“Russia is not Putin.” As a lecturer in Russian history, and an ex-Soviet Russian American, I have said these words many times. But now the treasures of Russia’s culture — its poetry, novels, movies, theater, symphonies — must be weighed against the current regime’s premeditated murder of the innocent. In this new world, the rest of Russian history and culture is reduced to mere backstory by Feb. 24.
Start with what Ivan Turgenev called the “great, powerful, righteous and free Russian language” that should comfort me in “days of dreary musings.” As a writer whose sensibility was shaped by Russian and Soviet classics, I took great pains to teach Russian to my American-born children. I wanted them to read Alexander Pushkin’s verses, Anton Chekhov’s stories and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novels — all those books my husband and I brought with us to America — in the language in which they were written.
But I cannot view Russian today as righteous or free. I hear it as the language of Russian occupiers and officials telling Ukrainians to surrender, or of Ukrainian defenders swearing at a Russian warship: a tool for battlefield exchanges. It’s the language wielded by mothers in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Bucha to curse the killers of their children. The war, cynically unfolding during the Great Lent, has tainted the Russian language, just as it has the Russian Orthodox Church, whose head blessed the invasion. I haven’t picked up a Russian book in seven weeks. Nor did I buy egg decoration kits for the Russian Easter last Sunday.
