Vladimir Putin is at war. The whole planet knows it, sees it. He is at war with Ukraine. Against NATO. And against the political opposition in Russia. Another war of the Russian president goes completely under the radar. The one he leads against women.
And this war is unfolding on at least two fronts. In Ukraine, where Russian soldiers use sexual violence and the kidnapping of children as weapons of combat and enslavement, even genocide. But also in Russia, where women’s rights have taken huge steps backwards since he came to power. Very few presidents in the world – even in the most authoritarian countries on the planet – can boast of having eliminated the meager protections in force to counter domestic violence. Vladimir Putin has this infamous privilege.
It is with these few elements in mind that I enthusiastically began reading the latest book by the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, Twice in the same river. The author, whose mother is Estonian, became known worldwide thanks to her novel Purge, published in 2010, in which she dissects both the ravages of wartime rape and the horrors committed in the Baltic states in the name of the glory of the Soviet Union. Since then, his fiction books and plays have been translated into more than forty languages. His work has been rewarded with an avalanche of prizes, including the Foreign Femina.
In March 2023, Mme Oksanen was invited to a conference on threats to democracy and freedom of expression. The speech she gave there became the basis for this essay which appeared in Finnish last year and arrived here just in time for the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The book begins with a strong image, the story of Sofi Oksanen’s Estonian great-aunt, who, after undergoing a night of interrogation at the hands of Soviet forces, only uttered two words. For the rest of his life. “Jah, ärä” or “Yes, stop”. A nightmare surrounded by unsaid words from which she never woke up. A crime that is repeated today because it has never been punished.
And this is where a good part of Sofi Oksanen’s thesis lies. In the idea that the crimes of Putin’s Russia today are only the continuation of those of yesterday and that they go hand in hand with Russian imperialism, which, if it has changed its face , has been the same since the time of the tsars.
Sofi Oksanen notably offers a very enlightening explanation of the terminology used by the Kremlin to justify the invasion of Ukraine, presented to the Russians as a military operation aimed at liberating the neighboring country from its “Nazi” government. “In the West, when we talk about ancient German crimes, we almost always mention the Holocaust. But in Russia or the Soviet Union, we only remember the attack on the USSR by Hitler’s Germany and the Russians who were killed there, the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad. Compared to this, the Holocaust is completely irrelevant. The West is stunned by the absurdity of Putin’s concept of “denazification”, but in Russia the question does not arise: “denazification” means eliminating people who seek to attack or destroy Russia – and in this case, destroying Russia means defeating the Russian Empire,” she notes, in one of the most illuminating passages of the essay.
However, there are not only pearls of wisdom in Twice in the same river. On several occasions, I cringed when reading passages that seemed to confuse the intentions of the Kremlin and the Russian population as a whole. And who transform anecdotes into generalizations that flirt with Russophobia. The author notably recounts that the Ukrainian authorities intercepted a conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife in the spring of 2022. During the exchange, the latter gave her blessing for her husband to rape Ukrainian women on the condition of protecting herself. “This call is not the only one of its kind – the phones seized by the Ukrainians confirm that the wives, girlfriends and mothers of Russian soldiers are aware of the crimes committed by their relatives, and that they encourage them,” writes Mme Oksanen. The accusation is gigantic and lacks nuance.
In the same vein, Sofi Oksanen generally presents Russian women as facilitators of the crimes of the Putin era – inside Russia as well as outside – and very little mentions Russian resistance movements, largely feminine, who denounce as much the machismo of the Russian power as the violence perpetrated by the army. We can think in particular of the activists of Pussy Riot who have become known all over the world for their art that is both protesting and feminist.
These extrapolations and omissions are sometimes annoying and do not always serve the purpose, which, in general, is very relevant. Not only has the Russian president reduced the rights of women and sexual minorities, but he has made misogyny, presented as a “defense of traditional values”, an export product relayed by Russian troll farms. These messages find traction in authoritarian countries, but also in the heart of Western democracies, notes the author.
“The exploitation of misogyny is something else. Logically, Putin exploits it not only in war zones, but also in domestic and foreign policy, to increase the influence of the regime, support the central power and expand the imperialist project,” writes the author. We are duly warned.
Extract
“Sexual violence is one of the world’s oldest weapons; efficient, supragenerational in its effects, it does not require logistics, technical maintenance or modernization. However, the impunity which encourages rape is not the lot of all armies, contrary to what we heard during the first revelations of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Regarding Hitler’s Germany, historian Antony Beevor spoke of “the greatest collective rape in our history”. Later, the Russian Federation would use the same weapon in Chechnya, in Syria, in the areas it controls in Ukraine since 2014 and through the Wagner group, in command of Russian military intelligence in many countries. Africa. »
Who is Sofi Oksanen?
Of a Finnish father and an Estonian mother, Sofi Oksanen was born in Finland in 1977. Playwright and novelist, she is the author of the works Stalin’s cows, Baby Jane, Purge And The dog park, his most recent novel. She also wrote a few essays, including A skirt too short. Violence against women and colonialism are two of his favorite themes.
Twice in the Same River – Putin’s War on Women
Stock Editions
302 pages
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