Following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the tightening of his autocratic regime in Russia — with more than 1,100 people prosecuted for opposing the war — it has become extremely dangerous to travel to Russia as a dual citizen.
Last year, when Ksenia Karelina was arrested after travelling from Los Angeles to Russia to visit family and then sentenced to 12 years for donating $51.80 to a charity supporting Ukraine, I realised that I might never set foot in my homeland again. Russia Starts Here, a new book by British journalist Howard Amos is a welcome gift that took me to a little-known region of western Russia with fascinating stories to tell.
Amos, who reported from Moscow for almost a decade until 2022, spent a total of 18 months in the Pskov region, where he volunteered at an orphanage. The region “nestles like a kidney below St Petersburg” and marks Russia’s border with Estonia, Latvia and Belarus.
Formerly a thriving commercial hub and a military stronghold, Pskov began losing its importance as the Russian Empire expanded westward; it suffered during the Nazi occupation of the second world war, and its largely agrarian economy and villages never recovered after the collapse of central planning. Today, with about only 600,000 people, the Pskov region often comes out on top in national ratings of depopulation, disease and poverty.
The title of the book was inspired by the human-size “RUSSIA STARTS HERE” sign that decorates Pskov’s embankment of the Velikaya river. Amos set out to examine a tiny sample of the big nation with a candid and deeply compassionate lens, revealing stories of ordinary people, cultural heritage, contradictions and uncomfortable truths that may just help readers understand Russia today.
Each chapter is a story in itself, skilfully sewn together into a patchwork of a glorious past and abandoned future. The Pskov region was home to Pushkin’s ancestral estate and to the luxurious rural retreat of the Stroganoffs, one of the richest families in the Russian Empire. Today, it’s a land of rotting villages and a handful of pensioners reminiscing about the Soviet Union and railing against Gorbachev and Yeltsin for having “pissed everything away”. Amos, fluent in Russian, interviewed some interesting characters.
Vladimir Orlov was put in charge of a Pskov flax mill in 1987. For centuries, flax used to be a cash crop for the region, cultivated to produce linen. The British Royal Navy was once a major client. Globally, flax’s popularity began to wane in the 1970s, as linen was replaced by cheap cotton. The Soviet central planning system kept the Pskov industry propped up, but it collapsed in the 1990s as Russia embraced capitalism. Orlov witnessed it first-hand, recalling improbable stories of barter deals, scams and banditry before the inevitable closure.
Up until recently, Sergei Kirin was employed by German Volksbund, which has been tracking down hundreds of lost Wehrmacht cemeteries in the Pskov region, obliterated under Stalin. Such work would have been impossible without a Russian intermediary even during the thaw in the 1990s. Kirin helped carry out exhumations and re-bury German soldiers for three decades, yet, like most Russians today, he is fiercely resentful of the west and supports the Russian cause in Ukraine.
Not everyone shares that view. Lev Shlosberg is a Pskov politician, who has been in opposition to the government since the mid-1990s. In 2014, he was badly beaten up after he had helped reveal that Russian soldiers had been assisting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Today, with most Russian opposition politicians either dead, in exile or behind bars, Shlosberg is a lonely figure without a public office, treading a tightrope of his convictions, well aware of the futility of his cause.
As Amos takes us to Pskov institutions for children with learning disabilities or a psychiatric hospital where many patients end up staying for life because of alcohol abuse, he never offers judgment, even as children’s carers turn a blind eye to bullying. An orphanage may well be the only employer in town, where carers simply have to detach themselves emotionally to conserve their own mental health.
Whether writing about Putin supporters, ordinary men volunteering to fight in Ukraine or fishermen frustrated by EU regulations, Amos tells compelling stories of real lives, shaped by hardship, loss and painful contradictions. His empathy is genuine and profoundly contagious.
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire by Howard Amos Bloomsbury £20, 320 pages
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