Latest news with #Lebedev
Saba Yemen
03-05-2025
- Saba Yemen
Russian forces destroy Ukrainian factory repairing Western weapons
Moscow - (Saba): Sergei Lebedev, the coordinator of Russian covert operations in the Nikolaev region, announced that Russian forces targeted a military equipment maintenance factory in the Kyiv-occupied part of the Zaporozhye region. Sputnik quoted Lebedev as saying: "A factory in Zaporozhye was successfully targeted. The factory was repairing armored vehicles, mostly foreign-made." According to him, it is also reliably known that the company produced and assembled parts for drones. Whatsapp Telegram Email Print
Telegraph
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Author Sergei Lebedev: ‘Trump is a huge gift to Putin's Russia'
'This is my first book that will not be published in Russia,' says Sergei Lebedev, looking, not for the last time in our conversation, unspeakably weary. After a moment, however, his face brightens. 'But my Ukrainian friends and colleagues have been able to read it in Russian. And they've said: 'you've done good.'' Lebedev is currently one of the most admired novelists from Russia, if not in Russia. His books have been translated into 20 languages and the New York Review of Books has called him 'the best of Russia's younger generation of writers'. His latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, which explores the events that inaugurated the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict over a decade ago, is his first book since the acclaimed Untraceable, which was translated into English in 2021. An offbeat thriller about the Russian inventor of a Novichok-style nerve agent who is pursued by assassins after defecting to the West, Untraceable was inspired by the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. Lebedev is amazed that some people were taken by surprise when Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the Salisbury affair, to him, had been a clear demonstration of Putin's contempt for the notion of sovereignty. 'I don't think that anyone [in the West] took the Skripal poisoning really seriously, or [Alexander] Litvinenko's [in 2006] as well. It was like: OK, this is what we expect from the Russians, this is their business as usual. But if it is not an act of state terrorism in miniature, I don't know what to call it.' Lebedev, 43, is an exile: he's talking to me over Zoom from his home in Potsdam, an hour from Berlin. He moved to Germany in 2018 with his wife, a political scientist and historian, when she was offered a job there. Initially he made frequent return trips to Moscow, but not any longer now that 'the Iron Curtain has fallen again'. Potsdam, with its former KGB prison and Soviet barracks, is a salutary place to live, he says. 'Feeling these traces of the former presence of the Imperial force, it keeps you on the alert, it keeps you vigilant: it reminds you that the Russian version of history – that this was a liberation, not an occupation – is not true, though that is something that very few Russians, even intellectuals, would admit. For Putin and his generation of decision-makers, they do remember [the Soviet withdrawal from East Germany] as a retreat, as a defeat, and they of course would like one day to regain it.' I ask him what he thinks of President Trump's recent intervention in the ongoing saga of Putin's imperial ambitions. 'Maybe I'm naive but I'm highly surprised by this course of events. I think it's – how to put it in a diplomatic way? – a betrayal of Ukraine's trust. It's an attempt to get rid of the moral language which includes the terms 'aggressor' and 'victim', and to depict the whole conflict in terms of business: Ukraine as just a proxy in a big conflict between two superpowers who can negotiate. Which is what Russian propaganda has been saying for years. This approach is a huge gift to the Putin side.' Lebedev's latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, is set during the annexation of parts of eastern Ukraine by Russian separatists in 2014. It examines the impact of these events, including the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, on the residents of a former mining town in the Donbas; but it also delves further back into the area's history. The coal mines of this region have been a convenient dumping ground for corpses over the years, from opponents of the Bolsheviks to tens of thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazi invaders during the Second World War. Lebedev lends one of these forgotten bodies a voice, allowing him to tell us about his life and afterlife in an impressionistic, incantatory lament. These murdered Jews in eastern Ukraine have been forgotten – 'on our mental map, the eastern border of the Holocaust is Babi Yar in Kyiv' – because the Soviets knew that if they brought the world's attention to this Nazi atrocity, they would also draw focus on to the mass murders earlier committed by Russians. 'They literally covered for the Nazis. This is the place where the two systems of these bitter enemies, the Soviets and the Nazis, overlapped in a very strange and eerie romance. 'For me this was the departure point for attempting to understand how the Soviet Union, which positioned itself as a stronghold of anti-fascism, eventually turned into what is now a fascist state. This red monster's skin is now turning brown, and this is what I try to depict and to understand in this novel.' Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981, the son of two geologists (he followed them into the field for several years in his 20s). As a small boy he devoured English-language books his father had picked up on a trip to London as part of a scientific delegation: 'my passion in childhood was Mr Sherlock Holmes. Of course, when I went to London earlier this year, I visited Baker Street. 'What Mr Sherlock Holmes shows is that every evil leaves a trace – nothing will go unnoticed if you are intelligent enough – and this was something subconsciously important for me in my childhood. It is what geology teaches, too: it is possible to reconstruct a whole epoch. And this was my inspiration when I faced Soviet history, full of disconnections, full of loopholes, missing links, chains and witnesses; but still, if you dare, you can go there and you can reconstruct.' He has retained a love of English literature: readers of Untraceable will remember the assassin who loves Auden's poetry. 'This was my way to learn English, I translated [Auden] into Russian, together with Leonard Cohen – maybe a strange couple.' For many years Lebedev was a journalist but it was 'a metaphysical crisis' that turned him into a novelist: he discovered that his grandmother's second husband had been a senior officer in the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. 'I simply wasn't able to cope with the fact that a member of the family was a mass murderer. Then I realised that the way of dealing with this was to write a book about it – and because the state archives are classified, it had to be fiction. 'And I realised all of a sudden that this whole generation of evil-doers had simply disappeared from the public memory and conscience. We can all produce a mental image of an SS officer but this was not the case with the Soviets, and I realised that I needed to bring this figure back on to the cultural scene, made of flesh.' The result was his first novel, Oblivion (2011), which confronted its readers with the obscene actions of the men who ran Stalin's gulags. I ask Lebedev if he thinks he can ever return to Moscow. 'You know, I'm not thinking about this right now because it is weakening to go into these kinds of deliberations. I have many things to do, I have my texts to write, I have my language to be defended from those who use it as a language of aggression. And this is it for now.' Friends in Moscow report that the war is an accepted fact of life now: 'even for those who say, or think, that they are anti-Putin, anti-war, this has become a new reality that you cannot fight with. And of course a new social stratum has been born – soldiers, soldiers' families, those who produce military equipment, millions of people involved in the war effort – who, whatever they really think, will say that this is a just war. And the problem is that I don't see any real political leverage to remove this stratum from its position of power even in the best-case scenario.' I ask Lebedev if he has ever received any flak from the Russian authorities. 'Not seriously – not yet.' Does he worry about placing himself in danger by being so outspoken? 'It doesn't feel good, but I think it's part of the job description. There's also something very personal here. Generations of my family lived in the Soviet Union and they all kept silent. At least half of my family was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. My grandmother was one of the only survivors, and despite this she was the editor of many volumes of Lenin's works. 'She took care of the writings of the man on whose orders her relatives were executed, and she never expressed any resistance or disagreement.' That is not Lebedev's way: 'I think that I'm physically just tired of this burden of unspoken words.' The Lady of the Mine, tr Antonina W Bouis (Apollo, £18.99), will be published on April 24
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Author Sergei Lebedev: ‘Trump is a huge gift to Putin's Russia'
'This is my first book that will not be published in Russia,' says Sergei Lebedev, looking, not for the last time in our conversation, unspeakably weary. After a moment, however, his face brightens. 'But my Ukrainian friends and colleagues have been able to read it in Russian. And they've said: 'you've done good.'' Lebedev is currently one of the most admired novelists from Russia, if not in Russia. His books have been translated into 20 languages and the New York Review of Books has called him 'the best of Russia's younger generation of writers'. His latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, which explores the events that inaugurated the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict over a decade ago, is his first book since the acclaimed Untraceable, which was translated into English in 2021. An offbeat thriller about the Russian inventor of a Novichok-style nerve agent who is pursued by assassins after defecting to the West, Untraceable was inspired by the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. Lebedev is amazed that some people were taken by surprise when Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the Salisbury affair, to him, had been a clear demonstration of Putin's contempt for the notion of sovereignty. 'I don't think that anyone [in the West] took the Skripal poisoning really seriously, or [Alexander] Litvinenko's [in 2006] as well. It was like: OK, this is what we expect from the Russians, this is their business as usual. But if it is not an act of state terrorism in miniature, I don't know what to call it.' Lebedev, 43, is an exile: he's talking to me over Zoom from his home in Potsdam, an hour from Berlin. He moved to Germany in 2018 with his wife, a political scientist and historian, when she was offered a job there. Initially he made frequent return trips to Moscow, but not any longer now that 'the Iron Curtain has fallen again'. Potsdam, with its former KGB prison and Soviet barracks, is a salutary place to live, he says. 'Feeling these traces of the former presence of the Imperial force, it keeps you on the alert, it keeps you vigilant: it reminds you that the Russian version of history – that this was a liberation, not an occupation – is not true, though that is something that very few Russians, even intellectuals, would admit. For Putin and his generation of decision-makers, they do remember [the Soviet withdrawal from East Germany] as a retreat, as a defeat, and they of course would like one day to regain it.' I ask him what he thinks of President Trump's recent intervention in the ongoing saga of Putin's imperial ambitions. 'Maybe I'm naive but I'm highly surprised by this course of events. I think it's – how to put it in a diplomatic way? – a betrayal of Ukraine's trust. It's an attempt to get rid of the moral language which includes the terms 'aggressor' and 'victim', and to depict the whole conflict in terms of business: Ukraine as just a proxy in a big conflict between two superpowers who can negotiate. Which is what Russian propaganda has been saying for years. This approach is a huge gift to the Putin side.' Lebedev's latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, is set during the annexation of parts of eastern Ukraine by Russian separatists in 2014. It examines the impact of these events, including the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, on the residents of a former mining town in the Donbas; but it also delves further back into the area's history. The coal mines of this region have been a convenient dumping ground for corpses over the years, from opponents of the Bolsheviks to tens of thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazi invaders during the Second World War. Lebedev lends one of these forgotten bodies a voice, allowing him to tell us about his life and afterlife in an impressionistic, incantatory lament. These murdered Jews in eastern Ukraine have been forgotten – 'on our mental map, the eastern border of the Holocaust is Babi Yar in Kyiv' – because the Soviets knew that if they brought the world's attention to this Nazi atrocity, they would also draw focus on to the mass murders earlier committed by Russians. 'They literally covered for the Nazis. This is the place where the two systems of these bitter enemies, the Soviets and the Nazis, overlapped in a very strange and eerie romance. 'For me this was the departure point for attempting to understand how the Soviet Union, which positioned itself as a stronghold of anti-fascism, eventually turned into what is now a fascist state. This red monster's skin is now turning brown, and this is what I try to depict and to understand in this novel.' Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981, the son of two geologists (he followed them into the field for several years in his 20s). As a small boy he devoured English-language books his father had picked up on a trip to London as part of a scientific delegation: 'my passion in childhood was Mr Sherlock Holmes. Of course, when I went to London earlier this year, I visited Baker Street. 'What Mr Sherlock Holmes shows is that every evil leaves a trace – nothing will go unnoticed if you are intelligent enough – and this was something subconsciously important for me in my childhood. It is what geology teaches, too: it is possible to reconstruct a whole epoch. And this was my inspiration when I faced Soviet history, full of disconnections, full of loopholes, missing links, chains and witnesses; but still, if you dare, you can go there and you can reconstruct.' He has retained a love of English literature: readers of Untraceable will remember the assassin who loves Auden's poetry. 'This was my way to learn English, I translated [Auden] into Russian, together with Leonard Cohen – maybe a strange couple.' For many years Lebedev was a journalist but it was 'a metaphysical crisis' that turned him into a novelist: he discovered that his grandmother's second husband had been a senior officer in the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. 'I simply wasn't able to cope with the fact that a member of the family was a mass murderer. Then I realised that the way of dealing with this was to write a book about it – and because the state archives are classified, it had to be fiction. 'And I realised all of a sudden that this whole generation of evil-doers had simply disappeared from the public memory and conscience. We can all produce a mental image of an SS officer but this was not the case with the Soviets, and I realised that I needed to bring this figure back on to the cultural scene, made of flesh.' The result was his first novel, Oblivion (2011), which confronted its readers with the obscene actions of the men who ran Stalin's gulags. I ask Lebedev if he thinks he can ever return to Moscow. 'You know, I'm not thinking about this right now because it is weakening to go into these kinds of deliberations. I have many things to do, I have my texts to write, I have my language to be defended from those who use it as a language of aggression. And this is it for now.' Friends in Moscow report that the war is an accepted fact of life now: 'even for those who say, or think, that they are anti-Putin, anti-war, this has become a new reality that you cannot fight with. And of course a new social stratum has been born – soldiers, soldiers' families, those who produce military equipment, millions of people involved in the war effort – who, whatever they really think, will say that this is a just war. And the problem is that I don't see any real political leverage to remove this stratum from its position of power even in the best-case scenario.' I ask Lebedev if he has ever received any flak from the Russian authorities. 'Not seriously – not yet.' Does he worry about placing himself in danger by being so outspoken? 'It doesn't feel good, but I think it's part of the job description. There's also something very personal here. Generations of my family lived in the Soviet Union and they all kept silent. At least half of my family was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. My grandmother was one of the only survivors, and despite this she was the editor of many volumes of Lenin's works. 'She took care of the writings of the man on whose orders her relatives were executed, and she never expressed any resistance or disagreement.' That is not Lebedev's way: 'I think that I'm physically just tired of this burden of unspoken words.' The Lady of the Mine, tr Antonina W Bouis (Apollo, £18.99), will be published on April 24 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
No redemption for empire — a review of Sergei Lebedev's ‘Lady of the Mine'
Over the past three years of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, the very mention of a Russian novel or film set in Ukraine has understandably evoked trepidation among Ukrainians and Ukraine's supporters. Despite Russia's relentless missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and the staggering number of documented war crimes committed by Russian troops on Ukrainian soil, a number of Russian artists have used their international platforms not to confront this harsh reality but to defend Russian literature from so-called "cancellation" or to even try and humanize the soldiers waging war in Ukraine. By doing so, they often appear detached from — or even complicit in — the suffering committed in their country's name. Exiled Russian author Sergei Lebedev's latest novel, 'The Lady of the Mine,' set against the backdrop of Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, offers a glimpse of what it might look like if the Russian opposition were to actually confront their country's imperialist legacy. The novel underscores the fact that any meaningful project of decolonizing Russian culture must begin from within — specifically, among the country's own anti-war intellectuals. Absent this internal reckoning, the rhetoric of decolonization risks remaining little more than a gesture of wishful thinking. Before he embarked on his literary career, Lebedev worked on geological expeditions in Russia's far North, where some of the Soviet Union's most brutal gulags were located, and also worked as a journalist. Having moved to Germany six years ago for professional reasons, he remains outside of Russia given his vocal anti-war stance. In "The Lady of the Mine," eastern Ukraine at the start of the war in 2014 serves as a sort of palimpsest where war, history, and memory collide with the ghosts of Russian imperial ambition. Lebedev attempts an exorcism of Russia's colonial myths, particularly the Soviet "miner's myth" of Donbas which has long been manipulated by Russian state-controlled propaganda to "justify" their country's aggression beyond Russia's borders. Stripping away illusions of industrial glory, Lebedev reveals the Soviet narrative about Donbas not as some fabled land but as a relentless vortex, unyielding and insatiable. As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that the road to conquest only leads a country into the abyss. Read also: 'Donbas is fiction' — Kateryna Zarembo's book dismantles Russian myths about Ukraine's east At the novel's center is Zhanna, who abandons her university studies in Kharkiv to care for her dying mother Marianna. The cancer that consumes Marianna's body becomes synonymous with the Russian propaganda she watches on television — as the former ravages her body, the latter erodes her mind. Zhanna is horrified by the Russian propagandists on her mother's television shouting about a so-called "Banderite coup" in Kyiv — their effort to discredit the Revolution of Dignity — but 'her mother seemed to understand, and, being on the same wavelength of madness, listened with dark and cruel attention.' The pro-Russian talking points on the television screen were 'pouring into her mother's consciousness, destroying the usual connections of things and phenomena and building new ones: phantasmagoric and sinister.' The "phantasmagoric and sinister" includes the return of her neighbor Valentine, known as 'Valet,' who was exiled to Russia years ago. The Russian military sends Valet and a handful of others to his hometown to help orchestrate a staged uprising, fabricating the illusion pushed by pro-Russian talking heads that the people of Donetsk Oblast genuinely support Russia's annexation. His cover story is simple: he has come back to visit his mother. Yet Valet's return is also deeply personal. Years earlier, he was forced to leave Ukraine for his relatives in Russia because Marianna, viewed by the townspeople as the mine's enigmatic guardian, recognized him as a murderer, his guilt betrayed by specks of blood on his clothes and a gold tooth in his pocket that could have only come from the town's mine. Now, back in Donetsk Oblast, Valet sees an opportunity for revenge by preying on Marianna's young and vulnerable daughter. The town's mine stands as both a grave and a silent witness, its buried secrets forming the novel's dark undercurrent. According to local lore, the sealed-off mine shaft holds the remains of Jews executed by the Nazis during World War II. Yet, through the voice of the Engineer — the long-dead architect of the mine, roused from death by Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine — another dark truth emerges: the Soviets never exhumed the bodies because beneath them lie the remnants of older atrocities, evidence of Russian crimes long concealed. 'Under us lie Red Army prisoners shot by the Germans. Beneath them, people shot by the Bolsheviks when the Red Army was retreating, and the prisoners of Soviet prisons. Under them, people executed in the Civil War by advancing and retreating troops, Whites, Reds, Greens, random people, hostages. Below them, the murdered strikers of the first revolution, in 1905. Stratigraphy. The tiers. Unity in fossilization,' the Engineer explains. '(The Russian occupants) hadn't realized it yet, but they had turned into those whom they considered their worst enemy, whom they had defeated and crushed: the Nazis.' Bound together in death, the bodies in the mine embody 'the mute horror of the European subconscious.' Given the lack of oxygen in the mine shaft, they have not fully decomposed, leaving them 'imprisoned in the embers, in the remains of a bygone age: ashes encased in ashes.' Some book reviews have reduced Lebedev's novel to its perceived inaction, claiming 'nothing really happens,' as if war were only what is shown in films and not slow-burning terror. Others fixate on its themes of death and decay as 'typically Russian.' In those reviews, the significance of the novel being set in Ukraine's East at the start of the war in 2014 was completely overlooked. This novel rejects such an oversimplification — it is not a regurgitation of old, cliched literary tropes but a quiet reckoning with the very ideas that have sustained longstanding stereotypes about Russian literature. Multiple scenes in the novel are crafted to show that the fall of Donetsk was not due to 'pro-Russian separatists' rising up after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014 in Kyiv. In one instance, Valet observes that 'if you looked at the town, walked the streets, went into the yards, listened to what people said, you would never believe they were seriously thinking of separating from Ukraine.' The agents of Russian occupation are all depicted as predators in one way or another. Valet, for instance, is driven by his perverse desire to sexually corrupt Zhanna, even going so far as to masturbate outside her window as he reflects on how exactly to take advantage of her vulnerability following her mother's fatal illness. Lebedev's novel offers no attempt to cast Russian forces in a sympathetic light . They are not depicted as mere pawns in Russian President Vladimir Putin's political machinations but as fully aware perpetrators, intent on committing horrific war crimes in the name of Russia. The presence of Russian culture in the novel is reduced to instances like seedy clubs where Russian chanson music — a musical genre that romanticizes criminality — blares in the background, further underscoring the moral decay that accompanies contemporary Russia and Russian forces' presence in Ukraine. As the Engineer says from beyond the grave, '(The Russian occupants) hadn't realized it yet, but they had turned into those whom they considered their worst enemy, whom they had defeated and crushed: the Nazis.' 'Yes, they have power. But it is the power of the scum, the power of the bottom that has risen and risen. The power of a lowlife who suddenly has been given the power to rise up and rule. And that power is doomed to denounce itself.' Among his Russian literary peers, Lebedev was arguably the only one suited to write such a novel. best suited to write such a novel. His body of work has long been dedicated to exploring Russia's past and how the failure of his country to engage with its darkest moments in history has shaped the present. 'The Lady of the Mine' is a continuation of this, exposing the crimes of empire and the system that enables them. There are no ruminations on the Russian soul, no appeals to 19th century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin for saving — everything is entirely clear. Yet, the emergence of substantive anti-war literature from Russia's contemporary literary scene remains, for the foreseeable future, a remote prospect — Lebedev's reception has arguably been stronger among international audiences. While his novel stands as a striking exemplar of literary dissent, it is also crucial to recognize that the broader endeavor of decolonizing Russian culture cannot be circumscribed to representations of its war of aggression against Ukraine alone. For the Russian exile community to write and speak about the horrors of this war with clarity, honesty, and courage is not just an intellectual duty but an existential one — a step toward understanding not only the monstrosity Russia has become but also the path it failed to pursue. Or, as Lebedev himself put it in an interview for the Financial Times: 'If Russia is to have any future, it will have to become another country.' Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this article. There is an ever-increasing amount of books about or related to Ukraine, Russia, and Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine available to English-language readers, and I hope my recommendations prove useful when it comes to your next trip to the bookstore. It you like reading about this sort of thing, Read also: 'Russian colonialism is not reformable,' says historian Botakoz Kassymbekova We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Saba Yemen
30-03-2025
- Politics
- Saba Yemen
Number of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine on rise
Moscow-Saba: Sergei Lebedev, coordinator of the pro-Russian underground network in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), announced that the number of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, including those from Germany, Nordic countries, and Latin America, is steadily increasing. Sputnik quoted Lebedev as saying: "Many foreign forces have arrived. Groups have arrived from Germany and the Nordic countries, and there are also French. The number of Poles and Romanians has unexpectedly decreased, while the number of mercenaries from Latin America has increased." Whatsapp Telegram Email Print
