• Svetlana Aleksievich "If Putin manages to win, I doubt he will stop in Ukraine"

  • Yuri Andrujovich "99% of Russians are passive and indifferent"

  • Andrew Leatherbarrow "Russian soldiers have kept Chernobyl and the rest of the plants running"

It occurs to me that the ideal is that we never completely understand the reason that makes some men drop bombs on others.

The unreason, rather, that leads them to destroy buildings and destinations.

Because, somehow, to understand the barbarian is to accept the logic of his actions.

In a certain way, the racket with the victimizer's mobiles makes us intellectual accomplices of his crime.

And yet, there is no other civil and civilized way to face war and death than to do it from intelligence.

Then, these are some books that I find useful to look at the landscape of this war.

Because they shed some light instead of so many bombs.

Anne Applebaum:

Red Famine.

Stalin's war against the Ukraine

War is also the result of a badly resolved sum of grudges.

And the past that hangs over the relationship between Russia and Ukraine has pits full of hate and death.

Anne Applebaum, an enormous essayist of these years, deals in this book with what is perhaps the largest of all those black holes: the

Holodomor

, the terrible famine that Ukraine suffered under Soviet power.

Applebaum disassembles piece by piece the machinery of power that ended up starving almost four million people between 1932 and 1934. And she shows us its infernal mechanism, one that still operates in the memory of the heirs of its victims.

And in that of their victimizers.

Translation by Nerea Arando Sastre (Debate, 2019)

Masha Gessen:

The future is history.

Russia and the return of totalitarianism

Masha Gessen was born in Moscow and brought to the United States as a child by her parents, Soviet Jewish émigrés.

That itinerary, typical of the years of the Cold War, Gessen later completed by returning to post-communist Russia in 1991 to become an extraordinary chronicler of the present and activist for homosexual rights there.

In

The Future is History,

perhaps her most notable book, Gessen seeks to draw a fresco of post-communism from various destinies faced with social upheaval and the end of the illusion that perestroika meant.

Showing the changed pace of people dancing with history on the ground shaken by an incipient and deceptive freedom, Gessen concludes that the transition was a passage to a new authoritarianism.

Comparable by her ambition to

The end of homo sovieticus,

by Svetlana Aleksievich, this book perfectly summarizes what

Russia inherited from the Soviet period as a result, but also as a condemnation.

Translation by José Adrián Vitier (Turner, 2018).

Svetlana Aleksievich:

The Zinc Boys.

Soviet Voices of the War in Afghanistan

Svetlana Aleksievich

, Nobel Prize winner in 2015, has sometimes claimed to be a Soviet writer.

Through her books, all armed with a polyphony that owes so much to Dostoyevsky, she wanders half the country or the entire country.

A country that no longer exists, the USSR, but whose presence has become manifest in the mistaken idea of ​​its restoration these days of war of the Russian State against Ukraine.

Close to 10,000 Russian soldiers have fallen in the four weeks of campaign that we already counted, a number that would be unbearable for any country other than Putin's vertical and authoritarian Russia.

In

The Zinc Boys,

where Aleksievich dealt with another war and other coffins, there are many of the keys to the ferocity of these wars launched from the Kremlin.

And, above all, its abysmal absurdity and the enormous pain that spread throughout the geography of post-communism.

Translation by Iulia Dobrovólskaya and Zahara García González (Debate, 2016).

Yuri Andrujovich:

The Last Territory

Yuri Andrujovich

(Ivano-Frankivsk, 1960) is, without a doubt, the living Ukrainian writer who has best narrated the country historically nestled between Russia and Germany, two powers in which Ukraine has found less calm than violence.

In

The Last Territory,

a collection of essays and chronicles, Andrujovich portrays the independent Ukraine with humor and many reasons, with abundant historical excursions and delicious brushstrokes of the most absolute contemporaneity.

The portrait of Ukraine that emerges from those pages has many more colors than the now ubiquitous flag of that country, but all are just as lively, fresh and eager and promising on the horizon.

By the way, Andrujovich remains there, in the western Ukrainian city where he was born.

Waiting for the arrival of the barbarians with the patience of the heart.

Translation by Iuri Lech (Cliff, 2007).

Vasili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg:

The Black Book

The black book

is a monument in ink and blood to the most terrible episode in the common history of Russians and Ukrainians: the 1941 Nazi invasion of the west of the then Soviet Union.

Even before the World War ended, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee undertook to collect testimonies of the atrocities committed by the occupiers to present to a future tribunal.

They didn't know there would be a Nuremberg, but they anticipated it.

Today it is particularly shocking to read the pages devoted to the barbarism of the German occupation troops in the Soviet Ukraine.

How it shudders to see the Russian and Ukrainian peoples together suffering the horror inflicted by a common enemy.

The story is capricious.

The horror is always the same.

Translation by Jorge Ferrer (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011).

Argemino Barro:

A history of Rus.

Chronicle of the war in eastern Ukraine

The journalist Argemino Barro has been covering the war on the ground in recent weeks.

It rains pours for someone who has already lived through the 2014 campaign and wrote this formidable book where apart from telling it, he makes a historical and sentimental journey through the crossed history of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Barro's pen traces the itineraries of a common history that from time to time seems to want to stop being so.

His account is firm and compassionate.

A good Spanish reporter could not be missing from this list that sheds light on the opaque war, on his hateful gloom.

(The big garden, 2020).

Emmanuel Carrère:

Limonov

.

The chaos, the nationalism, the passion, almost all the madness of Russia.

What Carrère does in this jaw-dropping account of the life of Eduard Limonov, one of Russia's most distinct, writer and politician, hero and villain, may only serve to confuse us as we move across the landscape of war.

Blessed confusion, though.

Because not understanding is, here, understanding something

.

Translation by Jaime Zulaika (Anagram. 2012).

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InterviewSvetlana Aleksievich: "If Putin manages to win, I doubt he will stop in Ukraine"

War in UkraineSerhii Plokhy: "The possibility of a third World War exists, of course"

War in UkraineClaudio Magris and Martin Pollack: "In these traumatic days, Ukraine is once again consolidating its identity"

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