82 Books & arts The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2 dle East and Europe, including Tate Britain
in London. His emotionally raw work is
sometimes compared to Goya’s, though
friends describe him as a Kurdish Tou-
louse-Lautrec, partly because of his small
stature, but mostly for his observational
style. For the phdhe completed in London
in 2013, he documented Anfal in line-draw-
ings based on the memories of survivors.
Despite the grave subject matter, the draw-
ings’ sense of movement—like the vibran-
cy of his earlier, modernist-inspired paint-
ings—imbues his oeuvre with an air of
resilience and vitality.
“I was shocked to see such vivid and
lively works,” says Shad Abdulkarim, a col-
lector who plans to include some of Mr Ah-
med’s early paintings in the contemporary-
art museum he is opening in the Kurdish
city of Sulaymaniyah this year. That is one
of the institutions now springing up to
safeguard a culture that has helped sustain
the Kurds’ stateless nation through centu-
ries of conflict. Another is the Culture Fac-
tory, an expansive new arts hub that, with
support from the Kurdistan Regional Gov-
ernment, is being developed in a formerly
derelict tobacco factory in Sulaymaniyah.
An exhibition of Mr Ahmed’s drawings
opened in one of its galleries in December.
“Our political situation repeats every
ten years,” says Dara Ola, the show’s curator
and a co-founder of the Culture Factory. Mr
Ahmed’s theme “of Halabja, refugees, of
fleeing home—it’s always current.” Indeed,
the parallel with Turkey’s recent attacks on
Kurds in Syria is stark. Mr Ola suspects that
younger Kurds, tired of politics and war,
need to be reminded of their history, and
thinks Mr Ahmed’s pictures can help. “It’s a
different experience to see artwork about
this subject rather than a documentary or
photos,” he reckons. For his part, Mr Ah-
med now abjures colour in his art. “Black
and white”, he says, “is the best language to
bring the pain out.” 7P
eople whodevote themselves to help-
ing the unfortunate are not always
loved by the more comfortable. They are a
pain in the conscience; they can be grat-
ingly pious. But in her heyday as a friend of
Moscow’s dying and destitute, Elizaveta
Glinka, a medical philanthropist known as
Doctor Liza, was likeable as well as inspir-
ing. Whether she was ministering to rough
sleepers at a Moscow railway station or vis-
iting patients facing lonely deaths at home,
her style was both sensitive and practical.
She could cajole awkward bureaucrats and
relieve the afflicted. She frankly acknowl-
edged her own fear of death; it came to her
three years ago, when a flight carrying visi-
tors to the Russian garrison in Syria
crashed into the Black Sea.
Among the tales of integrity and com-
promise in Vladimir Putin’s Russia that
Joshua Yaffa narrates in his wonderfully in-
sightful new book, Glinka’s story is the
most poignant. In a process minutely
traced by Mr Yaffa, an American journalist
and previously a contributor to The Econo-
mist, things changed for her when Russian-
backed fighters staged their rebellion in
Ukraine in 2014. She began organising the
evacuation of children, many of them
wounded, from the war zone, dealing prag-
matically with both sides of the deadly con-
flict. But her apolitical, common-sense ap-
proach, effective as it had proved in
Moscow, came to entail moral hazards on
the battlefield.
As Glinka’s national profile rose, so did
her connections with the Russian elite, and
she was obliged to collude with the fiction
that the Kremlin bore no blame for the un-
folding mayhem in Ukraine. Her powerful
contacts, including Mr Putin himself, abet-
ted her humanitarian work and tried to
bask in her moral glow. Her older, liberal-
minded friends concluded that she had
sold out to the country’s rulers. Those rul-
ers lamented her death loudly, proclaiming
her a quasi-saint; more long-standing ac-
quaintances mourned with an extra tinge
of sadness, feeling she was a good person
whose record was ultimately tainted.
All Mr Yaffa’s well-told and neatly inter-
linked stories describe individuals whose
response to Russia’s authorities belongs
somewhere on the spectrum between de-
fiance and calculating collusion. His sub-
jects include Kirill Serebrennikov, a theatredirector who was placed under house ar-
rest; and an entrepreneurial zookeeper in
Crimea who, after the peninsula was an-
nexed, initially expected to benefit but fell
foul of the new Russian masters. In a re-
vealing exchange, the director of a prison-
camp-turned-museum in Perm tries to
persuade Mr Yaffa, and perhaps herself,
that its response to official pressure—
evolving from a warning against totalitar-
ianism to a softer take on the Soviet era—is
justified, if only because closure might be
the alternative. As Glinka seemed to do in
the final part of her life, the director makes
a utilitarian case for compromise.
Some compromise reluctantly, others
with apparent eagerness. One of Mr Yaffa’s
profiles is of the television boss Konstantin
Ernst, who after a mildly bohemian youth
used his cinematographic talents to hone
Mr Putin’s image as Russia’s strong-willed
saviour. Some readers will wish that Mr
Yaffa had devoted more space to characters
who preserved their integrity to the end,
even if that meant paying a heavy penalty.
He does offer one striking portrait of a per-
son who fits firmly in that category: the dis-
sident Russian Orthodox cleric Father Pa-
vel Adelgeim, who was murdered in 2013 by
a mentally deranged man.
In his youth, Adelgeim had endured tra-
vails for his Christian faith. He was sent to a
labour camp for professing “anti-Soviet”
opinions, where he suffered a work acci-
dent which cost him a leg. Later he learned
that a fellow-seminarian, who would go on
to make a decent career as an ecclesiastical
diplomat, had denounced him. By telling
the priest’s life-story, Mr Yaffa is able to
sketch in outline the recent history of the
Russian Orthodox church—from a precari-
ous existence under communism, to a
phase of flourishing in new-found free-
dom, to one of symbiosis with the state.
Adelgeim was one of the few clerics who
challenged this trend. In particular, he
questioned the harshly authoritarian pow-
er structures that emerged within the
church, mirroring those of the secular re-
gime. This stance enraged the bishop un-
der whom he served in north-western Rus-
sia, and the cleric found himself demoted
and isolated in the church, though still re-
vered by his flock. Some admirers called
him “the last free priest” in Russia. That is
an over-simplification. Last year, for in-
stance, around 200 priests signed a peti-
tion of protest against the incarceration of
people who had taken part in anti-govern-
ment demonstrations.
It is to Mr Yaffa’s credit that in general he
avoids simplifying. Even when he de-
scribes people who seek cynical advantage
from the powerful, the picture is never
completely dark; when he portrays moral
heroes, he never presents them as infalli-
ble. That is how things are in life, perhaps
nowhere more so than in Russia. 7Russian livesThe grey zone
Between Two Fires. By Joshua Yaffa. Tim
Duggan Books; 368 pages; $28. Granta
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