The choices we have here in America are different than the choices in Russia. Let’s start with choices we have here in America. First of all, the most important choice that we have is VOTING. That is the most important right that has not been taken away. In Putin’s Russia elections have not been free for decades. And opposition candidates were barred from running and even then, the results were always manipulated to deliver for Putin a staggering victory. So, this is what I can tell my American listeners:  VOTE.  ~Svetlana Satchkova 

 

I’m a journalist and novelist from Moscow who writes fiction and nonfiction about contemporary Russia, power, and the ways ordinary lives are warped by authoritarian systems.

Evoto

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016.

She covers culture and politics, with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, the Independent, and others. Currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn. Svetlana has published three novels in Russian; The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, is her English-language debut.

The Undead is a layered and sharply observant portrait of an artist caught in the machinery of state power, and the choices one faces in a system where even indifference can be dangerous. Written with the intimate insight of an émigré from Putin’s Russia, The Undead is both a compelling narrative and a chilling reflection of how repression operates today—not just against dissidents, but against anyone.

When Maya, a young Russian filmmaker, makes a low-budget horror movie, it seems like a promising start to her indie film career. But her jokey lo-fi picture soon attracts the attention of the autocratic state, and Maya is swept into a nightmarish system where logic breaks down and no one is safe.

“The Undead speaks not just to the situation in Russia but to our current American moment, asking difficult questions about the cost — to oneself and to others — of turning a blind eye to what one’s state is doing: what starts as a story about making a zombie movie becomes a story about a society where pervasive complicity has the power to turn people into zombies.” ~Anne Lounsbery

An Interview with Svetlana Satchkova by Maria Kuznetsova

Svetlana Satchkova | Full Stop

https://satchkova.com/ – website

@svetlana.satchkova – Instagram