If you’re a fan of graphic novels, take note: The most unforgettable book you’ll read in 2017 was released late last year. And if you’ve never so much as dipped a toe in the genre, “The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule” by author and illustrator Igort is the book that will get you hooked.
The childhood of Igort (pen name of award-winning Italian artist and comics illustrator Igor Tuveri) was dominated by Russian expatriate culture. As he grew older, Igort questioned to what extent his background had been influenced from afar by the long shadow of the Soviet Union. He decided that the only way to find out was to go directly to the source.
“I spent nearly five years in Ukraine, Russia, and Siberia, trying to understand, to document,” Igort writes. “What was the Soviet Union? What was it like to have lived through this experience that had lasted over seventy years? And most of all, what had it left the dazed locals I saw on the snow-covered streets?”
The result of his sojourn in the former Soviet Union is a new classic of graphic nonfiction on par with “Maus” by Art Spiegelman and “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi. Employing an elegant and unfussy illustration style, coupled with spare yet sensitive narration, Igort offers heartfelt first-person accounts from Ukrainians and Russians, who lived through some of the darkest years of the USSR’s seven-decade history.
“Beneath that Soviet reserve you sense the desire to be heard,” Igort observes. “I strained my ears to hear their stories and decided to draw them. I simply could not keep them inside. These are true stories of people I met by chance, on the street, who’d had the lot of being born and having lived in the tight grip of the Iron Curtain.”
Divided into two sections, “The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks” were originally published in Italy as separate books. Translated by Jamie Richards, the English edition offers a personal glimpse into two harrowing periods: the 1932 famine in Ukraine and the Chechen-Russian conflict of the 1990s.
“Ukraine has seen its share of famines — in 1922, for example, and it was terrible,” Igort writes at the outset of “The Ukrainian Notebooks.” “[The 1932] famine was intentionally provoked; the documents prove it.”
Peasant farmers’ resistance to communism and intimations of Ukrainian independence are believed to have spurred Joseph Stalin to close the Ukrainian border in 1932. Ukrainian grain stores were seized, travel was banned and rations were reduced. The tactic was horrifyingly effective. By 1934, the peasant population in Ukraine shrank from 5.6 million to just 149,000. The famine has become known as the Holodomor, or mass killing by starvation. Igort provides a deftly drawn visual forum to those who lived through the famine. The elderly men and women recall — and Igort shows — entire families wiped out, vast communal graves, corpses abandoned in empty homes and even cannibalism.
By the time Igort visited Ukraine, there was a new, invisible threat to the food supply: “radiatsiya.” He found trees covered with partially burned leaves, strange fish being caught, and local markets regularly stocked with contaminated food — all the result of radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster lingering in the air, water and soil.
In “The Russian Notebooks,” Igort turns his focus to the assassination of Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, a vocal critic of the Second Chechen War.
“When Anna was assassinated on October 7, 2006, I was shocked. I remember writing about it on my blog, where usually I post about books. Little did I know that just three years later … I would retrace some of her steps, trying to make sense of things,” he writes.
Through interviews with Politkovskaya’s colleagues and critics, Igort delves into the long-running Chechen conflict, tracing one journalist’s murder from early guerrilla warfare launched against czarist Russia in 1785 up to the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis in 2002.
“Chechnya, with its rebel and independence movements, has always been a thorn in the side of the Russian giant,” Igort writes. The area gained crucial importance to the USSR during the 20th century, supplying 45 percent of the Soviet oil reserve. Igort’s restrained, almost minimal illustrations offer an unflinching and compassionate look at the impact that the numerous acts of violence committed by both Chechens and Russians have had on real people.
Reading the true stories in “The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks” is one thing, but it’s Igort’s lucid, tasteful imagery that makes each narrator’s encounter with war atrocities, state-sanctioned murder, or starvation from a man-made famine or a man-made disaster both poignant and tangible.