By Peter Keough

Displaced views life during wartime as seen by both sides.

Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War, written by Valery Panyushkin and translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner. Europa Editions. 240 pp. $18.

As with Germany during the Third Reich, one almost despairs of finding Good Russians after they invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

But Valery Panyushkin, author of the poignant and peripatetic Displaced, is a good Russian. One of the few journalists in that country willing to criticize Vladimir Putin, he became despondent when the war began. Not just because of the criminal invasion, but because of the reaction of so many Russians, who willingly embraced the government’s lies.

People like his octogenarian father, who binged on the state news channels (imagine that every station is Fox News) and parroted their propaganda. When Panyushkin confronted the old man with the details of the Bucha massacre in which Russian troops butchered Ukrainian civilians, he was met with furious denials. That’s when he realized that,

[p]eople who react this way grasp the horrifying reality but are incapable of accepting it because that acceptance would be for them worse than death. We are the aggressors, and that is the reality. But if we are the aggressors, what is an eighty-two-year-old man supposed to do, an eighty-two-year-old man who’d been brought up, and who’d brought his children up, on the heroic feats of those who fought in World War II, soldiers who’d gone to their death to stop aggressors. What would it mean if we were now the aggressors? It could only mean one thing—suicide.

For Panyushkin, the only option to suicide was to write this book about those Ukrainians forced to become refugees because of the war. And about those, some Good Russians like himself, who chose to help them.

Among the former are Alla Achasova, a soil scientist in Kharkiv who somehow sleeps through the opening bombardment of the city. She dreams about drowning in a frozen sea and finding refuge in a cathedral. The next day she is participating in a Zoom call with UN scientists about global warming when a neighbor tells her to seek shelter because the fighting was just blocks away.

Luckily, she and her children manage to escape the city in a bus (driven by a hospital clown!) and through various fortunate developments she ends up in Prague where a job awaits her. To her astonishment, next to the refugee center where she and her family are temporarily lodging, she sees a church which is identical to the cathedral in her dream.

Alla’s story touches on several themes that Panyushkin emphasizes in his book — that anyone can wake up to find themselves a refugee, that routines persist in the midst of catastrophe, that life in wartime mixes horror with the surreal and absurd, and that salvation often comes in the form of serendipitous circumstances and kindly strangers.

It also touches on the theme of national guilt and personal responsibility. Alla is of Russian descent and has Russian friends; she has given up arguing with them when they insist that Russia is not attacking Ukraine but defending it. Though Russian speaking, she and her family will abandon their mother tongue and speak only in Ukrainian.

Not only the Russian victims of the invasion have misgivings about their homeland. So do many of the Russians who have helped refugees and are motivated by common decency and the need to respond to the pain caused by their nation’s actions. Some, like the Russian physicians who work in a clinic in the besieged city of Mariupol, still buy Putin’s justifications and propaganda. But their calling compels them to respond to the simple fact of human suffering. “I’m a doctor, I took the Oath, and I’m going to save people!” is their reasoning, according to Panyushkin. But once there, despite their faith in their government’s rectitude, even they have a hard time believing that the wounded Ukrainian children they treat were shot by Ukrainian snipers.

Internally Displaced Persons — Resources for Ukrainians. Photo: Harvard University

Dasha T., on the other hand, an actress and musician who lives in Moscow, doesn’t believe anything the government says and despises their policies. Her integrity has cost her — she was once offered a lucrative job with the TV station Russia Today but refused to work for the propaganda outlet. She is a volunteer for an organization called Rubikus that helps Ukrainians who have had to flee the war zone through Russia relocate to the West. Though the service is still legal, it does not make her popular, and as the various venues where she has found employment are shut down or flee the country she is facing hard times.

So why doesn’t she leave? Panyushkin speculates that she believes that being poor and doing what she loves in Moscow beats being poor in Europe and working as a cashier or a pizza deliverer. He adds,

She prefers that the so-called patriots who wear the letter ‘Z’ on their clothes hate her for something she really believes in. It’s better than being hated in Europe for being Russian and for starting this war — for something she’s not guilty of.

Then there are the journalists like Panyushkin who, like physicians, because of their vocation ostensibly have a moral obligation in the face of suffering and evil. Theirs is to seek out and report the truth, but they live in a country where such practices can result in lengthy prison sentences. Not to mention that the government has pulled the plug on the media outlets that have published and broadcast their work. And so, three months after the nightmare began, Panyushkin packed up the family and headed to the Latvian border.

Why now and not on previous occasions when the murderous reality of the regime was manifested? “We’re constantly asking one another why this particular war is so intolerable,” he writes.

There have been other wars — aggressive and barbaric in the same way and no less cruel. Russia has been killing people in Afghanistan, and in Chechnya, and in Syria. How were we able to lead normal lives with that in the background? And why are we incapable of leading normal lives now? I’ve formulated an answer for myself. I was able to write about those previous wars conducted by Russia because I was a newspaper reporter. I could go to the frontline and send my reports back to the newspaper. I could talk about how people were dying, how mothers were searching for their lost children, about the smell of a blown-up house, how the barely detectable sweetish odor of decaying bodies mixes with the smell of smoke and dust… I could write about all of this, and it gave me the strength to survive. But the Ukrainian war of 2022 differs from all other wars in that the first thing the Russian government did was to prohibit us from even using the word ‘war.’

And so, like those about whom he has written with such empathy, Panyushkin has himself become a refugee, joining the hundreds of thousands of others who have fled his country since the invasion. How long will it be before there are no more good Russians still living in Russia?

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).