A scientist in southern Russia tests a mysterious growth serum on livestock, attracting the vindictive dwarf brother of a Moscow billionaire. A string of brutal and mysterious murders follows, and the Russian state finds a new, and much more sinister, use for the invention. This is Fardwor, Russia!, the first novel of Russian journalist Oleg Kashin, recently published in English translation by Restless Books.
Kashin is one of Russia’s most prominent journalists internationally, not least due to the grim consequences of his work. In November 2010, Kashin was beaten half to death by two men wielding iron bars. Kashin believes that the attack was connected with his reporting for Russian daily Kommersant; newspaper staff saw it as an act of revenge by Pskov region governor Andrei Turchak, whom Kashin had insulted online. In any case, Kashin’s assailants made sure to break his fingers as a message. Five years later, the names of the journalist’s attackers came to light, as well as the man who had organised the hit — Aleksandr Gorbunov. Journalist and author of “Fardwor, Russia!” Oleg Kashin during an open debate at the Mayakovsky Central Library in St. Petersburg, September 2014. Photo CC: Okras / Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved. Kashin completed the manuscript to the novel just two months before he was attacked. Its title (Vperde, Roissia! in Russian) is a corruption of a 2009 article by Medvedev, “Forward, Russia!”, in which the president made vague overtures to anti-corruption and liberal reform, lauding a “modernisational majority” as the solution.
It was a hollow promise for change from above, in the name of a group which didn’t yet exist, without the will or the means to challenge the rotten core of the state and the corruption which corroded it. And after Putin returned to power in 2012, Russia’s liberals had precious little resolve left. Fardwor, Russia is an absurd and bleak reflection of that process of disenchantment.
