Howard Amos is a journalist with a decade’s experience reporting from Russia. Whilst based in Moscow throughout his career, Howard spent a year in the Pskov Region when he first moved to Russia, and the experience made a lasting impression on him.
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire is Howard’s first book, and offers a snapshot of today’s Russia through the people and places of Pskov Region.
Howard told us about his book: why ‘Russia starts here’, and what we can learn about Russia through this overlooked borderland – as well as his desert island book and what he’s looking forward to reading next.
Russia Starts Here is the Pushkin House Book of the Month, with 10% discount until the end of the month.
What are your top five recommended books?
- Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
- Norman Lewis, Naples ‘44
- Boris Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist
- Mark Mazower What You Did Not Tell
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
What is a book that inspired you as a young person?
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had a profound impact on me when I read it in my early teens. As did Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
What is a book that takes you back to a specific place or time?
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov – it was the only book I took with me the first time I went traveling independently and I will forever associate it with long, hot bus journeys across Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
What are you reading at the moment?
Alex Christofi’s Cypria – a wonderful memoir/history of Cyprus.
Which book are you looking forward to reading?
Shaun Walker’s The Illegals (published in April) is about Russia’s sleeper agent programme and will be impeccably researched and fascinating.
What is your desert island book?
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – it’s almost the only book that I re-read regularly.
What is a book or poem that cheers you up?
There’s something deeply comforting about good food writing; and it’s always deeply impressive when the written word can conjure tastes, smells and sensations. Some of my favourite food writers at the moment are Meera Sodha, Caroline Eden and Alissa Timoshkina.
What is a book you wish you’d written?
Lea Ypi’s Free is an incredible portrayal – through memoir – of Albania’s transition from the totalitarian Hoxha regime to capitalism and democracy. I was struck by the many similarities with the collapse of the Soviet Union and what unfolded in the 1990s.
If you were having a fantasy dinner party, who would you invite?
Cormac McCarthy, Varlam Shalamov and Vera Figner
Why did you call your book 'Russia Starts Here'?
I lifted the title of the book from an official tourist/marketing slogan created for Pskov in the 2010s. To this day, you find ‘Russia Starts Here’ plastered across buses and billboards across the region. It’s also spelled out in huge letters on the riverbank under Pskov’s kremlin. The title reflects the idea of the book (using one region to tell the story of the country as a whole), as well my hope that it can be picked up and read by anyone (not just those already with some knowledge of Russia and the region).
You were a journalist in Moscow for a decade, yet your book focuses on the Pskov Region. Why? What insights can we gain from this region?
I spent about a year in Pskov Region before I became a journalist in Moscow – working for a Russian charity and volunteering at an orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children. So, in many ways, my experience of Russia ‘started’ with Pskov Region. When I moved to Moscow, I often found myself recalling the people and places I knew back in Pskov Region (which I still visited regularly). They tended to be a much better guide to understanding Russia than some of the stories of high-level corruption, opposition protests and shadowy hackers that I covered as a Moscow-based journalist.
As well as being a good showcase for ‘small town Russia’, Pskov Region contains a number of fascinating sites including Alexander Pushkin’s country estate (now an enormous museum), and the Pskov Caves Monastery (the only monastery in Russia to have functioned continuously since its foundation). Pskov’s history encompasses a functioning medieval democracy, endless wars with the Latin principalities to the West, the rising power of Muscovite authoritarianism, and the abdication of the last tsar, Nikolai II.
Above all, though, it was Pskov Region’s contradictions that I always found revealing: while ‘old’ Russian land (the ancient fortress of Izborsk was one of the first places in Eastern Europe where Viking princes arrived to rule over the local Slavs) and on the edge of the European Union, it is both desperately poor and suffers one of the fastest rates of depopulation in Russia.
You first visited the Pskov Region in 2007, and you wrote the book between 2019 and 2024. How did you see the region change over this time? How did your idea of the book evolve over time?
On the surface, there have been huge changes. When I first went to Pskov in 2007, I remember it as a dusty, down-at-heel place where it was almost impossible to find a restaurant. Now, many tourist sites have been renovated and the city is filled with trendy coffee shops, places to eat and bars. This sort of ‘beautification’, which began in Moscow in the 2010s, has even trickled down to some small towns in the region—with new parks, pavements, and other urban infrastructure. In the countryside, there has been an influx of ‘dacha’ owners buying up properties – not only does Pskov Region’s lack of industry mean it’s an attractive holiday destination, it’s also a relatively short car journey from St. Petersburg,
At the same time, most of the changes have been cosmetic, and little has really been done to address the deep-seated economic and social problems. Depopulation, for example, continues apace, and it’s still very easy to find whole abandoned villages. The city of Pskov traditionally hoovered up people from the region’s small towns – but, now, even Pskov’s population appears to be wobbling. The deaths of so many Russian men in Ukraine is yet another factor that is exacerbating the demographic problem.
To be honest, my idea for the book did not evolve much after I came up with it in 2019. I made some changes to the contents of chapter (particularly following the full-scale invasion in 2022), but nothing fundamental.
Pskov Region has been affected by 20th-century history and recent events more significantly than other areas of Russia. What are the relationships of different communities and generations living in the region with the Russian state, history and identity?
Until it was subsumed by the expanding Muscovite state in the fifteenth century, Pskov was a city republic with extensive trade links to Europe and a democratic tradition (Pskov is the only Russian city where the city walls were built to protect everyone—not just the rich and powerful). Today, it is on the Western edge of Russia and borders the European Union and NATO—and it retains some echoes of its medieval democratic tradition in the form of people like opposition politician Lev Shlosberg, who I write about in the book. However, that’s not the way the Putin regime would look at it: they would see Pskov as a watchtower guarding Orthodox Russia against invaders—be they Poles, Swedes, or Nazi armies… or NATO battle groups.
How did you choose which people to include in your book?
I wanted the stories of the people in the book to be both compelling in of themselves, and also illustrative of a particular aspect of Russian society, culture, economics, religion, history, or politics. Some of the people I profile already had a public profile; others were ‘ordinary’ people. Some of them I knew personally; others I sought out for the book. Of course, some of the people I initially wanted to interview declined to speak to me. And others I came across in the process of researching and writing the book.
Which stories, people or places made the most impact on you?
One of the chapters of the book takes the form of a memoir about my time volunteering at the Belskoye Ustye orphanage, which is located deep in the Pskov Region countryside. In some ways this is the crux of the book, at least for me personally. My time working there with kids, carers and other volunteers and charity staff made an extremely deep impact.
I have been to many beautiful places in Pskov Region that are difficult to forget, but I would perhaps single out Pushkin Hills, the literary museum (which is more like a national park) built around the ancestral estate of poet Alexander Pushkin. It’s like no other museum I have ever been to – it’s so enormous it encompasses several other nearby estates and takes several days to explore properly. The place is a beguiling mix of ridiculous kitsch and touching adoration; and its landscapes distil a quintessential Slavic beauty. When I was researching the book, I was lucky enough to stay in a wooden dacha in the middle of the museum/national park for a few days. It had no running water, so I walked through a green meadow every morning to take a dip in the Sorot River.
What does your book reveal about Russian society in the context of the war in Ukraine?
There seems to be a divide between those observers who see the current war in Ukraine as ‘Putin’s war’ and those who believe it is ‘Russia’s war’. I think my book makes it clear that it is ‘Russia’s war’ – in so far as Putin’s cause in Ukraine obviously has significant support among Russians from all walks of life. Many people in Pskov Region who I previously admired turned out to support the war; and many more were ambivalent. At the same time, motivations can vary. One of the chapters profiles the widow of a man who volunteered to fight in Ukraine. At least according to his wife, he did not hate Ukrainians; had no interest in Russia acquiring Ukrainian land; had never been to Ukraine; did not believe Ukrainians were Nazis; and was not in need of the big sign-on bonuses paid to recruits. His motivations for going to fight seemed to be much more a product of his own upbringing: the economic deprivation of Pskov Region, dominant conceptions of masculinity, and a chronic lack of opportunity.
Some of the people in your book support the war. Why did you decide to include their stories? And what was your approach to writing about them?
I thought it was important for the reader to understand the depth of support for the war that there is in Pskov Region (and Russia as a whole), and to explore some of the reasons. When depicting characters who support the war, I tried not to define them by that support – but to show them in the round. In other words, to allow the reader a way to empathise with their lives and beliefs even if they disagreed fundamentally with their views on Ukraine. People can, of course, be very kind on a personal level, and enthusiastic cheerleaders for a genocidal war. The support for the fighting expressed by several characters who I know personally was painful for me when I encountered it – and I hope that comes across in the writing.
If you were to write another book about a different region of Russia, where would you write about?
Not a region, but a city – Vorkuta, which is above the Arctic Circle at the top of the Ural Mountains. It was established as a gulag in the 1930s in order to exploit the nearby coal deposits, and mining continues there to this day. You can’t reach it by road, only by train or plane. My wife was born there and we went to visit for a few days in February just before the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve never seen so much snow. All I knew of Vorkuta before visiting was its association with the gulag, but my wife’s family have very happy memories of living there in the later Soviet Union when workers were well-looked after. After the end of the Soviet Union, Vorkuta suffered a huge exodus of people, and flats there are so undesirable they can now be purchased for the equivalent of a few pounds. Whole sections of the town are abandoned. In the early 2000s, Putin launched a missile test in which a missile flew thousands of miles across central Russia before slamming into the target, which was an abandoned satellite town of Vorkuta.