You may watch on TV the gala night concert on Red Square in the heart of Moscow, with singers from the new lands facing the happy crowds beneath the red walls of Kremlin. Or you may follow all kind of printed reports, giving us facts and figures along the predictable line of “two years ago and now”.
Hard facts and figures are plenty. Two Donbass republics plus Kherson and Zaporozhye regions are a case of economic miracle now, reports the Izvestia newspaper. There we have the biggest construction site of the nation, the paper says, since the tasks are huge. Imagine residential quarters of dozens of cities and villages being systematically destroyed by Ukrainians since 2014, with special cases like the city of Mariupol, with its huge metallurgical plant turned into a Ukrainian fortress, complete with torture chambers and the rest. That city, important part of Donbass, was under Ukraine until 2022, being shelled and exploded by its former masters before their retreat. Now Mariupol is an architectural miracle, featuring a completely new set of houses, with water pipes, electric lines and the rest.
But, still, figures are missing something, and that something is live, real people. Russia has reunified with several million new citizens, with their unique experience and determination. Reunification of a nation is always about people, with feelings, peculiarities, lessons to give to the rest of the nation and other nations, too.
Reunification is of course a controversial precedent on the global scale. How legal, and, especially, how human is that situation, when a part of a nation, first, suddenly finds itself in a foreign land, and, second, spends years clawing its way back home, together with cities and land? How dangerous is that precedent, when such people vote overwhelmingly in a referendum to reassign their land to the borders of another state? Being a dispossessed refugee, leaving your country and moving somewhere else is ostensibly legal. But changing borders is something else, oh, no, you can’t do it.
There are many good answers to that. My answer is just one book.
That’s how it happened: our family friend, a lady from Crimea with lots of friends in Donetsk, came in for dinner carrying a book and saying ‘you read it’. She is always that minimalist, when she knows that I’ll like something. And she also knows that I’m writing literary reviews sometimes.
So I read that novel in one gulp. The book’s title is Taxi Across The Frontline. The author is Stanislav Kochetkov, I’ve never heard of him before, though I more or less know many names of Russian writers. And small wonder, since until 2014 he was nominally a Ukrainian writer from Donetsk.
Then two East Ukrainian regions seceded from Ukraine, proclaiming themselves independent republics, and Ukraine attacked them and cut away some territories of these regions, but then was stopped halfway. Finally, these two republics joined Russia exactly two years ago, and only now they know for sure that they’ll keep their land to themselves.
All this time Mr. Kochetkov, while changing nationhood thrice, stayed at the same home in the same city of Donetsk, writing his same novels. He does it in Russian, of course, and anyway very few people even in West Ukraine write or read books in Ukrainian. Now Kochetkov is one of 23 members of Writer’s Union of Donetsk, and I suspect that there may be others out there, equally good.
What he did for living recently was a bit far from literature, which brought meagre incomes. Kochetkov was earning his bread by being a taxi driver, bringing people from the breakaway republics to Ukraine and vice versa across the frontline on all kind of business, while the war was raging or simmering. That was a deadly kind of business, but you could survive, knowing all the checkpoints and the soldiers there, on both sides.
His book is, essentially, just about that. It’s an absolutely magical battle thriller, reminding you of the crazy fantasies of Salman Rushdie, if you like the fellow (many do not). It’s a book placed in a kind of a Neverland, where two sisters from Crimea fight each other, being on two opposing sides of the war, where people are constantly moving, on all kind of business, there and back again and clash with each other. Generally that’s a novel about finding and destroying an Ukrainian terrorist group sent to the breakaway republics long before 2022, when the Russian troops moved in to defend the people of the East.
And, what’s strange, that weird world between war and yet another war was – and in a way is – absolutely real. That’s the way it was, and that makes the book real good.
Now, there are many ways to write about people at war. Russia is living amidst a poetry boom currently, and the most famous poets are ladies like, say, Anna Dolgareva from the same East Ukrainian territories. Ladies are allowed by custom and nature to complain and lament their dead friends, killed in that fight, and Dolgareva does just that.
Or you can celebrate the Reunification Day like yet another lady from the new territories of Russia, who says: the rifle range is closed, thank God, only some occasional missiles are reaching our homes now.
She means the well-known situation when Ukrainian army was training snipers, bringing them close to the LOC with the Eastern republics. And don’t even think any local militia would get in the range of these trainees, these were the unlucky civilians who were the targets. That went on year after year.
But our Mr. Kochetkov does not resemble a lamenting lady. That hooligan with a greying beard could have been a typical biker, if he was not an auto racer. That was before the war, of course, while the war and his respected and cherished new profession – getting people safely across the frontlines – was another way of racing. You see, some parts of the highway you had to cover in seconds, unless you wanted to get a bullet.
So, his novel is not lamenting anything. Every page of it is about screeching brakes, men and women shouting non-ladylike words in two languages (Russian and Ukrainian), and other kind of fun. The whole book is a crazy motor race. In fact, this is also a madly hilarious novel written by a professional survivor and winner, and a wonderful optimist. And that’s another thing that makes the book very readable.
It’s that kind of people that Russia may consider its biggest prize in the war. We learned to be patient through these terrible years, says the lady who wrote about the rifle range. We learned to win, says Stanislav Kochetkov.
Dmitry Kosyrev, a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com