Russia can be dangerous and unpredictable, but oftentimes, we view it through the lens of our own assumptions, some of which turn out to be rather far-fetched. Writer Jędrzej Morawiecki tells us more about breaking Russia’s spell without losing it for good.
In one of Wrocław’s cafés, its walls papered with pages from archival issues of “Przekrój”, I met up with Jędrzej Morawiecki – a lecturer, PhD, non-fiction writer, and above all, a Russia expert. His new book Szuga will be published in Polish in early 2022. The book, moving from melting Siberia to the burning Donbas is meant to be, among other things, Morawiecki’s way of squaring up with his enchantment with Russia, and the disenchantment that inevitably followed.
Jan Pelczar: Did your fascination with Russia emerge naturally, or perhaps out of some contrariness?
Jędrzej Morawiecki: I suppose I needed to confront Poland’s demons. After all, we existed in the USSR’s orbit for almost half a century. Only when I started visiting Russia did I realize how different our experiences of those times were. I grew up in a family with strong opposition traditions, radical even, in the spirit of the Fighting Solidarity movement. I was exposed to anti-Russian narratives from an early age. As a child, I imagined the Russian Federation as a dark land. I was reading Tolkien back then already; I didn’t believe Russia to be Mordor, but I did have some thoughts, which years later I expressed in a piece written for Tygodnik Powszechny. I concluded that Russia is being used as a scare not unlike that of Sauron’s tower, its eye flashing from somewhere over the Kremlin. Ziemowit Szczerek has written about having similar impressions.
This dark land could have been fascinating, but back then, wasn’t being interested in Russia going out of fashion?
It was never fashionable in the first place. In primary school, when I was about 11, I went to the library and borrowed a collection of Russian stories and horror novellas, inspired by national folk tales, written by various authors from Nikolai Gogol to Anton Chekhov. The story of the Viy was one of my favourites. I also remember the librarians complaining about the book: “Why do they make you read this awful stuff!” I was surprised by their Russophobia, just like Russians are surprised with it to this day. They don’t understand where we got it from. They would always ask me: “But why is Poland joining NATO, we’ve always protected you. We even had our army over there.” Their perspective is completely different from ours; a lot of them truly believe that the Russian army came to Poland to protect us. In my view, our hostility was also due to resistance towards a culture being imposed onto us. I was fascinated by it in the form of the 19th-century literature that I discovered on my own. But at the same time, I was in the last year of the students who had compulsory Russian language classes at school, and I initiated the protest in our primary school. We defied the school programme and said that we didn’t want to learn Russian. Our headteacher and Russian teacher came to see us and explained that the lessons were not going to be a propaganda presentation, but rather a way of giving us the tools, the language and the understanding we would need to explore this culture. It convinced me. We’re meeting today thanks to them. Were my protest successful, perhaps I would have learned German at school and we’d be discussing something else entirely.
I never learned Russian at school, and as for Russia, I just find it frightening.
In my case, it was just contrariness, I wanted to explore something that people feared. When I thought of St. Petersburg, what came to my mind was the Prologue to Part Three of Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz, but I also viewed it as the city of Pushkin. I wanted to break a spell and put a spell on it all at once. The spells were readily available, right there on the shelves, inside publications such as Gazeta Wyborcza – and many others. I was enchanted with that masculine cowboy-bandit narrative that became dominant in Poland after the transformation [ed. note – this refers to the political, social and economic reforms that Poland underwent in the early 1990s as the country transitioned away from communism]. Wojciech Jagielski, Jacek Hugo-Bader, and many others. Back then, it was said that no woman should go to Russia.
Why so?
The idea of Russia as a very dangerous place still lingered. It was believed to be a world where you could be murdered or raped, a world of the mafia, huge social contrasts, and of a certain unusual flavour, a somewhat fantastical place in which pretty much anything could happen. The BBC once called my friend from Ukraine to ask him if he could follow up on a piece of information that, apparently, there was a man with gills living in Russia. It seemed like a place where anything was possible.
Was it not?
The first time I travelled to Russia, I hitchhiked there, after high school and before starting university. I went to Moscow, having caught a ride with some Polish lorry drivers. I am very grateful to them for picking me up. They also told me some extraordinary stories, but somehow, they always happened to someone else. Russia was not a safe place, indeed, but neither was Poland, if you asked German drivers. The ones that gave me a lift described Russia as “a nation of whores and Satan.” One time, they picked up a girl hitchhiking, and they automatically assumed her to be a sex worker. She wasn’t, and she wanted to get out of the car straight away… what an embarrassing situation. The route ended at a car park near Moscow, surrounded by a concrete fence: “Well, go, that’s Moscow over there.” I realized they had never been to the city. They just sat in a parking lot, drank local vodka and feared dangerous Russia. I reached Moscow, stayed with a Russian friend’s family, and became fascinated with the country, even though it turned out to be very different from how I imagined it. I went there convinced that, after a few trips, I would always sit in a bar at the old town market square in Wrocław, my face haunted with memories, wearing a leather jacket. People would look at me and say in hushed tones: “That’s him, the man who lived through so much.” I imagined I would say very little, while in reality, I talk and talk.
So what is worth talking about in the context of contemporary Russia?
It was incredibly diverse back then, it was a time of cultural liberalism. I felt a surge of fresh air that we didn’t have in Poland. I would come back to my country and suffocate. For example, in Russia, more was allowed. One could speak about things that were hushed in Poland because they went against Catholic doctrine and outdated interpretations of the Enlightenment scientific discourse. As a scientist, I’m aware that paranormal phenomena cannot be examined, but over there, people simply believe in them, and that’s that. I once watched a TV talk show where many various Christs met and talked, trying to explain who’s who. There was another version, too, in which they argued, each one wanting to convince the viewers that he was the Saviour. At some other time, they insisted that their simultaneous existence is not proof of them not being real. Years later, in the TV series American Gods, there was an episode in which several Christs meet, some of whom were never even crucified. I could see things like that much earlier, and not in a movie. It was Russia in the late 1990s.
You also chose your own Christ.
I went to Siberia. I heard of a Christ who lived in the taiga and used to be a traffic cop. I began visiting him, and it turned out to be a five-year adventure for me. I would go there and keep reading a lot about Russia. I was also fascinated by the Russian approach to journalism, their extraordinary freedom of writing in the form of ocherk, a literary genre close to a literary sketch, halfway between reportage and a subjective story. I would bring tons of newspapers that contained many surprises and great hunger for an encounter with another human being. It was also a time of great chaos, very cruel at that, as we can see in Aleksei Balabanov’s films, for example. For the same reason, it was an inspiring time. Pretty much everything was a narrative, topics and ideas were right there, ready for picking. Every day brought a whole new story.
How was it for Russians?
On the one hand, the people were overwhelmed with a sudden openness, space, air. In the Soviet Union, they missed it much more than we did. To them, it was miraculous. On the other hand, though, it was a humiliating time, economically dire at that. Payments were kept on hold for half a year at a time, sometimes for a whole year. Alternatively, workers were paid in canned goods, bolts or coffins, depending on what it was the factory produced. The only reliable place for work was the railway. In other places, regular payments were not a given. Also, previously absent foreigners now appeared. People would talk to me on the streets, inviting me to come and have some tea at their home. Sometimes vodka, but not as often. That was another myth I discovered to be untrue.
You mean alcohol?
Everyone said they drink an awful lot of vodka in Russia. Yes, there was vodka, but drank mainly by Poles who arrived there. They drank because they were offered some or because they came over with the assumption that they would be drinking. But after my first brush with the law for drinking on a train, I started to pay more attention to who was drinking there – it was usually foreigners. Later, I discovered that us Poles and Russians are not unlike each other, really, in terms of mentality, various transformation-related irregularities, and certain dangers. Back then, Poles were desperate to be different, and we lived in a poor country that got to be a little luckier. To this day, Russia is not a country for old people. Over there, you’re best off as a young man. The Russian reality can be very indifferent. Kerbs are high because nobody cares about people with disabilities. Pavements are covered with ice because nobody cares about the elderly. I used to think that sooner or later, I would move to Russia to live there permanently. The turning point came when I realized I didn’t want my daughter to grow up there.
Because Russia remained an empire of violations?
I mentioned the saying that women never go to Russia, but they did. One of them was Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, who soon turned towards political narratives. She told stories of purges and Chechen wars; she began to notice the darkest side of Russian power displays, the side I always tried to escape. My everyday life had more overstatements to it. We discussed the things that could happen as if they already had. Exaggerations made us even more afraid. I mentioned the BBC and a man with gills, but in the Polish evening news programme, there was once a piece about Russia being so cold that animals in the zoo are given proof spirit to drink. I collected all this news in binders until I finally said to myself I cannot see that strange world over there. Then, I wrote an article titled Turpizm magiczny [Magical Turpism]. In the article, I wrote that if you want to see dirty streets, you’ll see them, and if you want to meet with criminal groups, you can do that, too, although the mafia usually has better things to do than hang out with a tourist who just boarded a train. There were a lot of shootings over there, but there were shootings in Poland, too. Bad things that happened to me in Russia happened due to my stupidity, nothing else.
In my book Łuskanie świata [To Shell the World] I told a story of how I was robbed on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I got on, I took out some rum. In front of me, in the sleeping car, sat some men. They said they were thieves and asked if I was sure I wanted to talk and drink with them. I thought it a great idea. I got drunk, and they robbed me. After that, we travelled together for three more days. During that time, I managed to get some of my money back. They told me it’s the cheapest lesson I’m ever going to get in life: think carefully about with whom you drink. I was also beaten up in Russia once. I had a split lip and I lost my front tooth. It was also my fault, because I drank with the wrong people, I went to the wrong places, and I did things so moronic that I’m ashamed to even mention them. I was leading myself to harm, but the same things could have happened to me in Barcelona. Those were the sins of my youth. Later, I fought against such exoticization of Russia.
Because it was safe?
If you go there as a tourist, today you have nothing to fear. The food is delicious and the architecture is completely different from ours; so is the colour palette, also when it comes to buildings. There are different cars. The smell is gone, though, and I used to like it – the smell of leaded petrol, very harmful. In Poland it disappeared very quickly, but there, it stayed for longer. The Russian sky is completely different, so broad. There are trains you take and travel for days seeing nothing but a wall of forests. During walks and hikes you know you must be careful not to lose your path in the woods, as the trees can go on and on for hundreds of kilometres. There is a sense of vastness and the music of the language that I love. You can still find it all there.
What can no longer be found?
There isn’t as much air anymore. I remember the moment when I arrived at a university in Siberia and I met with an acquaintance who was high in the academic hierarchy. “You do realize,” they said to me, “that you came to a different country than two years ago.” It was in 2014, maybe 2015. I thought I had come to Russia, but in reality, I arrived at the Soviet Union that I only knew from books. The secret services grew much stronger. You could be fined a lot of money, I’m talking the equivalent of €5000, for liking the wrong comment on social media. Sharing one wrong post could cost you up to two years in prison. I was coming across people who had experienced it, without even looking. It wasn’t just what I heard from the media. I was working on a completely different topic, and yet I kept encountering such cases. A friend writing her PhD thesis in Siberia had a ‘shadow’ in the library. He would check what books she was reading. When I rented a flat, it took two or three days for me to discover several dozen viruses on my laptop. I began wondering whether I should take Yandex taxis (the Russian equivalent of Uber), and if it was a good idea to export my writings and recordings to the cloud.
Did you become afraid, too?
In my PhD thesis, I wrote about the journalist and author Dmitry Bykov. I liked him a lot for his lack of inhibitions, his adventurous lifestyle and his sense of humour. He was going outside the box back when our journalism was formally tame. I didn’t consider him political at all, because I have always avoided the Kremlin both in my journalism and my Russian travels alike. I have always tried not to discuss this part of the local reality. I was trying to cut myself off from it, but there is always a moment when politics barges into everything. In my case, it was the day when Bellingcat shared the news that Dmitry Bykov was poisoned during a meeting with children to whom he was supposed to tell the story of Karlsson-on-the-Roof. Before the meeting, his hotel was changed to another one. Bellingcat noted that the people who poisoned Alexei Navalny were seen near his new hotel. Most likely, they used Novichok. What is happening? I thought. The man supposed to tell children about an Astrid Lindgren character has his underwear poisoned? As if we were living in some political fiction.
Until then, I had focused on the bright side of the country because I liked it. I skipped the Kremlin and went somewhere else, to the vast planes of Siberia. Now it’s different in Russia. Grim warnings are coming from everywhere, even Siberia. Back in the day, it seemed to be not unlike Jack Kerouac’s America, and going there felt like going to India did to Westerners. The Russian reality of that time was steeped in its uniqueness and cultural diversity, it was a religious mosaic, too. There were shamans, Buddhists, and a Christ whose believers followed him into the taiga. There was a bizarre talk show with clairvoyant duels, and Trans-Siberian Railway conversations on the strangest topics, such as UFOs. Someone saw the Virgin Mary on a lake, someone else chatted to their ancestors’ spirits. Now, such topics could earn you a trip to court, as it could be considered unaccredited religious agitation. In Russia, I lived through a political thaw, not unlike that of 1905-1917. Now that world has returned, but ‘underneath’, as Andrzej Drawicz once described it.
So not that much has changed?
The secret service was always there in Russia, so was invigilation. I was booked more than once, especially as a foreigner in the areas where not many foreigners went. It was a standard procedure, just as it was normal to meet people who worked in the KGB, because plenty of people did. Up to a certain moment, you just assume that the so-called big game is taking place far, far away and you don’t need to have anything to do with it unless you enter the field of fire, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky did. In that case, something might happen. But for a while, you don’t have to do anything at all. Morality-guarding groups are being established at university dorms. Getting caught smoking just once or being late for community work is enough to get you kicked out of the university.
I experienced a country that was free and had plenty of air, but its intellectual foundation was too brittle to hold it up. At first, Vladimir Putin did modernize the country – Russia became wealthier. But after a while, he turned back to ‘his people’ from the special services and the country became very isolated. The same thing could happen everywhere in the world, though. In Poland, we hear the same phrases, such as ‘Getting up off our knees’. When I heard this, I was petrified – I’d heard it in Russia, two years back. In such a nationalist narrative, culture begins to collapse in no time. A cultural Mecca morphs into a mental slavery zone. There is less and less space for writers and artists, whose work is replaced by coarse propaganda, because art is being tampered with by the people who insist that we must defend the national narrative.
Perhaps the anti-Russian sentiment of some Polish people shouldn’t come as a surprise then?
What Russians find annoying about Poles is our sense of superiority. We treat them as something exotic, an anarchic folktale of the Russian soul, Rasputin; we keep saying that Russians are enslaved, and that ‘such a thing could only happen over there’. It is all untrue, and we are experiencing the same thing now in Poland. Just take a look and see where we were five years ago. Russians are not as different from us as we imagine, or as some people seem to wish.
How do you understand the term ‘Russian soul’?
I am not a fan of the ‘Russian soul’, I have never liked this expression. It seems overeffusive. Whenever I hear about a nation’s soul, I feel suspicious.
Why so?
What is the Polish soul? And the Russian one? Is it communist, or maybe Orthodox? How about the shamans? Whenever you hear about the soul of some nation, run in the opposite direction. It brings to mind Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1910 futuristic poem “The Crane”, which tells the story of all the worlds’ machines coming together to construct one great creature that starts to enslave and devour humans in order to make its muscles out of their dead bodies. This was always how I imagined the soul of a nation: a man-eating crane. The individual gets lost.
Now, however, there are still places to escape. It is said that in the Soviet Union, even up to three million people never had any papers. It was where some great alternative could always be happening. But the price to pay was victimization. People knew that any little thing could send them to a labour camp. On the one hand, there were numerous old-believer movements, as well as the Islamic, Buddhist and shamanic ones. On the other, people were crushed, frightened, starved for spirituality. Cut off from religious sources – the Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita were all banned – they searched for traces of spirituality in atheist publications and 19th-century literature. And the literature was diverse, powerful, thrilling. But I have found some particular ways of writing in French literature, too, so I wouldn’t choose literature as a way of defining the Russian soul, either.
Counterculture was always strong in Russia. You could do a photo essay on astral bodies with a Polish community activist and then discuss it with a priest. In the 1980s, instead of the opposition, Russians had their hippie counterculture, Viktor Tsoi, the band Kino, DDT, Mashina Vremeni. There were gigs on the streets, alternative music thrived. In Russia, hip-hop became popular much sooner than in Poland. Today, I would recommend Shortparis, a new group that doesn’t cater exclusively to Russian. Their music videos are great, they play for the ‘yellow vests’ from Central Asia, despised by Muscovites; they can organize a gig in front of a building site where migrants work illegally, and play just for them. Russians who pass them by have no idea what is going on. Those things are very interesting and very new. Just like the crazy movies they used to make, such as The Needle with Tsoi. In the contemporary cinema, say, from the last decade, I no longer see the same bite. I’m more impressed with Sergei Loznitsa and his film Donbass. After a visit to the frontline in Donbas, my perspective drastically shifted.
That’s the main topic of your new book, Szuga.
It will be an experimental book, also structurally. Together with the main characters, we go to Donbas. The plot takes off in 2010, but everything is condensed to just one winter, as I explain in the preface. I make some shifts that are not normally introduced in non-fiction literature. The titular word shuga (шуга) means sludge, slush ice mixed with water and after-snow mud – a harbinger of thaw. When the thaw comes, it doesn’t have to mean spring: beneath the ice and snow there is also dirt. Such a temperature rise could make a good environment for nationalistic movements to flourish. In winter, the world is bright and beautiful. Then everything turns grey, and the muck spreads. It is no longer easy to distinguish good from bad, reality from fiction, light from darkness. In Szuga, I question the previous ways of building narratives about Russia. Those who claim to be soldiers are not soldiers. The ones who claim not to be soldiers are soldiers, and take over Crimea. A tale of spirituality becomes a story of oppression and the dark side of religious institutions. At some points, the characters who seemed decent have to flee Russia and resurface on the Ukrainian side, in Donbas. Everything crumbles in the chaos of war, there are no good sides anymore. The weakest suffer the most. The beginning was the hardest, because I had to remember all those things you asked me at the beginning of our conversation. I had to uncover the feeling of enchantment and fascination with Russia so that I could brighten this country and seduce readers before they enter the darkness and see the decay.
Still, when it comes to the great narratives, I remain sceptical. Fairy tales can be vicious and very, very dark. They can also provide a way of denying the existence of evil altogether. The wars are a great example: it is not Satan who wages wars, people do. I’m lucky I ended up committing to this part of the world, though, for it’s very capacious. I could have ended up being fascinated with Hungary, which would be interesting, too, but Russia trumps it even just quantitatively. It covers vast swathes of the globe, its numerous cultures and religions making it remarkably universal. Meanwhile, the more homogenous we are, the more hermetic, self-centred, incomprehensible and uninteresting we become to the outside world.
Until recently, Russia had more confidence than Poland did, despite its experience of nationalism. Such a stance is also good for the development of culture, certainly. Russia didn’t feel such a need to prove its worth, to trace its past. It is, however, guilty of another sin, typical of many empires: the most interesting cultural endeavours are often discredited as ‘not ours’. Such is the case of Andrei Tarkovsky. Whenever I visited Russia, I would always hear: “Well, yes, but he isn’t very Russian.” So the fascinating explorations insult the national values. But art is about probing and questioning, that’s how you keep it alive. People are still doing it today, such as Andrey Zvyagintsev. When talking about his film Leviathan, I was also told: “Not ours.” But it is a movie that tells a story about Putin’s structures, and a situation in which something bad can happen to you because you were drawn into something without even realizing it.
Is that why criticism doesn’t reach the inside, choosing to look for the evil outside instead?
It has become more severe in recent years, which I find shocking. After 2014, people I knew well, liberal people – in the Russian sense of the word, although we must make the same disclaimer when speaking about Poland; after all, our liberals also have little in common with those in France or Spain – would grab my arm and say: “What are you going to do about Ukraine in Poland, tell me you support federalization.” They became feverish with an imperial dream. Some resistant intellectuals called it an emotional rape and propaganda carpet bombing. A moment of great mobilization came and people joined the choir, like in a Bulgakov novel.
I can remember that Crimea-conquering euphoria. The moment when everyone in the streets, all the tram passengers and every lorry trailer began to sing the same song. Then I realized: what Bulgakov described in Master and Margarita wasn’t necessarily fiction. They have their grim tale of Night Wolves, their sacred atom, their suffering in the name of the nation, their universe-encompassing mission. In Poland, we have our cursed soldiers who ‘abode the law of the wolves’, and of course, we ‘suffered the most out of all nations’. We also have a sacred mission, somewhat shabby compared to Russia, but well, that’s what we can afford. We have become airtight, wrapped ourselves with razor wire, we know less and less about ourselves. It’s all beginning to feel like it did in the beginning when I was just starting to explore the East. I do hope the pandemic curtain will be taken down soon, as it currently only allows people from a special FSB-approved list to enter Russia. Otherwise, we will soon start telling ourselves the most outlandish stories again, and we’ll have no way to verify them.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Translated from the Polish by Aga Zano
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