Daily Archives: January 14, 2023

Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

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Arts

Camouflaged appearance

IS THIS WHO YOU ARE?

HE was a big, heavy man. His camouflage jacket was buttoned tightly around him. The hat, decorated with skulls, was pulled low on his forehead. The bandana across his face left just enough space to see the glitter of his eyes.

He might just have been wrapped up against the cold, but everything about his dress and demeanour said, “Stay away! Don’t talk to me.”

There were six concrete steps between the car park and the pavement. As I walked down, he stepped up purposefully, and was breathing heavily by step three.

“You’ll get there,” I said, speaking as if I had every right to.

“Oh, I’m getting too old for this,” he replied.

“I know that feeling,” I said with a little laugh.

At the bottom I looked over my shoulder. He stopped at the top and turned. He raised his hand in a sort of salute, and said “Happy New Year, mate.”

For a second we were more than the camouflage we habitually wear; we were fellow travellers on the same difficult journey.

I could have taken his appearance at its word and said nothing, but how we look is so rarely who we are.

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