“Death is the key to understanding who the Russians are.” To grasp the message you need to get to Rzev, where the Volga makes three wide sleepy bends, and stop in front of the monument to the Soviet Soldier erected by Vladimir Putin four years ago: 25 meters of molten bronze visible from ten kilometers away to remember the forgotten battle , one million and 300 thousand men died to stop Hitler’s armies. It’s the other Stalingrad. That massacre was also expunged from school books because the sacrifice of human lives was so frightening that it overshadowed the very myth of victory. Downstream they had placed fishing nets to block thousands of bodies that went down with the current.
«It is the memorial created after the annexation of Crimea, with which Putin wanted to tell the Russians that he has not forgotten the battle». The speaker is Marzio Mian, a Chatwinian journalist who, following the tradition of the great correspondents of the past (Luigi Barzini, Egisto Corradi, Ettore Mo), does not go on television talk shows to explain history but to the places where it happened. He is the author of a revealing book, Volga Bluessubtitle Journey to the heart of Russia (Feltrinelli Gramma), the precious fruit of a unique expedition along the 6 thousand kilometers of the great river considered the baptismal font of a group of peoples, from its source to its mouth, from St. Petersburg to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Where Europe and Asia meet or divide depending on whether the compass of Russian history points to the East or the West.
«With that Soldier guarding the country», says Mian, who managed to accomplish the feat while the cannons thunder a little further west, «Putin intended to celebrate the end of mourning for the death of the Soviet Union and the beginning of his Great Game: the opening of hostilities to demonstrate that, starting from Ukraine, the space belonging to the empire cannot be considered anything else that the courtyard of today’s Russia. And that being a former USSR country does not mean having archived either History or Geography. But there is another important aspect to consider. The sculptor Andrej Korobtsov had designed the statue to face East, towards Moscow, but instead Putin ordered the Soldier to be oriented towards the West, towards NATO. A subtlety that the Polish and Baltic press, at the time, did not fail to notice.”
Volga Blues because the soundtrack of the journey is the music of the earth, a sense of melancholy that accompanied the author and the two guides Vlad and Katja into the heart of darkness of Russia at war with the West. A drop of the Volga, they say, takes about a month to descend from its sources, on the Rialto del Valdaj, to the Astrakhan delta. And their journey lasted a month. «It is the longest watercourse in Europe, with its source and mouth in different time zones, one at the latitude of the North Sea, the other at the same parallel as Lake Como. When we set off, in the taiga undergrowth, under the larches and fir trees there were snowdrops, the first blueberries and wild strawberries. Once we reached Astrakhan, the steppe was toasted by the sun, the lotus flowers were blooming on the delta, the watermelons were already ripe and very sweet.”
They crossed Tver, Dubna, Rybinsk, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Uljanovsk, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd: 6 thousand kilometers without ever meeting a single Western foreigner, without hearing any language other than Russian. A condition never experienced before. «Yet we visited big cities where business is done, where life goes on», underlines Mian. «It seems like a paradox, but perhaps Russia has never been as prosperous as it is today. It is also Putin’s paranoid Russia, steeped in rhetoric and suffocated by the control of the FSB, the security services heirs of the KGB; we live in a constant state of restlessness, which can often turn into panic. The most obvious aspect is that that immense country has turned its back on us because it does not want to be contaminated. His is a fight for survival. Russians know that if they were to be undermined by Western nihilism that denies identity and tradition, it would be the end for them. Even progressives, who do not accept Putin’s warmongering approach, believe that Western culture today is demonic. A word that is often heard over there.”
The great rivers tell it like it is. They flow in their own absolute time that seems to absentmindedly touch the history of men, but they are witnesses capable of delivering implacable truths. This is why Mian, to understand the hidden truths of Russia, listened to the Volga. How he listened to the Thames to understand Brexit, the Mississippi to grasp the Trumpian tremors of America, the Tiber to recall the strengths and weaknesses of immobile Italy and the Arctic ice to interpret the white war between the great powers for the possession of rare earths . Volga Blues it’s pure charm. This was triggered by a conversation with the director of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who underlines: «Russia would not exist without the Volga. It is the energy of the homeland, totem and destiny. It is the autobiography of a people. That placid mass of water incorporates everyone, people of twenty different nationalities live there, from Finno-Ugric peoples to southern nomads. Islam, let us think of Tatarstan, is as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as Orthodox Christianity. In Europe, in America, you fill your mouth with multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hatred. We, without further ado, include everyone because we are an imperial civilization.”
Inside that written journey, with the face of a young deacon on the cover, there are the fairy tales of Alexander Pushkin, the desperation of the Karamazov brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Prince Myshkin inIdiotUncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, Pierre Bezukhov by War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy; a diamond pit for Russian creativity, which has bewitched composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimskij-Korsakov and Igor Stravinsky. And then there are the popes of Patriarch Kirill, with their charisma, guardians of the Russian soul, aligned with today’s tsar. The missiles and soldiers headed for Ukraine are sprinkled with holy water by the crusader-prelates: as if to say that the soldiers fight on earth, the angels bless them from above.
«It was a journey with two propellants: the need to understand and the need to explain», concludes Marzio Mian. «Also because unique thinking reigns here. In Europe, NATO has become a dogma, venturing criticism means being marginalized. This doesn’t happen in the American world (I have a US passport) where even among liberals the debate is open, meaningful, and criticism of the administration’s actions is respected.” To the eternal question about Russian distrust towards democracy, the great liquid father responds with a phrase heard a thousand times during the journey into the heart of darkness: “Fuck the nineties”. It refers to the nineties of freedom and excess, those of Boris Yeltsin. «It was among the most dramatic periods in their history. There was shooting in the streets. Only with Ivan the Terrible and after the Revolution, during the civil war, was Russia so close to falling apart. To remember it, the old people use the word “smuta”, the period of troubles». The French writer Emmanuel Carrère, in love with that great country, explained his passion for the strong man in this way at the Turin book fair. Down there among the thousand bends of the river a saying gives rise to goosebumps: “Meeting death isn’t scary if you’re surrounded by Russians.” Marzio Mian translates it, having arrived with some more certainty at the mouth of the Volga, where the steppe is toasted by the sun: «Death can be horrendous, but not if it serves the Russian people. This is the root of their patriotism. In other words: we are less practical than you, but we have a bigger heart.”
