Michail Zygar: “Many liberal Russians are deeply hurt when Russia is called a colonial power”

Michail Zygar does not remember Leonid Brezhnev as merely a senile old man. In his new book on the Soviet Union, the Russian writer brings back a vain, shrewd hedonist who adored a cowboy hat given to him by Richard Nixon and practiced Western-film tricks with toy pistols.

“What is interesting in historical research is examining a person in a particular moment,” Zygar says. His book, “In the Shelter of Darkness: The Rise of Totalitarian Russia,” will appear in Swedish in January 2027. Zygar has spent six years working on it, drawing on interviews, diaries, biographies, interrogation records and letters.

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What is interesting in historical research is examining a person in a particular moment.

His method is to select people and moments from that vast archive, then weave their lives together. He traveled across the former Soviet republics to interview former party workers and officials who are still alive. “I always try to portray people so that they become understandable. Readers should understand why they chose to act as they did,” he says.

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I always try to portray people so that they become understandable. Readers should understand why they chose to act as they did.

One episode concerns Marshal Dmitry Yazov, the Soviet defense minister who took part in the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Yazov’s wife, Emma, a reader of liberal journals, fiercely opposed the coup on principle. She did not want her husband to become a military dictator, Zygar says, and eventually persuaded him to withdraw the armed troops from Moscow. His interpretation is that Yazov retreated out of love for his wife, bringing the coup to an end.

Another scene is a bitter 1973 argument between two prominent dissident couples, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Natalya Solzhenitsyna. Zygar describes Sakharov as a committed liberal who placed the individual above all else, while Solzhenitsyn prioritized the Russian people. Bonner was so irritated by the Solzhenitsyns’ fixation on that idea that she snapped: “I don’t give a damn about your Russian people!”

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Emma, who read liberal journals, opposed the coup on principle. She did not want her husband to become a military dictator.

Zygar, a Moscow-born exile now living in New York, says Russia is a colonial empire but refuses to understand itself as one. He argues that the Soviet Union persuaded Russians that their colonialism was different from everyone else’s. He will appear in Stockholm on September 9 with Lithuanian actor Ingeborga Dapkunaite in “Lost Stories,” a Russian-language play based on five true love stories.

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I don’t give a damn about your Russian people!