Organization of systematic rapes in Ukraine, rigged elections, forced Russification, deportations, torture, child theft. From the USSR to Putin’s Russia, it’s as if nothing had happened.
In the fall of 2022, Pramila Patten, special representative of the UN Secretary-General on sexual violence committed in times of conflict, declared that sexual violence was a “deliberate tactic” of Russian forces.
Nothing surprising for the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, who reminds us that sexual violence is “one of the oldest weapons in the world”. A weapon that Russia uses repeatedly from one generation to the next, which has become “an essential component of the genocide targeting the Ukrainians”.
It is this point of view that she develops in Twice in the same river. Putin’s war on women. A powerful and argued essay against misogyny as an instrument of power in Russia.
Born in 1977 to a Finnish father and an Estonian mother, Sofi Oksanen tells the heartbreaking story of her great-aunt, who became speechless after a night of interrogation at the start of the second Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. Silent, except for two words in Estonian that she repeated: “Yes, stop. »And what happened to her great-aunt is happening today in the heart of Europe.
Sofi Oksanen, who does not hesitate to define herself as a “postcolonial” author, has addressed these themes several times in her novels. As in Stalin’s cows or in Purge (Stock, 2010, Foreign Femina Prize), a family tragedy set against the backdrop of the occupation of Estonia and Soviet sexual violence.
From the Estonian point of view, “the war in Ukraine feels like reliving the events of the 1940s, as if we were constantly pressing the button replaybecause Russia uses the same road map as in its previous wars of conquest.
She points out that Russia, “a classic example of an authoritarian state with a patriarchal regime”, practically legalized domestic violence in 2017 by relaxing the legislation that was in force, with the ostentatious support of the Russian Orthodox Church. “A woman’s life is not worth much in Russia, and sexual violence is widespread. As violence begets violence, high inequality in Russia and events in Ukraine are correlated. »
For the author of Twice in the same river (whose title comes from a well-known quote by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus), Russia has a long history of making war crimes possible. “What to the West seems illogical, irrational, stupid, incomprehensible to common sense or the heart is perfectly rational for Moscow, it is a natural continuation of Russian governance. » As proof, the recent attempts by the Russian government to assimilate feminism to an “extremist ideology”.
In the eyes of Sofi Oksanen, “the aim is a pure Russia: a world purged of everything that the Kremlin describes as fascist, Nazi, antipatriotic, sick, satanic, crazy, extremist”.
A relentless and terrifying demonstration.