Charlotte Hobson - Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia

A New Yorker cartoon from 1998 showed a beggar on the streets of the city, holding a sign that says Expert on Russia. For most of the early twenty-first century Russia was a niche interest, pushed off the front pages by the War on Terror, the Great Crash, the Rise of China. Economically it was an aberration and politically, compared to the Cold War, an irrelevance. Russian university departments closed; the secret services culled their Russian speakers; development agencies pulled, or were pushed, out. Russia just wasnt in.

How things have changed! Writing in mid-2017, barely a day goes by without Russia on the front page: invading Eastern European countries; hacking the US election; subverting the Liberal World Order; splitting Europe; bombing Syria to smithereens while (allegedly) bamboozling the world with its next-generation, full-spectrum, hybrid war and weaponized propaganda. Russian President Vladimir Putin is the international Bond villain of the age (he must be delighted). The secret services are busy hiring Russian speakers again. Today everyone pretends to be an expert on Russia though they may never have visited the country or speak the language. Russia is most definitely in: seen either as the greatest evil in the world, or, for a new generation of far-right worshippers, the great hope.

What is missing among all the Russomania, Russophobia and Putinophilia is any sense of what the Russian people are like. They tend to be reduced to either authoritarian-loving dupes dumb enough to believe their lying leaders every word, or to passive victims broken into submission. Charlotte Hobsons Black Earth City, a memoir of her year in Russia in the early 1990s, is a sublime lesson in putting away ones preconceptions.

Hobsons great talent is to bring people and places alive in a few lines. Her place is Voronezh, the provincial southern capital home, over the centuries, to exiles and industrialists, a frontier town for chancers and those running away from something, and for foreign students who wanted to experience something more exotic than Moscow or St Petersburg. Hobson arrived in time to catch the last moments of the Soviet Union and stayed for the all-defining days which came after. She met poets and tycoons-in-waiting, dreamers and cynics; she witnessed hyperinflation and explored the nightmares of Soviet history which lie hidden under every picnic in the woods. She fell in love and carefully recorded the fears and aspirations of a generation coming of age in a country shedding its Soviet skin for a new Russian freedom.

Its hard not to read her sumptuous record now without thinking of what would come later. Were there already signs of how crooked reforms would become? How democracy would turn to what Russians call dermocracy, shitocracy? Can we already spot the coming of Putinism? Todays wars? As one is drawn into the lives of Voronezhs young, it is tempting to imagine where they are today: who has become a corrupt bureaucrat, and who is fighting in Ukraine; who has found Orthodox Fundamentalism, who is living in Kensington, and who has drunk himself to death.

Can one glimpse the future catastrophes among the parties and kisses? Is the worm which will turn and return Russia to authoritarianism already there in Hobsons funny book? And if so, where is it? In Russias denial of its own dark past? In the Wests cack-handed attempts to develop the economy? In the way Hobsons Russian boyfriend turns away from her?

But while one can read Black Earth City through a dark screen where young people enjoy themselves, unaware of impending tragedy, one can read it another way, too. The world Hobson writes about is full of ideas, daring and wit. It is open to the West, hungry for friendship, ready to welcome an Anglichanka blown in from Edinburgh. Is this warm, ebullient Russia really gone? Has it really become submerged beneath the Kremlins nausea-inducing television which sees a Western conspiracy behind everything? Its impossible to think, while reading Black Earth City, that all is lost. There is so much energy here, so little genuine enmity, so many bridges across which one could build contacts, so many different subjects to engage with and people one wants to get to know.

Black Earth City is not an overtly political book; it is a book about people living through tumultuous political times, but it becomes even more important to republish it as Russia becomes a political problem. More than just a tender portrait of the Russian people, Black Earth City also shows how one can engage with something you thought strange and dangerous yet turns out to be far closer to home than you ever imagined. It would have been easy for Hobson to make her Russian characters caricatures, bizarre foreigners. Instead she enters their minds so gracefully they become almost family: Voronezh might be just down the road.

Peter Pomerantsev, 2017