There is a legend about Russia's recent history that divides the past thirty years into two periods. In the first of these, from 1991 to 2000, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, efforts were made to democratise the Russian Federation and thus bring it closer to the West. In the second period, since 2000, when Vladimir Putin became the leader of the country, it has been sliding into the depths of authoritarianism.

Of course, what happened 21 years ago was in some sense a breakthrough. A powerful man with a history of service in the Soviet Ministry of Power replaced a shaky politician who was increasingly out of control. At the same time, the world saw a huge increase in the price of energy resources. And Russia, as we all know, earns money from an extensive economy, i.e. selling oil and gas. Thus, the firm hand of the new president and the favourable economic situation proved to be the factors that led many Russians to believe that there had been a significant change, and a change for the better.

Yet the Yeltsin era should not be separated from the Putin one. There are reasons why they should nevertheless be considered as an inseparable whole. The caesura of the year 2000 concerns the consciousness of many people, not the objectively recognised state of affairs, i.e. the actual policy of the Russian state. If the beginning of the 21st century meant something new in the history of Russia, it was simply the end of illusions in the minds of those who had pinned their hopes on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Such are the illusions of the narrator of Sergei Lebedev's book "People of August", published in 2016. The 1990s is a period in which they gradually shatter, and this young man, going through successive difficult personal experiences, learns the painful truth about his homeland. We are therefore confronted here with an initiation novel. Its title refers to those Russians who 30 years ago were convinced that their country would free itself from the communist past.

It was in August 1991 that the most important events took place, the outcome of which is still interpreted today in liberal opposition circles in Russia as the founding myth of the new state project. A group of apparatchiks led by Soviet Vice-President Gennady Yanayev staged a putsch in a bid to halt the collapse of the empire. They ultimately failed. Their defeat was followed by processes that could seemingly herald a complete break with the seven decades of the USSR. The removal of the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky from the KGB headquarters on Lubyansk Square in Moscow became a symbol.

So it might have seemed that in the 1990s Russia's political decision-makers were trying to push the country they ruled towards democracy on a Western model. But for many reasons they failed. And at the end of the decade, there was a recidivism of oordist tendencies, emblematic of which a former KGB officer became president of the Russian Federation.

However, the protagonist of " People of August" sees it quite differently. Recidivism is when what is no longer there comes back. However, the Soviet reality was not left behind. In the Russia of the 1990s – contrary to the messages of the day served by the "reformers" at the helm of the state – it continued, only in a different form than before. "Iron Felix did not leave Lubianka, he still stood there, invisible", we read in the book. In another passage, a statement is made: " The security, an old whore, did not die". And the narrator brutally finds out about it on himself.

Speaking of him, he earns his living as a private prospector and smuggler. His assignments range from finding out about relatives lost in the turmoil of history in various parts of the Soviet Union to finding biological material from the Siberian permafrost for a Japanese businessman who wants to... clone a mammoth.

In addition, the protagonist tries to unravel the mysteries surrounding the lives of his ancestors. The fate of these people is an illustration of the dramas that Russia went through in the 20th century, in which the roles of Soviet regime officials and "class enemies" were sometimes not obvious. In "People of August", the former Soviet republics of the 1990s appear as a vast space full of shocking strangeness. The town of Balchash in Kazakhstan is a case study.

"On the outskirts," the narrator recounts, "there were abandoned houses – their doors and radiators had been removed, windows pulled out or broken. It seemed that the marauders were coming from the direction of the desert, like barbarian nomads who were attacking the fortress, but they were, of course, the townspeople themselves".

The protagonist continues: "Towards evening – and the nights are cool in these lands even in summer – in the streets you could smell smoke coming out of pipes stuck in the hatches from makeshift cookers, the street lamps did not light up, but in the yards bonfires were lit, on which dinners were prepared, water for washing and laundry was heated. The glare of the bonfires was reflected in gold teeth. Men and women had them, a quarter of the inhabitants probably had fake ones because real gold would have cost too much. Someone had one or two metal teeth, and someone else had a whole replaced jaw – as in this way some mysterious tribe distinguishes itself from other ones."

People from the margins of the Soviet periphery – brought up outside the real influence of the Soviet education system and Soviet state propaganda – found themselves perfectly well in such conditions. At the same time, among the people who made their careers in Soviet times, and not only as state apparatchiks, there was no shortage of those who in the mid-1990s were living off crime. The narrator notes: "as recently as five or six years ago, today's marauders could have been labour leaders whose names and faces were displayed on a plaque of honour".

According to the protagonist, while Russians perceived communism as an ideological threat and therefore bade it farewell, sentiments towards the Soviet state remained alive in them. For the slavish nature of the Russian soul, burdened with a powerful fear of stateless chaos, has not changed. And this is the essence of the diagnosis that Lebedev makes to his compatriots.

The era of Yeltsin, a politician who enjoyed great favour in the West, is exposed drastically in "People of August", without any allowances. There is none of the usual, well-known from Polish debates, ridiculous justification of post-communist pathologies with the argument that freedom has its price. The narrator looks at politics in Russia in the 1990s through the prism of, among other things, the conflict between the president and parliament in 1993, the Chechen wars and the fraudulent presidential elections in 1996. It was not Putin who started to ration Russian democracy.

Lebedev's book is not an autobiography. Born in 1981, the author nevertheless remembers the fall of the Soviet Union. However, at the age of 14 he began to participate in geological expeditions in Russia and Kazakhstan. And what he experienced during these escapades was later reflected in his works. It is therefore not an exaggeration to treat it as a valuable testimony

– Filip Memches
– Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski