Illustrated chronicles of the forgotten and furious in Putin’s Russia

With a wink to the Humiliated and Injured portrayed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in late-19th-century St Petersburg, an alternative title for this work might have been the Invisible and Angry of Putin’s Russia. The book is split in two sections, the “Invisible” and the “Angry”, each conceived with a different approach and focusing on specific subjects.

Where did they go?

The first part describes an invisible Russia made up of socially marginalised groups, forgotten by the state and ignored by the rest of the world. These are people like sex workers in Nizhny Novgorod, Central Asian workers enslaved in Moscow’s grocery stores or hopeless people finding relief in alcohol or Orthodox fanaticism. Without applying any filter to their words and opinions, Lomasko allows their voices to flow freely in a language which is as gritty and shocking as the harshness of their everyday reality.

While “Invisible” is made up of standalone stories, the second part of the book can be read as a chronological excursus across an angry Russia. The author retraces the evolution of the most important protest movements which appeared in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential election: the rallies “For Fair Elections”, the “Occupy Abay” camp, the “March of Millions”, the Pussy Riot and Bolotnaya Square trials.

Yet the chronicle of these massive protests, in which thousands of Russians took to the streets, stopped in 2013. “Today, almost half of the people who actively protested until 2013, claiming specific political rights, have emigrated. Those demonstrators belonged mainly to the middle class, they were educated and had career perspectives. This is quite peculiar: in Russia, only those who can rebuild their lives abroad dare to speak openly about politics and to protest actively,” argues Lomasko, who agreed to an interview for this review.

Despite emigration and further restrictions on freedom of assembly introduced in 2012 and 2014, Russians went on protesting. In March 2017 massive anti-corruption protests led by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, criticising the regime of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, were held across Russia. While Lomasko could not include these recent events in her book, in the final section of Other Russias she rather focuses on the emergence of a different kind of social movement: the so-called “grassroots pressure groups” of 2015-2016. Lomasko notes the nationwide strikes launched by truck drivers against the so-called “Platon” road tax, as well as the sit-ins and protests staged by Muscovites in defence of the city parks, Trofyanka and Dubki, threatened by construction sites for a new church and a tower block.

Following the “Chronicle of protests” drawn in Other Russias, we can trace a particular evolution of social movements in Russia, as the emerging grassroots pressure groups claim to be “out of politics” and tend to distance themselves from traditional political allegiances. According to Lomasko, “People who try to mobilise today belong to a social class that did not participate in the protests of 2012. They do not have a degree, they have never been abroad and they will not claim political asylum in Europe. Today these people protest out of despair. If in the beginning they did not talk about politics it was because they did not know what it was and what was their place in politics. While protesting, they had to learn all that.”

Voicing the unspoken

Lomasko’s opinion about the ongoing transformations in citizen activism and protest dynamics in Russia, and their possible implications, is quite nuanced. She believes that “[t]oday’s protests are extremely serious, because these people have nothing to lose. The government underestimates to what extent absolute poverty is widespread in Russia and that is why protest movements will go ahead.” Nevertheless, even these “angry” Russians who dared to protest in the last two years finally became invisible: “the strikes of truckers across Russia, the camp they set up in Khimki (20 kilometres outside of Moscow), all these events have not reached mainstream media outlets in Europe and they were intentionally not broadcasted in Russia,” Lomasko bitterly acknowledges.

While insiders with a thorough knowledge of the Russian reality might object that Other Russias does not tell anything new, its strength lies instead in the genre chosen by Lomasko to describe these multiple facets of contemporary Russia. With her distinctive approach, she succeeds by putting faces and voices on otherwise neglected stories.

As explained in the book’s foreword, Lomasko’s style was heavily influenced by 19th and 20th century drawings done by Russian soldiers, concentration camp inmates and witnesses of the Leningrad siege. The urgency of these works was the only possible way of reporting the brutality of the surrounding world. In the same way, Lomasko’s growing interest in graphic journalism was much more than a stylistic choice: it was the only way to pursue an authentic reflection of Russia’s social and political reality. The book’s compelling life drawings, portraits and words are so expressive that the characters seem to be able to speak for themselves, engaging the reader in an illustrated conversation with ordinary Russians. This intimacy reveals the author’s talent in disclosing, with absolute honesty and empathy, the despair, anger, determination and irony of the Russian populace, in all their contradictions and humanity.

The frame is also very important, as Lomasko’s own voice remains on the side: even though we recognise her criticism towards the Russian government, she does not judge or interfere with the characters’ stories. Though peripheral, the comments spread throughout the book allow the reader to grasp valuable insights on Lomasko’s work and research approach, as well as on the relationships between the author and the people she portrays.

A grim picture

Victoria Lomasko was born in 1978 in Serpukhov (a city located about 100 km south of Moscow). As her father was also a professional artist, she received full support for her artistic vocation. For Lomasko, the real challenge was to find a public that would understand and uphold the social and political issues which were pressing to her. Mixing journalism and human rights activism, she established her creative method as well as her personal protest against “the insular Russian art scene”, where the artist is socially isolated from the viewer and vice versa.

“During the 2000s, one could hardly come across any artist whose works reflected the Russian reality,” Lomasko explains. “Contemporary art was often a tool to launder money made by selling oil, gas and natural resources: it was art for the oligarchs, to decorate their houses and entertain them.” In the last three years, as the economic situation in Russia has dramatically changed, “nobody is willing to invest in fake art anymore”. According to Lomasko, the contemporary Russian art scene is witnessing a grim present, and facing an unclear future: “Apart from a few exceptions among younger artists – like Irina Korina and Misha Most – most of today’s Russian artists have just disappeared. The majority of galleries shut down and one of the last existing platforms – the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art – now seems to be threatened by the divorce of Zhukova and Abramovich (the founders of the centre).”

Yet for Russian contemporary artists, the problem does not lie exclusively in a lack of financial means. In 2010 Victoria Lomasko co-edited with Anton Nikolaev her first book, Forbidden Art (Zapretnoe Iskusstvo), dedicated to the homonymous exhibition hosted in Moscow’s Sakharov Centre in March 2007. The book graphically reports on the criminal proceedings initiated by the Russian Orthodox ultraconservative movement, National Cathedral (Narodnyi Sobor) against Andrey Erofeev and Yuri Samodurov, the organiser of the exhibition and museum director respectively. The two were collectively fined 350,000 roubles (around 100,000 euro at that time) for “inciting religious hatred” – an offense punishable under Article 282 of the Russian Constitution.

For Lomasko, Forbidden Art was somewhat of a prelude of dire straits to come: she worked actively in Russia until 2014, taking part in numerous exhibitions and holding conferences and lectures about graphic journalism. Then, “a serious repression in the cultural sphere began, with the adoption of laws against the offence of religious feelings (the so-called Blasphemy bill, Article 148 of the Russian penal code since 2013), or against extremism (best known as the Yarovaya Law adopted in July 2016).”

Crackdown

Undoubtedly, artistic freedom in Russia has been experiencing a widespread crackdown in recent years with the latest case being the suspicious arrest (last August) of the prominent and controversial theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov. As the already incestuous relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state grows stronger, the life of a graphic artist, advocating for human rights, freedom of expression and LGBT equality, is not a bed of roses. “The ongoing repression does not target art for art’s sake, in a conceptual way; it is specifically aimed at those artists dealing with political and social issues,” Lomasko emphasises.

In such circumstances, Other Russias could only see the light outside of Russia; it was first published in the United States and the United Kingdom, in an English translation by David Campbell. As Lomasko did not receive any proposal from Russian publishers, an original Russian-language version of Other Russias is still missing. Lomasko, who is currently working on a third book about social transformations occurring in the Caucasus and Central Asian countries, finds it easier to work and exhibit in other former Soviet countries than in her own. In Russia she “just cannot make a living anymore”. Her recent publications can only be found on the Russian website Colta.ru, “which exclusively relies on donors and is therefore unable to pay an honorarium, even a symbolic one, to its contributors.”

Laura Luciani is an independent researcher and editor with the East Journal, an Italian online newspaper about social, political and cultural issues in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Book review, Graphic novel, Russia, Victoria Lomasko