Boris Johnson's former deputy says Sajid Javid is wrong to suggest the PM was his chief adviser's "puppet".

The lack of respect for the dead surprised even a soldier with the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary legion of former convicts that fought some of the bloodiest battles in the invasion of Ukraine. He looked at an ugly heap of wooden crosses and flower wreaths that had been pushed aside and cursed the authorities.

“What are you doing? They died for Russia, and you are razing their graves to the ground. You are rolling over them,” he said in a video shot at the time, pointing at the wreckage.

Workers were pouring concrete over a Wagner cemetery near the southern Russian city of Samara on August 24, part of Moscow’s punishment for the private army’s one-day mutiny in June. Not many in Russia noticed the soldier’s distress. Layers of injustice and mass killings go so far and so deep into Russia’s history that most of us have lost track. In Ukraine, the Russian army often leaves its dead soldiers behind.

Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted that at least 20,000 of his soldiers had died in what he called the “meat-grinder operation” that had destroyed the once-charming eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and finally captured its ruins in May. Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, one of Wagner’s co-founders, were then killed in a mysterious plane crash in August, their once familiar faces melting into oblivion. The hypocrisy and the indifference of many Russians were astonishing: President Vladimir Putin first sold Prigozhin’s paramilitary fighters to the country as “heroes.” Then he made them disappear, their graves paved over and crosses knocked down, forgotten even by the earth.

[Graeme Wood: The mercenary always loses]

In Russia, people speak of breaking through another bottom, to the next level of bad. That is where the country of my birth has now arrived. Generations of Ukrainians will remember Russians as serial killers, while in Russia, the anti-war protests have faded away. The secret services, in the fashion of the oprichniki guards of the old czars, sow terror at home while much of Russia turns away and sleeps. I look back now at Russia’s fleeting period of hope, and I wonder what has happened to the oxygen we breathed. Because even the air can be poisoned, I have learned, until indifference and fear become its essence.

Like many Soviet children, I grew up longing to travel. I studied the globe, learned languages, and dreamed of hearing the stories foreigners might tell. I became a reporter, first working in Moscow, then moving to Portland, Oregon, with my husband and son in the early aughts.

To my surprise, in the United States, nostalgia would sometimes flood me out of nowhere. I could be walking in some American park blooming with roses, thinking that I would give everything to be in a dank underpass in St. Petersburg or on the floor of a friend’s apartment covered in cigarette butts, listening to live music.

[Read: Russia’s twin nostalgias]

The changes I saw on television, I ached to witness on the ground: activists pushing against dictatorships in Belarus and Central Asia, national movements rising in the Caucasus, religious communities coalescing in Siberia. I wanted to learn about China’s new business interests in the far east of Russia, and to meet the shaman with six fingers on one hand who worshiped on the shores of Lake Baikal. Some KGB archives opened: The country was learning about its past crimes. One could so easily fall into the trap of believing that Russia was free.

And so my family and I moved to Russia from the United States in 2005. We saw no sign of Russia’s impending catastrophe. The capital was alive with tourists, artists, and businessmen from all over the world. At the opening of a basement theater for plays with political themes, I saw actors mock Putin without fear.

But all was not really quiet during those years. Chechnya was rebuilding from ruins after a decade-long war with the Russian army that killed thousands of people. As a correspondent for Newsweek, I covered terrorist attacks, armed conflicts, and KGB-style repression in the post-Soviet democracies. Still, in Moscow, the word stukach, or “informer,” sounded like a relic of an earlier time. Russia was awake, voting, protesting.

As a reporter, I wanted to get behind the country’s polished facade and look into what Russians call glubinkas, or “little depths”—the remote and miserable corners of a country’s life. I covered neo-Nazi groups, asbestos mines, provincial youth facing unemployment, and the temptations of a life in crime. I went to the Arctic, to the border with China, to places that many in Moscow considered godforsaken in their obscurity; but on coming back to Moscow, I began to bear witness to the gathering of a much worse darkness still.

Journalists often walk the paths where good is losing to evil. I stepped along those byways, saw victims, and reported on crimes against ordinary people. Some were my friends. Natalia Estemirova, or simply Natasha, lived in Grozny. She was an investigative reporter and a human-rights defender, as well as a single mother of a 15-year-old girl. During the Second Chechen War, I stayed at her house, its walls pocked with holes from shrapnel, the two of us talking late into the night. She told me about the dozens of abductions she had documented in what she described as a growing epidemic, crimes for which no one was held accountable.

On July 15, 2009, Natasha was herself abducted in broad daylight in front of her house. The men who pushed her into an unmarked Lada have never been identified or prosecuted. A few hours later, her bullet-riddled body was found on the side of the road. Together with a small group of journalists and human-rights defenders, I went to Chechnya to accompany her hearse along Vladimir Putin Avenue, Grozny’s sinisterly named central boulevard. Perhaps the people she’d helped during the war were too afraid of Chechnya’s brutal leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, to join us. Or were they indifferent? That day, one of Kadyrov’s aides told me that if I didn’t leave Chechnya immediately, I, too, would be made to disappear.  

During Putin’s first two terms in office, we journalists often went to such funerals for our assassinated colleagues: Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and others. These were restive years, especially 2011 and 2012. Russia had seen enough of Putin, his war in Georgia, his penchant for repression that smacked of an earlier era. Protesters ventured into city squares; Muscovites sought out sources of independent news on paper and television. But activists and their leaders started to be arrested, and statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Stalin sprang up around the country. I remember a feeling of suffocation, as if somebody were pumping the oxygen away. That feeling was one I had experienced as a child.

[Read: How Russian journalists dealt with fake news]

“This city has clogged pores, this city has shut up mouths, telephone calls are like confessions of mutiny,” my father wrote in a 1979 poem about my hometown. Now all of Russia began to seem that way, as though it were heading back to the 1970s. The number of informers was rapidly growing: People called “hotlines” to report on their neighbors to authorities. I sometimes felt that we told the truth only at the funerals of our assassinated friends. And I questioned my past nostalgia: Was this what Russia had been all along?

Then Boris Nemtsov, a democratic politician, one of the very best Russia had, with my last name but who was no relation, was shot in the back on a sidewalk within sight of the Kremlin walls.

Nemtsov and I come from the same town: Gorky, which means “bitter.” Soviet society, down to the children, was well trained to hunt down and condemn people who stood out. And so my classmates refused to play with me in the summer of 1979 because my mother had a big, curly Afro perm, loved Boney M., wore bell-bottom pants of her own design, and drove a tiny Zaporozhets car. She was one of the first women to drive in our city. In a photograph I adore, she is standing on top of that car, brave and free, in her colorful overalls, waving to us.

Life in my hometown was hidden from foreign eyes and organized, like some ill-omened nesting doll, in layers of secrecy. Scientists under the pressure of classified work agreements developed military technologies in army bases and scientific institutes within the closed city. The U.S.S.R. had at least 40 such towns, and some of them are still not open, meaning that to visit them as a nonresident, you need a permit.  

Growing up in that run-down, grim, secretive, industrial place, I imagined that one day, something magical would happen there. And something did: Nemtsov, a skinny physicist with messy hair, appeared. He was charismatic, unusual, reminding me of my parents and many of their friends—intellectuals who longed for freedom, justice, transparency, and travel.

Boris Nemtsov came to our home when I was 13, and he was the first true democrat I ever heard speak. He was a scientist researching quantum physics, designing antennas for spaceships at the local Radiophysical Research Institute. My dad was a young reporter, his articles constantly censored or banned. I remember a door marked Censor in the smoky hallway of his newsroom on Figner Street.

My father had called Nemtsov in the course of reporting a story about a half-built nuclear-power plant in Gorky. The site was visible from our balcony on the eighth floor of a concrete apartment block. The project’s plans revealed dangerous construction flaws that my father investigated. He interviewed the young scientist Nemtsov for this story, and the two teamed up to stop the nuclear project just one year before the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

“Everything Nemtsov said was unusual; nobody spoke like him,” my father later told me. “He understood the internal direction at a time when there were no politics in the U.S.S.R. He was a born politician.”

In the last years of the Soviet Union, the KGB tried to recruit Nemtsov to spy on a Jewish physicist in his institute in exchange for business trips to foreign conferences, Boris’s widow, Raisa Nemtsova, told me recently: “They knew that he was so open that nobody would think he was an agent, and at the same time, that he had ambitions, which gave them hopes. But they received a firm no from him.”

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Nemtsov became the governor of our town, opened it to foreign visitors, and restored its historical name, Nizhny Novgorod. As a political figure, Nemtsov said no to wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. To stop the First Chechen War, Governor Nemtsov collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on a letter to President Boris Yeltsin: “For many months in a row, blood has been shed and people have been dying in Chechnya, nonstop. The war is killing our children, killing our future, distorting and twisting our country, giving birth to enemies and hate.”

Nemtsov later said that he did not have much hope that Yeltsin would pay attention to the petition from Nizhny Novgorod. But 1 million residents of Nizhny Novgorod, a region with a population of just 3.5 million, put their signatures under that letter next to Nemtsov’s. The governor went all the way to the Kremlin with a minibus full of signed petitions. He went on to become one of the most important politicians in the Russian opposition, speaking out against the country’s autocratic turn and its first incursions into Ukraine.

When Nemtsov was shot in Moscow in 2017, the Kremlin tried five Chechen men for the killing, a sideshow meant to distract from the real reason for his death. The governor of  Nizhny Novgorod, Valery Shantsev, said nothing. No governor in Russia in 2017 would have dared to write an open letter to Putin and sign it with their own name. When I looked at Russia then, I saw a land of unconcern—a hand that waves as if to say “Who cares?”

Who cared when my best friend from school, Lena, was murdered by her husband in their apartment in Avtozavod, a depressing, industrial district of Nizhny Novgorod, built for workers at the city’s car plant? Lena’s neighbors could hear her screams but did not call the police, friends said. “Why bother? Many neighbors drink, scream, and beat each other,” one friend told me in 2010.

The same indifference extended to Katia Popova’s apartment building, also in Avtozavod. Katia’s mother locked her inside their tiny flat when the girl was just 13. Ten years later, plumbers discovered a tall 23-year-old who had come of age connected to this world only by a radio. Neighbors were aware of the girl living behind seven locks but were too afraid of the mother to get involved.

Something was wrong in my hometown. Putin’s Russia had decriminalized domestic violence, so why should neighbors intervene—even when a man was locked inside an apartment to starve to death, or the woman next door was being killed?

Then came another blow to what remained of civic life. On February 24, 2022, free-spirited critics of the Kremlin began leaving the country because the Kremlin had criminalized independent war reporting, which meant the end of journalism in Russia. People left the country just to gasp the air of sanity and get away from Putin’s cult of death.

The country mostly tolerated its own strangling. Pacifists inside Russia can be arrested for holding up a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in public, or for writing certain posts on social media.

Whether because of fear or inertia, Russian society hardly stirred itself during the massacres in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, and Mariupol. I don’t accept repression as an excuse for passivity. The willingness to remain silent is hardly distinguishable from the impulse of the Soviet man who looked at a nonconforming neighbor and picked up the phone to call the KGB. And the silence of the many throws into relief the protests of the few.

Last year, a movement called Soft Power petitioned against the war in Ukraine and the mobilization to support it: “President Vladimir Putin does not and cannot have any legal grounds, any balanced reasons for the war,” the petition said. Nearly half a million people signed it. But in the country at large, anti-war voices have grown faint and the lists of those arrested or killed have grown long. Russia’s rich enjoy opulent lives while the rest of the country stagnates—and sends its children to die in something they are not allowed to call “war.”

[Read: The bitter truth behind Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art]

The war in Ukraine destroyed the part of me that missed Russia and felt pain for its fate. I can at last let go of my peculiar nostalgia—the nostalgia for what I hoped Russia could one day be—and see the country for what it is.

Russia is the country destroying cities and villages in Ukraine; the country where more than 500 political prisoners languish; where even Wagner soldiers know that their nation has no pity for its dead; the global power whose leader has entered an anti-Western entente with North Korea, China, Hamas, and other authoritarian governments that kill journalists and opposition activists. Russia has reached its bottom, and then the level beyond.

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