His grandmother - the muse of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak and the inspiration for the character of Lara in "Doctor Zhivago" - was deported twice. His parents met in the Gulag, and in the 1980s they managed to leave the Soviet Union and settle in France. There his father Vadim, a poet and translator, became close to René Char and Henri Michaux.
In his book "Exiles" Andrei Kozovoy tells the incredible story of his family, which in itself reflects the development of Russia over nearly a century. In an interview with the French newspaper L'Express, this specialist in Russian and Soviet history, now a professor at the University of Lille, is quite pessimistic about the war in Ukraine, while also claiming that Vladimir Putin suffers from an inferiority complex.
L'EXPRESS: Your grandmother inspired the character of Lara in Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago". Why did this novel so alarm the Soviet authorities when it was published in 1957?
ANDREY KOZOVOY: We have to go back to the roots of this story. My maternal grandmother, Olga Ivinskaya, a great lover of poetry, met Boris Pasternak in 1946 in the editorial office of the magazine "Novy Mir". He was a living god to her. At that time, the character of Lara did not exist in the first version of "Doctor Zhivago". He immediately fell in love with her, even though he was married. They had a passionate affair, but in 1949 she was arrested.
Stalin then organized a purge of society, a campaign against "cosmopolitans without a homeland" - a term used by the regime to refer to Jews. This anti-Semitic campaign was largely due to the diplomatic rift between the Soviet Union and Israel, the context of the Cold War, but also to Stalin's anti-Semitism. Pasternak, however, was Jewish. He was certainly a writer valued by Stalin, but in the eyes of the literary authorities he had become a "bourgeois individualist", "detached from the masses" and secretly religious.
My grandmother, under surveillance by the secret services, was summoned and asked to take Pasternak to court. She refused. She paid the price and was sent to a labor camp until 1953. After her release, the love affair between Olga and her idol resumed. My grandmother became his new muse, inspiring him to write magnificent poems. It was at this time that the image of Lara was born and the novel as we know it appeared.
Since Soviet publishers did not want to publish it, the writer gave the manuscript to the Italian communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. "Doctor Zhivago" was a huge success. But the KGB raised the alarm, presenting it as an anti-Soviet novel.
Pasternak depicted the October Revolution using a completely apolitical hero, something unthinkable at the time. A campaign was launched against him, and my grandmother was used as a pawn. In October 1958, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which further inflamed the scandal. The regime wanted to force the writer to emigrate.
L'EXPRESS: Pasternak died in May 1960. Both your grandmother and your mother were arrested and deported to the Gulag after passing through the infamous Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters...
ANDREY KOZOVOY: The reason for their arrest, unlike in 1949, was not political. They were accused of currency trafficking, as Pasternak had secretly received his royalties from the sales of "Doctor Zhivago" abroad.
That was the pretext: the regime could not take revenge directly on the writer, so my grandmother had to pay the ultimate price again, this time accompanied by her daughter, my mother. The two were first sent to the Far East, and then, after an administrative reorganization, to a camp in Mordovia, 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow. It was there that my mother met my father, through letters...
L'EXPRESS: Born in Kharkov to a family of assimilated Jews, your father, Vadim, was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda...
ANDREY KOZOVOY: My paternal great-grandfather was a practicing Jew from a small town in western Ukraine, not far from Lviv. One of his sons, my grandfather, broke with Judaism and embraced Marxism-Leninism, another form of religion. He changed his first name, calling himself Mark in honor of Marx. After settling in Kharkov, he became the father of two children, including my father, Vadim.
My father, in his youth, also believed in Lenin, but after arriving in Moscow to study history, he distanced himself from communist dogma. In 1957 he was arrested for belonging to a student group that believed that de-Stalinization should continue. He served an eight-year sentence in Mordovia, and in 1961 he learned of the arrival of my grandmother and mother.
Fascinated by the French poetry he dreamed of translating, he wrote to my mother asking her to lend him her anthology of poetry. They secretly exchanged books; he translated for her, and she became his muse. After my mother's release in 1962, my father gave her a rare Russian edition of "The Flowers of Evil" - a true declaration of love. He was released in 1963, and they married in 1964.
L'EXPRESS: Your family managed, not without difficulty, to leave the Soviet Union and settle in France in the 1980s. But you say that in the 1990s, your father's faith in what was then called "New Russia" was rapidly crumbling. Why such pessimism?
ANDREY KOZOVOY: In the late 1980s, during perestroika, my parents, like many other emigrants, were euphoric, feeling that anything was possible and that Russia could have a democratic future. But disappointment quickly followed.
In 1993, my father was shocked to see Boris Yeltsin order tanks to fire on the Parliament building to remove deputies who refused to carry out his order to dissolve parliament. At the time, he explained that "the Russian president has no more dangerous enemy than himself". My father was particularly disgusted by the war against Chechnya, which began in late 1994.
"This unhealthy continuity is disgusting: everything repeats itself!", he wrote in an essay defending the Chechens' right to self-determination that remains unpublished. The tragedy of my parents, and especially my father, was their forced exile, the fact that he was cut off from his beloved language, from the readers of his poetry, so complex, so modern. A fully Russified Jew who had somehow become more royalist than the Tsar, he devoted himself entirely to the Russian language. He wanted so desperately to share his love...
But the political reality is that Russia in the 1990s began to slide toward authoritarianism, all the while claiming to be democratic. My father died in 1999 at the age of 61 - the year Vladimir Putin came to power (and also the year his own father died at 88, a curious coincidence).
Ultimately, I think it was a good thing, because he didn't see the worst. Seeing the bombing of his native Ukraine would have caused him terrible suffering...
L'EXPRESS: "Putinists come and go, Pushkinists remain", you write in the epilogue of your book. Didn't Pushkin or Dostoevsky contribute to Russian imperialism?
ANDREY KOZOVOY: Let's not oversimplify! I argue that the classics had a contradictory attitude towards the Russian imperial experience. Pushkin certainly supports the Russian Empire against Poland in several poems that were heavily criticized during his lifetime. But we need to put these views in their historical context and also consider these great writers in all their complexity.
Leo Tolstoy protested the war with Japan and became a pacifist, while in his early years he was more of a neo-imperialist. Dostoevsky, in contrast, moved from left to right, but for me he remains above all the author of "Demons", a prophetic novel about totalitarianism. Let us not adopt a Manichaean and simplistic view of "cancellation culture". Because by that logic we could also reject German culture and the works of Heidegger because of its links to Nazism.
Today, a significant part of the opposition to Vladimir Putin is Russian-speaking. We cannot build a new Russia without Russians and without drawing on the best that Russian culture has to offer the world. Boris Pasternak is actually a good historical example. He was not a dissident. But he tried to create an exceptional body of work outside the political sphere, while at the same time playing, somewhat unconsciously, a completely subversive role.
Not because the CIA facilitated the distribution of "Doctor Zhivago" in the USSR. But because his novel was far more powerful than that and ultimately proved disastrous for communist ideology and propaganda since 1917.
L'EXPRESS: Your family belonged to the Russian intelligentsia. To what extent did Vladimir Putin, who comes from a modest family, harbor a sense of social revenge?
ANDREY KOZOVOY: He certainly has an inferiority complex. His parents worked in a factory and lived in appalling conditions, in a miserable communal apartment. When he was a young KGB officer, Putin was undoubtedly mocked for his background, as the KGB was considered by many to be a haven for rich kids and the privileged.
Hence his current declared passion for history, conservative Russian intellectuals and his numerous quotes from authors. He wants to show that he is an insatiable reader and connoisseur of Russian history. But, of course, he is completely wrong about this. The only person he is proud of is his grandfather Spiridon, a chef in the Kremlin who cooked for Lenin's wife and later for Khrushchev and his family.
L'EXPRESS: How do you see the development of the war in Ukraine?
ANDREY KOZOVOY: I am on the side of the pessimists. We are probably experiencing the last year of peace in Europe. On the one hand, Europe cannot simply supply weapons to the Ukrainians, who are overworked and short of human and military resources. If we do not give up on Ukraine, we cannot avoid the issue of foreign troops on Ukrainian territory.
We must understand that Putin already has this new European war in mind, as evidenced by his "hybrid war", his provocations and drone flights. Of course, it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in his mind, whether he is bluffing or not. But at the end of his life he can be considered a man determined to see it through.
As he told Oliver Stone in the documentary "Conversations with Putin", he believes that Khrushchev was weak because he gave in to Kennedy's pressure in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He would not give in... But in any case, we need to establish a much stronger balance of power for real change to happen in Ukraine.
Otherwise, we must be ready to give in on the Ukrainian issue, knowing that other former Soviet republics like Moldova or the Baltic states, which are extremely easy targets for Russia, will follow the fate of Ukraine. This spiral we are in will not necessarily lead to a third world war, but in any case to a much more serious conflict than the current one. As long as Putin is alive, Russia will not surrender.
L'EXPRESS: The Russian population seems resigned. The majority may not be active supporters of Putinism, but Russians are turning to the private sector...
ANDREY KOZOVOY: Watching the news in France, one might think that the Russian population remains passive in the face of the regime. This is partly true, and applies to Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two major Russian cities. Unlike in 2011-2012, they have been largely spared the hardships that Russians have been experiencing since 2022. To explain this, one must take into account the long-standing culture of submission to a strong leader and the fact that resistance has been silenced and stifled.
With the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in prison in February 2024, the regime beheaded the most prominent figure of the opposition. Protesting the war in Ukraine or Putin has become suicide. Yet the rebellious spirit among young Russians has not disappeared: spontaneous rallies are still taking place, especially in the countryside.
People are supporting street musicians arrested for playing songs by "foreign agents" and are gathering to protest inflation, tax increases, restrictions on mobile phone use, and the creation of a "sovereign" internet. They are protesting silently. Recent polls show that only 28% of the population supports continuing the war in Ukraine; the vast majority of young people want peace.
As in Soviet times, many are reading books by "foreign agents" - Dmitry Bykov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin - who are now in exile. But this is far from a widespread movement. As long as the economic situation remains bearable, Moscow and St. Petersburg will not budge.
To start moving in the right direction, I think a palace coup after Putin's death is more likely than a social uprising. The key is who comes after Putin. But again, we need to put pressure on Putin, not fear him, and send our troops to defend Ukraine.