Tony Wood

In Vladimir Sorokin’s novel The Queue, one of the protagonists is struggling with a crossword: ‘1 Across – Russian Soviet writer.’ Suggestions come from people next to him in the long line that is the book’s setting and subject – Sholokhov, Mayakovsky? – but are rejected, because neither fits both adjectives at the same time. When Sorokin wrote The Queue in the 1980s, these adjectives – always in tension – could still sit together in a handful of cases (the answer settled on is Gorky); but since then, they have been severed from each other by the watershed of 1991, and now represent distinct historical epochs, as well as two separate literary cultures.

The corridor we are standing in bristles with ice. Thick layers of what turn out, on closer inspection, to be delicate, hexagonal crystals line the walls and ceiling. I and a handful of other visitors are in the basement laboratory of the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk; according to the red numbers of an LED panel, the temperature is −8 °C. After a few minutes, our presence – breathing, talking – has raised the temperature to −7 °C, and we are ushered back to the surface, where it is 35 °C, a day of dazzling Arctic sunshine and heat that makes the skin prickle. Here, as elsewhere in Russia, it has been a searing summer, turning large swathes of the landscape into kindling. The apocalyptic scenes in European Russia – thousands burned out of their homes, millions of hectares of crops destroyed, Moscow wreathed in smoke from smouldering peat bogs – have dominated news reports. But vast areas of the Far Eastern Federal District were damaged too.

She is recognisable even in the grey, pixellated CCTV images: a tall, slender woman with grey hair, her oval glasses perched on an aquiline nose. She is looking to her right, a stern expression on her face, as she carries her shopping towards the door of her apartment building. She enters, disappearing from view; the time-stamp reads 16:01. It is the last time she will be seen alive. She will...

Writing his memoirs in 1946, two years before his death, Sergei Eisenstein declared that he had ‘been fascinated by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film involved watching a flying skeleton horse pull a bewitched carriage across the sky, in Georges Méliès’s Les 400 Farces du diable. It was skeletons, he says, that made him go to...

On 16 April, President Medvedev announced the official end of Russia’s ‘counter-terrorist operation’ in Chechnya, effectively declaring victory in the long war against Chechen separatism. Much of Grozny – virtually razed to the ground during a decade and a half of fighting – has now been reconstructed, and in recent years there has been a marked decline in the...