What Lomasko set out to do with this book was capture the lives of Russian citizens whose voices aren't generally heard. Not just by us here in the States, but even within Russia itself. School teachers in towns so rural that they have class sizes sometimes as small as 1, middle-aged sex workers in mid-sized cities, teenagers in juvenile prison convicted of murder, women who had been tricked in becoming slaves at a Moscow grocery store... People who most of society would like to collectively forget exist. Perhaps because it highlights failures in their society overall. Perhaps because it hits too close to home. Perhaps because those people's lives are so full of pain that to even acknowledge it would bring an immense amount to them vicariously. Regardless of how and why these people got to where they are, though, they are on the fringes of Russian society, and that's what Lomasko wanted to get to.
And that is very much what she does. The book contains dozens of short vignettes. Captured from "interviews" she conducted. I use quotes there because she didn't set out to have a formal sit-down interview with them; she would just talk with them and record the conversation. She wasn't collecting stories for this book, really; she was just sitting with them and being an empathetic human being. She even notes that several of these vignettes started out as her just sketching someone on a park bench or at a cafe or something, and they would come over and start talking to her. Accordingly, some of their stories are longer and more in-depth, some are very cursory; but in every case, it still gets across at least a snapshot of who these people are and how they came to their station in life.
But it's debatable, as I said, of being called comics. The vignettes are all written out in text, and illustrations of the individuals accompany each piece. So a casual flip-through would likely put this in the "illustrated prose" categroy. But most of the illustrations depict the individuals speaking via word balloons, and the longer vignettes have the same people drawn several times over several pages, suggesting a "deliberate sequence" to borrow from McCloud's definition. Not that McCloud's definition is the end-all-be-all when it comes to how we define comics, but my point is that this isn't a comic in how you'd typically think of one.
But here's why I ultimately landed on the side of doing a review here. The stories Lomasko tells here come from the period of 2008-2016. This is a particularly interesting timeframe because Vladmir Putin served as Prime Minister of Russia from 2008-2012 and then took up the office of President, a position which he has held since then. Putin had been in national politics since the late '90s, so he was very much a known quantity to the people of Russia before he was elected President, but there were a good number of people -- including multiple international bodies -- who pointed out some "irregularities" with the election and, significantly for my interest here, this led to a large number of public protests, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the '90s. The Pussy Riot concert is perhaps the most famous, with the band's arrest and trial gaining international attention for what very much seemed like a kangaroo court. Lomasko covers both some of those protests and the Pussy Riot trials here.
But here we are, well over a decade later, and Putin remains in power. The protests have dwindled to almost nothing because Putin's been pretty ruthless in silencing opposition voices. The loudest ones have been literally been thrown out of high windows, poisoned, or otherwise 'disappeared' and that has, in turn, convinced others to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. These people that Lomasko was trying to hard to shine a light on are still largely kept at the periphery, barely eking out an existence in many cases.
In many ways, the snippets we see in Other Russias is pretty close to the propaganda the US promoted about the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. (Except for the bread lines. They really pushed the Russians-have-to-wait-in-long-lines-just-for-bread narrative back then.) But more stikingly, I see a lot of parallels between Other Russias and what I see here in the United States today. Peacful protests that are met with violence. Police who are willing to look the other way when it comes to illegal sex work... provided they themselves are able to partake of a few "favors." Underfunded schools with any slightly-outside-the-middle-of-the-bell-curve kids being left to fend for themselves. Teenagers who try to kill people because they think they'd be literally rewarded for their 'political' stance.
The issues facing Russia today are the result of any number of different factors than what we have in the United States, so I'm not suggesting that we'll have stories just like the ones here in another few years. But it did feel a little like reading 1984 or Brave New World and thinking, "Oh, damn, this hits closer to home than I'm comfortable with!" Not only just the empathy Lomasko clearly has for her subjects, and which she does an excellent job of passing on to the reader. But the situations, I think, will start to look more and more familiar to people the further we get into the current US collapse.
Other Russias came out in 2017 from n+1 Books, so it should be available through your favorite bookstore. The might not have it in stock but they'll no doubt be happy to order it for you. The book retails for $20.00 US.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
