Ivan Philippov writes:

The day of the invasion – 24 February – is a day that will be forever seared into my memory. The enormity and the irrationality of the war was like a physical blow. In my carefully constructed social bubble, there wasn’t a single person who supported the war. We felt like leaves, scattered by a hurricane. We still feel like this.

Some of us left Russia and some stayed. I left with the film director Kantemir Balagov. It was past midnight when we were sitting in the deserted food court of Istanbul airport, waiting for our flight to Yerevan, Armenia. Nursing a glass of water, Kantemir asked me: do you think we should stop speaking in Russian? Do we have to be ashamed of our language? That is probably the only question to which I have an unequivocal answer: “No!”

Let me try to explain. Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy both speak Russian, but their languages could not be more different. Zelenskiy’s Russian is passionate, emotional and vibrant – alive. The language of Russian propaganda is dead: a senseless pile-up of obscure bureaucratese. The great Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev made a powerful film, Loveless, about an absence of love in everyday Russian life. The Russian that Putin and his cronies speak reflects this – it is deliberately un-alive. So no, we will never be ashamed of Russian: we speak a different language.

It’s not quite the same with our passports. In the line to the border control in Istanbul, I overheard a conversation between a Ukrainian mother and daughter. They were standing right behind me – they were trying to fly back home to Kyiv. They left for a holiday in Turkey before the war and now they were going back to a world in which their grandmother was hiding in a bomb shelter and their father and brother had joined the territorial defence forces. I listened to their conversation and felt an overpowering sense of shame. My Russian passport burned like hot coal in my pocket.

I don’t think I will be able to read any of my favourite Russian books or watch Russian films or TV shows that I loved any time soon. They all have has the same ending now: 24 February and the robotic voice of President Putin announcing his “limited military operation”. Bucha, Irpen, Hostomel, Mariupol … We will have to write new books and make new films. And, step by step, we will figure out what it means to be Russian now. [Continue reading…]