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The city is violent, and entombed within it is a history of violence.
Government purges and NKVD torture chambers have given way to gangster thuggery and casual street beatings.
It certainly doesnt belong to the novels narrator, Andrei Kaplan.
He arrives without the intention of staying any longer than he has to.
She lives among Soviet furniture and buys her groceries at markets lingering from the Soviet era.
Shes the novels emotional center, and her frailty is the source of its considerable heartbreak.
It turns out he doesnt even belong to the newly rich, at least not for long.
A Terrible Countryis an autobiographical novel of a conventional sort.
It doesnt make much of what its author and its narrator have in common.
Theyre both also fanatical hockey players.
What differentiates the two?
Andrei is something of a fuck-up and more naive than his author.
I can say this because Ive known Gessen for 20 years.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited (quite heavily).
Like, literally, what do they do all day?
How much money do they have?
It would be a colossal waste of time!
You went to Russia right after your first book came out.
I thought I could not.
I was pretty sure thats how well I needed to know something to write a novel about it.
Of living with my grandmother and being trapped in that apartment with her and having those conversations.
And it was on the one hand incredibly frustrating, but on the other hand incredibly sad.
And once it was over I just really wanted to write it down somehow, to get it down.
The fact that it was a year gave it a kind of narrative shape.
But in between, I was writing those essays for you at theLRBand forTheNew Yorker.
And, you know, Id been doing that for years, in between writing fiction.
I never regretted doing them but I wanted people to stop throwing them out!
And I thought, What if I embedded the essays in a book?
If they were in a novel, people would have to keep them around.
That was my pitch when I got a fellowship at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
I wanted to trap these essays in amber.
That was a very bad draft.
There was a long essay about the history of Russian oil.
There was a long essay on Putin.
There was a long essay on Joseph Brodsky and his best friend, Lev Loseff.
It sounds awesome to me.Trust me when I tell you.
It was humanly impossible to read.
He later got shot.
I got arrested for going around to the polling stations with his campaign manager without a registration.
I knew what it felt like to be trapped in a police station in Russia.
Have you ever gotten pistol-whipped like Andrei?That happened to a friend of mine.
I did a very close study of his face after it happened.
I do not recommend getting hit by a pistol.
Pick-up hockey is a place where people come together.
And the fact that hes a goalie goalies are strange.
Theres a depiction in your book of the marginal bohemian existence lived by Andreis new friends.
It seemed harsher to me than a parallel bohemian life in New York.Russia is not a rich country.
Its per capita GDP is still less than Romanias.
Teachers are paid nothing, doctors are paid nothing.
Those people do quite well.
But there are many, many people who are just eking out an existence.
You could walk around all day and not find one.
But there was a lot of political freedom.
If you watched the news, there was just crazy stuff happening all the time.
This was not a high point for Russian press freedom, but it was very entertaining.
They had tapped phone conversations being published in their rival newspapers.
But like I say, no coffee.
And Gusinsky later got run out of the country by Putin.
2008 is somewhere in between.
There is less political freedom, but more places to get coffee.
Now, in 2018, in terms of coffee, its amazing.
But then you turn on the TV and its pure propaganda.
So actually Im not Tom Friedman.
Because it turns out you’ve got the option to have cappuccinosandpolitical repression.
Its there to protect the prerogatives of large capital.
Its not a revolutionary regime by any stretch.
Now its also the case that the regime became more dangerous after Crimea.
After Crimea, it drew them in to this nationalist orgy.
To an extent, thats still ongoing.
Its not back to the USSR.
And how bad is that?I mean, thats one of the questions that the novel deals with.
When do you know that its become really bad?
And I mean, at some level, youhaveto go about your life.
You cant lie in bed all day crying.
But there does come a point where you cant or shouldnt go about your life anymore.
Its hard to know where that point lies, though.
Putin used to say this interesting thing, whenever hed be asked about political freedoms.
Hed say, Look, things arent great but at least its not 1937.
It was interesting because what does that mean exactly?
Are you supposed to cheer for Putin that hes not dragging people off in the night?
Or is he making a veiled threat (I can make if 1937 if I want)?
But also, it wasnt entirely true.
For example in Chechnya its been 1937 for a while.
If youre gay in Chechnya, you really will get dragged off in the middle of the night.
So itis1937, for some people.
I dont have a solution, but neither do I feel like just carrying on with things.
And I thought the arguments people were having about Holocaust analogies were very interesting.
And everyone agrees thatthatwas bad.
Ergo, this is also bad.
Lets not do this.
Thats why you study history!
Its close enough to 1937, frankly.
And its the same here.
Maybe that question, Is it 1937?
is no longer a useful question.
We dont need for it to become 1937 before we start worrying about it.
Is Trump worse than Putin?Absolutely.
Putin, as bad as he is, is well within the mainstream of Russian politics.
His opinions about things are pretty average, for a Russian.
I mean that as a factual statement, not as an excuse.
Whereas Trump is a radical fringe figure.
But Trump to me is far worse than Putin!
Cozying up to Russia is just about thebestthing Trump has done.
