‘Moscow has been seized by ghouls’

Writer Svetlana Satchkova’s first novel in English follows a Russian film director who stays out of politics — until it comes for her

In a past life, Svetlana Satchkova was a journalist in Moscow covering the film industry for glossy magazines like Vogue, Glamour, and Afisha. In 2016, sensing that Russia’s descent into autocracy was only accelerating, she emigrated to the United States. Now, 10 years later, she’s published her first novel in English: The Undead.

— Where did the idea for The Undead come from?

— When I started writing the novel, I was not going to write a political novel. I started with a real-life story of a friend of mine who was a film director in Moscow, and she was making her debut feature, just like [the book’s main character] Maya. Maya is based on that friend of mine.

You probably recognised a lot of people from the Russian film industry. I've changed their names; the only person who appears under their own name is Kirill Serebrennikov. He was arrested in 2017, so he serves as basically a time post for the novel.

My friend’s story basically copies Maya's. She was a journalist. We worked together in magazines, and then she decided to quit and go after her life's dream, which was becoming a film director.

So she graduated from VKSR [High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors in Moscow], and she was considered a genius there. Her professors admired her. Everyone thought that she would be the next big thing. Right out of the programme, she signed with a producer, got the money for her project, and got some celebrities to star in her movie.

That was very exciting, and I was there by her side all the time. I even had a small part in the movie myself. It was not a zombie flick [like in my book]; It was a dramedy.

And then, just like in the novel, the producer started stalling on the money for post-production, and he wouldn't tell her what was happening. She tried to confront him several times, and he would be like, “Of course I want to finish the movie.” But then two years passed and nothing was happening.

And then the story happened. You probably recognised one of the actors as Aleksey Panin, who was always involved in scandals. A scandal happened that's also mirrored in the novel, where a video emerged of him supposedly having sex with a dog. That happened in real life.

My friend realised that the movie would never get made now [because it featured Panin]. It would never get finished because he was blacklisted, essentially.

So that became her life's tragedy. She never filmed or wrote anything after that. She retreated into domestic life and stopped talking to everyone from her old life, where she’d been a film director.

And this bothered me, because I couldn't make sense of the story in my mind. Even though she was my best friend and we spoke about it, I just thought, “Why can't she overcome this failure?” Lots of people do that — they just start writing another project.

This is especially true in Russia, where it’s so easy to make movies. I know about the film industry because for years I worked for glossy magazines in Russia. My last place of employment was the Russian Condé Nast, and I was always reporting on the film industry. I've been to countless film sets, so I know this industry from the inside.

So I started writing the story of my friend, basically trying to figure out what happened to her. What is it like for a creative person to experience this kind of failure and to never film anything again?

— You mentioned it was inspired in part by the case against Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk. Can you expand on this a bit?

— While I was writing it, I would start my day with reading the news from Russia.

When I left Russia, it wasn’t because I wanted to live in New York. I mean, I love New York — I went to college here — but I loved Moscow even more. I only left because I was terrified of staying. I left in 2016. And this is like a wound that's hurting all the time. I always think about politics. I keep track of everything that's happening.

So at that time when I was writing, Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested, and their trial was happening. I followed it, and I was so outraged that I decided I would write about it. And this especially made sense because Maya, who's modeled after my friend, also kind of inherited my friend’s political beliefs, or lack thereof. Because my friend, the film director, was completely ignorant of any kind of politics or even what was happening in Russia.

She was one of those people — and there were a lot of them in my circles — who had very nice jobs, who were making art, and who just didn't notice what was happening in the country at large.

[They didn’t notice] that there was this incredible corruption, that the state was getting violent, that dissenters were being thrown in jail and tortured. That there was no civic freedom to speak of.

They had no idea what's happening because they didn't care. And I would confront my friend about this. I would have these conversations with her, ask her what she thought about it, and she would be like, “What are you talking about? Everything is great. Our lives are great.” And this really puzzled me.

So while I was writing this novel, I was also exploring this because I was trying to make sense in my mind of why this was happening, why people just learn to ignore this chunk of reality and live in a bubble. So Maya was having these conversations in the novel with people who were trying to confront her about this. And then it kind of organically grew into a more political narrative.

— What is your relationship to Maya and her desire, in the first half of the book, to stay out of politics? You write from her perspective so convincingly — did you yourself have a personal transformation similar to hers?

— Oh, I totally understand people like that because I stayed quiet myself. I was a single mom for a long time, and my parents have lived in the States since 1992. So for a long time, I was in Russia alone with my young son. If something happened to me, there would be no one to take care of him. So for that reason alone — and also because I’m not a very brave person — I always stayed quiet. I never wrote about politics, never mentioned it. I never went to any protests. And I knew this about myself.

I’ve never been a hero. I admire Navalny and other people like him endlessly, but I’m just not made like that.

But what differentiates me from people like Maya is that at least I was not ignoring what was happening. I realised what was happening. I kept track of everything, and I stared evil in the face.

My question to Maya is, why can’t you just confront what’s happening? Why can’t you just confront reality? I saw it, and I was just terrified of it. That’s why I stayed quiet, and that’s why I eventually made the decision to leave.

— Can you talk about the title of your book and the metaphor of the “undead”?

— [In earlier drafts of the book,] Maya was making a dramedy, just like my friend was in real life. But when I was writing scenes from that dramedy, they just came out flat and uninteresting. So I tried to figure out how to make the movie more interesting for the reader and also for myself.

So my husband came up with this zombie idea, that Lenin comes to life. I believe I'm not the first one who came up with this idea. And this is where the title came from. But then, while I continued to write, I wrote this scene where Maya is speaking to her best friend, Lena, who's leaving for the United States. Lena is, of course, me. The conversation was taken from real life, because [my friend] was trying to understand why I was leaving. And I remember saying — this was the exact word I used — “But Moscow has been seized by ghouls.”

And by ghouls, I meant anyone who is associated with the Russian state — people who work for the state, as well as all those oligarchs, all those people who are funneling money that belongs to the Russian people to their own accounts in Switzerland, Cyprus, or somewhere else. Moscow has been taken from people like me by those people.

So now I think that “the undead” refers to three things. One of them is the movie that Maya is making. Another is the ghouls who have taken over Moscow and Russia. And maybe it also refers to people like Maya, who — at least up to a certain point — live in this kind of half-alive state because they're ignoring what's happening. They've been brainwashed, zombified.

Or maybe it's just how your mind adapts to the terror that surrounds you, because the reality is so terrifying that you just can't confront it.

— What is your relationship with that friend like now? Was she offended by the book?

— I have no idea, because our relationship disintegrated even before the book was published — for reasons that are still mysterious to me.

We still text each other. We congratulate each other on our birthdays and whatnot. But our conversations happen less often with time. [First,] she claimed that she was too busy with being a mom. She got married, gave birth to a daughter, and first her daughter was several months old, then several years old. So we spoke maybe once every six months, then it became like once every year.

And then we finally spoke, two or three years ago, when I first started writing this novel. In that conversation I told her, “I'm writing a novel about you and me.”

If somebody said something like this to me, I would be like, “Oh my God, can I read it? What is it about?” But she just changed the subject. She was not interested. Can you imagine this?

It really puzzled me at the time, but I thought maybe we would speak about it later. But we never spoke [about it] after that. I mean, we never fought or anything. It just never happened. Our relationship just kind of dissolved.

— Was it hard to go back in time and write about this period in Russia’s recent history, given the even harsher repressions happening every day in Russia today?

— It was kind of hard for me because I left in 2016. And my novel begins in 2017 and ends in 2019. So people in Russia might tell me, “Oh, you can't know anything because you've left”; “You weren't here at the time." But at the same time, look at Maya, look at other people like her — they were completely clueless living in Russia. So it's possible to live in Russia and not know anything. And in the same vein, I believe it's possible to live outside of Russia and still know what's happening there.

So it's like this conflict that's happening now between “уехавшие” [Russians who have emigrated] and “оставшиеся” [those who have stayed in Russia]. People are saying, “You don't understand anything because you've left.” But my claim is that I do understand — though of course I had to do a lot of research too.

— Democratic backsliding and corruption are obviously resonant themes right now in the US, where your book was published, though it feels very grounded in Russia. Were you thinking about American politics at all when writing the book?

— To be honest, at the time I was writing, I was not thinking about that at all. I was only thinking about telling the story that I created out of everything that happened around me. But after I finished it, I realised immediately that it was timely. I realised that this book has implications for what's happening in America, and some people have obviously noticed it. Some reviewers noticed it, and they're mentioning it in their reviews: “This is what's happening now in the States.”

I think it's a stretch, obviously, because here, at least, Trump can't run for president anymore. That's not going to happen; somebody else will come. But obviously the tendencies that I see are very troubling, especially as a lot of people, a lot of regular citizens, support him and many of his initiatives.