“Not a family in Russia that does not have its zombie”, writes Iegor Gran in Z as zombiea fiery book in which the French writer attacks a part of Russian society, the vast majority, which unconditionally supports President Vladimir Putin.
If the zombie evokes the corpse emerging from the tomb that a voodoo priest places at his service or the armies of the living dead that haunt the films of George A. Romero, the zombie, in Russia, is the uncle, the great -mother, sister, son, husband.
All those who march in line behind the “supreme hypnotist”, blind supporters of the illegal war that Russia has been waging without complexes since February 24th.
“For me, these Russian zombies are people who are normal, who are sometimes very friendly, who are sometimes even my friends or people who have helped me in the past, who have a heart in addition, explains Iegor Gran at the end thread, from Paris. But as soon as the conversation comes to Ukraine and what is happening there, they switch into a logorrhea of fictions, stupidly repeat what they hear right and left or pour out a torrent of hatred against the West or against Ukraine. »
Russia’s mutation into “a toxic Zombieland” is what made the war possible. A phenomenon which, in the eyes of the author, results from a real “collective madness”.
“I describe in this book conversations I have had with loved ones, or conversations I have seen between zombies. The idea was to shed some light on the blind spot of this war, which is that portion of the Russian population that supports Putin and, beyond Putin, that supports the war,” says Iegor Gran, who is not losing his temper. in view of the “criminal passivity in the face of this regime”.
A gigantic April Fool’s joke
Born in 1964 in Moscow, he is the son of the writer Andreï Siniavski (1925-1997), a Soviet dissident who spent a few years in the gulag before choosing exile and being appointed, in 1974, professor of literature and Russian civilization at the Sorbonne. Arrived in France at the age of ten, Iegor Gran has pursued parallel careers for 25 years as an engineer and novelist (NGO!, Ecology at the bottom of my housePOL, 2003 and 2011).
Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the writer has been struck to see some of the “ordinary” people he follows on social networks turn into monsters, between two videos of cats and a recipe for jams , encouraging murder and war under the guise of “denazifying” Ukraine.
Apathy has a broad back, and many Russians, believes Iegor Gran, are guilty of willful blindness.
The idea was to shed some light on the blind spot of this war, which is that portion of the Russian population that supports Putin and, beyond Putin, that supports the war
According to him, believing that the Russian people would be victims of Putin’s propaganda does not hold water. Impossible to adhere to the propaganda, he writes, it “makes think of a sabotage, or a gigantic April Fool’s joke concocted by morons”.
“I am convinced that my zombies, continues the one who is also a columnist at Charlie Hebdo since 2011, deep down they are aware that there is no biological laboratory on the borders of Ukraine and Russia where we take the COVID virus, that we traffic it with the Slavic DNA and put it on migratory birds to disseminate it in Russia. I am convinced that no human being is capable of sincerely believing this kind of absolute fiction. »
Victim or accomplice?
Are the Russian people victim or accomplice? The question is legitimate, believes Iegor Gran. “But the responsibility of the Russian people is obvious in what happened,” he said. I’m not saying that all Russians support Putin, of course. There is a small proportion of extremely brave people, who go out into the street with a sign. The problem is that the mass of the Russian people, especially in the provinces and especially among the somewhat elderly, are entirely for the war. Many studies have also shown that between 60 and 70% of the Russian population supports the war in Ukraine.
The proof that this mass exists, and that it is dominant, can be seen, according to him, in the absence of an anti-war movement in Russia. “During the war in Afghanistan, there was quite quickly a committee of soldiers’ mothers who, not seeing their children return, began to hold the state to account. What we don’t see at all today. »
Admittedly, repression plays its role in present-day Russia, but it does not explain everything, believes the writer, who recalls that according to data compiled by OVD-Info — a Russian NGO for the defense of human rights —, there have been only 305 criminal prosecutions in Russia since the start of the war. In this immense country of 145 million inhabitants, these are, he points out, “extremely low figures”.
In Iran, where violent demonstrations have been taking place for a month and where the authorities are firing live ammunition at the crowds, the toll has already risen to nearly a hundred dead. Nothing like this in Russia, stresses Iegor Gran. “I don’t know of any example of a protester being killed today in Russia, even though the issue is sending his own children to the butchery. »
For him, the case is closed: the zombie has chosen to be a zombie. He is not a victim, but an active collaborator in his transformation.
It remains to explain the inexplicable. Why the Russian people today still seem to waver between farce and tragedy. Pathological love of fiction, masochism, curse, narcissistic injury? “I believe that the main, the deepest intimate need of the Russian people is a need for suffering, perpetual and never satisfied, everywhere and in everything”, wrote Dostoyevsky in a letter of December 1874.
Now, the Slavic soul, the spiritual destiny of the Russian people, Yegor Gran does not swallow any of this. “I refuse to believe in some sort of curse that would mean that these people, whatever we do, will always be on the wrong side of the barricades. This is false, there have been several cases in history where the Russians were on the right side. »