One night in the hands of the Soviet secret police left the girl mute and broken. The only words she uttered thereafter were “jah, ära” (yes, please don’t). Decades later her great-niece, the writer Sofi Oksanen, brings together the torment of women then and their counterparts in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine now. A thread — make that a rope — of sexual violence, she argues, links the Soviet communist regime with its modern Russian successor.
Oksanen, aged 48, is Finland’s best-known living novelist, likened to the Swedish crime author Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and even to Charles Dickens. Her six novels have been translated into 40 languages and sold more than two million copies. Childhood trips to see her mother’s family in Soviet-occupied Estonia gave her first-hand experience of the pervasive lies, euphemisms, humiliation and repression of life there. The fact that these topics were barely discussed in Finland — where self-censorship was the price of independence — was jarring.
Oksanen has explored these themes in prize-winners such as Purge and When the Doves Disappeared. This 200-page polemic is an elaboration of a speech she gave in Sweden in 2023 about Putin’s war on women: misogyny as a central tool of state power, as she puts it. Don’t read it at bedtime. Most of the 25 short, piercing chapters start with a vignette involving revolting savagery, past or present, mostly against women, although also including horrible tortures of men (one features a pipe and barbed wire).
These are jumping-off points for her exploration of themes such as history, imperialism and militarism. She also lambasts western wishful thinking in dealing with Soviet and post-Soviet reality. The result could feel rushed or relentless. But readers will appreciate Oksanen’s elegant, passionate wordsmithery, ably translated by Owen F Witesman, an American who learnt Finnish as a Mormon missionary. Historical and geographical details illuminate, but do not obscure, her personal and political perspectives.
Her central point is that the crimes in Ukraine are neither new nor unusual. Seen from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and behaviour in the lands it has seized and annexed, feels like a “rehash of the 1940s, as if someone were pressing the replay button”. Estonia’s Soviet occupiers sought to obliterate their subjects’ memory of prewar statehood. The Estonian novelist Jaan Kross remembered, as a student, seeing books from his university library being chopped up with an axe in the courtyard. Being found in possession of flags, passports, currency or other official memorabilia from the “bourgeois nationalist” era was a serious criminal offence. Even family photos from the 1920s and 1930s were buried or hidden behind wallpaper, brought out only for special occasions.
In the eastern Ukrainian territories now occupied by Russia, possessing the “wrong” pictures is dangerous too. Oksanen tells the story of a 22-year-old, Illia, caught at a checkpoint where soldiers found a picture on his phone, of him celebrating Ukrainian independence day. Eight of them raped him.
Sexual violence as a tool of conquest is cheap and effective everywhere. It “traumatises and disintegrates the bonds of entire communities and families for generations”. Ukrainian parents have been forced to watch the rape of their children, and vice versa. Russians boast when raping Ukrainian women that they will no longer want to have sex with Ukrainian men. “Our enemy is the wretch who wants to annihilate the most intimate thing in our lives,” says one such victim, who now finds sex with her man “horrible”. Similarly, Russians castrate prisoners of war while boasting that this will ensure there are no more Ukrainians.
Many tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and placed with Russian parents, where they are schooled to hate their origins and revere their captors. All this does not count as genocide, but it should, Oksanen argues.
The associated stigma, shame and blame obscure the crimes. Like Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus — her tongue and hands are removed so she cannot identify her rapists — Ukrainians struggle even to name their tormentors. Occupation, Oksanen notes, reverses the moral paradigm: “What used to be right and respectable becomes wrong and dangerous.” Humanitarian work, or even simple acts of kindness, seem to be incomprehensible to the Russian occupiers in Ukraine — such behaviour is surely only a cover for western espionage. The Russian (and before that Soviet) penchant for spy mania is evocatively depicted.
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The book’s strongest point is fitting the suffering of Ukrainians into a bigger picture. Russia is not inherently misogynist, she notes. Indeed the Russian empire in 1721, and then 1845, was the first European state to penalise and then criminalise domestic violence. Nor are men who carry out the atrocities (and the women who egg them on) monsters from birth. They are maddened by the perverted nationalism pumped out by the Kremlin’s lie machine, which depicts Ukrainians and other despised nationalities as Nazis, nutcases or nitwits — not really human, and thus deserving whatever mistreatment comes their way: Untermenschen, one would say in German. The parallel is understated but irresistible.
Russian atrocities are also fuelled by the obsession with the Second World War, now seen as the epitome of national virtue (in truth, the Soviet Union’s non-Russian peoples and territories bore the brunt of the fighting and destruction). The “illusion of grandeur is a sprinkle of golden rain”, Oksanen writes, distracting Russians from real life and its abuse, poverty, misery, ill-health and exploitation.
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She finishes by excoriating the failure of western liberal opinion to grasp the true horror of Russian imperialism past and present. Universities, museums and publishing houses dive eagerly into the “decolonisation” of curriculums, exhibitions and texts dealing with their own countries’ imperial past. But “eastern Europe” is seen through a patronising prism of exoticism and orientalism.
That may be beginning to change, as Oksanen acknowledges fleetingly. But a more serious new danger is looming: the adulation of Putin’s authoritarian, patriarchal and supremacist regime among politicians and pundits at the other end of the political spectrum, chiefly in the US. Here the problem is far worse than selective condemnation. It is outright enthusiasm — and disdain for those who disagree. For the fervently Atlanticist Estonians, and for their neighbours in the other once-captive nations, the world has turned upside down.
Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women by Sofi Oksanen, translated by Owen F Witesman (HarperVia £16.99 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
