28 February – 5 March 2026
by Boris Akunin
Source: Facebook
28 February 2026
I’ve been thinking about how Trump is the classic case of the compulsive gambler. (I don’t know whether there’s a Russian term for this personality type.) Once again he’s gone va banque.
If the military operation fails, he’ll be a lame duck by the middle of his term. Iran is nothing, nothing like Venezuela, after all.
And, of course, I’ve been thinking about how this event reflects on the Russian-Ukrainian war and peace talks. (Badly.)
I’m very concerned for my near and dear in Israel. (I have a lot of them.)
Wild zigs and zags with an outcome that’s hard to predict—such is our present stage of history.
What are your thoughts on this? What will happen under both scenarios: American victory and American defeat. And which is the greater likelihood?
Source: Facebook
1 March 2026
NOTES OF A PHENOLOGIST
Today, as I said goodbye to calendar winter, I suddenly realized that I’d said goodbye to real winter a long time ago. The last time I saw snow was on 7 December 2014, when I was on my way to Sheremetievo, not knowing at the time that I would never be coming back to Russia.
Since then, I’ve seen snow only from a distance, on the peaks of the Pyrenees or the Alps. For nearly 12 years my life has consisted of only three seasons: spring, summer, and fall, followed immediately by spring. Winter has been left behind somewhere in the distant past. As has Russia. Both of them have now merged in my imagination into one thing.
The reader expects me to rhyme ‘rose’—something nostalgically émigré, but instead will get an unrhymed haiku.
I could get along
Without summer. Let’s have spring --
And move straight to fall.
Ah, beautiful summer, I would love you if not for the heat and dust. Now spring and autumn—that’s for me.
I don’t miss snow or winter or Russia at all. I only miss a few people left behind in wintry Russia.
Source: Facebook
2 March 2026
THE READING ROOM
We at BaBook are always thinking about how to maintain our connection with Russian and Belarussian readers who can’t buy books from us (or anywhere abroad).
And we have come up with the idea of making our bestsellers available free of charge.
Today we are launching The Reading Room.
We’re starting with my Vikistoriya. Two other authors whose books are popular with our audience have already consented to free-access publication. These texts will appear in our public reading room in a little while.
But this is specifically a reading room. The books will be published at the rate of a chapter a day. In olden times this was called serial publication. Novels were printed chapter by chapter in daily newspapers.
If you don’t want to miss the next installment, better set yourself a reminder.
Source: Facebook
6 March 2026
A new recording has come out of my Fandorin novel All the World’s a Stage. Read by Artur Smolyaninov.
It has a bonus: a play for puppet theatre written by Erast Fandorin. And I myself read the play. It was simpler and faster that way than rehearsing with Artur how to pronounce all the Japanese names and words.
It’s a chance to compare two levels of performance—a professional actor and the author.
I remember how in third grade, at a school performance, I had to give a dramatic recitation of a poem on stage, immediately after a tenth-grader.
My feeling right now is more or less the same.
Source: Facebook
7 March 2026
The Times has published an interview with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen born in Iran. About the ambivalent feelings this war has evoked in her. In brief: she hates the regime but is frightened for the people. Especially for the tens of thousands of prisoners. ‘The Islamic Republic has a history of using conflict as an excuse to execute imprisoned opponents’, she says. And, the newspaper writes, there are now 32,000 political prisoners in Iran. Hostages, basically.
Reading the interview hit me hard. Not only because I, too, find this divided consciousness all too familiar but because for me, Nazanin is not just a face on television but a real live person.
The year before last, the British Book Awards gave me their prize for writers who have been subjected to persecution. There was a fancy gala and ceremony, where I felt like a fake (as I said in my speech). The previous time, the prize had gone to Salman Rushdie, whom the previous ayatollah had sentenced to death and who not long before had been crippled, nearly killed, by a fanatic. Which means that I, arrested in absentia, am a couch prisoner of conscience. In addition to this, the laudatory speech on my selflessness was supposed to be given by Nazanin, whose release from Iranian prisons all of Britain had fought for for six years.
And here I was sitting at a banquet table for two or three hours, waiting for my category, listening to speeches, watching the entertainment, and next to me was an empty chair with a label ‘Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’. Thank god she hasn’t come, I thought. But five minutes before my award she appeared. She said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve been standing outside the door in the empty vestibule this whole time. I can’t be around large numbers of people, I start having a panic attack’. (I later read that she was kept for seven months without a break in a cell of two square metres. She gave a speech about what a hero I was and vanished again.
What is my point in writing this?
My point is that you can’t take down a regime in another country, even the foulest regime, without securing the support of its opponents. And if even these people start having ‘ambivalent feelings’, that means the jig is up.
Evil should and even must be wiped out. When therapy doesn’t work, you have to pick up the scalpel. But the surgeon must have a clear plan for the operation and not act according to the principle: let’s cut him open and then see how it goes.
Source: Facebook
9 March 2026
In the Reading Room on our club’s website, we have launched free-access publication of yet another book.
My Vikistoriya has been coming out bit by bit for a week, and now we’ve launched the bestseller by Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin, The Tsar in Person. You definitely would not be able to read this book in Russia.
Bookmark it.
Source: Facebook
10 March 2026
Our Time of Troubles has really lucked out with its chronicler. Leonid Parfenov continues to do what he knows how to do better than anyone in the world: record the history unfolding before our eyes.
Over the course of a few days, in parts (it’s four hours long!), I watched the newly released NMDNI 2025. This isn’t even recent but simply just the other day. History completely fresh.
I won’t add the link or else jealous FB won’t show anyone the post. Find it yourself. You won’t regret it.
The release was filmed on viewer donations. I like that very much, too.
Source: Facebook
[NB The link to NMDNI 2025 on YouTube is here: https://youtu.be/fIovZouAQ7A?si=4IILjML5r-rF-lK5– RiR]
Translated by Marian Schwartz
