Åsne Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) is one of a rare group of contemporary journalists who have the narrative instincts of a novelist, the scope of a historian, and the bravery to go to parts of the world in search of the day's most relevant and dangerous stories.
In Never Say War: Life in Russia Today, Seierstad returns to Russia, a country whose language she speaks, where she'd studied at university in what was then Leningrad, and about which she'd published an earlier work, The Angel of Grozny, that saw her run afoul of the Russian government. This time she's posing as a tourist, and undertakes four trips in the space of a year, looking to make sense of Russia's aggression against its neighbor Ukraine.
In the book, Seierstad's point of entry into the story of contemporary Russia is former soldier Andrey Medvedev, who flees from Russia to Norway across the frozen Pasvik River rather than re-up for another (mandatory, ever-lengthening) brutal tour of duty in Ukraine with the mercenary Wagner Group. Through recounting the arc of Andrey's life, Seierstad demonstrates the anatomy of a society that is at war, even as it's prohibited from using that very word. Instead, people simply use "before" when they want to reference how things had changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "The preposition had to say it all."
The book delves into details of the Wagner Group itself, which had the most success on the Russian side of the war, and the criminality of both its founder and the recruits it attracts through promises of wages far exceeding anything the soldiers might earn legally. Andrey had described seeing a number of people he knew from prison in his Wagner cohort: "There were several familiar faces. Most of them were like him, from children's homes, correctional facilities and asylums." Because, as the book repeats from time to time, "The best soldier was one nobody would miss." The chapter culminates with the ultimate rebellion of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who turned the company tanks toward Moscow in protest over a lack of provisions, supplies, and strategic direction.
Seierstad encounters no such direct defiance in the regions far from the capital, where many of the soldiers come from, in her travels through the glubinka (countryside), and visits with people from all walks of life, including members of Andrey's family. While there's a variety of opinion among the people she speaks with, she finds them resigned to the war to various degrees, having internalized much of the official propaganda. People are heard through their own words, and nothing and no one is treated with anything less than the empathy that has always characterized Seierstad's work. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: Åsne Seierstad delivers essential reading about Russia's war on Ukraine and the impact that a steady diet of pervasive propaganda wreaks on a society.