Italian comics artist and illustrator Igort (5 Is the Perfect Number) spent nearly five years in Ukraine, Russia and Serbia trying to understand and document the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, and later Russia, on its own people. The first half of this stunning graphic novel, "The Ukrainian Notebooks," examines the 1932-1933 Ukraine famine orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. Created to destroy many of the Ukrainian people, their culture and their independence, food shortages caused millions to die of starvation and even resort to cannibalism. The second half, "The Russian Notebooks," sheds light on the 2006 assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and examines Russia's disappearing democracy. Alongside Anna's story, as told by those who knew her, Igort shares interviews with soldiers sent to Chechnya, who committed unfathomable and grotesque crimes and torture. Igort's accompanying art reveals both the victims and perpetrators in stark and humanizing detail.
Igor layers the interviews, one by one and fact after fact, so that readers are left with nothing but disturbing truth. His color palette is as stark as the terrors these people have faced: washed-out browns and reds, with some grey and black. This factual telling bears witness not only to the horrors, but also to the resilience that these people have needed to draw upon to survive. An illustrated postscript, dated September 2014, details what Western media had called a civil war when it was in fact a war of invasion by the Russian Federation. That the unpredictable violence of the past continues to this day makes The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks a critical read. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company