Author Sergei Lebedev: ‘Trump is a huge gift to Putin’s Russia’

“This is my first book that will not be published in Russia,” says Sergei Lebedev, looking, not for the last time in our conversation, unspeakably weary. After a moment, however, his face brightens. “But my Ukrainian friends and colleagues have been able to read it in Russian. And they’ve said: ‘you’ve done good.’”

Lebedev is currently one of the most admired novelists from Russia, if not in Russia. His books have been translated into 20 languages and the New York Review of Books has called him “the best of Russia’s younger gen­er­a­tion of writers”. His latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, which explores the events that inaugurated the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict over a decade ago, is his first book since the acclaimed Untraceable, which was translated into English in 2021.

An offbeat thriller about the Russian inventor of a Novichok-style nerve agent who is pursued by assassins after defecting to the West, Untraceable was inspired by the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. Lebedev is amazed that some people were taken by surprise when Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the Salisbury affair, to him, had been a clear demonstration of Putin’s contempt for the notion of sovereignty.

“I don’t think that anyone [in the West] took the Skripal poisoning really seriously, or [Alexander] Litvinenko’s [in 2006] as well. It was like: OK, this is what we expect from the Russians, this is their business as usual. But if it is not an act of state terrorism in miniature, I don’t know what to call it.”

Lebedev, 43, is an exile: he’s talking to me over Zoom from his home in Potsdam, an hour from Berlin. He moved to Germany in 2018 with his wife, a political scientist and historian, when she was offered a job there. Initially he made frequent return trips to Moscow, but not any longer now that “the Iron Curtain has fallen again”.

Potsdam, with its former KGB prison and Soviet barracks, is a salutary place to live, he says. “Feeling these traces of the former presence of the Imperial force, it keeps you on the alert, it keeps you vigilant: it reminds you that the Russian version of history – that this was a liberation, not an occupation – is not true, though that is something that very few Russians, even intellectuals, would admit. For Putin and his generation of decision-makers, they do remember [the Soviet withdrawal from East Germany] as a retreat, as a defeat, and they of course would like one day to regain it.”

I ask him what he thinks of President Trump’s recent intervention in the ongoing saga of Putin’s imperial ambitions. “Maybe I’m naive but I’m highly surprised by this course of events. I think it’s – how to put it in a diplomatic way? – a betrayal of Ukraine’s trust. It’s an attempt to get rid of the moral language which includes the terms ‘aggressor’ and ‘victim’, and to depict the whole conflict in terms of business: Ukraine as just a proxy in a big conflict between two superpowers who can negotiate. Which is what Russian propaganda has been saying for years. This approach is a huge gift to the Putin side.”

Lebedev’s latest novel, The Lady of the Mine, is set during the annexation of parts of eastern Ukraine by Russian separatists in 2014. It examines the impact of these events, including the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, on the residents of a former mining town in the Donbas; but it also delves further back into the area’s history.

The coal mines of this region have been a convenient dumping ground for corpses over the years, from opponents of the Bolsheviks to tens of thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazi invaders during the Second World War. Lebedev lends one of these forgotten bodies a voice, allowing him to tell us about his life and afterlife in an impressionistic, incantatory lament.

These murdered Jews in eastern Ukraine have been forgotten – “on our mental map, the eastern border of the Holocaust is Babi Yar in Kyiv” – because the Soviets knew that if they brought the world’s attention to this Nazi atrocity, they would also draw focus on to the mass murders earlier committed by Russians. “They literally covered for the Nazis. This is the place where the two systems of these bitter enemies, the Soviets and the Nazis, overlapped in a very strange and eerie romance.

“For me this was the departure point for attempting to understand how the Soviet Union, which positioned itself as a stronghold of anti-fascism, eventually turned into what is now a fascist state. This red monster’s skin is now turning brown, and this is what I try to depict and to understand in this novel.”

Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981, the son of two geologists (he followed them into the field for several years in his 20s). As a small boy he devoured English-language books his father had picked up on a trip to London as part of a scientific delegation: “my passion in childhood was Mr Sherlock Holmes. Of course, when I went to London earlier this year, I visited Baker Street.

“What Mr Sherlock Holmes shows is that every evil leaves a trace – nothing will go unnoticed if you are intelligent enough – and this was something subconsciously important for me in my childhood. It is what geology teaches, too: it is possible to reconstruct a whole epoch. And this was my inspiration when I faced Soviet history, full of disconnections, full of loopholes, missing links, chains and witnesses; but still, if you dare, you can go there and you can reconstruct.”

He has retained a love of English literature: readers of Untraceable will remember the assassin who loves Auden’s poetry. “This was my way to learn English, I translated [Auden] into Russian, together with Leonard Cohen – maybe a strange couple.”

For many years Lebedev was a journalist but it was “a metaphysical crisis” that turned him into a novelist: he discovered that his grandmother’s second husband had been a senior officer in the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. “I simply wasn’t able to cope with the fact that a member of the family was a mass murderer. Then I realised that the way of dealing with this was to write a book about it – and because the state archives are classified, it had to be fiction.

“And I realised all of a sudden that this whole generation of evil-doers had simply disappeared from the public memory and conscience. We can all produce a mental image of an SS officer but this was not the case with the Soviets, and I realised that I needed to bring this figure back on to the cultural scene, made of flesh.” The result was his first novel, Oblivion (2011), which confronted its readers with the obscene actions of the men who ran Stalin’s gulags.

I ask Lebedev if he thinks he can ever return to Moscow. “You know, I’m not thinking about this right now because it is weakening to go into these kinds of deliberations. I have many things to do, I have my texts to write, I have my language to be defended from those who use it as a language of aggression. And this is it for now.”

Friends in Moscow report that the war is an accepted fact of life now: “even for those who say, or think, that they are anti-Putin, anti-war, this has become a new reality that you cannot fight with. And of course a new social stratum has been born – soldiers, soldiers’ families, those who produce military equipment, millions of people involved in the war effort – who, whatever they really think, will say that this is a just war. And the problem is that I don’t see any real political leverage to remove this stratum from its position of power even in the best-case scenario.”

I ask Lebedev if he has ever received any flak from the Russian authorities. “Not seriously – not yet.” Does he worry about placing himself in danger by being so outspoken?

“It doesn’t feel good, but I think it’s part of the job description. There’s also something very personal here. Generations of my family lived in the Soviet Union and they all kept silent. At least half of my family was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. My grandmother was one of the only survivors, and despite this she was the editor of many volumes of Lenin’s works.

“She took care of the writings of the man on whose orders her relatives were executed, and she never expressed any resistance or disagreement.” That is not Lebedev’s way: “I think that I’m physically just tired of this burden of unspoken words.”

The Lady of the Mine, tr Antonina W Bouis (Apollo, £18.99), will be published on April 24