elektrichki may be ridden without creating a travel record.

  Federal Security Service (FSB) – The successor organizations to the USSR’s Committee of State Security (KGB).

  Kontora – Slang for the Federal Security Service.

  Muscovite – A resident of the city of Moscow.

  Muzhik – Directly translates as “peasant” but also serves as an endearing term among men.

  “New-well-forgotten-old” or “Everything new is the well forgotten old” – A common Russian proverb, which may refer to a moment in time when a particular up-and-coming new trend references a similar one from the past.

  OMON – A Russian special forces police unit generally dispatched in high-risk and crisis situations; particularly notorious for violently breaking protests.

  Sankya – An affectionate, diminutive pronunciation of the name Sasha (which in itself is a diminutive of Alexander). Likewise, Kolkya is a diminutive of Nikolai; Kostya of Konstantin; Lyosha of Alexey; Vaskya of Vasily; Venka of Venyamin; Vero-chka of Vera; etc.

  Tarring the gates – An old village tradition used to besmirch the honor of a woman.

  Verst – An antiquated Russian unit of measure, about 0.66 mile or 1.1 km.

  “Waste them in the toilet” or “Rub them out in the outhouse” – An expression famously used by then—Prime Minister of Russia (who would later become Russia’s president) Vladimir Putin during a press conference on terrorism in 1999.

  Zhiguli – A classic Soviet model of a car produced by Avto VAZ, the largest automobile manufacturer in Eastern Europe.

  SANKYA

  CHAPTER ONE

  They were denied the stage.

  Sasha looked down, his eyes tired of red flags and gray military coats.

  Red fluttered around them, brushing their faces, sometimes stirring the odor of musty fabric.

  Gray stood behind the barrier. All identical conscripts—short, grimy, weakly gripping billy clubs. The police had heavy faces, burgundy from annoyance. The indispensable officer glared defiantly at the crowd. His insolent hands on the top rung of the fence separating them, the guardians of the law and of the whole city, from the protestors.

  Around them stood some mustachioed lieutenant colonels, lavish bellies
under their military coats. And somewhere there should also be the most important and officious of them all, the full colonel.

  Sasha always tried to spot this one, the rally’s chief security officer. Sometimes he was a lean man with ascetic cheeks, squeamishly bossing around the porky lieutenant colonels. Sometimes he was like the lieutenant colonels, a bigger, heavier version yet at the same time more agile, more spry, with a smile on his face and good teeth. There was also a third type—absolutely tiny, mushroom-like, moving rapidly behind the rows of police on his quick little feet…

  Sasha hadn’t seen him yet, this full colonel, stars on his shoulders.

  A little farther away, behind the fencing, cars buzzed and squeaked, heavy metro doors clanged shut, dusty bums gathered bottles and surveyed their rims in a businesslike manner. A Caucasian man sipped lemonade and watched the protest from behind the backs of the policemen. Sasha accidentally met his eyes. The Caucasian man turned and walked away.

  Sasha noticed some buses bearing the coat of arms with a fanged beast. The curtains in the bus windows trembled. People were sitting in those buses, waiting for an opportunity to step out, to run out, clutching rubber mallets in tough fists, looking angrily for somebody to hit, and to hit them with flourish, to knock them down and knock them out.

  “You see this, yes?” Venka asked Sasha. Venka had not slept. He was hungover, his eyes swollen like overcooked dumplings.

  Sasha nodded.

  Their hope hadn’t panned out. The OMON unit was here.

  Venka smiled as if there weren’t a bunch of camouflaged demons awaiting their cue but rather a brigade of clowns handing out balloons.

  Sasha wandered into the crowd gathered behind the fence.

  Fenced them in like lepers…

  The fence was composed of two-meter sections along which the conscripts stood at equal intervals.

  Venka followed Sasha. Their crew gathered at the other end of the plaza, and they could already make out Yana’s voice as she lined up the formation of boys and girls.

  Sasha studied the unwell and poor as he brushed up against them. Almost all of them were deeply and irritatingly old.

  Some sort of despair showed in their demeanor, as if they had gathered their last reserves of strength to get here and now wished only to die. The portraits that they carried in their hands and clutched to their chests depicted their leaders as younger than most of the people here. The face of young Lenin, smiling softly, an enlarged photo familiar to Sasha from his first grammar book. Then the calm face of Lenin’s successor, held up by trembling elderly hands. The successor wore a military cap and the epaulettes of a generalissimo.

  Thin newspapers printed on gray paper were being handed out. Sasha outright refused, and Venka rebuffed merrily.

  The scene was a simple mixture of pity and anguish.

  Several hundred or maybe several thousand people gathered in this plaza two to three times a year, united in the unrealistic certainty that their presence would somehow expel a government they hated.

  In the years that had passed since the bourgeois takeover, the torchbearers became definitively old, and they didn’t scare anyone anymore.

  Then four years ago, Kostenko, a former officer and also, oddly, a philosopher, a wily and original thinker, led into the plaza a crowd of brazen and angry youths who didn’t exactly understand what they were doing among the red banners and elderly people.

  Within a few years, this group expanded and gained infamy for its brazen acts and noisy brawls.

  By now Kostenko’s party attracted so many motley youths that a metal fence was needed to contain today’s rally. So that none of them spilled out…

  Robust, sharp old men periodically surveyed Sasha and Venka with interest, hope, and skepticism.

  A representative of the patriotic house faction shuffled in place at the podium. Even from a distance, one could make out his smooth, pink face—the face of a person who ate well, a face that set him apart from all the other gray and anxious faces gathered nearby.

  The representative was wearing a black, expensively cut coat. He took off his sheepskin hat and stood before the people with his head uncovered. Someone from the valetry held this hat for him.

  Banners with clumsy messages hung along the stage. These would never motivate anyone toward decisive action.

  Sasha cringed as he read them.

  There was no time for them to present. They were denied the stage. Sasha, standing on the second-to-last step, looked up at the administrator. The administrator pretended to be distracted by other business.

  “Let’s go, guys, let’s go. Another time.”

  “What’s happening with Kostenko?”

  Sasha heard the deep, clear voice of the representative as he descended the stage. The representative had noticed Sasha’s red armband and posed this question to the administrator, who had already turned away, relieved.

  “He’s locked up.”

  There was a hint of malice in his voice that quickly disappeared when the representative shot back: “I know he’s locked up.”

  “They say he’s going to get fifteen years,” said the administrator. Now his voice belied slight regret for Kostenko’s fate.

  In the short time this conversation took place, Sasha stood still on the steps of the narrow ladder and blatantly eavesdropped. One step down from him stood an elderly woman, waiting to ascend the stage.

  “Well, you’re coming down, or what?” she asked. Sasha jumped off the ladder and onto the asphalt.

  “Go scream down there,” she said to him. “You’re too young for the stage…”

  Venka waited for Sasha at the bottom. He quickly understood everything, and asked him nothing. It seemed Venka didn’t care whether they were allowed on the stage or not.

  Venka fingered several dozen firecrackers in his pocket. At times, he pulled them out, one at a time, and twirled them in front of his face, almost as if he didn’t know what they were.

  “Got a smoke?” Venka asked Sasha.

  “I already told you…”

  “You did?” Venka smiled, puzzled. “What did you tell me?”

  Once again, they emerged from the crowd to join their crew, already in formation.

  Yana, raven-haired, wearing a short, elegant jacket with furtrimmed hood and sleeves, marched up and down the ranks, looking absolutely charming.

  Sasha knew that she was Kostenko’s lover.

  Kostenko was in pretrial detention, yes, under investigation. He was arrested for buying firearms, just a few automatic rifles, and now his crew, his pack, his gang stood in nervous ranks, black headbands over their faces, foreheads sweaty, eyes bewildered.

  They came from all over the country. Youthful outsiders, freaks, malcontents united by who knew what, maybe just some black mark placed on them at birth.

  Matvey, who led their faction in Kostenko’s absence, was not among the ranks today. He stood on the sidelines, watching.

  Yana lifted the megaphone to her face and raised her arm.

  Her voice was swallowed by the collective scream that answered it, and only her very first rolling, sonorous syllable remained.

  Having not yet found his place, Sasha stood near the ranks, his mouth wide open. In his peripheral vision, he could see the frightened pigeons leaving the asphalt, an officer twitching nervously, the sluggish hands of the conscripts standing near the fencing as they fondled their batons. As Sasha shouted along with the others, his eyes filled with that requisite void, which, throughout the ages, always precedes an act of violence. They were seven hundred souls, and they screamed the word “Revolution.”

  “Tishin!” They waved Sasha over. “Come here!”

  He joined the left front rank next to Venka, whose hungover eyes, previously doughy, were now red, almost burnt, as if they had been sautéed in a piping hot skillet.

  “Go away, granny!” Venka laughed.

  An old lady stood near the formation, and Sasha heard her voice in the brief pause between shouti
ng: “Fools! Provocateurs! Your Kostenko goes to prison to become famous! The Jews brought you here!”

  Yana walked by, not paying any attention to the old lady, her face bright and exposed, like an open fracture.

  “Heathen!” screamed the old lady into her face, but Yana was already walking away indifferently.

  Granny’s sharp eye found Sasha.

  “The Jews brought you!” she repeated. “You’re a Jew! A Jew and a Nazi!”

  Sasha was gently nudged in the back by those standing behind him, and the formation began to move.

  The chant “Re-vo-lu-ti-on!” trembled and vibrated across the whole plaza, overpowering the deep voice from the stage, the police radios, and the voices of the other protesters.

  “Founding Fathers! Guys!” The voices from the stage appealed to them. “You didn’t come here to scream! Let’s behave ourselves…”

  The formation waved red and black flags and moved past the stage in the direction of the enclosure. The screaming was loud enough to puncture eardrums.

  “The president…” shouted Yana. The protesters responded with seven hundred throats: “Should be drowned in the Volga River!” “The governor…should be drowned in the Volga River!”

  “Well, will somebody please do something, gentlemen,” the speaker pleaded helplessly. And Sasha noted the out-of-place usage of “gentlemen,” and it might even have made him smile if he wasn’t too busy screaming, hoarsely and tirelessly, until his teeth chilled: “We loathe the government!”

  The other sounds in the plaza fell into a rhythm with this scream, the squeal of the metro doors, the conscripts fussing with their gray military coats, the hiss of portable radios, the honks of car horns.

  “Love and war! Love and war!”

  “Love and love!” Sasha improvised, when he caught another glimpse of Yana as she turned sharply in front of the first rank, her jacket’s hood rising and falling.