10 July 2025
by Clem Cecil
Clem Cecil reviews Russia Starts Here by Howard Amos [Hardback, £20, 320pp., ISBN-9781472991348, Bloomsbury Continuum, London, February 2025]
If you want a picture of Russian life outside Moscow today, get this book. The author has been visiting Pskov region, a province northwest of Moscow that shares a border with Estonia, over the last twenty years, and the book has been long in the writing – partly because Amos found himself paralysed by the outbreak of the war with Ukraine – in fact he thought he wouldn’t return to the book. But he did and the book is all the better for its long incubation. It sheds light both on the genesis of the war and why many Russians support it.
The book consists of a series of portraits of people Amos has encountered in or around his life in Pskov region, and is beautifully illustrated by his father. Amos first went to the area as a volunteer to work in a state orphanage. His experience there was harrowing, but also powerful, and having made a deep connection with a couple he was billeted with – Nina and Nikolai – he continued to visit, slowly getting to know the region.
The Russia Amos is writing about is rooted in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the overarching narrative thread of this book is, inevitably, the war with Ukraine. This is reportage par excellence and thanks to a natural empathy and curiosity about his fellow humans, Amos’s portraits are fully three dimensional – he understands that in order to understand the person you have to understand the context , and vice versa.
Nina and Nikolai are pro-war. This is a theme that runs through the book. We see, over and over again, how the Russian experience in World War Two and the cult of veneration around it created by Putin, has led Russia back on to a war footing – as a way to shore up a sense of self left in ruins by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As this book illustrates through the careful portraits of individuals, the shock waves of that collapse have been long and deep and are still playing out.
Russia Starts Here reminded me of the surveys of Russian peasants that were written in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, such as that by Radishchev, which did so much to change perceptions of ordinary Russians amongst the ruling classes. This book has the potential to do the same for a western audience.
Religion and propaganda are major themes in the book – the existence of real spirituality but also of distorted and sublimated spirituality for example in the cult of Pushkin. Feeding into the propaganda is an obsession with the past and a tendency to manipulate it, whether it is in the history books being written today or in fake historic buildings – history being moulded to assuage the wounds of the present.
The brilliant but ultimately tragic photographer Dima Markov, to whom a chapter is dedicated says, ‘”I don’t know why I’m so drawn to the past! It’s a fucking affliction that our country suffers from. And so do I! It’s some sort of fucking hankering after the past, and not the future.”’ Markov is also revealing about why Russians are willing to go and fight: ‘“When you don’t value your own fucking life, when there’s fucking nothing from which you can draw strength, and there’s no interest in life, of course you’ll fucking go off to war without a second thought”… Russia was a deeply traumatized country, he added. “You need to relate to Russians as sick people.”’
Amos’s portrait of Semyon Geichenko, creator and original director of Pushkin Hills, a kind of Russian literary Disneyland, is that of a man who conjured up a great fakery to protect himself from official opprobrium having suffered at the hands of the authorities in the 1940s, when he was given a ten year sentence for ‘anti-Soviet defeatist propaganda’ and then sent to the front to fight as part of a punishment battalion, where he lost an arm. Geichenko’s shams are more benign than some, but fakery is fakery and Geichenko’s work is the thin end of the wedge of a lack of squeamishness about moulding history to serve the political climate.
When Geichenko was appointed Director of Mikhailovskoye in 1945, Pushkin’s country estate in the Pskov Region, it was a ruin. Geichenko created a 3,000 hectare site dedicated to the poet that included three estates and a restored monastery: ‘a place where reality and fantasy collided… a utopia were the Soviet Union came closest to perfection.’ Geichenko was aware of what he was doing, and himself said, ‘We got rid of religion in 1917, and Pushkin became our religion.’ Geichenko successfully created a popular new destination and became a star in his own right, famous for his stories – many of which were as truth-bending as Mikhailovskoye. He received an official pardon for his 1941 conviction in 1992, a year before he died at the age of 89.
The Pskov region is home to the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, one of the units secretly sent across the border into Ukraine in 2014. Amos writes: ‘at the entrance to one [base] there is a large poster with a picture of planet Earth alongside a tank, helicopter, plane and several masked soldiers. It reads: “Russia’s borders have no limits.”’ And the 76th is taking a battering in the war – in 2023 the local authorities created a daily bus service to the cemetery from Pskov. Amos is not interested in criticising those who fight in the war – he sees everyone as part of a larger tragedy.
Amos has a knack for explaining complex things in a simple way and his grasp of the ways of the Russian Orthodox Church is sure. He expertly conveys the curious mixture of powerful personalities, including the deeply sinister Tikhon Shevkunov, personal confessor to Putin, and the obscure hierarchies on which the church runs. Shevkunov is the author of the best-selling Everyday Saints (that has sold 3.5m copies to date) and is too busy rewriting Russian history to save souls: his Russia- My History – a permanent exhibition that has been replicated in over 20 sites in Russia and occupied Ukraine, and as of the end of 2023 been visited by over 20 million Russians, is all about: ‘pride in Russia’s great destiny, the glory of empire, and the qualities of the Russian people.’ Shevkunov, who Putin made Metropolitan of Crimea in 2023, has been compared to Rasputin. He and Putin share many nationalist and empire-building opinions that have directly fed into the decision to invade Ukraine.
But Amos doesn’t write off the church. Father Raphael also gets a chapter – an eccentric and appealing man-of-the-people figure who represents the freedom of early post-Soviet Orthodox ideology that was less enmeshed with political life. The story of the charismatic Raphael is told through his brother Alexander Ogorodnikov, who while deeply involved in the revival of Christianity towards the end of the Soviet Union, never actually became a monk unlike his brother, who was ordained at the Caves Monastery in Pskov. Raphael was tragically killed in a car crash in 1988; Alexander went on to become ‘the most famous religious dissident in the late Soviet Union – and one of the country’s last political prisoners,’ and his story is moving: ‘those like Alexander could have become the foundation of a post-Soviet Orthodox Church that was less fixated on acquiring buildings, money and power – and more on people’s souls,’ writes Amos.
Amos is good at finding hope in seemingly hopeless situations, a useful talent for a Russophile. Pskov’s flax industry had been 140,000 hectares strong after the war. Today there are only 28 hectares that are attached to a government research centre. Talking to Tamara Andreeva, who works at the centre, and is, ‘likely… the oldest still-active flax worker in Pskov Region, if not all of Russia,’ he says, ‘Tamara’s earth-stained hands were a living connection to centuries of tradition. And the seeds from the institute’s new flax strains, which are stored in sealed vaults, guarantee that – at least biologically – there could be a way back.’
At the end of this vivid tour of present-day Russian life, Amos exhorts us to keep a long view: ‘such as stand-off cannot last forever,’ he writes, ‘One day, the pendulum will swing back, and this part of Europe will again become a place of intermingling, compromise and trade — rather than suspicion and war.’ Until that happens, let us hope we have guides as humane and perceptive as Amos to help us understand it.
If you would like to review a book for our website, please contact Charlotte by email at this address: charlotte (at) rightsinrussia (dot) org
