Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This author has created something highly imaginative, but incredibly ambitious. She somehow squashes 20th Century Russian history into this book. When Alexander moves into a new apartment he meets his ninety year old neighbour Tatiana. She is failing in health due to Alzheimer’s and he maybe the right person to hear about her life, quickly before she forgets,
Alexander has been through enough himself, and was hoping to be able to rest and forget in Minsk. Yet meets this old lady who has painted red crosses on the doors of all the apartments except her own. Tatiana’s tale is a tragic but familiar one, one of falling out of favour with the powers of the soviet system. She has endured oppression, the Gulag and losing her daughter. What’s lovely is the relationship they build with each other, based on mutual heartache and not forgetting those they’ve loved and lost. The removal of Tatiana’s daughter is very emotional and heart-rending. I loved the way the author wove ‘authentic’ documents, songs and poetry into the narrative.

I found this novel extremely poignant and thought provoking. The choice to mix the story of a young single father in with that of a survivor of Stalin’s terror was bold, though I feel it only underlines the collision of generations present not just in Eastern Europe but worldwide. Although many years of history are breezed through, this novel is more concerned with examining the human cost of all these changes. A unique perspective on ‘human progress’.

The structure is sometimes difficult to understand. However, I did read the translator’s note and they did impress how hard this layout is to translate for English speaking audiences, so I feel that some leeway can be given here.

On 9 August 2020 Belarus held a presidential election where Alexander Lukashenko once again won the vote. Lukashenko has won every presidential election since 1994 and the latest one was marred by claims of widespread electoral fraud. The results were rejected by numerous countries, the European Union and resulted in sanctions and protests in Belarus. Protesters, who included bloggers, business men, presidential campaign members and peaceful prostesters were met with resistance and imprisonment from the Belarusian authorities. Those who disagree with government, express their opposing opinions or are involved in political activities are imprisoned in prison camps, among others one outside the Belarusian capital Minsk (according to CNN)

Although Red Crosses was published in 2017 before recent events, it’s difficult not to draw a parallel between Belarusian, Minsk-born author, Sasha Filipenko’s background and the main plot of his novel.

Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/red-crosses-sasha-filipenko/

A really moving story about the experience of women during the Soviet era who were forced to leave their children at orphanages after they were persecuted by the state due to crimes they did not commit. Our first narrator, Alexander, has just moved to a new apartment in Minsk in 2001 after the death of his wife in Yekaterinburg. He was disturbed by his 90-year-old neighbour, Tatyana Alexeyevna, who frequently puts red crosses in front of her door to remind her of her way home after Alzheimer caused her to forget short-term memories, sometimes also include her previous meetings with Alexander that causes him to frequently reintroduce himself.

The story is being told with double narrators, Alexander and Tatyana, that bring up the narrative of the story in the present and past moments although it’s focused on the development of life for Tatyana, starting with how she was born in 1910 in London. Her father, who was greatly disturbed after his wife died in childbirth, decided to take Tatyana back to Moscow in 1919 amidst the Russian Civil War to help to construct the new socialist republic. Tatyana soon grew up without a father figure after her father’s death and was raised by her socialist fatherland into one of the translators assigned to translate important documents at NKID, a bureau under the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. She soon started a family of her own, and the problem started as the Germans attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

Tatyana was gravely disturbed by how her work is instrumental in signing off the fates of hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war (POW) who fought against the Axis power. Sasha Filipenko includes many letters and telegrams that form correspondences between the Red Cross in Geneva and the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs between 1941 and 1945 regarding the exchange of the list of prisoners of war. Molotov and the Soviet establishment responded to the inquiries with intense silence, reflecting the policy of the USSR at that time that any soldiers surrendering to the enemy are “enemies of the state”. But at the same time, it also shows how the Soviets as a state attempted to downplay the ability of the Germans and other Axis power to show compassion by exchanging the list of POWs through the Red Cross. Tatyana’s problem happened after she encountered the name of her husband in the list of Soviet POWs in Romania that she was tasked to translate from French, and she quickly altered after intense panic got the best of her.

The alternating narrators provide interesting remarks to the story, as though Sasha Filipenko creates a dialogue between the past and present states of the former Soviet Union. The Soviet’s lack of attention to the international treaty that other countries honoured during the Second World War (e.g. The Hague Convention of 1907 about Laws and Customs of War on Land and Geneva Convention of 1929 about Prisoners of War) are described in full volume, both through citing the Soviet archives and the retelling of Tatyana’s fate as she lost her family due to the institutional persecution by the state. It leads to some questions on how and why such dehumanising actions could be performed by the state and countless actors supporting it. Throughout the story, Sasha Filipenko tries to compare through the voice of Tatyana how Stalin and the leadership of the USSR have become such a father figure that was hardly questioned in their actions and leadership qualities.

The style of Sasha Filipenko kinda reminds me of Svetlana Alexievich, although this is a work of fiction. The story is recounted through the testimony of Tatyana, followed by direct quotations of documents concerning the historical situation that is being told. It gives the vibe of a fictionalised reality and makes me question if there are many Tatyana’s out there who were not able to reunite with their families after the end of their persecution and ended up killing themselves. As a work of historical fiction, this is a really interesting bridge between the “full-of-Gulag” past of the Soviet people and post-Soviet life as lead by the contemporaries.

As someone who knows very little about modern Russian history, I found this short book really informative and impactful. The portrayal of collective blindness, fear, complicity (to a certain extent), and the experience of surviving in a gulag is harrowing, but I just couldn’t stop reading.

I personally disagree with the reviews that say the book packs too much history in too few pages. In addition to history, one of the main themes of the book is the basic human right to know — even when the worst has happened — and to grieve and commemorate. I think this theme has been developed very well and that’s what moved me the most.

In terms of reading experience, the text flows very well and the voices of both protagonists are convincing. I also appreciate how authentic documents were woven into the narrative.

Red Crosses is the fourth novel by well-respected young Bielorussian-born St-Petersburg-based author Sasha Filipenko. It is his first attempt at a historical novel and has been longlisted for the prestigious Yasnaya Polyana Award.

It is a look at the dehumanising, ruthless face of power in Soviet Russia, both at a state and deeply personal level. Based on real WW2 correspondence between the Red Cross and Russian institutions showing Russia’s lack of interest in international treaties and in the destiny of its prisoners who, as portrayed in the novel, were often considered cowards and collaborators and their spouses accomplices.

91-year-old Tatyana Alekseevna, a woman suffering from Alzheimer who draws red crosses on doors in her Minsk condo to find her way back, tells her young new neighbour her life story. She has witnessed the rise and collapse of the Soviet utopian dreams and, when her husband goes missing during WW2 and is suspected of collaborationism, her life is engulfed in a climate of suspicion and fear as purges continue sweeping the country. In this tense and harrowing story that delves into Soviet Russia’s dark past anything can – and will – happen. Under Stalin’s omnipresent father figure, hers will be a harrowing but irony-filled tale of guilt, atonement and ultimately gross self-deception and staunch survival. Read till the very last line to appreciate the irony.

The style is dry and deliberately laconic to reflect the dryness of the documents the novel is based on (as per author interview), convey irony and foreground bare facts. Filipenko also makes effective and extensive use of skaz, the spoken language with its immediacy and punchiness. This, however, is not always rendered successfully in translation, as one gets the meaning but not always the desired effect.
The author shows how a dehumanising, ruthless system functioned at a state level and how it impacted individual lives. While this is not totally new, the novel is ultimately grounded in present concerns, i.e. in the Soviet legacy of post-Soviet countries like Belorussia and the not so uncommon desire to downplay Soviet Russia’s mistakes, dismiss enquiries into history as acts of sabotage, and repress change.
Like many Russian novelists, Filkipenko dialogizes with tradition (from questions regarding to how much the Russian people can take, to the existence of God, to the horrible apparatchik and the gulag tradition and also incorporating songs and poems) and interrogates present power asking a fundamental question: what present can be built on the legacy of horror-filled 20ieth-century history? An urgent, thought-provoking novel. Looking forward to reading more work by this author.

References to the interview in https://www.labirint.ru/now/intervyu-s-filipenko/ (in Russian).

Thank you so much Europa Editions for an ARC of Red Crosses in exchange for an honest review.

There's a lot packed in a small book, maybe too much - I'm still not sure how Sasha's story fits in with Tatyana's experience of being a POW wife and experiencing imprisonment in the Gulag.
Many interesting parts however, with authentic documents exchanged between the Red Cross and Soviet institutions regarding POW during WW2.

This is a book that may well be better received by readers unfamiliar with Soviet history, especially around the gulag. For me, it tries to cram around a hundred years of Russian history, pretty much the whole of the twentieth century, into a scant 200 or so pages and the result is a sad superficiality.

In addition, most of that history is very 'told' with little being dramatised. The inserted use of authentic documents is a nice touch but the complicated strands of narrative do little to augment the story, and horrific things happen in a sentence then are over and done with, never to be mentioned again. This kind of panoramic storytelling just isn't to my taste, I'm afraid, and there are other books which tell similar stories about the gulag, the soviet war against her own citizens with greater power, depth and personal characterisation.

Sorry - I appreciate the opportunity to read an ARC but this isn't for me.

"In the middle of a field stood a cross. It was narrow and of human height. Simple but proud. Made from two old pipes, peeling and rust-covered, the cross appeared red. Leaning slightly, but lethally piercing the ground, this cross would vibrate with the first gust of wind and be transformed into a musical instrument. The cross sang about the past and the future, about death and desperation, about memory and humility. Not just wet but soaked in blood from below, from this very land, the cross was its history and metaphor, a warning and a landmark. Rains watered the cross, snow covered it, the sun burned it, and the shadow it cast was not black but a deep red. And now this shadow spread out so far across the horizon that, from time to time, people thought it was the sunset and stopped to admire it."

Red Crosses has been translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner from the 2017 Russian original by Belarusian author Sasha Filipenko.

The novel opens with Sasha moving into a flat, to start a new life with his young daughter, when he finds a red cross painted on his door. Trying to remove it he is waylaid by his elderly neighbour Tatyana Alexeyevna.

“What are you doing?”
“Cleaning my door,” I answer without turning around.
“Why?”
“Some idiot drew a cross on it.”
“Nice to meet you! The idiot you’re referring to is me. I was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. So far, it’s only affected my short-term memory— sometimes I don’t even remember what happened a few minutes ago, but my doctor promises that very soon my speech will be affected too. I’ll begin forgetting words and then I’ll lose the ability to move. Not much to look forward to, huh? The crosses are here to help me find my way back home. But pretty soon I’ll probably forget what they mean too.”

Sasha and Tatyana gradually, although initially rather reluctantly on Sasha’s behalf, form a bond and tell each other of their respective lives. Tatyana’s starts in the UK in the early part of the 20th century, and continues via a period in WW2 transcribing various official documents for the Soviet intelligence services. A key plot point revolves around her discovering her missing-in-action husband’s name on a list of Soviet PoWs sent by the Romanian government via the Red Cross, something that both gives her hope but puts her life at risk, and she eventually spends almost a decade in a gulag.

The novel’s focus on the fate of Soviet PoWs, and the Soviet government unwillingness to engage with their foes in a mutual exchange of information is fascinating, particularly the reproduction in the text of historical documents -“Internal Soviet government memos, official Soviet decrees and rulings, as well as telegrams and letters from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross” as the translator’s explain in an illuminating foreword, one that focuses on their choice of formatting as well as their choices of words to emphasise two of the novel’s key motifs, bridges and red crosses.

I applaud brevity in novels, but for a 200 page book, arguably the author tries to pack too much in. Tatyana’s deterioration with Alzheimer’s seemed to be largely incidental, Sasha’s own family story (how his young daughter was born 3 months after his wife died) felt one that deserved a novel of its own rather than just a few pages, and even Tatyana’s traumatic decade in the camps, although vividly portrayed, couldn’t really be done justice.

3,5 stars

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION:

A heart wrenching story exploring memory and Russian history - from Stalin's terror to the present day.

Tatiana Alexeyevna is 90 years old and she’s losing her memory. To find her way in her Soviet-era apartment block, she resorts to painting red crosses on the doors leading back to her apartment. But she still remembers the past in vivid detail.

Alexander, a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two, would like nothing better than to forget the tragic events that have brought him to Minsk. When he moves into the flat next door to Tatiana’s, he’s cornered by the loquacious old lady. Reluctant at first, he’s soon drawn into Tatiana’s life story. A story told urgently, before her memories of the Russian 20th century, and its horrors, are wiped out.

The two come to recognize their own broken hearts in each other, forging an unlikely friendship, a pact against forgetting, their encounter giving rise to a new sense of hope in the future.

Deeply moving, with flashes of humour, underpinned by ground-breaking research, Red Crosses is a shining narrative in the tradition of the great Russian novel. All the more necessary, as the Russia of today goes about the business of rewriting history.

NO SPOILERS

From the publisher’s description this seemed to be a book which I would really enjoy. 25% of the way in it has become a rare Did Not Finish. Perhaps something has been lost in translation but for me, it is unreadable.

There is a foreword by both translators explaining their use of different fonts, italics and specific punctuation “to make this complex interweaving of voices and temporal frames more visible”. I found nothing particularly complex and could have followed it perfectly well without “such a graphic representation”

I enjoy historical fiction as a great way to learn about the past but I do like it to be well written and this, frankly, I think, is poorly written. It’s a shame because I did want to know. Perhaps Filipenko should have written a straightforward history book.



Thank you to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the Advanced Reader Copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.